Saul Alinsky, Big Community Organizer, was born 109 Year Ago

Saul Alinsky got a PHD in criminology from University of Chicago in the 30's or so. He palled around with gangsters and catoholic bishops. One of Alinsky's big successes was organizing in the Back of the Yards area helping to improve the are by organizing people.

Alinsky was full of some great quotes and ideas, but because of copy paste stuff will have to just paraphrase stuff. Alinsky asserted life was full of contradictions. Perhaps his greatest philosophical insights were always appealing to people in their self interest like the heurisitic he gives in "Rules for Radicals" and "Reveille for Radicals" of if you wanted to get a pastor to do something you dont have a meeting and start talking about morals and bible verses and assumed shared understandings and values. Instead you talk in terms of how you will help his church or boost attendance or other parts of his utility function in the vein of rational choice theory.

Alinsky had some big successes like the East Man Kodak strike where he and his elite friends were able to provide the request market incentives for Kodak to voluntarily without coercive government action change its racially based hiring and firing and promotion guidelines.

Perhaps the most important ideas of Alinsky included the need for basic human dignity in his assertion that, one should never do for people what they can do, but instead help empower people to better their own lives themselves. Alinsky's political philosophy was that of Organizational Jujitzu getting enemies to over extend their powers and equalize the field in the court of public opinion/the market place of ideas.

Alinsky also asserted that people must accept the world as it is in order to be able to efficiently cybernetically transform it into what one thinks it should be.

Now it may be true Alinsky offered a job to Hillary Clinton that she didn't take. What a world it could have been had her labor been used to actually organize people to improve their lives. Alinsky asserted there are two forms of social power: organized people and organized money, which organizing people is cheaper than ever in the internet age.

Source


http://courses.cs.vt.edu/cs3604/support/Assignments/alinsky.html

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