Saul Alinsky's Legacy
A friend sent me a link to a blog post on TPM Cafe by Zack Exley who was Organizing Director at MoveOn.org and directed online organizing for the Kerry-Edwards campaign. His background is somewhat similar to my own, although he has been doing it longer than I have, and the post touches on organizing issues that I always find interesting.
Exley writes that the two principle schools of thought in progressive organizing are derived from Lenin or Saul Alinsky, and names ACORN and the Highlander Folk School as being part of the Alinsky tradition. Shortly after college I became an organizer for SEIU Local 880, which was founded by ACORN. In 2004 I worked for Project Vote (the same group Barack Obama once worked for), which is also closely aligned with ACORN. While living in Tennessee, I was lucky enough to visit the Highlander Center and participated in a community group with its current director. Those who trained me would argue that ACORN has a different approach than Alinsky, but its safe to say that I've been strongly influenced by that tradition.
Its interesting to see Alinsky in the news again in relation to this year's Presidential election. Hillary Clinton did her undergraduate senior thesis on Alinsky and turned down a job offer from him. Barack Obama worked as a community organizer in an Alinsky-style community organization in Chicago. Despite his profound influence on American politics, I never heard Alinsky's name in college while earning a BA in Political Science. He isn't the sort of character that the establishment encourages people to learn about.
I'll get back to the topic of Exley's blog post, which criticizes both Alinsky and Lenin influenced organizers of separating themselves from "The People" who they organize and underestimating the ability of The People to lead themselves.
I strongly agree with his point that organizers need to trust the people they organize to show leadership and innovation that must be utilized and respected. I had this experience when I worked for Dennis Kucinich's campaign in 2003. I was charged with putting together mostly volunteer organizations in about a dozen states. Because of the campaign's lack of resources, I had to rely on volunteer leaders.
I found that every state had smart volunteers ready to step into leadership roles. Some groups were more active than others and some needed less guidance than others. Often what they needed was an organizer to integrate their work into the broader campaign and some occasional technical expertise from a professional organizer.
Exley has had the same experiences but doesn't mention what I found to be true when I got to know some of the volunteer leaders better. Most of them had participated in something political before and it was often a movement related to the Alinsky style of direct action and community organizing.
The point of Alinsky style organizing isn't just to work on the issue at hand but to teach people how to work together with or without a professional organizer. The fact that the people helping the campaign had first gotten involved during a union organizing campaign, a peace rally, or working with a community group on a local issue tells me that the empowerment aspect of Alinsky-style organizers is having exactly the long-term effect it's meant to have.
Another important point Exley fails to mention is that the typical online political activist is white, middle class, and middle aged. Its no surprise that he finds this demographic, which is more like his own background, more prepared to act with little direction.
That's a little different than organizing in an impoverished neighborhood with underfunded schools where kids are lucky to get a basic education, much less taught how to take direct action to improve their community. Even in the poorest communities there are existing leaders and intelligent people ready to step up. But its also a lot harder to train new leaders and get people to take action when they're more worried about paying the rent than going to the city council meeting you keep bugging them about. People in those communities are less likely to participate in the online organizing world in which Exley primarily operates.
When ACORN organizes to work on something simple that people are concerned about in their own neighborhood, like getting a stop light at a dangerous intersection, its never just about that project alone. Its about finding and training new leaders, and getting people to work together to solve their shared problems. Sowing those seeds creates the community leaders whose efforts Exley is so happy to reap with his mouse and sickle.
I agree with Exley's criticism of progressive organizers who underestimate the abilities of "the people" to lead themselves. If anything, that attitude is an abandonment of the community organizing principles I read and learned about.
But I also think Exley should give more credit to the organizers on whose shoulders he now stands. The fact that he is able to cast his wide online net and bring in so many who are ready to take leadership, is the realization of the goals of Alinsky-style organizers, who should know that their ultimate achievement is to work themselves out of a job.
The best online organizing strategies are those that fully take advantage of the legacy of the Alinsky approach.
Added on edit: I'm strolling around TPM Cafe a little more and discovering that Alinsky and organizing are big topics of debate right now, which is my idea of great brain candy. I may write more about this later.