>How does this distinguish Alinsky-style organizing efforts from any other
>progressive or leftist organizing efforts? Do the Alinskyists fail in
>distinctive ways? Is the record really any worse for those groups than for all
>the vanguardists, Marxists, Marxist-Leninists, social democrats, etc., etc.?
>Or any of the various nationalist efforts, whether Chicano, African-American,
>or others?
Well none of it's really all that successful, is it? The M-L vanguardists all failed for sure, and the social democrats have gotten lost in the Democratic party. But on paper the Alinskyites have some impressive numbers - there are community organzations all over the place, thousands of them, with thousands of organizers and millions spoken for. Yet despite that the political gains are minimal. I think the reasons are that local and narrow-issue organizing is almost by definition unable to affect the world beyond. Among many of the Alinskyish activists I've talked with over the years, there's frequently a hostility towards any analysis that connects their issue or locale to that larger world. A review of Wall Street in the New York City housing activist magazine City Limits, for example, complained there was nothing in it of use to the reviewer's life as an organizer. Aside from this blow to my narcissism, I've got to wonder how anyone in the U.S. thinks it's possible to do progressive organizing around issues like housing and development without understanding what the financial markets are all about.
On top of that localist limitation is the omnipresence of the foundations and their conservatizing influence. Instead of developing a real grassroots constituency, community organizations turn to their funders, and perform for them (Gina Neff explored this in her LBO article on philanthropy <http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/Foundations.html>). That means a capital-friendly agenda, and competition for scarce dollars rather than cooperation among groups with potentially common interests. Program officers want very specific agendas, very narrowly drawn - they don't like funding general operations. A proposal to, say, organize the residents of Bedford-Stuyvesant to lobby Albany and Washington for infrastructure investment and a jobs program wouldn't get a dime out of Ford; a program to rehab an apartment building might. And the group that supervises the rehab gradually morphs into a financier/developer.
Doug