Editing Saul Alinsky (section)

===''Playboy'' interview===
In March 1972, ''[[Playboy]]'' magazine published a 24,000-word interview with Alinsky.{{sfnp|Norden|1972}}

Alinsky was introduced as "a bespectacled, conservatively dressed community organizer who looks like an accountant and talks like a stevedore," a figure "hated and feared", according to ''[[The New York Times]]'', "in high places from coast to coast", and acknowledged by [[William F. Buckley Jr.]], "a bitter ideological foe", as "very close to an organizational genius". Levelling against him the charges of the New Left, the interview effectively invited Alinsky to summarize the lessons he had drawn for the new generation of activists in (a revision of an earlier work) ''Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals''.

====Life cycle of organizations====
Alinsky was confronted with "the tendency" of communities he had helped organize to eventually "join the establishment in return for their piece of the economic action", Back of the Yards, "now one of the most vociferously segregationist areas of Chicago," being cited as a "case in point". For Alinsky, this was only a "challenge." It is "a recurring pattern": "Prosperity makes cowards of us all, and the Back of the Yards is no exception. They've entered the nightfall of their success, and their dreams of a better world have been replaced by nightmares of fear—fear of change, fear of losing their material goods, fear of blacks."

Alinsky explained that the life span of one of his organizations might be five years. After that it was either absorbed into administering programs (rather than building people power) or died. That was something that just had to be accepted, with the understanding that "discrimination and deprivation does not automatically endow [the have-nots] with any special qualities." Perhaps he would move back into the area to organize "a new movement to overthrow the one I built 25 years ago." Did he not find this process of co-optation discouraging? "No. It's the eternal problem." All life is a "relay race of revolutions", each bringing society "a little closer to the ultimate goal of real personal and social freedom."

But what were his "so-called" radical critics "in fact saying"? That when a community comes to him ("we're being shafted in every way") and ask for help, he should say, "sorry . . .if you get power and win, then you'll become, just like Back of the Yards, materialistic and all that, so just go on suffering, it is better for your souls"? "It's kind of like a starving man coming up to you and begging you for a loaf of bread, and your telling him, 'Don't you realize that man doesn't live by bread alone.' What a cop out."{{sfnp|Norden|1972|pp=76–78}}

Revolutionary youth may have "few illusions about the system," but in ''Rules for Radicals'' Alinsky suggested "they have plenty of illusions about the way to change our world."{{sfnp|Alinsky|1971|p=xiii}} The "liberal cliché about reconciliation of opposing forces," so often invoked in opposition to radical confrontation, may be "a load of crap." "Reconciliation means just one thing: when one side gets enough power, then the other side gets reconciled to it." But opposition to consensus politics does not mean opposition to compromise — "just the opposite." "In the world as it is, no victory is ever absolute". "There is never nirvana." A "society without compromise is totalitarian."{{sfnp|Alinsky|1971|p=59}} And "in the world as it is, the right things also invariably get done for the wrong reasons."{{sfnp|Norden|1972|p=170}}

====Organizing the middle class====
For Alinsky, the real limitation of his organizing experience was that it had not extended into the middle-class majority:{{sfnp|Norden|1972|p=60}}
<blockquote>Christ, even if we could manage to organize all the exploited low-income groups – all the blacks, chicanos, Puerto Ricans, poor whites – and then, through some kind of organizational miracle, weld them all together into a viable coalition, what would you have? At the most optimistic estimate, 55,000,000 people by the end of this decade – but by then the total population will be over 225,000,000, of whom the overwhelming majority will be middle class. . . . Pragmatically, the only hope for genuine minority progress is to seek out allies within the majority and to organize that majority itself as part of a national movement for change.</blockquote>

The middle classes may be "conditioned to look for the safe and easy way, afraid to rock the boat," but Alinsky believed "they're beginning to realize the boat is sinking." On a wide range of issues, they feel "more defeated and lost today than the poor do." They were, Alinsky insisted, "good organizational material:" "more amorphous than some barrio in Southern California", so that "you're going to be organizing all across the country," but "the rules are the same."{{sfnp|Norden|1972|p=60}}

In 1968 he secured a year's funding in Chicago from the [[Midas (automotive service)|Midas International Corporation]] to train white middle class suburban activists. As understood by corporate president Gordon Sherman, the proposition was that "lack of organization in white neighborhoods can be as harmful to the total society as lack of organization in the black community. We all live in our own ghettos".<ref>{{Cite news|last=Janson|first=Donald|date=7 August 1968|title=Alinsky to Train White Militants|page=27|work=New York Times|url=https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1968/08/07/76959744.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0|access-date=8 January 2022}}</ref> Alinsky, however, never predicted exactly what form or direction middle-class organization would take. In Horwitt's sympathetic view he was "too empirical for that." He did suggest that "the chance for organization for action on pollution, inflation, Vietnam, violence, race, taxes is all about us," making it clear that he envisaged organization based on a community of the interest rather than on the dubious neighborliness of the suburb.{{sfnp|Horwitt|1989|p=534}}

In 1969 in Chicago, Alinsky and his IAF trainees helped initiate a city-wide Campaign Against Pollution (later to become the Citizens Action Program to Stop the [[Crosstown Expressway (Chicago)|Crosstown]]—a billion-dollar expressway).{{sfnp|Horwitt|1989|pp=531–532}} Alinsky was not beyond believing that such initiatives, scaled-up nationally, could "move on to the larger issues: pollution in the Pentagon and Congress and the board rooms of the megacorporations." Challenging, but the alternative, Alinsky warned, was for the "impotence" of the middle classes to turn into "political paranoia." This would make them "ripe for the plucking by some guy on horseback promising a return to the vanished verities of yesterday."{{sfnp|Norden|1972|p=60}}