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Legacies of Resistance
By Jim Straub
It happens somewhere in the US almost every day. On Chicago’s
South Side, dozens of elderly folks gather outside the power company’s
gates before dawn to block utility trucks from going to shut off poor
people’s electricity and are arrested. In Los Angeles, African-American,
Latino, and Korean bus riders, all wearing yellow t-shirts and chanting,
march one week against poor public transportation, and the next against
the war in Iraq.
Despite the supposed lack of class conflict in the US, hardly a day
passes without angry crowds of ordinary people confronting the elites
whose decisions affect their lives. In organizing terminology, these
groups are frequently called community-based organizations, or CBO’s.
From national networks like ACORN and the Industrial Areas Foundation
to locally based groups like Direct Action for Rights and Equality in
Providence or the Bus Riders’ Union in Los Angeles, these groups
share a particular set of organizing methods first developed in the
1930s.
Although community organizing in the US has many roots, historians frequently
trace its modern genesis to a disgruntled social worker named Saul Alinsky.
Born and raised in the slums of Chicago’s south side, Alinsky led
a colorful life during the early part of the century -- brawling in
Jewish-Polish gang fights, infiltrating Al Capone’s crime family
to write a sociology paper on it, and working as a state criminologist
-- before finding his true calling as a radical organizer in the 1930s.
Alinsky found himself drawn to “the causes that meant something
in those days -- fighting fascism at home and abroad and doing something
to improve the life of the masses of people who were without jobs, food,
or hope,” he reflected in an interview in the 1960s. The experience
of revolutionary upheaval during the Great Depression inspired Alinsky
to take things a step further. He moved back to his old south side neighborhood,
the Packinghouse District immortalized by Upton Sinclair in his novel
The Jungle, and started what he called “an organization of organizations.”
Conceived as a community-wide coalition to fight for the needs of an
impoverished, working-class neighborhood, the Back of the Yards Council
managed to unite a poor, ethnically divided slum and score a number
of surprising victories against meatpacking companies and the local
government.
The larger significance of the Back of the Yards Council was that it
was replicable; its strategy of uniting constituencies in a neighborhood
around indigenous leadership and goals could be picked up and taken
to almost any community in the country. Alinsky found himself being
called around the United States to help start other community-based
organizations. His brash style and the militant tactics of the groups
he helped form won him suspicion and anger from local elites. The Kansas
City police jailed him, while the Oakland City Council voted to ban
him from the city altogether. Malcolm X, meanwhile, said, “That
man knows more about organizing than any other person in the country.”
Alinsky’s model called for a professional organizer to act as an
outside agitator to unite existing local groups and build a membership
base around issues the community felt were important. He emphasized
militant confrontation against the power structure, but advocated flexibility
in tactics and ideological relativism. “The question is not, ‘Does
the end justify the means?’ The question is, ‘Does this particular
end justify this particular means?’” he wrote in his organizing
textbook Reveille for Radicals.
With such a flexible, pragmatic outlook, Alinsky-style groups found
themselves free to use tactics ranging from protest mobs to company
boycotts to one memorable “fart-in” at an opera in Rochester,
New York. Alinsky extended this flexibility to politics, saying the
organizer should not have an outside agenda, but should simply seek
to facilitate what the people of a community already want.
This emphasis on developing the capacity and voice of local leaders
and communities, however, took some strange turns. By supposedly not
bringing outside values or politics to the organizations, some groups
founded on the Alinsky method, such as his initial Back of the Yards
Council, began using their organizations for unforeseen ends, such as
keeping African Americans from moving into their neighborhood. And by
downplaying issues of oppression and privilege likely to exist within
organizations, many of these groups developed internal racial and gender
hierarchies. Alinsky’s own politics slid towards conservatism,
going from fighting capitalism in Chicago in the 1930s to calling the
Black Panthers “thugs” in the 1960s.
After Alinsky died in 1972, the groups that carried on with ideas he
pioneered inhabited a complex and mixed legacy. On one hand, activists
from the black, student, and women’s movements used the Alinsky
framework to craft organizations of people fighting in their collective
self-interest. On the other, some liberal elites like Charles Silberman
of Fortune magazine promoted Alinskian community organizing as a possible
reformist alternative to the tide of insurrection in US ghettos and
campuses. In the 1970s, the federal government actually began paying
the salaries of some community organizers through the VISTA (Volunteers
in Service to America) program. This tension, between effective mass
organizing and politically neutral clientelism, has existed in mainstream
community organizing ever since.
Source: Clamor Magazine
Culture Briefs
Marvel’s anti-war comic
One of Scotland’s leading comic writers has created a controversial
anti-war series in which iconic super heroes are drafted by George W.
Bush to fight for him in Iraq. Mark Millar, chief writer for the New
York publishers Marvel Comics and outspoken opponent of Bush and the
war in Iraq, has created a year-long series about US soldiers in Iraq
as the Persons Of Mass Destruction. Its most controversial aspect
is a story line in which Captain America is sent to Iraq. The first
of the monthly comics, Ultimates 2, will be published by Marvel
across the world at the end of this month. It is expected to cause a
huge debate, as Millar’s opposition to the war has already inspired
hundreds of US comic readers to sign an online petition to have him
sacked. But his right to free speech has been backed by the board of
Marvel, and he states that Bush is “the most terrifying threat to the
West since the Third Reich.” (Sunday Herald)
‘Raging cyclists’ in Chile
On the first Tuesday evening of every month hundreds of “Raging Cyclists”
block traffic in Chile’s Capitol, Santiago. The group models itself
after the San Francisco based Critical Mass, and was founded in 1996.
The ride has grown from a small group of 50 bikers to more than 3,000
participants. In Santiago, the group’s popularity has contributed to
an upsurge in cycling — 5 percent of Santiago residents now use a bicycle
as their primary means of transportation — a rate that has doubled in
the past decade, according to the ministry of transportation. During
the monthly rides, cyclists demand more bike paths and encourage non-polluting
forms of transportation. Because of these rides Santiago is planning
to build over 9 miles of bike paths in the city. The Chilean government
has also set aside over $8 million for public transportation. Along
with all of this, the cyclists have been working to promote cycling
in poor communities, where they donate bicycles and give lessons in
how to maintain them properly. (San Francisco
Chronicle)
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