Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> The obstacle is that secular leftists in the USA, on the average,
> have become lazier, stingier, and more pie-in-the-sky than religious
> leftists.
<g>
Actually, joking aside, you might be able to put up a good argument that that is a good thing. One of the factors in the '60s left going of the tracks was that we didn't know how to allocate our energies and time. It's a long battle and we need to figure out ways to stay around until we reach the end at least of our part of it!
I suspect that the tangle of threads Kelley has launched involves no one understanding very clearly what anyone else is talking about (under the label "productivity" or any other that has been used).
But I do want to insist that anyone (locally or on a maillist) who proposes that "The Left" _or_ some local organization ought to take on this or that task has to provide a serious estimate of what kind of resources (in people, money, public visibility, political base, etc) the proposal involves.
If I understand Kelley's questions/proposals correctly (which I may well not), they demand the existence of a really large movement, with many institutional linkages, before they would become practical.
As to Alinsky, no one I have known seriously attacted to his work has believed that any fundamental change (not just revolution but reforms) is necessary or desirable in the u.s. social relations. Alinksy's tactics are designed to help limited groups of people operating within the context of those social relations as a given. At a _mere_ tactical level I've picked up quite a bit from people influenced by Alinsky over the years (e.g., the organ of agitation is the ear, not the tongue, etc.). But such tactical hints do not a movement make.
I don't understand what Kelley is after when she writes, "So whenever a community comes to me and asks me for help and says. . . ." Under what conditions does "a community" (or for that matter an individual or a small group) come to anyone and ask for help? It doesn't make sense to me, except in the context of an ongoing social movement, with its fair share of headlines, and with its members scattered through the local population so they sometimes picke up requests like this, even when the person asking doesn't know she is. If Kelley means something else, I would like an explanation.
Carrol