The Radical Vision of Saul Alinski/ Community Is Possible
Fisher, Robert
Commonweal: 348 Organizing in search of a vision THE HADICAL VISION OF SAUL ALINSKY P. David Finks Paulist, $9.95, 275 pp. COMMOMITY IS POSSIBLE REPAIRING AMERICA'S ROOTS Harry C....
...Alinsky is no easier to deal with in death then he was in life...
...These two books seek to answer that need...
...Finks's study is organized around brief case studies of the major organizing projects Alinsky initiated or directly influenced...
...Most college students, even history or political science majors, never have...
...To see the segregationist problem of the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council as due to longevity or organizational prosperity is more than oversight...
...Boyte continues his work, most widely recognized in his Backyard Revolution, to counter the cynicism and despair of the 1970s and 1980s...
...Alinsky saw "nonideological" organizing as the cornerstone of his efforts...
...This book concludes with an all-too-brief chapter which sounds a note of caution, emphasizing that the contemporary efforts discussed are only the beginning, only the stirrings of a communityoriented alternative, and that there are limits and ambiguities inherent in populist movements...
...Boyte is best as a theoretician rather than a popularizer of left populism...
...Community Is Possible makes overtures in that direction...
...the results, of his work were uneven...
...Community Is Possible is nothing less than a highly accessible and engaging study of grass-roots democracy in action...
...If Finks was indeed serious about evaluating Alinsky's radical vision he would not have skirted the serious concerns friends and foes raised about Alinsky's theory and practice...
...Some Alinsky organizing projects, such as FIGHT in Rochester, in which Finks was a participant, are handled well...
...others, including most Alinsky organizations, had little to sustain them beyond their "normal" life span of five or six years...
...Paul, Minnesota...
...Finks's book is the long awaited and long overdue, first published biography of Alinsky...
...Most community organizing since then, from the New Left in the early 1960s through the left populists in the 1970s and 1980s, has continued to downplay the positive role of a mobilizing ideology and has emphasized instead, as Alinsky did, that community organization must be built around the material self-interests of community members...
...It is a thought-provoking work which offers fresh ideas and proposes new directions...
...But for the larger part it continues too much in the populist-booster vein of Boyte's earlier work...
...But he thought it manipulative to share his vision, his political critique, with the people he was organizing...
...P. David Finks asserts that Alinsky's contribution to the social change movements of the past thirty years is equal to that of Martin Luther King, Jr...
...Boyte presents an impressively wide range of case studies, based on historical research and extensive interviewing, from the Iroquois Confederacy to current efforts of COPS in San Antonio, the San Francisco Organizing Project, and lesser known activities in Lowell, Massachusetts, and St...
...It will, however, disappoint those more familiar with the subject...
...Robert Fisher HISTORY not only informs our present but is written by it...
...His life was filled with contradictions...
...I'm still waiting for him to apply his critical sharpness to a muchneeded study of the successes and failures, the virtues and limits of grass-roots populism...
...The book is excellent in its description of Alinsky's personality, personal life, and significant relationship with the Catholic church...
...P. David Finks's biography of Saul Alinsky and Harry Boyte's study of community activism follow on the heels of a contemporary movement...
...I suspect Boyte believes the time is not right for serious criticism...
...Alinsky possessed an "antifascist" ideology...
...It is a splendid book for anyone seeking a very readable introduction to the life and work of Saul Alinsky...
...If the thousands of citizen action efforts that grew up in the 1970s are to have a substantial impact on American life and politics it will take, at the outset, a mobilizing ideology, an alternative critique of the present, and a vision of the future, around which people and groups can be organized...
...This was central to the success of the populist farmers' movement of the 1890s, the labor and unemployment movements of the 1930s, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s...
...Most social change activists know the name and can associate it with "conflict" tactics or community organizing, but rarely are they conversant with much more about the person, his vision, and his method of grass-roots organizing...
...Boyte's work is more satisfying, a creative and often impressive exploration into the nature of community activism and the ideal of "commonwealth" in the United States...
...31 May 1985: 349...
...Alinsky is a figure important enough to warrant such extensive study...
...The historical lesson is no less valid now...
...He offers organizers and activists hopeful, positive examples of activism which he sees as the potential seeds, the models, for a more effective progressive/left effort in the future...
...he even went so far in his early career to refer to himself as a "professional anti-fascist...
...The large-scale mobilizations of our time — women, anti-war and nuclear activists, consumers, environmentalists — whether they know it or not, owe most of their bottom-up organizational strategy and hard-hitting, non-violent tactics to Saul Alinsky.'' The claim overshoots the mark but it is an interesting commentary that the person who, more than any individual, is responsible for the "backyard revolution" of the 1970s and 1980s is a relative unknown...
...Nevertheless, Finks had access to the Industrial Areas Foundation records, as no other researcher has, and while he has combined with these invaluable materials an impressive number of interviews with people who organized with Alinsky, I only wish he had done more with the opportunity...
...It never fails to amaze me how few people have ever heard of Saul Alinsky...
...Boyte begins to get at this issue of the role of a mobilizing ideology in his discussion throughout the book of the need for communal values and a vision of commonwealth...
...One of the problems community organizing has traditionally faced is its continued emphasis on being "non-ideological...
...The neo-populist interest in community organizing emerged in the 1960s, blossomed in the 1970s and early 1980s, and now needs, among other things, a sense of its historical roots to inform its future direction...
...While Finks titled his book The Vision of Saul Alinsky, there is very little on the issue of vision and ideology...
...Admittedly the fact that this is the first biography of Alinsky reflects the difficulty of the task and the complexity of the subject...
...But in general, analysis is limited...
...COMMOMITY IS POSSIBLE REPAIRING AMERICA'S ROOTS Harry C. Boyte Harper & Row, $6.95, 219 pp...
...Serious problems and changes in goals and strategies that occurred in efforts such as Back of the Yards and The Woodlawn Organization, for example, are never discussed...
...I'd suggest the time is perfect...
...Not sharing it openly, however, was simply another form of manipulation...
...The history of community organizing illustrates, however, that this lack of a galvanizing vision which transcends personal advantage has ruined countless community organizing projects...
...While Finks's biography is clearly the place to begin, a critical biography, perhaps along the lines of Robert Caro's The Power Broker, still needs to be written...
...Some, such as the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, became openly racist and segregationist...
...While I liked the book and found much of it fascinating, I remain uneasy with the tendency in Boyte's popular writing to see the seeds of progressive change and an alternative to corporate capitalism in almost every community gathering...
...It traces Alinsky from his early years in Chicago to those as a criminology student, with access to the Capone gang, at the University of Chicago, from being a supporter of the CIO and a distant admirer of Communist militancy in the 1930s to the founding of the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, the Community Service Organization, and a host of Industrial Areas Foundation projects in the 1960s...
Vol. 112 • May 1985 • No. 11
