Mighty Oaks from Little A.C.O.R.N.s Grow. Not.
Now that the greatest threat to America has been revealed to be some shadowy organization called ACORN, a little background should be helpful. ACORN springs from the philosophy of a fellow named Saul Alinsky, whose Rules For Radicals was one of the reads, back in the day. Alinsky's philosophy was to avoid philosophy. Assorted political bigs in the Democratic Party have been associated with ACORN, usually in very weak terms.
As a student radical I hated Alinsky. He was anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-Marxist, and anti-political. He was in no way part of the New Left or the old left. What this fellow was purveying as "radical" was, and is, anything but. I wouldn't go so far as to call it liberal. That would be giving it too much credit. The reason is that Alinskyism is anti-ideological and anti-political.
What Alinsky groups do is try to mobilize poor people around the most localist, pragmatic, elemental needs, like affordable electricity and non-discriminatory rental and lending policies. This entails milling around in front of banks and politicians' offices until they are granted a hearing. At the hearing their advocates try and beg for some relief. That was Obama's pastime at one point. It's an honorable calling, as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far.
Please don't get me wrong. If there were ten million ACORNs running around, the country would be a better place. I salute their work and sacrifices. On the merits, for any big time politician, having ACORN on the resumé ought to be utterly harmless at worst.
I should mention that a sometimes downside of ACORN is that they don't afford their own workers much in the way of power. There have been some ugly spats about unions and working conditions (much as in Nader's organizations). Oh well, nobody's perfect.
I still don't like ACORN because to me it is a distraction from thinking and doing big change, both in intellectual and political terms. It's sort of a political version of the Salvation Army. Sure, do your thing. Good deeds are fine. I doubt they will amount to anything. ACORN after all has been in business for decades. Nobody heard about them until they could be hung around Obama's neck, and because they are -- horrors -- registering people to vote. Right arm. Or something.
You know, John Sayles makes a wonderful point in his brilliant little film Matewan, about the struggle of organizers. When Joe Henehan first arrives in Matewan, he finds a group of coal miners already divided white against black, and native born against immigrant. They've been primed for violent confrontation with the mine owners hired thugs from the Baldwin Felts agency. All of these circumstances are problems for the Union organizer, because he does not know that in the midst of the men is a hired provocateur, an agent of the owners who is respected by the miners, and is a Judas goat leading them to slaughter.
This is the problem for EVERY organizer. It is the shadow that falls on every organization that springs up to challenge the status quo. How do you keep the leadership pure, without resorting to Dogma and schlerotic ideology--how do you cope with the provocateurs that insist on throwing bricks at cops during a peaceful demonstration, or turning in voter registration drives forms with names like Johnny Toilet, and Boris Badenough? It is a wicked problem, no matter how well intended your original aim.
October 11, 2008 2:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
An aside, c4. You're at an SF ILWU union meeting, during the days when Harry Bridges is just starting to organize. The Union leadership is clearly in the pocket of the ship owners. They are controlling the agenda carefully by only calling on their plants among the rank and file. But, perhaps by accident, they recognize "the old Norwegian." ("the old Norwegian is always the protagonist in waterfront tales, it seems). Nobody in the Hall know where he stands on the issues, so when he rises to speak there is dead silence.
"I been in dis union for tirty tree years now" the Old Norwegian says, "and der's von ting I vant to know!"
You could hear a pin drop. The Old Norwegian points to a picture of one of the union founders hanging on the wall.
"and dat's who the fuck is dat fellow"
October 11, 2008 3:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
That story seems awful familiar, but I can't quite put my finger on it. I want to say it was Eugene O'Neills 'The Long Voyage Home', but I don't think that's it--I think I'm just remembering the two Norwegians, Ole and Axel.
October 11, 2008 4:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
You might be on to something - I heard it from my dad, I think, who was a stevedore in SF and a veteran of the labor struggle. I never thought that it might be from, god forbid, a literary source.
October 12, 2008 1:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's a great story. And if it didn't happen--It SHOULD have...
October 12, 2008 11:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
i used to work for ACORN in Florida, campaiging for them for "Fair Elections". They paid 12 dollars per hour and did give bonuses for extra signatures to get their proposal on the Ballot for the state elections. they were extremely aggressive and were not really a housing assistance group. its was strictly a political group. i did hear of them organizing in Orlando to help the tenants in need, but mostly they talked about attacking the repulicans and especially walmart and publix. they got arrested several tiomes in the walmart parking lots for trespassing!! but they would go back again and risk getting arrested.!!
October 11, 2008 2:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
Dr Rotwang, when a group of people are barely getting by without starving or freezing to death, a group that is local issue focused, not political or idealogical at all, is exactly what they need. First they have to find a way to stay alive. Only when that is taken care of do they have the energy to take on political/idealogical issues. I think that was Alinsky's position, and if so, it was a good one.
With the economical meltdown that seems to be occurring now, many of us will be reduced to those basics too. If that happens we will no longer be Democrats, just people wanting to survive.
October 11, 2008 4:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Rotwang, the Bolshevik!
Personally, I'm of the Propaganda of the Deed persuasion.
October 11, 2008 4:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
Doesn't this take us back to the Weathermen? The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand? Bastille Day?
Pretty soon someone puts up a sign--"Some Pigs with lipstick are more equal than others"
I think I'll pitch my bedroll in Mahatma Gandhi's Ashram...
October 11, 2008 4:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
Of course. I'm joking with (needling?) Rotwang, but seriously --
Alinsky was a Chicagoan, resident of that conflicted city, home of anarchy and a police department long on fascism and short on human rights (examples? how 'bout Haymarket all the way to the 1968 police riot).
In that city Alinsky's methods would seem to have been pragmatically sound. And Rotwang's criticisms? Fond romanticism.
October 11, 2008 4:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Organizing is hard. If I knew how to do it right, you would have heard about it by now.
Perhaps the two hottest local issues, before Obama, have been the living wage and anti-Wal-Mart, both of which ACORN has distinguished itself.
Hoppy raises the classic problem of insurgency -- focusing on basic needs or building something durable. The more elemental the focus, the less future is in it. Of course, for the people involved it can be life or death. But that doesn't mean it works! As I said, ACORN has been doing the Lord's work for a long time, but the Lord has yet to answer them.
The Ashram and Propaganda of the Deed are understandable alternatives. But they haven't been more productive than ACORN.
Any sort of insurgency, ACORN included, is romanticism. That's the territory.
October 11, 2008 7:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
"ACORN has been doing the lord's work for a long time, but the lord has yet to answer them."
i'm not so sure about that. one of their own is likely about to be the president of the united states. that strikes me as one hell of an oak tree.
October 12, 2008 12:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
Regarding Obama, it's giving ACORN quite a lot to credit them for Him. I don't doubt that his organizing experience stands him in good stead, nor that ACORN alumni are doing great things. But in my view that still doesn't say much for ACORN itself.
October 12, 2008 8:46 AM | Reply | Permalink
fair enough.
October 12, 2008 12:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
Rotwang, you sound like an out of date old fart. You really do not know what you are talking about.
First, no one currently in the field refers to themselves as a follower of Alinsky; the man died in 1972, for pete's sake, and a lot of progress has been made in the field since then.
Second, in Chicago alone, organizers have won millions of dollars from banks through the Community Reinvestment Act, won new schools and community centers and libraries, prevented the displacement of many low income renters and homeowners (while not of course being able to stop gentification and the forces of capitalism, but that's a little beyond the current abilities of any organizers), passed serious legislation on housing, tenants rights, access to schools for the homeless and disabled, etc.
Go back to your ivory tower and spin your radical philosophical dreams, and do your homework before you cast aspersions on people working long hours for low pay and very little glory. Organizers have not yet brought the revolution, and some of them are middle of the roaders as you suggest, but most are not, and are out on the front lines every day.
October 11, 2008 7:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm certainly dated, and like JMC I'm not Ms Congeniality. As for people invoking Alinsky, just because they don't doesn't mean they aren't adhering to his approach. See J.M. Keynes on 'madmen in authority.'
Like I said, the ACORNs, whose efforts and sacrifices I have complimented in case you didn't notice, have been around a long time. They (nor anyone else) have produced no lasting organization dedicated to systematic radical change. If you think they have, then you don't know what radical change is. You don't know.
It's ironic that you cite Chicago. Chicago is the de facto national showcase for Alinskyism. Chicago has one of the last of the unyielding, urban Democratic machines, as powerful as ever. It delivers the goods, up to a point, and has the place locked down tighter than John McCain's sphincter. I don't doubt ACORN has done good things there, but call me an old fart, I'm just not satisfied. CRA for instance has always been pretty weak tea, and it's 30 years old.
On exhibit in this post is the sort of genuinely reactionary anti-intellectualism invoked by non-radicals to fend off criticism. You can see the same shit at Daily Kos. It's a feeble effort at agenda control. It works at Kos because any discouraging word is deluged with 600 flames, orchestrated by the Minimum Leader and his epigones.
You want to do good deeds, more power to you. You want to get radical, look past ACORN.
October 11, 2008 8:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
I want to be on the practical end of radical. I have no use for spouting radical language if it can't be put into practice, if it doesn't bring about actual concrete change. Sure, CRA is not perfect, but it has brought millions of dollars to low income housing. That's more than all the groups spouting radical language have done combined, times ten. I'll take that over some radical rhetoric any day. I'll take getting new schools built in areas where kids are packed in like sardines over marching around shouting slogans. Sitting around dreaming about the General Strike does not produce change in this world.
Is organizing enough? Of course not. But I don't see any big radical movement that you're out front of. Is there some group that is winning more radical change that I am somehow missing?
I understand what radical is; I'm not satisfied that organizing has been as far left as it could be-- and some of it has been very centrist, though not ACORN in particular, not that I would cite them as the best example, but that's where the discussion started.
We're all trying in our own ways, and sure, all of our work needs a challenge to be bigger, deeper, more to scale. But I don't think that denigrating organizing, whether it is ACORN or most of the other stuff that is being done, makes any sense coming from the left. In fact, it is downright insulting to people who are pouring their souls into their work.
October 11, 2008 10:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, all I want to do is get the ability to do a general strike in this country. That means virtually no one goes to their job on a given day, or few days. No police, no transportation, no fire department, no garbage pickup, no stores open, no beauty parlors, not even the SPCA dog shelters.
If we had the ability to do that we, the people, would finally have absolute power. Nothing else will move the moneyed class. Interfere with their cash flow and you get attention.
Unfortunately this would be viewed as insurrection by the federal government, even one headed by Obama, and many people would be killed by the National Guardsmen. The federal government also won't tolerate any interference in the cash flow to the moneyed class.
October 11, 2008 9:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
Shhhhhhh, Hoppy--don't you know the elite capitalists have been working for generations and spent billions to turn the popular strike into an unspeakable godless communist eeeevil? Exactly for the reasons you give.
No wonder they put down the French so much.
October 12, 2008 12:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think it would be more accurate to say that Alinsky's doctrine, if that's the mot juste, was apolitical than that it was anti-political, wouldn't it? I mean, I may have been absent from Radical Leftist School on the day that whatever tract explains how and why his work as a community organizer was opiate of the people (or whatever incompatible-with-the-radical-left thing it is that justifies hating it in your youth and damning it with faint praise in the present)was approved by the committee. But as I've always understood it, an organized, educated community is pretty much the most favorable envonironment radical agitators could hope for. Unless they're such control freaks that from their perspective, there's was no education like re-education.
Seriously. I sincerely don't understand in what way antagonism toward Alinsky is a politically justified radical position. Am I just dense?
Also, while it's very natural to dismiss very large 501(c)(3) organizations -- such as, inter alia, The Salvation Army and ACORN -- as being in the doing-good business, it's almost always a mistake to do it before taking a long, hard objective look at its component parts. Because, as should go without saying, there's a very high likelihood that any corporate entity that moves as much capital around as a major national (or wrt the SA, international) charity does is in the money business first, even when it's in the doing-good business second. Which is only possible if it isn't already in the power business second. And if it wasn't, you'd kind of have to ask yourself why, the influence of capital being what it is. That doesn't mean there mightn't be a valid answer. Just that it's not aa unreasonable question.
October 12, 2008 2:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's not clear that ACORN educates much beyond imparting the lesson that when you organize a pressure group you can sometimes get results. Thing about a pressure group is that when and if you win, you're finished. You can go home and relax until the next thing.
It's not incompatible so much as irrelevant. The biggest radical needs are national or at least regional.
October 12, 2008 8:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
"You know, John Sayles makes a wonderful point in his brilliant little film Matewan, about the struggle of organizers."
To the union workers who made that film, Sayles is an asshole.
Just so you know.
Tschüss!
October 12, 2008 3:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for taking an unpopular position, Rotwang. We go through the "reform or revolution" argument about twice a week here in my household but I hold the view that we can walk and chew gum at the same time. I am a member of a non-profit "advocacy" group for social justice working within the system and an organizer for the IWW whose constitution clearly states our mission to replace the system.
The difference is the non-profit has the same goals but feels the need to be opaque, the Wobblies do much the same type of activism but are clear in their intentions.What is needed then is a Popular Front where each is comfortable.
October 12, 2008 2:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
You're welcome, comrade. In this case, I'd say the choice is not reform or revolution, it's reform or relief. ACORN is about relief. Obviously lots of people need relief and there is always a place for it. But we should distinguish relief from reform. Reforms are more durable than relief. For the impatient, and everybody has a right to be impatient, relief is more appealing. For radical politics you need lots of patience.
October 12, 2008 2:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
I should have said that I donate (modestly) to ACORN at work through the Combined Federal Campaign. I'd forgotten till this morning. (See 'Old Fart,' above)
Only because the IWW wasn't one of the options.
October 13, 2008 10:00 AM | Reply | Permalink