Ridicule is Man’s Most Potent Weapon
During an appearance on Firing Line in December of 1967, radical activist, community organizer and author Saul D. Alinsky told host William F. Buckley Jr., “Controversy is a matrix of everything creative that comes out of life.“ He further quipped, “All progress comes in response to a threat.” The core of his argument that evening, however, was that the only way people can get power is when they take it for themselves. As undeniably intelligent as he was, Mr. Buckley seemed to have a difficult time comprehending any of these notions. Or at least he pretended to have a difficult time for the sake of his audience.
Out of simple contrariness, when I was about twelve or thirteen I began working my way through the entire political spectrum, from the extreme Right to the extreme Left and beyond. I became an outspoken True Believer at each stop along the way—I was a fascist, a conservative, a revolutionary Marxist—sometimes for a few days, sometimes a few weeks. By the time I was in high school, I considered myself a Bakuninist with strong Nihilist leanings. It was around that time I first read Alinsky’s last book, Rules for Radicals, originally published in 1971, less than a year before his death.
After three decades of working tirelessly to mobilize the nation’s urban poor to empower themselves one neighborhood at a time, the book was Alinsky’s attempt to distill the lessons he’d learned from personal experience, adapting them for the new generation of young student radicals emerging from the Sixties.
I found the book insufferable and obnoxious. Not only was I not interested in having some liberal blowhard preach to me about “rules,” I had no interest in organizing anything, let alone “communities.” What’s more, Alinsky’s standard m.o. for achieving social change—namely unifying a disparate group of people by identifying a common enemy for them, then letting their hate do the rest—struck me as not all that different from the tack used by Germany’s National Socialists in the Twenties and Thirties, and by the racist rabble-rousers who worked their way through the American South in the Fifties and Sixties. At the time I took it as more confirmation that at heart there was no discernible difference between the Right and Left, they simply used different vocabularies to achieve their goals via the same methods.
Forty years later, still an unrepentant nihilist, I decided it was time to reassess Alinsky. Considering the present circumstances, it only seemed fair.
Saul Alinsky was born in Chicago in 1909, and received a degree in archaeology from The University of Chicago in 1930. Quickly recognizing there wasn’t much call for archaeologists during the Great Depression, he went on to grad school (again at the U of C), this time studying criminology. He left grad school after two years, and began working part time as an organizer for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). But having attended college on Chicago’s South Side, all Alinsky had to do was venture a block off campus in any direction to be confronted with the sort of living conditions experienced by the city’s poor blacks. A firm believer in the value and power of participatory democracy, it occurred to him that a large percentage of the American populace had effectively been silenced and forgotten, and had no say in the kind of local policymaking that affected them directly.
Toward the end of the decade he began edging away from labor issues after recognizing the much more widespread and devastating issue of the daily nightmare facing Chicago’s poor black community. With his organizational skills, he took it upon himself to try and show the residents of a blighted neighborhood near the Stockyards how they might unite in an effort to get local officials to pay attention to them at last. It was a ballsy move in 1939 for a young Jewish intellectual, but having encountered pervasive anti-Semitism for much of his life, it was an issue he could relate to, perhaps even more so than the problems facing factory workers.
After organizing several politically active community groups in neighborhoods around the South Side, and after those groups at long last finally started having their voices heard by city and state officials, Alinsky took his methodology on the road in the Fifties, helping organize similar community groups in the slums of other major cities around the country. In the early Sixties, he returned to Chicago to begin mobilizing disenfranchised poor blacks in some of the city’s other ghettoes, which did not place him in the good graces of Mayor Richard Daley.
For all his good intentions, Alinsky was, like most of us, a mass of contradictions. He once famously said, “I’d rather steal than go on welfare.” Although often wildly misinterpreted, the underlying message was that his goal in mobilizing these groups was to help them empower themselves. Help them become more self sufficient instead of being dependent on government entitlement programs. Ironically, had his intentions been understood, it was an idea and a goal that would have been roundly applauded by the same staunch conservatives who were attacking him at every turn, just as he was attacking them.
He insisted he only organized in neighborhoods where he’d been invited, that he never marched into a new place like some kind of evangelist promising to give the people what they needed. At the same time, as laid out in Rules for Radicals, the standard tactic went like this: He’d enter a community and establish friendly contact with a neighborhood church. Then he’d appraise the local situation, identify a major problem, and most important of all, finger a demon, usually a local politician, businessman, slum lord or the like. He’d make contacts and spread the word using the church as a headquarters. The new community activist group would then choose their own board of directors. In the best of all possible worlds, the newly-chosen enemy, after being publicly goaded and ridiculed by protesters, will in turn try to vilify, demonize or somehow discredit the protest’s leaders, and once that happens you’re good to go—it will only strengthen your position and spur other people to join up. Then he would offer a few tactical suggestions and back away, letting the newly-born activist group do what needed to be done to fix the problem. In short, it’s a process of not only pointing out, but often creating a conflict that needs to be solved. Again, it’s a tactic that works just as well for Nazis and racists as it does for the struggling underclass desperate to be heard, and in many cases works much, much better.
He was adamant in his refusal to join any organization (“Even those I’ve set up,” he once said). He despised religious and political groups of all stripes, saying once you join one, you are expected to adhere to their dogma and doctrines, which was something he could not stomach. At the same time, he was not reluctant to cut deals with religious or political groups when it was expedient or somehow served his purpose. It also seems a bit contradictory that a man with such disdain for the doctrinaire would go on to publish a book of rules he hoped people would follow.
That said, unlike most activists, Alinsky at least had a sense of humor, and was a major proponent of the unorthodox protest. The third rule he lays out in his book states, "Whenever possible go outside the expertise of the enemy.” Marching around with picket signs and chanting “The people united will never be defeated” simply wasn’t going to cut it anymore. He counseled newly-minted community activists to go beyond the general experience and thinking of the enemy. Give them something they can’t quite fathom. He further counseled them that people always do the right thing for the wrong reason, so they should use that to their advantage whenever possible.
Case in point, when it was learned a slum lord who owned several decaying housing complexes in Chicago lived in a wealthy white suburb, Alinsky arranged to send busloads of black protesters to picket on the clean suburban sidewalks for days on end. In time the slum lord’s neighbors began putting pressure on him to do something about the conditions in his buildings, not out of any solidarity with the protesters, but simply in an effort to make them go away.
He also learned that sometimes merely the threat of an outrageous protest was enough to make local officials agree to hear the activist’s grievances. All progress comes in response to a threat, after all. A threatened Piss-In at O’Hare, in which hundreds of blacks would commandeer every urinal in the airport for as long as it took did the trick, as did a threatened Fart-In at a local philharmonic concert in Rochester, NY.
So I like to think of Alinsky as a radical who was earnest in his intent, but not righteous, which again sets him apart from most social activists.
As an aside, going back to Alinsky now after so many years it occurs to me how much an (utterly subconscious) influence he was on the Dadaist revolutionary group a friend and I formed in college, The Nihilist Workers Party. Particularly that third rule mentioned above, though we referred to it as “Semantic Interference.” Instead of threatening Piss-Ins to further the social good, however, we threatened to immolate (imaginary) puppies in public, marched outside the student union with blank protest signs and smoked large black cigars in fancy sweater shops for no reason at all.
Toward the end of his life, after spending thirty years attempting to empower disenfranchised poor blacks, Alinsky next set his sights on the white middle class, who in the early Seventies were feeling a bit disenfranchised themselves. Following the turmoil of the Sixties, their world had been turned upside down, they were frightened and dismayed and confused. THe comfort and security of the Eisenhower Era was gone. As Alinsky saw it, if he didn’t do something to help spur them to be more politically active and socially conscious, help them feel like they still had a voice in this new world, some Right Wing extremist kook would come along promising to set the clock back to a better day, and they’d follow. What’s more, if middle class whites and poor blacks couldn’t find some kind of unity, didn’t start working together to wrest power back from the wealthy, we would all remain as fucked as ever.
Well, forty-five years on now, it’s clear his warnings were fairly prescient.
What is interesting, however, has been the rise of countless grassroots movements across the country over the past eighteen months. Some are pro-Trump, some are anti-Trump, but most in one way or another arose in direct response to that single unifying figure, most are reacting to a perceived threat from one side or the other, and most, wittingly or not, seem to be employing Alinsky’s tactics.
But one widespread criticism of Alinsky’s tactics over the years holds that too often the activist groups in question lose sight of the real problem, that bit of social justice they were after in the first place. Instead they concentrate their energies on destroying their chosen enemy assuming this is all that needs to be done, or they get sidetracked and focus on some petty issue only tangentially related to the original conflict.
This is certainly what seems to be happening today, with most of the stated goals becoming so petty and wrongheaded as to completely lose sight of the larger picture. Will removing a bunch of statues really do anything to put an end to racism? Will impeaching the president really do anything to turn the clock back and make it all right again? Will burning down a Washington DC pizza parlor prevent a thousand children a day from being shipped to Mars to become sex slaves of the Satanic liberal elite? Of course not, But try telling any of them that. They’re doing something, they’re seeing immediate results, and that’s all that matters.
I do have more respect for Alinsky now than I did when I was in high school. What he told Buckley about the role of conflict, controversy and threat simply seems a given now. But looking at the present situation I have come to understand that his greatest, his ultimate failure—and this is true of most activist and political theorists of any shade—was neglecting to admit that most people are vindictive, bone-stupid sillyasses by nature, and we will always be fucked as a result.
by Jim Knipfel