07/17/2008
How to become an outside agitator
Quite possibly the most dangerous man in the world
I just finished reading a new book by David Sirota called The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington.
Now, I'm not too sure that I agree with the title. While I found a lot of the political movements and politicians profiled in the book quite heartening. I think it would take something that looked a lot more like an armed insurrection to make Washington and Wall Street even look up from the stock quotes.
One of the most informative things in the book, I think, is the constant references Sirota makes to someone named Saul Alinsky. I recalled mentions of this guy made by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. Some sort of radical organizer, I gathered.
I poked around on the web and turned up a long interview with Alinsky done in 1972, just before his premature death.
Alinsky was a feared organizer of unions and poor people all over the US. Feared by the industrialists and the government, I should say, not by the people he helped. The interview is a hoot. Far from being some sanctimonious political theoretician who helped "guide the masses" to his pre-approved views and conclusions, Alinsky was a street-wise guy who made it a point to let the community steer the decisions.
He grew up in Chicago's worst slums, and after graduating college with a degree in criminology, he became the mascot of the Capone gang at its height. For several years, he consorted and partied with murderers and gangsters, learning the ins and outs of a criminal organization at the knee of Frank Nitti, who ran the mob with Capone in jail.
He moved from the mob to union organizing with John L. Lewis, and from there to community organizing and writing.
After I read the interview, I picked up Rules For Radicals, Alinsky's book of political and organizing philosophy. It's mindblowing. Not at all the hang-the-bastards-from-the-oak-tree screed I was expecting, the book completely embraces working patiently within the existing system, acknowledging the constant contradictions involved in any political process.
For instance: Alinsky's first community organizing success was in a Chicago slum called Back Of The Yards. After years of struggle, the people achieved political power with Alinsky's help. Years later, Alinsky revisited the neighborhood; he found that the poor victims of economic and political discrimination had emerged into the middle-class as bourgeois racists. This, he points out, is an example to organizers that political upheaval contains within it the seeds of it's own defeat; the way to deal with this is to regard political action as a slow-moving, constant process.
Read the interview. Even though it seems like it was edited to death by Alinsky and parts re-written in somewhat rehearsed-sounding language, it's still a hoot. He's the anti-Machiavelli, and a true advocate of democracy.
And yes, I'm aware that Hillary Clinton wrote a college paper about Alinsky. Don't hold that against him.
