Saul Alinsky developed quite the reputation for himself in the 50s and 60s as a political organizer, at a time when American society was noticeably more cohesive, and where there was much better dependability of employment. His efforts were greatly focused on Civil Rights, the Anti-War movement, and unionization. In the fifty years since then, there have been entire generations of African-Americans who have left the previously segregated communities and have come to participate in a much more multi-racial middle class. Furthermore, the grand unifying movements of the 1960s have been replaced by a much more fragmented society where collective action seems to be increasingly difficult. Union membership, over the last 35 years, has declined from one in five in the workforce, to a little more than one in ten. With the precipitous decline in manufacturing work (following a similar trajectory, from about in one in five workers to a bit under one in ten), this suggests that much unionization remains present in the public sector, so that those workers enjoy both the amplified job security and benefits funding, along with the additional layer of advocacy afforded by the unions. While Alinsky was heavily involved with anti-war activism, that begs the question that military employment itself, which has traditionally been an avenue of employment stability out of the working class, has itself diminished over time. At the height of the Vietnam War, the total number of service members in Vietnam (about 550,000) was higher than the current number of service members on active duty with the Army alone. Throughout the private sector, jobs usually last under a decade and, while many still have well put together benefits packages, the defined benefit pension has all but completed disappeared. This has lead to an awkward situation where the public sector, funded obviously by tax levies on all workers regardless of sector, is actually preferable to the private sector for the average member of the workforce.
Toward the beginning of the book. Alinsky puts forth that much of his experience was among the bottom 40% of income earners (who would earn 30-60K per year in current dollars), and while that remains a very adequate income for a household of one person in the overwhelming majority of markets, that also clearly indicates that marriage and family has diminished sharply among those below the upper middle class. Elizabeth Warren has an excellent video entitled 'The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class' where she runs the numbers for households of like composition in 1970 and 2005. The cost of housing alone has close to doubled, day care was not a thing in the early 70s, forty years ago completing a bachelors degree in almost any subject was a worthwhile project (where as now the cost has increased by 250%, again adjusting for inflation, and frequently graduates are encumbered by debt that averages over $30,000 for degrees in the social sciences and liberal arts that generally do not have a clearcut home in the real economy).
Alinsky describes that 'the responsible organizer would have known that it is the establshment that has betrayed the flag, while the flag, itself, remains the glorious symbol of America's hopes and dreams.' While there are still many millions of Americans who remain quite patriotic, those hopes and dreams are increasingly out of reach in a much more fragmented work force and society. English language fluency itself, while still a reality for the overwhelming majority of Americans, is increasingly challenged by the larger and larger Mexican subculture that does not see itself as wholly American. Vast swaths of the southern border territory have become majority Spanish-speaking and ever as far north as Yakima, WA one can find large municipalities that are 30% hispanic. This is not that people of those backgrounds cannot be fully functioning members of American society, but that the sheer cultural force of these numbers is changing what it means to be American.
Alinsky goes on to describe that 'any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future.' This nation has travelled relatively deeply into this phase of cultural and linguistic separation that over the next two or three generations could imperil the sovereign integrity of the US.
Furthermore, this citzenry has already travelelled beyond the 'security of familiar experience.' This is a time of low unemployment, and we are already witnessng increasing rates of mass casualty incidents, and the disruptive activities of the Black Likes Matter movement in recent years. BLM seems to have gone so far as to advocate for violence against police officers. While the DJIA is approaching 20% of its most recent highs, thus suggesting a bear market could be in the works, any related losses in the work force could easily be six or twelve months away. With the unemployment rate currently a bit below 4%, it is not pleasant to imagine how much social protest and mass casualty incidents will take place when the unemployment rate is just 6% (which would approximate the unemployment rate during the dot-com downturn, which was not even technically a recession). Fifty years ago, people generally were somewhat more disciplined, somewhat better integrated into actual, real-time communities, and employment was generally longer-lasting and provided better purchasing power.
To quote Alinsky directly: 'citizen participation is the animating spirit and force in a society predicated on voluntarism.' In the last eighteen months, Bret Weinstein, by any stretch a liberal democrat with a deep commitment to the progressive left as he understood/understands it, was essentially driven from a tenured faculty position at Evergreen State College in Washington State. He had communicated some principled disagreements to a 'day of absence' where non-hispanic whites were actively encouraged to not be on campus for a day, via a distribution list to faculty and student leadership. For two or three days, the campus was taken over by student mobs, the senior-ranking administrator instructed the campus PD to disarm and stand down, and somewhat later Weinstein's wife was also pressured to leave. By any stretch, Weinstein was and remains an active citizen dedicated to 'the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace, cooperation, equal and full opportunities for education, full and useful employment, health, and the creation of those circumstances in which man can have the chance to live by values that give meaning to life.'
This really does seem to be a time when the political left, with movements such as BLM mentioned above, and also Antifa, is becoming deeply undemocratic. While Alinsky clarified that 'it is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral,' these groups do not seem to have an end-state in mind. While I am not at all conflating the perspective of someone like Weinstein with the agenda of the Unite the Right Rally, it is perhaps ironic that the organizers of the UTR Rally were very careful to file all the correct paperwork, get the needed permissions, and even sought out the guidance of the ACLU, and then these law-abiding right-wing whites were subjected to the mob violence of the counter-protestors. Since when do civil libertarian left-wing jews and ACLU-consulting white ethnonationalists get subjected to the same type of harrassment from left-wing movements and mobs?
Alinsky goes on to describe that 'the man of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms. He has no other problem; he thinks only of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action. He asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only whether they will work. To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody.' Certainly, what happened at Evergreen State and at the Unite The Right Rally were bloody messes, and yet it seems that the antagonists were lacking in any strategic aim. There was no aim but to silence the opposition by any means necessary; of all things Bret Weinstein has become a regular with center-right commentators like Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogen, and David Rubin. Weinstein has started discussing the development of an 'intellectual dark web' of people who have become increasingly disenfranchised from the authoritarian left.
Pertinent examples are given for the pragmatic tactics that are consistent with Alinksy's method, such as Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, refusal to emancipate slaves in states where he actually had control, incarceration of political opponents, and usage of military tribunals to make judicial decisions. Similarly, he gives the example that the Indian federal government criminalized the kind of passive resistance that Gandhi's movement had practiced shortly after Indian independence. With that said, none of that is with the political left devouring its own or with ardent right-wingers consulting with a flagship civil liberties organization. There is no apparent strategy here except to shut up the opposition.
This book does not advocate simply for civil discourse: 'Power is the very essence, the very dyname of life. It is the power of the heart pumping blood, and sustaining life in the body. It is the power of actual citizen participation pulsing upward, providing a unified strength for a common purpose.' This type of unified action is less and less feasible in contemporary circumstances. Employment situations are too fragile, the wages earned are sorely needed to cover debt repayments and escalating housing expenses, the citizenry is increasingly diverse (unless the activist is a well-integrated, and *bilingual* schizoid, but then rally speeches will take all the longer), people are able to escape into their own on-line enclaves, the mass protest movements seem to be taken out of Idiocracy, and lacking the frustration tolerance to cope with anything Alinsky had been discussing.
The characteristics of the talented organizer are given as: curiosity, irreverence, imagination, a sense of humor, a bit of a blurred vision for a better world, an organized personality, a well-integrated political schizoid, ego, a free and open mind (and political relativity), constantly creating the new out of the old, and communication. This last one is particularly important, and all the more challenging in contemporary America. There is simply far greater diversity than was the case a half century ago. The building of a broad-based political coalition is therefore more demanding, and arguably vast swaths of the American populace are too intimidated by the realities of their circumstances to organize for positive change (as discussed above, with the duplicity of employment, diminished purchasing power, increased escapism, and increasing linguistic diversity). Rapport with one's constituency is very important and also more difficult to achieve. Alinsky also argued for a sharply self-critical tendency, so as to build an increasingly effective movement. What such a movement would be right now is up in the air (perhaps broad-based advocacy for those in their mid-thirties through the mid-fifties to reshape the retirement and health care schemes, which are increasingly untenable, such as the replacement of defined benefit pensions with defined-contribution 401K and 403B plans; that still begs the question, though, of people willing to put their necks out when employment itself is that much more uncertain).
The author of this book provides some important clarification: 'An issue then is something you can do something about, but as long as you feel powerless and unable to do anything about it, all you have is a bad scene.' Consistent with the discussion above, much of American society seems like a bad scene. Alinsky was advocating for a strategically minded, self-correcting movement for social change, and much of the attention span of the citizenry seems too collapsed for this. Along these lines, Alinsky describes that jail terms of activists that exceed sixty days have two risks: 1.the revolutionary is removed from action for so long that he loses touch; 2.if you are gone long enough everybody forgets. Perhaps this timeframe could be reduced to thirty days for the same guidance to apply, because with instant access to information people generally have less patience and a reduced time horizon for commitment to a social change movement. This is sad because with the increased damage to the middle class there is increased consolidation of financial assets with the 1% and vast portions of the workforce are clinging tenaciously to what work and resources they have in order to avoid hardship
Moving on, the income ranges for different socio-economic tiers can be translated into current dollars: 40-75K for the lower middle class, 75-125K for the middle middle class, and 125K-200K for the upper middle class. A simple inflation adjustment does not include the other factors mentioned, such as housing cost, education cost, reduced retirement prospects, increased indebtedness from education and consumer credit purchases, and the curtailed length any individual job will last. To a fair extent, Alinsky seems to have been assuming an underlying stability to the American economy and society that permitted a lot of the activities in which her participated fifty years ago. That was not a time when white collar work could be outsourced to another continent, and the majority of people with jobs could assume coverage by pension programs. There is a certain courage his approach took, and that type of courage may well be lacking in this day and age.
Alinsky gives a detailed description of the lower middle class that is worth repeating here (and remember this book was published in 1971): With a few exceptions, such as teachers, they have never gone beyond high school. They have been committed to the values of success, getting ahead, security, have their 'own' home, auto, color TV, and friends. Their lives have been 90 percent unfulfilled dreams. To escape their frustration they grasp at a last hope that their children will get that college education and realize those unfulfilled dreams. They are a fearful people, who feel threatened from all sides: the nightmare of pending retirement and old age with a social security decimated by inflation; the shadow of unemployment from a slumping economy, with blacks, already fearsome because the culture conflict, threatening job competition; the high cost of long-term illness; and finally with mortgages outstanding, they dread the possibility of property devaluation from non-whites moving into their neighborhood. They are best by taxes on incomes, food, real estate, and automobiles, at all levels - city, state, and national. Seduced by their values into installment buying, they find themselves barely able to meet long-term payments, let alone the current cost of living. Victimized by TV commercials with their fraudulent claims for food and medical products, they watch the news between the commercial with Senate committee hearings showing that the purchase of these products is largely a waste of their hard-earned money. Repeated financial crises result from accidents that they thought they were insured against only to experience the fine-print evasions of one of our most shocking confidence rackets of today, the insurance racket. Their pleasures are simple: gardening a tiny back yard behind a small house, bungalow, or ticky-tacky, in a monotonous subdivision on the fringe of suburbs; going on a Sunday drive out to the country, having a once-a-week dinner out at some place like a Howard Johnson's. Many of the so-called hard hats, police, fire, sanitation workers, schoolteachers, and much of the civil service, mechanics, electricians, janitors, and semiskilled workers are in this class.'
Please take into consideration that this profiles a lower middle class that was characterized by much greater stability than is generally the case today. The overwhelming majority of people got married relatively young and frequently stay married; divorce was relatively rare and an out-of-wedlock birth was similarly rare and met with considerable shame, both among blacks and whites. A single income earner could afford a consistent, albeit austere middle-class life. That is far from the case today. The majority of births in the black community are out of wedlock, the rate of illegitimacy among whites now exceeds that of blacks from fifty years ago, employers change every five or eight years, both blacks and whites are concerned about an increasing tendency away from an English-speaking worforce and society. These days fewer people get married, people generally get married later in life, the number of workers per social security recipient is collapsing (the Social Security Administration is forecasting that at some point in the 2030s or 2040s that less than 80% of expected benefits will be paid due to shortfalls from payroll taxes, and that has nothing to do with inflation). People are living longer and that exacerbates the cost of health coverage, more people are obese which comes with its own health risks.
Long story short, this books seems like a curiosity from a previous era when people had a stronger sense of hope and when the United States was more resilient, socially, economically, and politically. While there were definite concerns back then, in some ways greater than today, the overall structural changes in the society and economy do not seem as amenable to this tenacious, thoughtful form of activism. America is much more diverse, the middle class is much more frail, people generally live more isolated lives, people cling desperately to the jobs that they have with diminished purchasing power and prospects for old age, people lead their lives with a shorter time horizon, and the broad unifying movements seem to be lacking. Of all possible situations, where the white ethnonationalists of the Unite the Right Rally were careful, law-abiding, and sought the guidance of the ACLU, and the thuggery of Antifa received broader support. As mentioned above, with unemployment at one of its lowest points in the last few years there is still an increasing tendency toward mass casualty incidents and feckless racial populism. As a nation, what are we going to be facing when the unemployment rate is 6%?
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ORGANIZING FOR AMERICA AND OUR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS
Reviewed in the United States on September 17, 2009
2/2010: ORGANIZING FOR AMERICA HAS BEEN PASSING OUT PAPERWORK TO TEACHERS FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS OFFERING TO RECRUIT THEM "build on the movement that elected President Obama by empowering students across the country to help us bring about our agenda".Suggested reading on this recruiting paperwork;*Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky*The New Organizers, Zack Exley*Stir It Up: Lessons from Community Organizing and Advocacy, Rinku Sen*Obama Field Organizers Plot a Miracle, Zack Exley, Huffington Post*Dreams of My Father Chicago Chapters, Barack Hussein ObamaHe separates mankind into three groups; "Haves, the Have-Nots and the Have-a-Little, Want Mores".His book "Rules for Radicals" is written for the "Have-Nots and how to take it away".Chapters;- The Purpose- Of Means and Ends- Word about Words- The Education of an Organizer- Communication- In the Beginning- Tactics- The Genesis of Tactic Proxy- The Way AheadObama was trained by the Alinsky-founded Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in Chicago. For several years Obama himself taught workshops on the Alinsky method.Alinsky said, "Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins -- or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom -- Lucifer."Please view the image I posted.
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