Kelley wrote:
> If you wish to
> understand what I've written, I'd suggest you actually read it. The answers
> to your questions are right there.
I've read it. I've even copied it into a Word file and formatted it for clear reading. And the more I read and reread it, the harder it is for me to figure out just what you are after. Take the following paragraph, in response to my first post. (The passage you responded to, incidentally, began with "For what it's worth": i.e., I took your original post as chatty, and chatted back. I'm sorry if I misread the tone.)
Kelley: 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."
1. _Has_ "a community" ever come to you and asked for such help?
2. What would you have to do to create such a situation (a whole community, however defined, asking you personally to help)?
3. I could hardly say in the abstract what anyone would say if confronted with such a request, since it makes no sense In the abstract. That is what I meant by historicizing it. What series of events, involving what kind of people in what kind of a situation in what kind of a national and world context brought about the occasion in which someone asks you ot help them fight what battle? Can't you see the abstractness of this?
4. One context I can imagine is that of _The Bicycle Thief_. The protagonist goes to all the social institutions (including Union and Communist Party) looking for help, and none is forthcoming. But there is not a CP with several million members in the US right now. Hence I doubt that anyone let alone a whole community is going to come to ask any one of us for such help.
5. The hypothetical answer you describe me as giving to your hypothetical situation is silly, because I have _no_ answer (positive or negative) to give until I know the situation AND ABOVE ALL KNOW MY (THE LOCAL GROUP'S) RESOURCES OF PEOPLE, ENERGY, COMMUNITY POWER, ETC.)
And to repeat, my initial post was off the top of my head ("for what it's worth"). If you want a response to Alinsky, you will have to present him in your own words, not merely give us a URL to an interview. Your subsequent posts seem to me to call for 10s of thousands of leftists devoting damn near full time to an utterly vague project.
But take a look someday at the old Attorney Generals list of subversive organizations. A huge number of them were clearly organizations doing just what you ask for here -- but they had the vigorous CPUSA of the '30s behind them. (They were front groups. But they really did help people too.)
Carrol