>I think several decades of experience in the U.S. with Alinsky-style
>organizing have shown its rather serious limits. Community organization
>after community organzation and what do we have to show for it? Some
>co-opted into being junior real estate developers and bankers, many of them
>very cleverly by the Ford Foundation, and others ineffectual. They have
>done nothing to reverse the impoverishment of vast urban areas, nor have
>they had an influence on politics at the regional or national level. They
>were completely disarmed in fighting welfare reform, too.
I guess i would ask whether that's due to (a) a basic flaw in the methodology (and if so, what is that flaw); or (b) a problem with training a large-enough number of sufficiently creative organisers --- something to which Alinsky himself alluded; or (c) a problem with wealth disparity -- not only do the Big Cigars control access to resources, but we're forced to fund their oppression of us (an issue to which Chomsky alludes).
What do you think?
Successful organising seems to me to be much more like therapy with victims of battering -- it's not helpful to just say 'you're being beaten senseless every night, so the solution to your problem is clear: leave!'. There are complex feelings of helplessness, guilt, and despair involved that have to be dealt with first unless the advisor is prepared to shortcut the process by intervening physically, too.
So with communities, it seems to me: we're bombarded relentlessly with anti-socialist, pro-capitalist propaganda that tells us we're wrong to think that there's a problem, and if there _is_ a problem it's all due to our personal failure to live up to the legitimate expectations of capitalists, ...and (most important!) there's no escape. We have to get people to the point where they can say Yeah, those scunners are vulnerable in certain ways, so that's where we'll hit them -- and we'll keep on hitting them until _we_ control the action.
Or do you see it differently?
Margaret