alinsky's used this to shock them by telling them that they were wedded to a victim mentality, refusing to involve themselves in messy issues of power, preferring purity to nitty gritty politics. this inevitably outraged social justice activists who were wedded to the notion that the Truth can only be grasped by the oppressed - the Subject of History. according to my mentor, it would take a week to ten days working through this exercise for social justice activists to get over this notion, get over their shock and anger at his position.
alinksy would have none of this romanticism, especially romanticization of the oppressed - which was why he antagonized new leftists. He argued that victimizing the poor, insisting that we remain pure and wash our hands of power/politics was a paralyzing dead end. the poor, he said, should be organized to take power, which would necessarily mean making the kinds of compromises - dealing with what he called "the world as it is". the poor needed to take power and revolt against what he called welfare colonialism.
for alinsky, the world was always about power and conflict. social justice folks, with their romanitic notions of truth located in a subject of history ostensibly excluded from power, were - basically - afraid of power, people who used this as an excuse to, ultimately, do nothing.
At 01:15 PM 2/29/2012, guava tree wrote:
>Love of Thucydides is a thread that runs through the
>"neo-conservative" (anti-democratic) menagerie-- Hobbes of course
>translated Thucydides -- Donald Kagan, who in his condensed
>single-volume of the peloponnesian war keeps flogging on how the
>Athenians failed to rout the Spartans when they had the chance and
>overall weren't "tough" enough. --Victor Davis Hanson-- There are many
>more, but one's time is better spent elsewhere-- The refrain is "our
>democracy has enemies within who will weaken us to such an extent that
>the enemies out there will be able to completely crush our society!"
>
>the other way of reading Thucydides of course is to ask: "why is the
>"democracy" sending colonies out across the Mediterranean, demanding
>tribute from them, protection money, acting like an aggressor,
>bullying smaller city-states-- Is this a society worth defending?"
>
>On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 12:30 AM, <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> > Oh, boy! I notice these guys
> >
> > http://www.openculture.com/philosophy_free_courses
> >
> > have half a dozen Strauss lectures on Plato, one on Vico, and one on
> Thucydides.
> >
> > I'm almost tempted to see what this asshole might have had to say about
> Thcydides.
> >
> > Joanna
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
>
>
>--
>http://guavapuree.wordpress.com
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