>On Sep 18, 2009, at 1:15 PM, Bob Morris wrote:
>
>> I think the left needs to
>>re-read Rules for Radicals.
>
>I tried, man. It was excruciating.
>
>In any case, I followed a link from one of your posts to this interview:
>
><http://www.progress.org/2003/alinsky3.htm>
>
>>PLAYBOY: The assumption behind the Administration's Silent Majority
>>thesis is that most of the middle class is inherently conservative.
>>How can even the most skillful organizational tactics unite them in
>>support of your radical goals?
>>
>>ALINSKY: Conservative? That's a crock of crap. Right now they're
>>nowhere. But they can and will go either of two ways in the coming
>>years -- to a native American fascism or toward radical social change.
>
>Well, no.
>
>Could you tell me what Alinsky and his spawn have actually accomplished?
you left out the rest, which was mighty good polemic, some of which I disagree with -- but it's better than a lot of the mealy-mouthed crap out there. the guy had a passion and had you not quoted the snippet and i went for more, i never would have read it and started to maybe want to pay more attention.
meanwhile, i'm partly a result of saul alinksy's model, so there you have it. that ought to be good enough fer ya. :)
it was the background behind a lot of the work I did with my mentor. we used a lot of alinsky's stuff in community organizing. i won't detail it all because i have written about here so many times, it's just a matter of reading the archives. I personally don't know anything about him, only knowing of the organizing effort and tactics secondhand, but people used to love this stuff.
here's the rest of that alinsky piece:
" Right now they're frozen, festering in apathy, leading what Thoreau called "lives of quiet desperation:" They're oppressed by taxation and inflation, poisoned by pollution, terrorized by urban crime, frightened by the new youth culture, baffled by the computerized world around them. They've worked all their lives to get their own little house in the suburbs, their color TV, their two cars, and now the good life seems to have turned to ashes in their mouths. Their personal lives are generally unfulfilling, their jobs unsatisfying, they've succumbed to tranquilizers and pep pills, they drown their anxieties in alcohol, they feel trapped in longterm endurance marriages or escape into guilt-ridden divorces. They're losing their kids and they're losing their dreams. They're alienated, depersonalized, without any feeling of participation in the political process, and they feel rejected and hopeless. Their utopia of status and security has become a tacky-tacky suburb, their split-levels have sprouted prison bars and their disillusionment is becoming terminal.
They're the first to live in a total mass-media-oriented world, and every night when they turn on the TV and the news comes on, they see the almost unbelievable hypocrisy and deceit and even outright idiocy of our national leaders and the corruption and disintegration of all our institutions, from the police and courts to the White House itself. Their society appears to be crumbling and they see themselves as no more than small failures within the larger failure. All their old values seem to have deserted them, leaving them rudderless in a sea of social chaos. Believe me, this is good organizational material.
The despair is there; now it's up to us to go in and rub raw the sores of discontent, galvanize them for radical social change. We'll give them a way to participate in the democratic process, a way to exercise their rights as citizens and strike back at the establishment that oppresses them, instead of giving in to apathy. We'll start with specific issues -- taxes, jobs, consumer problems, pollution -- and from there move on to the larger issues: pollution in the Pentagon and the Congress and the board rooms of the megacorporations. Once you organize people, they'll keep advancing from issue to issue toward the ultimate objective: people power. We'll not only give them a cause, we'll make life goddamn exciting for them again -- life instead of existence. We'll turn them on."