Written between the summers of 1944 and ’45, the first pages have the feel of triumphant World War II movies, where the heroic Army platoon includes representatives of various ethnicities: GIs and full-fledged Americans all. Alinsky adds to that mix Negroes, whom the army had segregated and the Hollywood movies had left out. Among this nation of beautiful cultural complexity are a few radicals who belong, according to the Jeffersonian typology that Alinsky affectionately quotes, to one of the two opposing parties that have existed throughout world history: the democrats, who trust the people and want to spread political power among them, and the aristocrats, who fear and distrust the people and want power to remain in the hands of the upper classes.4
Although Alinsky often merges the radical and the democrat, for him they are theoretically distinct: radicals are the politically active democrats, who historically have led the struggles—sometimes revolutionary, sometimes not—for democratic power. The essential Alinsky argument is that in the postwar period the radical must become a new kind of leader, a community organizer, who creates but does not exactly lead a new kind of organization. What happens between the organizer and the community is an art, which cannot be reduced to method, but when it works it produces a successful organization, and an organization is the key to power. Without organization there is no power. Without the organizer, there is no organization.
Who is this contemporary radical and what does he believe? In the first pages of Reveille for Radicals, Alinsky describes the principles of the radical democrat, a hodge-podge of Popular Front and Enlightenment ideas, with an emphasis on “trusting” or even “loving” real people in all their complexities, plus the insistence that democracy comes from “the bottom up.” The list of the radical’s convictions begins with the belief that all people should have high standards of “food, housing, and health,” that “human rights” are more important than “property rights,” and goes on to mention “full employment,” “real equality of opportunity,” “local rights” (so long as they don’t become a cover for “Tory reaction”), “social planning” (so long as it is not “top down”), and various New Deal slogans of the left variety. Early in the book he lists as a radical democratic belief the “hope for a future where the means of economic production will be owned by all of the people instead of just a comparative handful,” yet in the book’s last pages he calls for a new American democracy based on a rejuvenated “organized labor, organized business, and organized religion.” The contradiction between “owned by all the people” and a central role for organized business doesn’t count for much. What the radical believes is just an incantation; there is no real attempt to analyze the connections, or possible contradictions, between its various goals and principles. And even if it is possible to characterize the early Alinsky as some kind of social democrat, the “social” part of the formulation was always secondary, always the adjective. Democrat was the noun, the central idea.
Of more consequence to him is the line separating the radical from the liberal. Although he doesn’t argue the point explicitly, he identifies liberalism with an effete middle-class approach to politics, while radicalism is real, rough, plain-talking, unadorned working-class democracy. Nevertheless the difference is not primarily an issue of class or belief but the fact that the radical, unlike the liberal, is a political fighter and that liberals are afraid of power, while radicals know that ordinary people wielding power is what democracy is all about.
After this cursory attempt to establish a philosophical basis to his politics, Alinsky gets down to what he does best: strategy. American radicals, he argues, have joined the rest of the world’s radicals in throwing their main energy into organizing the labor movement. That is sensible, he argues, because the constituency of the American labor movement is not just another “interest” but the overwhelming majority of the American people. Nonetheless, there is a problem: “As labor unions have become strong, wealthy, fat, and respectable, they have behaved more like organized business,” and are in danger of losing their original democratic purpose.5
This formulation, unlike Alinsky’s earlier list of radical beliefs, was in 1946 an important departure within Popular Front thinking. Reveille for Radicals was published before New Men of Power, C. Wright Mills’s critique of top union leaders, and although Alinsky’s ideas share some similarities to earlier Communist critiques of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), this was not the way most of his left contemporaries talked and wrote about the CIO. During World War II Alinsky had worked with the War Manpower Commission in what his principal biographer, Stanford Horwitt, calls “efforts to maintain worker morale and harmony in key industries, such as in defense plants.”6 In the course of that work, Alinsky got a firsthand view of the new collaboration between industry managers, union leaders, and government officials, who often fought a united battle against rank-and-file initiative and shop-floor control of production, at the same time as they were imposing union contracts in some industries and helping unions become thoroughly institutionalized in others.7 This collaboration was a first step in the remaking of much of the top CIO leadership into “new men of power,” who by the time the war ended had lost what little contact they once had with the rank and file. Alinsky was astute enough to see this as it was happening, and to raise a warning cry.
What to do about a labor movement that is becoming corrupt and antidemocratic? Abandon it? Alinsky answers that suggestion with a quip: “The fault with the American radical is not that he chose to make his bed in the labor movement but that he fell asleep in it.”8 The radical’s job is to reawaken the democratic promise of unionism by building community organizations, made up of labor unions and other community groups, whose own struggles for power in the neighborhood will renew union (and American) democracy. How to do this is what Reveille for Radicals is all about. Another obvious alternative—for workers to fight within their unions for democratic unionism—is not even mentioned. Instead, the solution to union corruption is to build a new kind of community organization, what Alinsky dubbed, using capital letters, a People’s Organization.*
Unions, Alinsky argues, are languishing precisely because they have institutional power. Through ritualized contract negotiations they can win higher wages without the active participation of their members. The People’s Organization, or PO—an organization of pre-existing organizations, including local unions—is designed to resolve that. To fight for the community’s agenda, it must propel people into action because, unlike the unions, the PO does not have established, formal power. It can win new parks or youth recreation programs or rent control or some other demand only if people are willing to become politically active. Since the unions are a part of the PO, the community battles involve union members, too. Political activity in the community then carries over into the unions, restores internal democracy, and saves them from corruption. Argument complete.
Despite Alinsky’s rhetorical accent on democracy, this approach left Cesar Chavez ill-equipped to think about the actual dynamics of union democracy. In making his case, Alinsky does not go beyond the idea that civic participation in the PO will spill over into nearby unions. Just as Alinsky never considered the idea that union members would wage a direct battle for union democracy, he is uninterested in the kinds of internal union structures that might make democratic unionism more likely. That was a road Alinsky chose not to take in either his book or his political practice, perhaps because it would have upset the few union chiefs who were among his early supporters. Alinsky has no discussion of the potential power of independent union locals; nothing about encouraging rank-and-file debate, political education, and contested elections; no comment on how union conventions might take up issues of real concern to their members. None of that was in Cesar Chavez’s intellectual arsenal; all of it was missing from the UFW.
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
