PLAYBOY: How does a self-styled outside
agitator like yourself get accepted in the community he plans to organize?
ALINSKY: The first and most important
thing you can do to win this acceptance is to bait the power structure
into publicly attacking you. In Back of the Yards, when I was first establishing
my credentials, I deliberately maneuvered to provoke criticism. I made
outrageous statements to the press, I attacked every civic and business
leader I could think of, and I goaded the establishment to strike back.
The Chicago Tribune, one of the most right-wing rags in the country at
the time, branded me a subversive menace and spokesmen for the meat packers
denounced me as a dangerous enemy of law and order. Now, these were the
same forces that were screwing the average Joe in Back of the Yards, and
the minute he saw those attacks he said, "That guy Alinsky must be all
right if he can get those bastards that pissed off; he must have something
or they wouldn't be so worried." So I used what I call psychological jujitsu
on the establishment, and it provided me with my credentials, my birth
certificate, in all the communities I ever organized.
But over and above all these devices,
the ultimate key to acceptance by a community is respect for the dignity
of the individual you're dealing with. If you feel smug or arrogant or
condescending, he'll sense it right away, and you might as well take the
next plane out. The first thing you've got to do in a community is listen,
not talk, and learn to eat, sleep, breathe only one thing: the problems
and aspirations of the community. Because no matter how imaginative your
tactics, how shrewd your strategy, you're doomed before you even start
if you don't win the trust and respect of the people; and the only way
to get that is for you to trust and respect them. And without that respect
there's no communication, no mutual confidence and no action. That's the
first lesson any good organizer has to learn, and I learned it in Back
of the Yards. If I hadn't, we would never have won, and we could never
have turned that liellhole into a textbook model of progressive community
organization. Twenty-five years later, the Back of the Yards Council is
still going strong, and a whole generation has grown up not even knowing
that their neighborhood was once one of the foulest slums in the country.
Even Mayor Daley lives there now -- about the only argument I'd ever buy
for restrictive covenants.
PLAYBOY: Mayor Daley's presence
in Back of the Yards symbolizes what some radicals consider the fatal flaw
in your work: the tendency of communities you've organized eventually to
join the establishment in return for their piece of the economic action.
As a case in point, Back of the Yards is now one of the most vociferously
segregationist areas of Chicago. Do you see this as a failure?
ALINSKY: No, only as a challenge.
It's quite true that the Back of the Yards Council, which 20 years ago,
was waving banners attacking all forms of discrimination and intolerance,
today doesn't want Negroes, just like other middle-class white communities.
Over the years they've won victory after victory against poverty and exploitation
and they've moved steadily up the ladder from the have-nots to the have-a-little-want-mores
until today they've thrown in their lot with the haves. This is a recurring
pattern; you can see it in the American labor movement, which has gone
from John L. Lewis to George Meany in one generation. Prosperity makes
cowards of us all, and Back of the Yards is no exception. They've entered
the nightfall of success, and their dreams of a better world have been
replaced by nightmares of fear -- fear of change, fear of losing their
material goods, fear of blacks. Last time I was in Back of the Yards, a
good number of the cars were plastered with Wallace stickers; I could have
puked. Like so many onetime revolutionaries, they've traded in their birthright
for property and prosperity. This is why I've seriously thought of moving
back into the area and organizing a new movement to overthrow the one I
built 25 years ago.
PLAYBOY: This process of co-optation
doesn't discourage you?
ALINSKY: No. It's the eternal
problem, but it must be accepted with the understanding that all life is
a series of revolutions, one following the other, each bringing society
a little bit closer to the ultimate goal of real personal and social freedom.
I certainly don't regret for one minute what I did in the Back of the Yards.
Over 200,000 people were given decent lives, hope for the future and new
dignity because of what we did in that cesspool. Sure, today they've grown
fat and comfortable and smug, and they need to be kicked in the ass again,
but if I had a choice between seeing those same people festering in filth
and poverty and despair, and living a decent life within the confines of
the establishment's prejudices, I'd do it all over again. One of the problems
here, and the reason some people just give up when they see that economic
improvements don't make Albert Schweitzers out of everybody, is that too
many liberals and radicals have a tender-minded, overly romantic image
of the poor; they glamorize the povertystricken slum dweller as a paragon
of justice and expect him to behave like an angel the minute his shackles
are removed. That's crud. Poverty is ugly, evil and degrading, and the
fact that have-nots exist in despair, discrimination and deprivation does
not automatically endow them with any special qualities of charity, justice,
wisdom, mercy or moral purity. They are people, with all the faults
of people -- greed, envy, suspicion, intolerance -- and once they get on
top they can be just as bigoted as the people who once oppressed them.
But that doesn't mean you leave them to rot. You just keep on fighting.
PLAYBOY: Spokesmen for the New Left
contend that this process of accommodation renders piecemeal reforms meaningless,
and that the overthrow and replacement of the system itself is the only
means of ensuring meaningful social progress. How would you answer them?
ALINSKY: That kind of rhetoric
explains why there's nothing left of the New Left. It would be great if
the whole system would just disappear overnight, but it won't, and the
kids on the New Left sure as hell aren't going to overthrow it. Shit, Abbie
Hoffman and Jerry Rubin couldn't organize a successful luncheon, much less
a revolution. I can sympathize with the impatience and pessimism of a lot
of kids, but they've got to remember that real revolution is a long, hard
process. Radicals in the United States don't have the strength to confront
a local police force in armed struggle, much less the Army, Navy and Air
Force; it's just idiocy for the Panthers to talk about all power growing
from the barrel of a gun when the other side has all the guns.
America isn't Russia in 1917 or China
in 1946, and any violent head-on collision with the power structure will
only ensure the mass suicide of the left and the probable triumph of domestic
fascism. So you're not going to get instant nirvana -- or any nirvana,
for that matter -- and you've got to ask yourself, "Short of that, what
the hell can I do?" The only answer is to build up local power bases that
can merge into a national power movement that will ultimately realize your
goals. That takes time and hard work and all the tedium connected with
hard work, which turns off a lot of today's rhetorical radicals. But it's
the only alternative to the continuation of the present system.
It's
important to look at this issue in a historical perspective. Every major
revolutionary movement in history has gone through the same process of
corruption, proceeding from virginal purity to seduction to decadence.
Look at the Christian church as it evolved from the days of the martyrs
to a giant holding company, or the way the Russian Revolution degenerated
into a morass of bureaucracy and oppression as the new class of state managers
replaced the feudal landowners as the reigning power elite.
Look at our American Revolution; there
wasn't anybody more dedicated to the right of revolution than Sam Adams,
leader of the Sons of Liberty, the radical wing of the revolution. But
once we won the fight, you couldn't find a worse dictatorial reactionary
than Adams; he insisted that every single leader of Shays' Rebellion be
executed as a warning to the masses.
He had the right to revolt,
but nobody had the right to revolt against him. Take Gandhi, even; within
ten months of India's independence, he acquiesced in the law making passive
resistance a felony, and he abandoned his nonviolent principles to support
the military occupation of Kashmir. Subsequently, we've seen the same thing
happen in Goa and Pakistan. Over and over again, the firebrand revolutionary
freedom fighter is the first to destroy the rights and even the lives of
the next generation of rebels.
But recognizing this isn't cause
for despair. All life is warfare, and it's the continuing fight against
the status quo that revitalizes society, stimulates new values and gives
man renewed hope of eventual progress. The struggle itself is the victory.
History is like a relay race of revolutions; the torch of idealism is carried
by one group of revolutionaries until it too becomes an establishment,
and then the torch is snatched up and carried on the next leg of the race
by a new generation of revolutionaries. The cycle goes on and on, and along
the way the values of humanism and social justice the rebels champion take
shape and change and are slowly implanted in the minds of all men even
as their advocates falter and succumb to the materialistic decadence of
the prevailing status quo.
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. |