Portside

Jane McAlevey is a union organizer and a critic of what is generally thought of as the U.S. “labor reform” movement. In a recent article, she outlines her critique of “New Labor” and attributes its weaknesses to the ideas and practice of Saul Alinsky, the best known community organizer of his time and a continuing influence in American community and labor organizing. In this review of her article, I separate her criticism of labor—which I think has merit—from its attribution to Saul Alinsky—which I find without merit. The argument is important because radicals interested in social transformation need to pay attention to Alinsky. His dismissal as an incremental pragmatist results in failure to learn important lessons he has to teach.

Introduction

This review and critique is particularly aimed at people “on the left” who are, or want to be, organizers or leaders of small “d” democratic people power organizations—whether at the workplace or in “communities”. I am not here arguing for the necessity of such organizations; I assume it.

In “The Crisis of New Labor and Alinsky’s Legacy…”,(1) Jane McAlevey brings criticism to bear on “New Labor” (the grouping who consider themselves labor reformers, who took leadership of the AFL-CIO at its 1995 Convention, some of whom left the AFL-CIO not long thereafter to form Change To Win) based on her experience and thinking. I find her criticisms often persuasive.

She also claims that New Labor’s problems largely originate in Saul Alinsky’s thinking and practice, and to what she calls “the Alinsky diaspora”.   I do not agree with her view of Alinsky.

Jane McAlevey is a respected organizer, and a thoughtful observer of U.S. unions. By both her own and the accounts of others, she knows how to build participatory, democratic union locals. But her case against Alinsky does not bear close scrutiny. She elaborates her article in a soon-to-be published book.

This is not merely a matter of historic accuracy or interest. There is a long-standing left Alinsky criticism that leads to his dismissal as anything more than—take your pick of one or more of the following: an imaginative tactician and nothing more; a pragmatic reformist with no broader vision than traditional American pluralism; an anti-communist red-baiter; owned by the Catholic Church; a CIA agent (in Italy), and more.

Having worked for Alinsky, and knowing some of his close associates, I use my own experience and that of others, Alinsky’s writings, speeches, interviews and other materials, and writing by organizers I believe to be in “the Alinsky tradition” to specifically dispute McAlevey’s claims and analysis, and more generally to challenge other claims about his views.

I hope to convince people who are interested in building and leading people power organizations to confront and transform the current state of affairs in the world that they can learn a good deal from Saul Alinsky. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t also things to criticize; I have done that elsewhere.

Let me here deal quickly with the “diaspora.” Anyone can call himself or herself an “Alinskyite”, “Alinskyist”, “Alinskian” or some permutation of the same. They could do that for any of a number of reasons: they imagine themselves to be carrying on in a tradition they respect and value; they want to borrow Alinsky’s legitimacy; it helps with some foundation or church funding sources; they want to provide a window dressing for ideas or behavior that would be open to criticism without some more respected person’s name identified with it. There are no doubt other reasons as well.

Making Alinsky responsible for those who claim his mantle is like blaming Freud for whatever may be the faults of Jung and Adler; blaming Marx for Pol Pot and Kim Jong-un; and, for that matter, blaming Jesus for the Inquisition. To do any of these, you have to start with what Alinsky, Freud, Marx or Jesus said, and then see if the diaspora is true to it. McAlevey’s textual analysis doesn’t accomplish this. The Alinsky diaspora is an interesting subject, but I leave its discussion for another time. My focus is on Alinsky himself.

McAlevey’s Methodology

McAlevey says:

I have used Alinsky’s own texts, what he himself said and wrote, as the foundation for this discussion.(2)

I conducted a line-by-line content analysis comparing his first book, Reveille for Radicals, with Rules for Radicals, which I consider the defining Alinsky text… (3)

I put a premium on his very last public words, an extensive interview conducted by Playboy magazine three months before he died…”(4)

[I conducted] “semistructured interviews…with longtime Alinsky organizers.”(5)

If by the last she means someone who worked with Alinsky, or for the Industrial Areas Foundation when he was still alive, there is not one such organizer identified. Nor, for that matter, is anyone identified who worked closely with any of Alinsky’s direct associates—who were few in number, and known in the field. No interviews, articles or anything else by any of these people are cited. I carefully checked the 66 “Notes” (footnotes) that accompany the article to find out who these sources were.

No systematic index identifications demonstrate a “line-by-line content analysis”.   While Reveille for Radicals(6) is cited, there are no page numbers indexed. And for Rules for Radicals,(7) the only pages cited are 63-66. A “line-by-line content analysis” deserves more representation in an index or the text so that a reader can go to the source and check for her/himself—as I wanted to do.

She says Alinsky “key postulates” are represented in New Labor. If “key postulates” means core concepts or fundamental principles, there’s no way to make this connection because the evidentiary linkages that would be required to demonstrate it simply aren’t part of either her text or “Notes.”

McAlevey’s Case

Leaving aside methodological problems, I want to look at the substance of McAlevey’s case. She says important things about the state of organized labor, organizing and related matters. She fails to connect them to Saul Alinsky’s ideas or practices.

Her central claim, is stated in the article’s “Abstract”:

This article examines the strategic choices made by New Labor’s leadership after their victory at the AFL-CIO Convention in 1995, and the choices made by the breakaway unions that formed Change to Win. I identify the influence of Saul Alinsky…and attribute the strengths and weaknesses of New Labor’s organizing approach to Alinsky’s strengths and weaknesses…[A] crucial factor in labor’s decline rests with decisions within its control to embrace corporate campaigns and narrowly defined interest-based politics—decisions that led unions away from workers and the workplace and put them at odds with unorganized workers and the community.(8)

A key piece of McAlevey’s argument is summed up in this paragraph:

“A key aspect of the CIO organizer’s craft was identifying organic worker leaders in the shop and anchoring campaigns in the ‘whole worker’, who was understood to be a person embedded in a range of social relationships in the workplace and in the community. By contrast, Alinsky’s ‘people’s organizations’—what he called “O of O’ or Organizations of Organizations—were top-down rather than bottom-up formations, staff driven and focused more on tactical warfare than on keeping people organized to control their own destiny.”(9)

Here are more of her statements (I will subsequently analyze them):

I identify the influence of Saul Alinsky in the background of many of the current New Labor leaders and attribute the strengths and weaknesses of New Labor’s organizing approach to Alinsky’s strengths and weaknesses.(10)

[This article]…identifies the influence of several strands of Alinsky doctrine in the organizational background of many current New Labor leaders…(11)

Corporate Campaigns

[New Labor leadership’s Alinskyist origins] prioritization of corporate campaigns reproduced and privileged Alinsky-like ‘jujitsu tactics’ in a ‘war’ conducted between labor and business elites.(12)

I will argue that Alinsky’s extreme pragmatism and his embrace of ‘ends justify the means’ tactics enabled New Labor’s leaders to rationalize accords with big business that stripped workers and their communities of the ability to defend themselves against their employers.(13)

Moreover, New Labor’s adoption of Alinskyist methods stands in contrast to the organizing style at the root of many of organized labor’s great victories…the successful organizing of the union of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) during the 1930s.(14)

Alinsky’s worldview is virtually indistinguishable from New Labor’s…(15)

Alinsky is frequently credited with helping to develop the concept of the corporate campaign…Corporate campaigns reproduced and privileged Alinsky-like ‘jujitsu tactics’ in a ‘war’ conducted between labor and business elites.(16)

Means and Ends

Alinsky’s extreme pragmatism and his embrace of ‘ends justify the means’ tactics enabled New Labor’s leaders to rationalize accords with big business that stripped workers and their communities of the ability to defend themselves against their employers”.(17)

Tactical Warfare

I contrast Alinsky’s well-known core principles for organizers, as laid out in Rules for Radicals [she identifies 13 aphorisms about power tactics] with the core principles of an 1199 organizer.(18)

[Alinsky’s organizer is] “focused more on tactical warfare than on keeping people organized to control their own destiny.”(19)

Leaders and Organizers

The role of the CIO-1199 organizer [the approach she contrasts favorably to Alinsky’s] is to correctly identify the organic leaders…then teach and apprentice them through the employer fight.(20)

[Alinsky’s] professional staff chose and anoint worker leaders based on their own observation and preference.(21)

[I]n Rules for Radicals, Alinsky obscured the issue of organizer strategy. He declared that there are leaders and there are organizers, and that they are different…The role of the CIO-1199 organizer is to correctly identify the organic leaders…then teach and apprentice them through the employer fight.(22)

Alinskyist methods stand in contrast to the organizing style at the root of many of organized labor’s great victories…the successful organizing of the unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) during the 1930s.(23)

Top Down vs. Bottom Up

…Alinsky’s ‘people’s organizations’ were top-down rather than bottom-up formations…(24)

Ideology/Fair Share of the Pie

Fundamentally, Alinsky was not proposing class struggle or threatening the structure of the economy or of society. He wanted a fairer share of the pie for ‘freedom loving’ people. Alinsky’s worldview is virtually indistinguishable from New Labor’s…” (In her book Raising Expectations McAlevey approvingly cites Stir It Up: Lessons in Community Organizing and Advocacy, by Rinku Sen who, “argues that Alinsky’s obsession with pragmatism and nondivisive issues resulted in generations of otherwise good organizing that often undermined the very people who need good organizing the most, the poor, the working class, and people of color, none of whom have issues that could be easily characterized as nondivisive.”)(25)

Reveille for Radicals was the first book that discussed organizing as a craft devoid of ideology…(26)

On the question of ideology, Alinsky was caustic…and had…an obsession with [Alexis de Toqueville’s idea of] the primacy of the individual versus the omnipotence of the state. He often preached Tocqueville’s embrace of the middle class as the anchor of a ‘free’ society…(27)

New Labor, she says, is about “narrowly defined interest-based politics”, which can be attributed to “the influence of Saul Alinsky…[and] to Alinsky’s strengths and weaknesses”.(28)

[In the CIO-1199 model, a workplace organizing committee is] “made up of the organic leaders, not activists as in the Alinsky-New Labor model”.(29)

These, and other not-cited, statements by McAlevey add up to an Alinsky indictment. They do not stand up when put under the microscope of deeper examination. In what follows, I offer a detailed examination of some of them.

Corporate Campaigns, “Proxies for People,” and Alinsky’s “jujitsu tactics”.

Alinsky’s idea of “jujitsu tactics” is to find the weaknesses in your opponent’s strengths and use them against him. Thus in the Rochester, NY FIGHT organization’s battle with KODAK over racially discriminatory hiring, proxies were collected so that FIGHT could gain access to a KODAK stockholder meeting and put the issue in the national media, with the threat to the corporation that if it did not negotiate it would find itself subpoenaed by a Senate sub-committee then staffed by Robert F. Kennedy, and called to a meeting with Governor Nelson Rockefeller.(30)

Here’s the important point: there was a community organization deeply rooted in Rochester’s black community that engaged in this struggle. At a FIGHT rally, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) then-Chairman Stokely Carmichael “predicted that when FIGHT was through with the conflict they will be able to say ’jump’ and Kodak will ask ‘how high?’”(31) Carmichael called FIGHT an example of black power. FIGHT’s President, Minister Franklin Florence, said, “In Rochester, ‘black power’ is spelled FIGHT.”(32)

That which is supposed to have come “from Saul Alinsky” has little to do with what New Labor thinks labor should do. The epitome of New Labor’s corporate campaign is “the union”—viewed by most members as a third party—doing for its members, not with them, nor by them.

To demonstrate her point about corporate campaigns, McAlevey writes, “[In an interview]… Ray Rogers [a key figure in the development of corporate campaigns] also references Alinsky.”(33) But Rogers doesn’t connect Alinsky with corporate campaigns; he only makes a point about Alinsky’s tactical thinking. Here’s what he actually says:

…Whenever you’re dealing with these big business people…, they’ve always got a scale of profits and losses in front of their eyes. Basically, you have to force them to do the right thing, what Saul Alinsky called “forcing someone to take the low road to morality.(34)

Shortly before he died, Alinsky imagined a national “Proxies for People” campaign that would be used to organize the alienated middle-class, both directly in chapters and through such organizations as their mosques, synagogues and churches, as well as other voluntary associations, colleges and universities, and elsewhere. It was to be a vehicle to tap middle-class despair, alienation and feelings of powerlessness. This is quite a contrast from the typical labor corporate campaign that involves little or no mass participation at all, however effective it may be in getting a corporation to the negotiating table. McAlevey conflates “Proxies for People” with “corporate campaigns”; she shouldn’t.

In his McAlevey-cited Playboy interview, Alinsky was clear that collecting proxies was an organizing tool to be used to serve a larger purpose:

[D]espite all the crap about “people’s capitalism,” the dominant controlling stock in all major corporations is vested in the hands of a few people we could never get to…We want to use the proxies as a means of social and political pressure against the mega-corporations, and as a vehicle for exposing their hypocrisy and deceit…The proxy tactic is also an invaluable means of gaining middle-class participation in radical causes…

Proxies can become a springboard to other issues in organizing the middle class. Proxy participation on a large scale could ultimately mean the democratization of corporate America, and could result in the changing of these corporations’ overseas operations, which would precipitate important shifts in our foreign policy…It will mean revolution, peaceful revolution, and we will get away with it in the years to come.(35)

Alinsky relished the opportunity to say something like, “the shares of millions of Americans were voted down by a handful of the corporate elite.”(36) Not a bad tool to use in the relational, one-to-one, face-to-face, organizing work that was, and remains, central to those who organize in his tradition. When McAlevey talks about her own organizing work, this is the kind of organizing she does. So did Alinsky.

Means and Ends

Alinsky was deeply committed to the core values of the democratic tradition, and those found in the social and economic justice teachings of the world’s great religions. Alinsky’s pragmatism, or realism, was based on the understanding that to change the world you need to start with it as it is. And you need to begin “within the experience” of the people you are organizing. His continuing focus throughout his life was on organizing people into “people’s organizations” that had the power to further core social and economic justice values. (Indeed, this combination of realism/pragmatism in the service of fundamental values is what characterizes McAlevey’s organizing work.)

Here’s how Msgr John Egan, a legendary figure in Roman Catholic social justice circles, eulogized Alinsky. Imagining him facing the Lord, he has God saying,

“You saw me despised and you treated me with dignity. You saw me powerless to secure a job and decent housing, and you helped me organize with my brothers and sisters to secure my rights as a human being and as a citizen; you saw me still enslaved, and you lifted my eyes to freedom and self-determination. You saw me being pushed around, and you cared constantly.”(37)

Egan told a story that is indicative of where Alinsky’s commitments lay. “Make up your mind, Jack,” Alinsky said to Egan, “whether you want to be a priest or a bishop. All other decisions will flow from that one.”(38)

McAlevey makes the point that Alinsky “embrace[d] ‘ends justify the means’.” More precisely, he gave a talk at Union Theological Seminary titled, “Of Means and Ends.” Here’s what Alinsky said there:

THAT PERENNIAL QUESTION, “Does the end justify the means?” is meaningless as it stands; the real and only question regarding the ethics of means and ends is, and always has been, “Does this particular end justify this particular means?” If the Gestapo comes to your door and asks if you are hiding Jews in your attic (and you are), you lie and hope it works…To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody.(39)

When nurses strike—as McAlevey organized them to do—they may harm patients. They use this means because the end for which they are fighting—better conditions so that more patients can be better served as well as improvements in their own lives—justifies it. What justifies means other than ends, which, in turn, become means to other ends.

“Tactical Warfare”

It is precisely CIO drives that taught Alinsky about organizing. And he didn’t abandon the lessons. In Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC), the site of his first organizing effort, he worked closely with the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC), and its key organizer Herb March (to whom I will later return). Before that, as a student at the University of Chicago, he was active in raising food, money and other support for striking miners in Southern Illinois. Beyond that, he supported Republican Spain when Franco sought to overthrow its government, and was otherwise—as he described himself—“a professional anti-fascist”. It was during this period that he met and came under the wing of John L. Lewis, the CIO’s leader as well as President of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA).(40)

Alinsky called the groups he or his associates built “mass organizations”. The major strategies and tactics of these organizations owe their origins to the CIO and the ferment of the 1930s: nonviolent, disruptive, direct action (or the threat of it), consumer boycotts, rent strikes, mass lobbying, mass voter registration and others. These tactics, however, are in the service of organizing people to control their own destiny—which McAlevey denies.

Alinsky’s 13 aphorisms appear in the Rules book chapter, “Tactics,” which begins, “Tactics means doing what you can with what you have…Here our concern is with…how the Have-Nots take from the Haves.” The chapter then lists and elaborates each of the rules. A footnote to the first rule says: “Power is always derived from two main sources: money and people. Lacking money, the Have-Nots must build power from their own flesh and blood. A mass movement expresses itself with mass tactics.”(41)

Doesn’t this sound like a discussion of how a mass organization’s tactical warfare serves “core principles”? Isn’t that a good deal different from calling the tactics “core principles”, which is what McAlevey says.

Permanent, mass-based, people power organizations were the vehicles to win and enforce social and economic justice victories and, more broadly, to realize a democratic society. The education of members in democracy’s values and methods was central to them. Alinsky is explicit about this throughout Reveille, Rules and in numerous of his articles.

In “Making An Offer We Can’t Refuse,” Richard Harmon, one of Alinsky’s core staff members at the time IAF’s Training Institute was launched, wrote:

Organizing is teaching,…not academic-type teaching, which is confined for the most part to stuffing data into people’s ears. Organizing is teaching which rests on people’s life experiences, drawing them out, developing trust, going into action, disrupting old perceptions of reality, developing group solidarity, watching the growth of confidence to continue to act, then sharing in the emotional foundation for continual questioning of the then current status quo…This means that education is primarily in the action, but becomes really liberating education only if the person develops the discipline to rigorously reflect on that action… We have to own the questions in this educational process. It must be our curiosity that is the engine …pulling us into action, then reflection, then more action, more reflection.(42)

Does McAlevey disagree with this as a key aspect to understanding education in the context of organizing? I doubt it. Alinsky’s fundamental purpose was creating people power organizations that were schools for democratic citizenship. That was his passion.

Leaders

“[O]rganic leaders” are the very people central to an Alinsky organization’s success. Alinsky had a simple definition of a leader, “a [person] with a following”. He repeated it widely.(43)

Alinsky:

It is apparent that the primary and most difficult job confronting an organizer is the actual identification of the local leadership. With few exceptions, the real local leaders are completely unknown outside of the community…The job of locating the individual native leaders…can be done only through a search that requires infinite patience. It means participating in countless informal situations and being constantly alert…It means the closest of observation and constant testing of each clue…It means intimate association with particular interest groups within the community…[and] working through these interest groups to discover the real leaders…Just as people have a variety of interests, so they have a variety of leaders. The problem of identifying native leadership is as baffling and complicated as the problem of understanding the forces, interests, and myriads of elements that make up the life of a community…These natural leaders run into considerable numbers…These are the common people and in them are to be found the small natural leaders of the natural groups which are present among all people. .. [O]nly the people and their own leaders can build a People’s Organization.(44)

Reveille has an entire chapter devoted to “Native Leadership”. Ironically, its points are well illustrated by McAlevey in her Raising Expectations memoir, in part an account of her Las Vegas years as a union organizer.(45)

Primacy of Staff “as Above All Others”

Since McAlevey herself talks about leaders and organizers, I think it fair to conclude she thinks they are different—so how this difference “obscured the issue of organizer strategy” is unclear. By her account, and that of others, she exemplifies that difference. She was, when in the field, a talented organizer.

Not only that, she was an “outside organizer”. She is critical of Alinsky’s “outside organizer.” As she presents this organizer, “The organizer is a behind-the-scenes individual who is not a leader, who does not have anything to do with decisions and decision making, and who must come from outside the community.” (46)

McAlevey came “from outside” the workplaces where she organized. According to Raising Expectations she was largely “a behind-the-scenes individual” interested in working with the “organic leaders” she and her organizing staff identified in workplaces. But she, as is also the case with Alinsky’s outside organizer, was deeply involved in “decisions and decision-making.” If the outside organizer isn’t involved in those, what is the need for her or him in the first place?

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