A Testament for Organizers

There is a collective wisdom and lore passed down among agitators, it turns out. I associated it most with Saul Alinsky, but reading Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle -- probably the greatest literary treatment of the pre-Cold War Heroic Age of the American Communist Party -- one sees that it is in fact of older lineage than that. Indeed, it may be downright ancient. Steinbeck's organizer characters seem to have learned well the lessons of the New Testament, for instance (apart from that whole business about turning the other cheek).

We learn from the Penguin Classics Introduction that Steinbeck made the comparison himself to the original disciples, and it was not necessarily one he intended flatteringly. The two CP organizers at the heart of this novel are certainly wise as serpents, if not always as innocent as doves. One of the pair, Mac, is a kind of social chameleon. Someone accuses him at one point of being a "born actor" who, as soon as he is dropped in the midst of a new group of people, will start to imitate all their speech and ways.

When he is first introduced to the owner of a small orchard, whose aid the striking fruit pickers will need to win over if they are to find a place to camp for the duration of the strike, Mac catches on fast to a stray reference to the old man's love of dogs. He therefore suddenly makes a point of cozying up to the pointers the man keeps behind his barn. "You like dogs, Mac?" his companion asks him. "I like anything," he replies.

He is, in short, all things to all people. And so perhaps instead of referring to the 1930s as the Heroic Age of American Communism, it would have been better to describe it as the Apostolic one.

Whether it is better to think of the disciples as proto-community organizers, however, or of community organizers as latter-day apostles who refuse to own up to the essentially religious and otherworldly nature of their calling, the point remains that the insights that guide both are shared.

And there is perhaps no better place to find a summa of that wisdom than in Steinbeck's short novel - with the possible exception of Alinsky's own great Rules for Radicals. The portrait of the organizer that emerges from both books is one straight out of the Gospels. For both Alinsky and Steinbeck, the ideal organizer (though Steinbeck's attitude to such a personage is decidedly ambiguous - much more so than Alinsky's) is a sower of seeds, just like a proselytizer of the Gospel.

Mac and Jim, in Steinbeck's novel, know full well that any given strike may fail -- and fail horribly. But it will spread an idea, they say, that may germinate later. Alinsky, meanwhile, envisioned the work of pursuing justice as an ascent up an infinite mountain, toward a transcendent goal that cannot ever be reached. Human history is for Alinsky what Aaron Wildavsky called a "succession of problems" - the solution of one yields another that was not anticipated beforehand. For him as for Mac and Jim, therefore, the purpose of a given struggle is in the struggle itself as much as in the outcome.

Alinksy speaks of the adventure and joy of life to be found in collective action. So too, Mac urges Jim, his protégé, to remember that even when a worker's strike is brutally crushed, the people who emerge from it will have had an experience of what it feels like to work together - one that will not be easily forgotten.

Behind this purity and nobility of purpose, however - and indeed, as a constitutive part of it - is to be found a certain Machiavellian and Mephistophelean tendency (something about which Alinksy was quite explicit) -- just as there is a whiff of Lucifer in some of the Gospel's instructions, and more than a trace of Christ in Milton's Satan (in the work, incidentally, that gave Steinbeck his title).

Alinksy, for instance, urges the organizer as much as possible to enlist "self-interest" in their cause. Mac applies this maxim to the letter, sizing up the fact that the small farmer mentioned above is in debt to the larger landowners against whom the workers are striking. He suggests that if the farmer allows the striking men to camp out on his property, they can pick his crop for free -- dropping his labor costs to zero, which -- coupled with the virtual monopoly he will enjoy once the workers have cleared out of the other orchards -- will catapult him in one go beyond the reach of his creditors (it tragically does not pan out that way, but that's another story). The man becomes a willing and eager participant in aiding the strikers' cause.

This raises the question, of course, of what then is the self-interest of the organizer? Are they alone to be pure and altruistic of motive, when none of the people they employ as instruments to their ends are presumed to be? Alinksy suggests that the organizer too is not immune to the love of power; but it is power of a highly sublimated kind. The organizer, he writes, takes a joy in being able to create something, to see it spring into being, and the satisfaction of this motive is a strong enough inducement to erase the need for "credit" or authority in any traditional sense.

Mac and Jim, therefore - like all true organizers - do not need to lead the strike by taking charge. Almost immediately upon their arrival among the fruit-pickers, they seek out the existing natural leaders who already seem to command the men. They gently bring them around to their point of view, and have the men elect them -- the existing leaders -- rather than themselves -- as head of the strike committee.

So too, they promote talk of the strike not by giving anyone the impression it was their idea, but by allowing each worker to conclude he came up with it himself.

This is a touch straight out of Alinsky, who depicts the organizer as a questioner who sits so sly - suggesting things but never committing themself directly. Jim and Mac are forever playing dumb. As a result, they see something they said in one context reappear in another, having been assimilated as someone else's idea.

When confronted by an argument from one of the labor leaders that they can't afford to strike, for instance, Jim warns him that if they don't take a stand over a wage cut in the apple industry, the cotton barons will decide to do the same when the men move on to the other crop the next season. By the next day, everyone in the fields is describing how they worked out for themselves the conclusion that the cotton barons will follow the orchard owners' suit, if the men do not go out on strike.

Alinksy would be proud. Mac and Jim have learned to find the joy of their work from behind the scenes - to see something come to life that they helped to create, even if their role in its fruition will never be acknowledged.

Of course, Steinbeck was writing his great novel of labor unrest long before Alinsky set down his rules for radicals. Their thinking in these matters emerges from something of the same crisis and milieu, however, so it is hardly any wonder that they reach similar conclusions. Steinbeck's book was published in 1936, just a year after Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act - and some time, it is plain, before its effects had actually had a chance to percolate down to the reality on the ground.

Alinsky, meanwhile, was a product of the historical situation in labor relations that came just after - the great wave of unionizing that followed the passage of the NLRA, and which was associated above all with the incredible growth of the CIO (for which Alinsky worked). Saul Bellow, writing in The Adventures  of Augie March, likens the role of the CIO organizer at that time (Augie himself briefly works for the union, among his many jobs) to that of a Jesuit missionary just arrived at a receptive village, who simply cannot baptize fast enough to stem the tide of new believers.

Soon, the age of Communist Party organizers engaged in tit-for-tat violence with far-right vigilantes was replaced by that of formalized union contracts with recognized collective bargaining rights and no-strike clauses.

Alinsky, for one, resented the loss of militancy that resulted from the success of his own and others' work with the CIO - while also viewing it as simply another indication of the infinite mountain it is the task of the organizer to ascend. As one group of people achieves relative stability and prosperity, they are as likely as not to shift into the role of the oppressor. And so the organizer too must change their focus and priorities - must identify new injustices and new groups of people to organize. The organizer's work is never done.

The world that Steinbeck's novel describes, however, is one that it is only possible to romanticize in retrospect. As much as Alinksy and Steinbeck's organizers implement some of the same wisdom, after all, we should remember that in Steinbeck, this wisdom ultimately fails them. The strike is not successful. Nor does it necessarily bring the other men closer together. The ending of Steinbeck's book is highly ambiguous, and the novel has more the structure of a cascading disaster than that of a model of sound organizing practice.

This too, however, is a reality of the organizer's art that Alinsky would also have acknowledged. He urges in Rules for Radicals that readers should treat his book as anything but what its title implies. There are in fact, no rules, he notes, and no truths that will apply absolutely in all situations.

Mac makes the same point, early in the book, while advising Jim. He rejects the notion of strategy as a discipline that can be learned. You can read all the tactics you want, he tells Jim, but they won't help you because every situation is different. You just have to "use whatever material is to hand," in any way you can.

Is the Alinsky/Mac view of life and of how to be a good organizer the only "right" one to have? Surely not, and surely neither of them would claim it was. It is a conception of the world that grew out of certain historical experiences, but it is perhaps not relevant to all. There are times when an organizer's belief in their own relative purity of motive (Alinsky's self-interest solely in the name of selfless creation, etc.) is a very dangerous thing. There are people who can use the Machiavelian carve-outs in the Alinksy or Mac ethos - the occasional nods to the occasional truth that the ends do occasionally justify the means - to excuse practically any atrocity.

(And say, this probably should have occurred to me earlier - but could it be "Mac" for "Machiavelli"?)

The Alinksy/Mac worldview is undoubtedly a compelling one; there is a reason so many organizers and would-be activists and advocates, including myself, have found Rules for Radicals such an electrifying book over the years. But it should be cut by internalizing the more pessimistic wisdom of Steinbeck's novel, which helps us to see the damage and the cruelty that organizing under this heading can do, as well as its potential for beauty and nobility and self-sacrifice.

There is other New Testament wisdom, in short, that any organizer or activist ought to keep in mind as well when doing their work, and which can counterbalance the Mac in all of us: the injunction not to repay evil with evil.