In his biography of John L. Lewis, the book he wrote right after he finished Reveille for Radicals, Alinsky was even worse on the question of internal union democracy. Here, in a book that Chavez read and reread and gave as a gift, Alinsky championed Lewis’s destruction of independent locals in the United Mine Workers of America, arguing that eliminating their power was essential to all that Lewis accomplished on the national scene.
Part II of Reveille for Radicals is mostly a string of Alinsky stories, highly fictionalized tales of how he organized the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council and a few other partly real, mostly imaginary People’s Organizations. The stories make good reading, but they are not as delectable as the storyteller seems to believe. Most of Alinsky’s friends would agree with Fred Ross’s assessment: “Saul could tell a better story than he could write it. He gave it certain inflections and body language, and he was great with a deadpan delivery.” Also, harsher standards apply to the written word. Alinsky’s publisher insisted that he leave out most of the real names, thus denying the reader part of what made the spoken stories so enjoyable: the inside dope on some famous people, and how the wily community organizer outwitted them.
Alinsky’s stories were not merely enjoyable, however. They were the essential vehicle through which he conveyed his political knowledge. Alinsky insisted on a few general principles of organizing, but beyond those principles and guidelines about the structure of a PO, there are just his stories and whatever lessons they might suggest. Alinsky is a political actor more than a grand theorist; he is immersed in particular, specific problems, and his knowledge of the complexity of those problems seems to overwhelm his capacity to make big theories about what he is doing. He would rather just tell us a few aphorisms and describe some of his tricks.
Not that Alinsky is unable to theorize; rather, he is unwilling. Overtheorizing, coming into a community with a full set of abstract notions about what the people should do, is both a violation of his democratic principles and monumentally impractical. It won’t work. The people have to set their own agenda; they will not fight for someone else’s. The Alinsky organizer in a working-class community, like the Leninist organizer, is there to combat “straight trade unionism.” (Alinsky no doubt borrowed the term from his CP friends.) But the community organizer, unlike the Leninist, is not the bearer of scientific socialism or any other complete set of ideas that the workers must learn. Alinsky’s organizer has a ton of techniques, but he has only two main ideas to teach: popular participation, and a specific form of organization. And his brief is not to teach those ideas—it is to get people to try them out. As they do, and win power as a result, they can almost teach the ideas to themselves.
According to Alinskyite theory, stories do just fine for teaching democratic politics. Alinsky, Ross, and Chavez were all storytellers, masters of the art of conversation. They knew how to talk, and they knew how to listen. This is no accident of personality. It is a consciously acknowledged element of the theory. All of the various Alinskyite training centers teach conversation, which requires, first, listening, and among the Alinskyites, Chavez is the most famous listener. His ability to give his full attention to the person with whom he was talking is the stuff of legend, and in this case the legend is firmly grounded.
But Chavez and Ross and Alinsky didn’t just listen—they told stories that made points, specific ones. “You want higher wages, better working conditions, rent control, an end to police brutality? Let me tell you what happened over in Los Angeles, where the people got together and won some of those things.” And a story would follow. Probably an exaggeration, as most good stories are. But that was okay, because the story was intended to inspire and instruct, not be an accurate historical account. What did the stories teach? If you build an organization and get active in it, you can improve your world. And if you want to do that, the organizer can show you how. It is that simple.
The emphasis on small, intimate conversation as the essential political discourse starts with Alinsky, builds with Ross, and becomes perhaps Chavez’s supreme contribution to organizational theory and practice. “One-on-one” organizing, like the feminist consciousness-raising groups to which it is related, was promoted not just as another way of talking politics but as the way of doing it. Its enemy, its opposite, is political oratory: the great transforming speech delivered to a gathering of listeners, which inspires, instructs, and gives historical meaning to that which the audience has just done or is about to do. This is an enormous departure in democratic theory. So much for the great speeches and speechmakers who helped define democracy: the big boys like Pericles, Danton, Lincoln, Debs, and King; and adios to all the soap-boxers whose ability to hold and inspire a crowd has for so long been a touchstone of popular politics. In this new view, such speeches, and the people who make them, are suspect, perhaps even essentially antidemocratic, because they are so often full of bombast and rhetoric, and are talking at the people instead of listening to them.
It would be wrong to give full credit (or blame) to Alinsky for this departure. It is part of his idea of how the community organizer operates, but it is not his primary emphasis. It is Chavez, the shy, ineffective public speaker, who mastered small-scale conversation, who ultimately developed it into a full-blown theory. Throughout his telling of the story of the UFW—the story of the founding, the grape boycott, the union contracts—the tale that was then retold by most of Chavez’s chroniclers, the success of the union depended on overcoming the error of grand speeches and radical rhetoric. Beware the inspiring speech, Chavez learned and taught. Trust only direct, personal contact.
Part II of Reveille for Radicals does contain a few general principles about how to form a People’s Organization, basically how to weave the essential elements of the neighborhood together to make a community. These essential elements are what the organizer tries to identify as he listens to people talk. He listens in order to help them find their own agendas, to identify the “native leadership,” to familiarize himself with preexisting community organizations (and the divisions within those organizations), and to understand and appreciate community traditions. Sometimes Alinsky—and Ross and Chavez, too—compare the organizer to a juggler, a performer who already has six plates in the air and must add a seventh. Organizers do their work through the proper juggling of local leaders, preexisting organizations, and community traditions. They must keep all of the elements coordinated, happily in the air at once, without dropping a single one. But jugglers don’t change the character of what they toss. The plates remain plates. Here Alinsky underestimates the organizer’s powers, because the organizer can change the character of the plates. When the juggled elements become an organization of elements, they are transformed. They are no longer just local leaders, preexisting community groups, and community traditions. Through the magic of organization they become political power. The juggler analogy does not do the organizer justice. A better image—and one that Alinsky also used—is the wizard, the alchemist. Through the philosopher’s stone of organization, the alchemist transmutes an apathetic, powerless, divided neighborhood into a powerful community, fighting for its own agenda.
In Reveille for Radicals, as well as in most Alinskyite and neo-Alinskyite organizations, the community organizer must be an outsider. Generally this is an uncontested and unsupported assumption. Alinsky makes but a single partial argument in Reveille about the necessity of the organizer’s otherness.In three brief paragraphs toward the end of the book, Alinsky asserts “one simple maxim: in order to be part of all, you must be part of none.” The organizer must stand above all the “innumerable rivalries, fears, jealousies, and suspicions within a community.” It is hard to do that if one is already part of the community. Here, characteristically, Alinsky tells a story (one he probably made up for the purpose),