Against the Left

Alinsky grew up on Chicago’s West Side, then an epicentre of working class struggle. When the Great Depression struck, it impacted a whole generation of radicals, including Alinsky. After a brief period studying criminology at the University of Chicago, he began working for the Congress of Industrial Organisations (CIO) under the mentorship of John L. Lewis, the union’s president.

Alinsky’s experience with the CIO profoundly shaped him. Communist and socialist influence was rising in the labour movement at this time, and leadership battles were bitterly contested. Seeking to take advantage of militants’ class anger and enthusiasm for organising, Lewis hired hundreds of them as full-time staffers — but kept them within arm’s reach. Through cooptation and quiet repression, Lewis and his bureaucracy secured control over the radicals. After other staffers questioned the use of such radicals for organising industrial workers, Lewis responded, “Who gets the bird? The hunter or the dog?”

Alinsky left the labour movement and formed his first community organisation, the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, in 1939. To organise the predominantly Roman Catholic community, he asked the church for support and pandered to its anticommunism.

As he explained in an interview with Playboy magazine:

In order to involve the Catholic priests in Back of the Yards, I didn’t give them any stuff about Christian ethics, I just appealed to their self-interest. I’d say, “Look, you’re telling your people to stay out of the Communist-dominated unions and action groups, right? . . . Your only hope is to move first, to beat the Communists at their own game, to show the people you’re more interested in their living conditions than the contents of your collection plate. And not only will you get them back again by supporting their struggle, but when they win they’ll be more prosperous and your donations will go up and the welfare of the Church will be enhanced.

Alinsky’s ploy worked, and he spread a very simple message throughout the community:

Look, you don’t have to put up with all this shit. There’s something concrete you can do about it. But to accomplish anything you’ve got to have power and you’ll only get it through organisation. Now, power comes in two forms — money and people. You haven’t got any money, but you do have people, and here’s what you can do with them.

This is Alinskyism’s core: in contests between money and people, a large enough group can secure immediate concessions from landlords, politicians, and business owners. This organising method helped his campaigns win local improvements in public housing, community health services, and public schools all across the United States.

Alinsky systematised these ideas in his most famous work, Rules for Radicals. In it, he tried to convince a new generation of radicalising youth from the New Left to adopt his “pragmatic” approach to organising, which rested on accepting “the world as it is” and rejecting more militant politics. The essence of this “realistic” radicalism was captured succinctly by Hillary Clinton herself, writing in her undergraduate thesis that,

Much of what Alinsky professes does not sound “radical.” . . . [H]e does not advocate immediate change. He is too much in the world right now to allow himself the luxury of symbolic suicide. He realises that radical goals have to be achieved often by non-radical, even “anti-radical” means.

At its outset, Alinsky presented Rules as an explicit alternative to the politics of revolutionary socialism:

The Have-Nots of the world seeking revolutionary writings, can find such literature only from the communists. . . . Here they can read about tactics, manoeuvres, strategy, and principles of action in the making of revolutions. . . . We have permitted a suicidal situation to unfold wherein revolution and communism have become one. These pages are committed to splitting this political atom.

Revolutionary ideas unnecessarily limit an organiser, Alinsky insisted. Rather, an organiser should have a “free and open mind, and political relativity” that allowed him to “respond to the realities of the widely different situations our society presents.” Alinsky’s discussion of means and ends most concretely expressed his relativism: “[i]n war,” he argued “the end justifies almost any means.”

Alinsky gave organisers a list of rules: “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have,” “Never go outside the experience of your people,” “Keep the pressure on.” These dicta have become so widespread that they can often be seen prominently posted in labour and nonprofit organisations’ offices.

Like much of Alinsky’s writing, Rules is filled with anecdotes of small victories. In one exemplary story, his Back of the Yards organisation campaigned for infant medical care from Chicago’s health office. Alinsky explained to his readers that, years earlier, the neighbourhood’s religious leadership had driven these clinics out of the community because they provided birth control information. Residents needed to simply ask the city to bring them back.

“I kept this information to myself,” Alinsky confessed, and convinced his organisation’s members to storm the office and demand the services. Alinsky asked the reader to review his discussion of means and ends before accusing him of “trickery.”

The Organiser Makes History

Despite his insistence on the importance of organisation, Alinsky wrote little about the role education, debate, and democracy should play in a community organisation. He focused instead on the organiser: “[o]rganisations are created, in large part, by the organiser,” a “highly imaginative and creative architect and engineer.”

As labour organiser and scholar Jane McAlevey put it in her recent book No Shortcuts: Organising for Power in the New Guilded Age, “Alinsky was not known for his governance skills.” His legacy has encouraged the union movement to embrace the bureaucratic pressures all unions face rather than resist them. Those pressures have helped lead to the legalistic grievance procedures, closed-door bargaining, and staff-led “corporate campaigns” that characterise the labour movement today, severely depressing rank-and-file engagement, enthusiasm, and mobilisation.

Alinsky didn’t place any special importance on the role or potential power of workers, and he preferred to treat all tactics in a campaign, including strikes, as potentially equal.

In the Playboy interview, he explained his transition from the labour movement to community organising:

What I wanted to try to do was to apply the organising skills I’d mastered in the CIO to the worst slums and ghettos, so that the most oppressed and exploited elements could take control of their own communities and their own destinies. Up until then, specific factories and industries had been organised for social change, but never whole communities.

In his second book, Reville for Radicals, Alinsky favourably quoted one CIO leader, who said:

If history has proved anything about the role of labour in highly industrialised societies in recent years, it has proved the gross error of ascribing to the trade unions a revolutionary character . . . workers have been and still are reluctant to get excited about political theories proposing radical social change.

The organiser, not the worker or community member, is the primary subject in an Alinsky-style organisation. While they discuss the importance of small victories to mobilise the community around a particular demand, they pay little attention to the development of rank-and-file political consciousness.

Alinsky and Cesar Chavez

Alinskyism’s characteristic traits are likely familiar to those who have worked with unions and social movement non-profit organisations in the past. Following the collapse of the mass militancy of the 1960s, many radicals formed organisations to sustain progressive grassroots engagement. In many cases, the Alinsky-style organisations served as the template for their structure and approach to building organisations.

Among those organisations, the United Farm Workers was particularly influential, a union impeccably documented by Frank Bardacke in Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers. The popularity of the UFW grew through the late 1960s just as the influence of the New Left began to wane, filling an important void that helped the union build large networks of support.

The founders of the UFW, including Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and Fred Ross, were devoted disciples of Alinsky. Chavez was even known for giving Alinsky’s biography of John L. Lewis to friends and colleagues as a gift. Alinsky’s ideas, however, ultimately left the union leadership unprepared to build the kind of democratic workers’ organisation necessary to successfully take on California’s powerful growing industry — and helped lead to the union’s eventual collapse.

As Bardacke concludes in his book, Chavez believed that,

organisers rather than local leaders were the crucial people who made politics happen. The organisers were, he said in 1969, “the heroes of the farm worker movement.” Without the guidance of skilled organisers . . . rank-and-file leaders would be forever trapped in a competitive individualism, incapable of building their own movement. That idea came from Saul Alinsky.

Staff organisers, not the farm workers themselves, were the heart and soul of the UFW under Chavez’s model.

The union carried this perspective to its logical conclusion: it had no local organisation at the rank-and-file level at all. Farm workers were unable to elect their leadership.

The bulk of the union’s revenue was gathered from donations from sympathetic progressive (mostly student or church-based) organisations rather than farm workers’ dues. Inevitably, this meant the union became more accountable to its liberal supporters than to conditions in the field.

The UFW came to resemble a fundraising outfit more than a union, raising money for farm worker organising based on the work of UFW staff in mostly urban areas, fuelled by the tragic tales of farm workers’ plight but without real input from those rank and filers. In fact, as Bardacke writes, Chavez and his loyalists actually declared war on those members who dissented from his organising vision, whether because they had radical political commitments of their own (Chavez also shared Alinsky’s disdain for leftism), disagreed with the cult of personality that Chavez began demanding in the late 1970s, or just wanted rank-and-file workers to have more of a say in the functioning of the day-to-day operations of the union.

At the height of its influence, the union represented over 50,000 members and brought some of the most powerful growers in the country to their knees. But with virtually no organisation in the fields, and with the union unable to leverage any power to enforce or renegotiate contracts with the growers, contracts expired and membership declined dramatically. Today, the union is a shadow of its former self.

Socialist Organising

Alinsky was correct that leadership is an indispensable element in the success of any social movement. But he is wrong that effective leadership must reject “political ideology” (as if such a thing were even possible). A democratic, social movement-focused leadership, guided by a radical political vision, can use its accumulated experience, political analysis, and understanding of history to come up with strategies to organise collective action from below.

Alinsky’s rejection of radical politics does not free organisers to be “flexible,” in other words. Instead, it limits them to a relatively constrained field of vision in which the rank and file appears hopelessly disorganised and conservative. They have no particular political aspirations of their own. Instead, the organiser must come from outside to encourage them to make “winnable” and “realistic” demands to improve their conditions.

A labour organiser explained it this way to McAlevey:

Alinsky’s attempt to strip the organising model of ideology manifests in various concrete practices, like insisting that groups should only wage winnable fights and that the organiser should refrain from bringing her political views into the organisation’s discourse. The ramifications render the Alinsky model impotent relative to many contemporary challenges because ideology is a central front of the rightwing, and, therefore the left must contest in this arena.

McAlevey gets at an important point: without a radical political guide to action, it’s easy for organisers to avoid confronting racial divisions within a workplace or neighbourhood (as Alinsky didn’t in Back of the Yards: after his departure, the organisation infamously used the tools and infrastructure he helped build to fight integration in the neighbourhood) or building an organisation that maximises democratic engagement among the rank and file. A labour militant who uses socialist politics to confidently argue against xenophobic scapegoating within their workplace more aptly characterises effective radicalism than the pipe-smoking armchair Marxist, as Alinsky would have it.

Far from making us rigid, our ideas help socialists understand the world around us, providing us with a sense of strategic direction and allowing us to plot effective collective action.

Alinsky’s attitude toward theory begs Leon Trotsky’s polemical question:

How many times have we met a smug centrist who reckons himself a “realist” merely because he sets out to swim without any ideological baggage whatever and is tossed by every vagrant current? He is unable to understand that principles are not dead ballast but a lifeline for a revolutionary swimmer.

Despite Alinsky’s Cold War-era insistence that revolutionary ideology makes an organiser inert or rigidly dogmatic, socialists have been among the most successful and committed organisers in virtually every movement against oppression and exploitation. We recognise that today’s conflicts help lay long-term political and organisational foundations for successive and escalating confrontations.

Workers’ confidence in their own power grows after each successful confrontation. Toward that end, socialists place the highest priority on thoroughgoing internal democracy and political education. This does not emerge from an abstract set of ethics, but rather from a practical understanding of how working class organisations successfully confront capital.

Because workers can rarely improve their quality of life by their own individual efforts, they must organise to build the social power necessary to win concessions from the bosses. They have the greatest leverage in their workplaces by shutting down production. Rank-and-file democracy not only guarantees that all workers can express their ideas about the best tactics to win, but also encourages a sense of identity and commitment to their organisation.

Shortcutting on democratic engagement with workers or community group members, or substituting the efforts of staff for rank-and-file members’ capacity, does not expedite a campaign’s success, but critically undermines an organisation’s long-term political strength by rendering the membership inert. Some people may even forget that they’re a member of the organisation at all.

A radical commitment to democracy is not only necessary for immediate and defensive campaigns, but lays the groundwork for future revolutionary struggles ahead. As people collectively debate, discuss, and assess their experiences, they’re more able to understand their own power to transform and reshape society to meet their needs. As the UFW example shows, no staff organiser, no matter how talented, can substitute for that patient process of building up rank-and-file capacity.

Alinsky never considers the possibility that people organised to fight in their community or workplace may eventually develop their own radical ideas about how they should organise or take collective action once they begin to sense their own power. In his model, the initiative remains in the hands of the organiser and staff. We insist on the necessity of democracy.

Alinsky’s own ideas about democracy and ideology developed out of his experience in the CIO bureaucracy. While he liked to present his ideas as “pragmatic” and matter-of-fact, they rather reflect a common sense among the labour and social movement bureaucracy.

While those who earn their living carrying out the day-to-day operations, maintenance, and political tasks of trade unions and community organisations, unlike the rank-and-file membership, their livelihood is not tied to the fate of class struggle. Rather, a bureaucrat’s income depends primarily on the organisation’s longevity – especially its ability to collect dues and raise money.

This often encourages reservations about direct confrontations with the boss and capital that may drain funds and endanger stable sources of revenue. While committed and often even militant radicals may join the staff or leadership of unions and community groups, they often end up pitted against the interests of their rank and file. Alinsky’s “pragmatism” has enjoyed a great deal of popularity and longevity precisely for providing a “radical” language for emphasising short-term and winnable campaigns against raising more ambitious demands and strategies to engage the rank and file to confront the power of the bosses.

This is not to say, of course, that rank-and-file workers or poor community residents are ready to beat down the gates of power, only to be restrained by a conservative bureaucracy. Economic uncertainty, poor job security, and the lack of militant leadership on the shop floor places limits on peoples’ willingness to fight.

But it would be wrong to treat the understandable hesitancy people might feel toward strikes or confronting the bosses as reflective of their insurmountable individualism or conservatism, as has been the traditional approach of those in the Alinsky school.

Exploitation and oppression will always produce elements of resistance, however small. The task of radicals who want to fight against and eventually overthrow those systems of oppression is to organise alongside that “militant minority” and prepare for greater struggles ahead. It was communist and socialist militants with this perspective who have played critical roles in leading struggles that led to the foundation of the US labour movement of the 1930s, the Black Freedom Struggle, and social movements erupting today.

In a sort of historical irony, Alinskyism enjoyed its own success living off the successes of the more radical movements that preceded it. Relatively high levels of working-class organisation (as well as the especially high profit rates of the postwar years) created a social and political climate where businesses, landlords, and politicians were more willing to concede to social pressure from below. As the economic situation began to deteriorate in the late 1960s, business declared an all out “one-sided class war.” Alinsky-style organisations have been increasingly unable to secure substantive victories ever since.

Despite all this, Alinsky’s writings remain the standard go-to guide for building militant organisation. But the stakes are too high, and our tasks are too urgent, to leave Alinskyism’s dominance unchallenged. We can do better.