“There can be no separation of the revolutionary process from the revolutionary goal.”  Murray Bookchin, Forms of Freedom.

The term “community organising” has become such a part of the modern political landscape on the left that it is easy to forget that it has a relatively recent history and a specific origin.

Indeed, it has become the default term to describe all manner of movement-building and activism on the left. Especially as progressive young people flocked to the profession since Barack Obama popularised it a decade ago. 

It originally referred to a very specific model, however – one that remains heavily influential today.

Handbooks for organisers

The modern community organising tradition in the United States can largely be traced back to a single person. Saul Alinsky started out organizing in 1930s Chicago in the Back of the Yard neighborhood, an area known for the horrific working conditions of the Union Stock Yard described in Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle.

Over the next several decades of work, he developed a model called congregation-based or institution-based community organising, which involves professional organisers working through existing faith and community institutions to build power and win issues in a community.

Alinsky’s impact on modern organising is hard to overstate. He founded the Industrial Areas Foundation, a community organising network and training organisation that exists in cities across the US to this day.

Mentees of Alinsky’s and trainees who passed through the IAF went on to found the other three major community organising networks in the country: DART, Gamaliel, and Faith in Action (formerly PICO) – as well as countless affiliated and non-affiliated local groups.

Alinsky’s books Reveille for Radicals (1946) and Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971) have long been the go-to handbooks for organisers.

The philosophy laid out therein, along with other training materials and exercises Alinsky developed, has influenced generations of community activists and is still taught in many organising trainings today.

Given the breadth of impact and continued precedence of Alinskyist organising, it is worth critically examining some of its basic tenets and their limitations.

Organiser as outsider—the need to de-professionalise organising

One fiercely debated concept is who counts as an ‘organiser’. The Alinskyist model imagines the typical community organiser as a necessarily an outsider, someone who can view a community’s problems with critical distance without the baggage and bias of those who belong it.

The organiser, for Alinsky, is a removed professional who should be able to organise anywhere and whose focus is to develop and build power for others, in a role he sometimes referred to as that of creator or god.

The people whom the organiser seeks to develop in the community are called ‘leaders’, and are interested in building power for themselves and improving their community’s situation.

Thorough critiques of this model already exist, but suffice it to say that it creates a strange dynamic where often white, often better-educated, often better-resourced, often younger people are going into communities they’re not from and getting paid to organise the people in those communities, who are then expected to become trained in organising themselves and shoulder a lot of the work. 

Except they’re called ‘leaders’, never ‘organisers’, and are not employed by the network.

Think twice

Simply because the practice has been criticised does not mean that it has ceased, especially in the years since community organising took off among leftist millennial college grads looking for meaningful work.

I should know: I was one of them.

I attended the week-long initiation training for one of the big four national networks with a large group of both organisers and leaders a few years ago, and I remember someone asking our trainer what the difference was between the two roles. “The only difference,” our trainer joked, “is that one of them gets paid.”

I’m not arguing, as some on the left do, that you can or should organise only in your own community: such arguments verge on nativist, segregationist thinking that can easily turn into the kind of dark municipalism we discussed in our last piece.

I am arguing, however, that we should think twice about who gets paid to organise as a profession and how we move towards a system that is structured differently.

Limitations and lack of existing institutions

Alinskyist organising is called institution-based or congregation-based community organising because it is designed around organising within existing institutions, usually faith-based ones.

Alinsky and later organisers in his tradition insist on the value of institutions, and I agree.

We need structures through which we can be intentional about how labour and power is shared, through which we can hold one another accountable, and through which we can create lasting alternatives to the domineering institutions that presently govern our lives.

Alinsky insists on organising only through existing institutions, however. The rationale is that congregations and community institutions are already organized—they have an internal structure, division of labor, a gathering place, buy-in from the community—and so they are much easier to move into action on an issue than starting from scratch.

There are two significant problems with this approach, one which has always been present and one which has increasingly become an obstacle in more recent decades.

Morally flexible

The first issue with working through existing institutions is that the institutions in question often have some very questionable values.

Misogyny, homophobia, classism, and racism are ingrained in the history and fabric of many faith traditions, and especially the first two are still formally written into many faith doctrines to this day (as is classism, if you count prosperity gospel traditions).

Even more deeply, such institutions are often built around extremely rigid hierarchies that are antithetical to the construction of a free, equal, and democratic society.

It doesn’t help that the Alinskyist model brings no shared set of values or educational framework of its own to the table to help people question some of these deeply ingrained assumptions.

The model is issue-based, and Alinsky famously advocated being apolitical and willing to be morally flexible on almost any question if it helped win the issue at hand.

Reproductive rights

This perspective is part of a core training point in Alinskyist organising – ”the world as it is” versus “the world as it should be.”

It’s framed as pragmatism: we don’t live in the world as it should be, we live in the real world, and we have to act according to those rules to get what we want.

At training, this was always explained as a necessary strategy in order to achieve the world as it should be, but I frequently found myself looking around and wondering what that “world as it should be” would look like absent a shared set of values or a means to grow past our various blind spots.

Such “pragmatism” also constricts what is politically possible, as it means you end up working off of the lowest common denominator between competing ideologies for fear of alienating member institutions.

We couldn’t co-sponsor anything to do with gender or reproductive rights, much less work on the issues ourselves, and I was told in no uncertain terms not to bring up the question of gay marriage or Israel-Palestine with certain pastors.

Crumbling institutions 

To return to the question of institutions, this doesn’t mean that I think these institutions are beyond repair or that I’m advocating abandoning them altogether.

I am a practicing Catholic who has remained so because from a personal standpoint, I still find beauty and community in elements of my tradition, and I believe in the possibility of redemption and transformation.

Faith is an incredibly powerful motivator and unifier, and faith traditions certainly have a place in a vibrant public sphere – but even the most progressive and open faith tradition should not itself constitute the public sphere.

From an organising standpoint, we have to ask ourselves if these types of institutions are capable of laying the groundwork—much less becoming the central foundation—for a radically different, systemically transformed society.  

The more recent and increasingly prevalent problem with organising through existing institutions is that those institutions are crumbling.

Abandoned buildings

I was employed as a community organiser in Detroit, where I still live and organise (though now in my own neighborhood and not for pay).

The effects of neoliberalism are most visible in the negative, in the absences and gaping holes it leaves in our communities.

Detroit, like many Rust Belt cities, is a place where such absence takes a very literal form.

Austerity measures and economic pressures have forced public parks, recreation centers, public schools, and community businesses to close, while foreclosures have forced many residents out of their homes.

Overgrown lots and abandoned buildings take the place of once-vibrant community institutions, and once-active block clubs are either shadows of their former selves or no longer exist at all.

Transformational vehicle

In downtown Detroit and in other American cities that are wealthier and more gentrified, meanwhile, the destruction of public space takes a different form with the privatisation of every public space from parks to schools to plazas.

The main plaza in downtown Detroit where all the city avenues meet is now Quicken Loans plaza, patrolled by private security guards who waste no time telling protestors and loiterers to leave.

Where community and faith institutions still exist, their membership is on the decline. Church participation is waning among younger generations, even in Detroit where it’s still more a part of life than in many other cities, and severe economic pressures on the working poor mean that free time to participate in any kind of community is scarce.

Other factors we’ve touched on in earlier articles —suburbanisation, car culture, the atomisation of society—play a role as well.

So if these institutions don’t exist like they used to and are not suited to being the kind of transformational vehicle we need, how are we supposed to radically transform society?

Working through the existing political system is insufficient

This brings me to the next limitation of Alinskyist organising, the element perhaps most often critiqued on the left: radical transformation is not really the goal.

Capitalism gets a wide variety of treatments in modern training depending on the individual trainer, but a coherent critique that demands its replacement altogether is largely absent.

Much of Alinsky’s and his followers’ writings display an obsession with Athenian democracy and with the American founding fathers: representative democracy and the US political system is often portrayed as an essentially unproblematic system that has simply been corrupted and must be restored by making its people into active citizens again.

‘Winning’ is framed as getting elected representatives to acquiesce to your demands, rather than changing the way our political and economic systems are structured.

The short-sighted focus on picking only concrete and winnable issues means never getting at underlying systemic problems that require longer campaigns or that cannot be solved at all within the constraints of the current system.

Immediate needs

At its core, the institution-based community organising model rests on extracting concessions from the system as it is—but the system as it is is fundamentally broken.

There is no sustainable future under capitalism and no mechanism to stop the ravages of capitalism under representative democracy. If we’re going to stop the crises of our time, we need to move in a different direction altogether.

Of course, even if our goal is total structural transformation, we still have the need for oppositional politics in the meantime. We have to survive long enough to make it to the revolution, and we have to create space within the current system for alternatives to breathe and grow.

But if oppositional politics can best be accomplished by organising through institutions, and those institutions are either defunct or not suited to transformational politics, then even just extracting wins from the current system requires building new institutions.

All of this means that our energies as organisers are better suited toward building genuine alternatives. By building community-based, grassroots institutions, we can simultaneously prefigure the kind of society we’re working towards and meet immediate needs in the here and now.

Alinsky’s legacy

We’ve written about what these institutions might look like here and here. Constructing grassroots democratic institutions of our own allows us to simultaneously engage in survival politics in the short term and lay the groundwork for a different type of society in the long term.

We don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater; we can use some of the tools Alinsky contributed to build these new institutions.

The concept of the one-on-one, a conversation between organiser and community member designed to build a relationship and unearth the community member’s motivations and stake in the work, remains a valuable organising tool.

So too do some of Alinsky’s other contributions — the importance of communicating using language and analogies that make sense for the audience and context, for example, and using humor and ridicule in actions against political opponents.

Modern organisers are indebted to Alinsky’s legacy in many dimensions. But his model must be transcended if we are going to build a radically transformed, just, and free democratic society together.

These Authors

The Symbiosis Research Collective is a network of organisers and activist-researchers across North America, assembling a confederation of community organisations that can build a democratic and ecological society from the ground up. We are fighting for a better world by creating institutions of participatory democracy and the solidarity economy through community organizing, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city. Twitter: @SymbiosisRev

This article was written by Katie Horvath (@katesville7).