Ah, the age-old debate.

But Zack, is it really as clear cut as all that?

How many Alinksy-influenced organizers are there who never got to the point of a rent strike - much less in a two minute conversation? I have many friends who spent months and even years in such organizations without ever being able to organize any focused activity at all. I knew of others who followed the community where it wanted to go into overtly racist politics - or refused to follow them and had to leave. A few were more successful.

Organizing can be a bitch, sometimes.

This conversation might easily go in ways other than those assumed by Alinsky:

For example:

"Wait a minute - what's in it for you? Why do you care so much?"

or

"Yeah, I'd do it, but the some of the other tenants - man - they're a bunch of kiss-asses. You'd never get them together."

or

"Some of those tenants - those damned Puerto Ricans (or whatever) - I don't blame the landlord for being hard on them. They're the ones who are wrecking the place. If I owned the building I wouldn't want them either."

Etc. Etc. Etc.

For every such success there are probably many more failures. Or successful campaigns that fell apart later because of some other issue.

And then again, the contradistinction to Lenin is kind of misplaced too. Without knowing the context, what is it that he's trying to say? One suspects he might have been arguing (rightly or wrongly) against what he saw as excessive passivity by his Menshevik rivals. I don't see this as a polar opposite to Alinsky at all. Both are arguing for activity as opposed to passivity - in very different contexts.

And I'm not at all against Alinskyite organizing. All successful organizing has to learn how to listen to people. Alinsky's Rules are worth reading. But they're no more a blueprint than Mao's little red book. They are things worth thinking about.

Back in the seventies, there were Maoists and other radicals who "colonized" factories in order to "lead the working class to revolution". Of course they never got there or anywhere close.

Those who nonetheless succeeded in accomplishing something of lasting value (say building a union strong enough to actually win something substantial for its members) were those who learned to listen to people and realize that their "theoretical knowledge" was as much an impediment as an asset. They too, like the successful Alinskyite organizers, learned that there were severe limits to the leadership they could provide. There were others who did not learn these lessons. These folks continued to sell their "revolutionary" papers at the plant gates - and accomplished nothing.

Beware of polar opposites like the ones you are proposing. The story is more complicated.

Two observations (take 'em or leave 'em):

1. This paradigm goes much farther back--to the beginnings of the western tradition.  Alinsky is Socratic, Lenin, Plato's "philosopher king".  It isn't just about organizing:  its about how ideas are generated and who has a right to generate them.
2. There's probably not a single intellectual or artistic tradition which cannot be demonstrated to have a genealogies similar to the ones about which Mr. Exley writes.  There are violinists today who can trace their line of tutelage back to Paganini and keyboard artists who can trace their's back to Bach.  There are historians who trace theirs back to Gibbon or Toynbee.  Each generation adds to the tradition.  No generation has to start from scratch.

This is not to say genius (organizational, intellectual, artistic) can't spontaneously spring up just about anywhere.  Rather, it is to suggest that there is room in the concept "the people" for both tradition and novelty.  Jefferson didn't invent the idea, after all.

aMike

This may be a backwards question, but in my own limited local political experience the problem isn't organizing a smart, strong, enthusiastic group, but in finding some way to undermine the opposition - an opposition which also hereabouts conceives itself as being "the people" - in fact abuses that concept about as far as it will go - while being readily manipulable by corporations with interests in local political outcomes, and easily amplified by a press which finds the simpleton rhetoric of "the people" makes for an easy narrative whereas actually exploring the complexities of what's real just asks too much, apparently, of the reporters.

So given an opposition (on everything - this is a group that attends every single local public meeting, and actively opposes absolutely everything that they themselves aren't the first to suggest - which is damn little), ahem, given an opposition which is determined, thick-headed, in a symbiotic relationship with local press hacks, and all over the vocabulary of speaking for "the people" ... well, would we be better off to just discredit that whole narrative, and start again from someplace that hasn't been entirely co-opted?

There's a big difference between Socrates inciting young students to think outside the box, vs. the 22yo Alinskyite organizer asking a series of leading questions designed to 'trick' a person into doing what the organizer wants them to do.

I don't think so actually. For example, in union campaigns and in MoveOn actions (e.g. citizen, face-to-face, lobbying campaigns) -- the vast majority of the people who stepped up into leadership had never done anything 'political' before. So where'd they learn to be leaders? Fighting their PTA, being a leader in their church (not a left leader, just a church leader), raising their family, defending themselves against their husband, etc...

It turns out there are just a ton of ways to become a great leader -- ways that the classic left organizer tends not to recognize.

I definitely don't mean to say that generations of Alinskyite orgnaizers didn't accomplish anything. Amazing people, amazing work! It's just...things aren't working anymore...so let's figure it out and move up and onward.

Hegel has a line that goes something like "The sovereignty of the People is one of those confusions embraced by those who believe in the mystical notion of 'the People'." What exactly is gained in this conversation by talking about "the People" rather than "people"? It seems to me to obscure a number of things -- for example, that middle-class university-educated professionals like those one finds through MoveOn.org are more likely to have the skills and experience necessary for effective political organizing than are people at the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. So that if one takes one's experiences in educating MoveOn.org types as a template, one might indeed find that groups tend to be replete with potential self-actualized leaders -- while, if one were starting from experiences in southern Alabama trailer parks, one might find fewer such ready-to-hand high-skilled leaders.

"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone

Zack, I almost but not quite think you're being intentionally obtuse. Move On, unions, all of these things need organizers. If they didn't, would there be a need for Move On at all? Do groups of workers spontaneously without any outside impetus at all organize themselves into unions?

You're simply painting the most maniupulative picture possible of past organizing attempts without realizing that the success stories among them were only made possible when that baggage was shed.

Why must every generation think they invented sex?

Zack,Consider the tradition that fits neatly into neither of your two camps -- the organizers who over the years have build robust self-governing civic, social movement, and labor organziations. In this context, "organizing" is what leaders do to earn their leadership -- they enter into realations with their constituency, they inspire, they strategize, they act and - when they're good - they develop more leaders. Remember that Alinksy's model was the CIO, an approach to organziing that spurred the greatest surge in self-governing association building (unions) since the late 19th century. Similarly, the model for much of the civil rights organizing was the self-governing Black church. Baptist ministers had to "organize" their own congregations to survive. Organizing - and people who do it - has been with us long before Lenin or Alinsky (in the UFW we used to debate whether the "first" organizer was Moses or St. Paul) and will be long after we are gone. By the way, I agree with you that it's very easy for an implicit elitism to creep into the styles that you describe. That's why I prefer to think of organizing as a leadership skill, particularly attuned to the development of self-governing associations at all levels. 

He's saying much more than just find leaders among "the people." Click through to the longer article he cites. He's saying that organizers need to (1) listen to "the people" from inside, as it were, and identify, trust and work with their natural leaders and (2) provide a vision, strategy and long-term goal that is worth fighting for. Leadership does develop from within, but people need to see a vision and a plan that are worth fighting for. Small stakes aren't worth the time and effort.

For politicians that means big goals like universal health care; reversing the policies that have contributed to so much income inequality in the last 30 years; and reorienting our society from fear and militarism to cooperation and negotiation. Obama at the moment seems to have the most of this, but I could use a whole lot bigger vision.

 What I saw as an organizer was my culture of middle class organizers patronizing the living daylights out of every worker leader they ever met - and thereby driving leaders away and attracting non-leaders.

One of the things this tells me is that middle class organizers need to get out there and organize the middle class.  It won't be easy:  workers in "the professions" have been bamboozled for generations by being flattered that they're above all that sort of thing.  Consequently they join the ranks of "consultants" when the reality of their powerlessness in the face of true power hits them.  I think a few years of trying to organize programmers, and other members of the information sector may give them the humility they need to talk to worker leaders as equals.

aMike

If I require a plumber or doctor for a particular job, I get someone with a specialized set of skills that I respect and need. S/he is expected to be professional with some combination of skill, courteousness, and competentcy to get the job done. If not, then the person loses professional status and becomes a fraud and a quack.

Regardless, this technicain is certainly "of the people" all during this job. If anything, I, the person being "served" am less "of the people" and more "of the bosses" in that arrangement.

The same can be said of the arrangement between activists and constituencies. Activists need to do their jobs and achieve results.

We need to reserve the term "activist" for people who 1) have sizable constituancies 2) actually accomplish things.

Citizen "activists" who don't set realistic goals, don't achieve ends, and just sit around kvetching in social clubs; they aren't activists, they're wanna-bes in the post radical era.
They're "inactivists."

OK - but the fundamental issue of the image you've raised is this:

In one case you have an old, wise, respected man dialoging with his young students.

In the other case (the case you find with most progressive organizing campaigns these days) you have a 23yo dialoging with (and being trained to dialog with) old, wise, respected workplace leaders.

It's the classic misapplication of a good idea out of context.

I'll meet you half way, sorta

Socrates didn't start out old, wise, and respected.  He wasn't even a professional.  (Well, he was, but his profession was masonry, not philosophy).  One of the things that got him into trouble with the high honchos in Athens was that he wasn't credentialed, and that he taught free.  While he was alive, he wasn't all that much respected, either, except by his students, and even they thought he was a little nuts to participate in his own execution, rather than take the prearranged boat out of town and live comfortably in retirement. 

I suspect Socrates became old, wise, and respected by trial and error, and, sometime in his youth, he may have started a dialog with an older, wiser, fellow mason over a retsina in the tavern and wound knocked on his keester for asking the kind of questions 23 year olds do before they know the difference between wise and wise-ass. 

So I have confidence that your 23 year old organizer, if he keeps at it, and dissects what went wrong and learns when he gets knocked about a bit, may wind up as wise, respected, (and old) as Socrates.  He'll need to find a Plato to tell the rest of the world about it.  :-) 

aMike

But usually he just goes to grad school after a couple of years of organizing.