SAUL ALINSKY, THE MARXIST WHO WAS OBAMA'S MOST ENDURING INFLUENCESaul Alinsky was a Chicago Marxist who spent his adult life training activists in the art of agitating for “social change,” with the ultimate goal of transforming America, piece by piece, into a socialist nation. Alinsky popularized the concept of the “community organizer,” and he was instrumental in establishing the aggressive political tactics that characterized the 1960s and have remained central to all subsequent revolutionary movements in the United States.
Alinsky outlined his tactics and strategies in two books, Reveille for Radicals (1946) and Rules for Radicals (1972).
In the Alinsky model, “community organizing” is a euphemism for “revolution”—a wholesale revolution whose ultimate objective is the systematic acquisition of power by a purportedly oppressed segment of the population, and the radical transformation of America’s social and economic structure. The goal is to foment enough public discontent, moral confusion, and outright chaos to spark the social upheaval that Marx, Engels, and Lenin predicted—a revolution whose foot soldiers view the status quo as fatally flawed and wholly unworthy of salvation. Thus, the theory goes, the population at large will settle for nothing less than that status quo’s complete collapse—to be followed by the erection of an entirely new system upon its ruins. Toward that end, people will be apt to follow the lead of charismatic radical organizers who project an aura of confidence and vision, and who profess to clearly understand what types of societal “change” is needed.
As Alinsky put it: “A reformation means that the masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They don’t know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won’t act for change but won’t strongly oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for revolution.”
But Alinsky’s brand of revolution was not characterized by dramatic, sweeping, overnight transformations of social institutions. As political analyst Richard Poe puts it, “Alinsky viewed revolution as a slow, patient process. The trick was to penetrate existing institutions such as churches, unions and political parties.” He advised organizers and their disciples to quietly, subtly gain influence within the decision-making ranks of these institutions, and to introduce changes from that platform. This was a tactic known as “infiltration.”
Alinsky’s revolution promised that by changing the structure of society’s institutions, it would rid America of such vices as socio-pathology and criminality. Arguing that these vices were caused not by personal character flaws but rather by external societal influences, Alinsky’s worldview was thoroughly steeped in the socialist left’s collectivist, class-based doctrine of economic determinism. “It is not the people who must be judged but the circumstances that made them that way,” declared Alinsky. Chief among these circumstances, he said, was capitalism, or, as he once put it, “the larcenous pressures of a materialistic society.”
To counter that materialism, Alinsky favored a socialist alternative. To lead society toward that alternative, Alinsky sought to train an army of “community organizers,” whom he affectionately called “radicals.” Finding themselves “adrift in the stormy sea of capitalism,” these radical community organizers would help society “advance from the jungle of laissez-faire capitalism to a world worthy of the name of human civilization.” They would, explained Alinsky, “hope for a future where the means of production will be owned by all of the people instead of just a comparative handful.” In other words, socialism.
Alinsky laid out a set of basic principles to guide the actions and decisions of such “community organizers” and the “People’s Organizations” they established. The community organizer, he said, “must first rub raw the resentments of the people; fan the latent hostilities to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act.” The organizer’s function, he added, was “to agitate to the point of conflict” and “to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a ‘dangerous enemy.’”
Alinsky stressed that community organizers and their followers needed to take care, when first unveiling their particular crusade for “change,” not to alienate the middle class with any type of crude language, defiant demeanor, or menacing appearance that suggested radicalism or a disrespect for middle class mores and traditions. For this very reason, he disliked the hippies and counterculture activists of the 1960s. As Richard Poe puts it: “Alinsky scolded the Sixties Left for scaring off potential converts in Middle America. True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism, Alinsky taught. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within.”
While his ultimate goal was nothing less than the “radicalization of the middle class,” Alinsky stressed the importance of “learning to talk the language of those with whom one is trying to converse.” “Tactics must begin with the experience of the middle class,” he said, “accepting their aversion to rudeness, vulgarity, and conflict. Start them easy, don’t scare them off.”
In the 1980s Barack Obama was trained as a “community organizer” by three mentors who were trained at the Alinsky-founded Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in the Windy City. Though he never met Alinsky personally (the latter died in 1972), Obama developed a reputation as a veritable master of Alinsky’s method. For several years thereafter, Obama himself taught workshops on that method, most notably with the organization ACORN.
