Description of Alinsky in "Obama: From Promise to Power"

[johnkarls]

Rules for Radicals
Saul Alinsky
Paperback = 10/23/1989
Hardcover = 1/1/1971


In our August book (“Obama: From Promise to Power”), David Mendell talks about Jerry Kellman’s hiring Barack to leave his corporate jobs in NYC to become a community organizer in Chicago (p. 67) –

“Kellman had hired him to launch the Developing Communities Project, an ecumenically funded group whose mission still today is to empower the poor and disenfranchised through grassroots organization. THE GROUP IS BASED IN THE COMMUNITY ORGANIZING TRADITION OF SAUL ALINSKY. Alinsky’s activism in the first half of the twentieth century ran parallel with the labor movement, although he expanded the theory of organizing people to include grievances other than employment. Born in 1909, Alinsky grew up in Chicago’s gritty Back of the Yards neighborhood during the Great Depression. He made his first political efforts in his home community of blue-collar European immigrants, organizing meatpackers to agitate for better working conditions. He believed in public confrontation in the form of sit-ins and boycotts, but his success stemmed mainly from instilling people with the belief that they had the power to redefine their own lives, through both activism and personal behavior. IN HIS MANIFESTO “RULES FOR RADICALS,” Alinsky wrote, “When we talk about a person’s lifting himself by his own bootstraps, we are talking about power. Power must be understood for what it is, for the part it plays in every area of our life, if we are to understand it and thereby grasp the essentials of relationships and functions between groups and organizations, particularly in a pluralistic society. To know power and not fear it is essential to its constructive use and control.” Alinsky taught organizers to work behind the scenes, listening to residents for hours upon hours to decipher what their community needed and what it could realistically achieve.

“Alinsky’s life mission and and his methodologies are both central to Obama’s modern political message. As noted before, a recurring passage in many of Obama’s speeches is his mission of “giving voice to the voiceless and power to the powerless.” But Obama also speaks frequently about self-reliance as the most effective means of ultimately pulling oneself out of financial and social distress. Alinsky himself was politically active, traveling the country and attempting to politicize the masses. In the process, he established an institute that trained, among others, Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers Union. Alinsky’s work also influenced the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War protestors. OBAMA WROTE THAT HE WAS DRAWN TO ALINSKY’S FORM OF DIRECT ACTION. “ONCE I FOUND AN ISSUE PEOPLE CARED ABOUT, I COULD TAKE THEM INTO ACTION. WITH ENOUGH ACTIONS, I COULD START TO BUILD POWER. ISSUES, ACTIONS, POWER, SELF INTEREST. I LIKED THESE CONCEPTS. THEY BESPOKE A CERTAIN HARDHEADEDNESS, A WORLDLY LACK OF SENTIMENT; POLITICS, NOT RELIGION.”

(emphasis added)

And David Mendell, again (p. 70) –

“A main tenet of the Alinsky organizing philosophy was attention to listening – to pull together the masses for a common cause, the organizer must hear and understand the limitations, the fears and the experiences of the people being assembled. Working out of a small office in a church, Obama was assigned to conduct twenty to thirty interviews each week.”solutions

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