Alinsky Re: [lbo-talk] productivity

[snit snat]

At 01:26 PM 8/17/2004, Carrol Cox wrote:
>For what it's worth, the Back-of-the-Yards organization in Chicago, the
>archetypal Alinsky achievement, developed into an aggressively racist
>organization existing mostly to defend residential segregation. Local
>groups which do not have a national focus (or which are not subordinated
>to groups which have such a national focus) go nowhere except to the
>right or to the kind of thing Dwayne describes.

"So whenever a community comes to me and asks me for help and says, "We're 
being exploited and discriminated against and shafted in every way; we need 
to organize," what am I going to say? "Sorry, guys, if I help organize you 
to get power and you win, then you'll all become. just like Back of the 
Yards, materialistic and all that, so just go on suffering, it's really 
better for your souls." And yet that's what a good many so-called radicals 
are in fact saying. It's kind of like a starving man coming up to you and 
begging you for a loaf of bread, and your telling him, "Don't you realize 
that man doesn't live by bread alone?" What a cop-out. No, there'll be 
setbacks, reverses, plenty of them, but you've just got to keep on 
sluggin'. I knew when I left Back of the Yards in 1940 that I hadn't 
created a utopia, but people were standing straight for the first time in 
their lives, and that was enough for me."

The rest: http://www.progress.org/2003/alinsky9.htm

"We're in a fucking stagmire."

       --Little Carmine, 'The Sopranos'