SAUL ALINSKY and GENE SHARP

[mojo.rhythm]

What do people here think of Saul Alinsky and Gene Sharp? Feel free to post your thoughts below (if you have any).

I haven't read them myself, but I'm wondering if any comrades have?

Cheers!

[Martin Luther]

All I know is that they're the ultimate bugaboos of the American right.

[mojo.rhythm]

Agreed. Which is what makes me wanna read 'em, lol. All I know about Saul Alinsky is that he was a community organiser in the sixties who pretty much pioneered the craft, and that the Tea Party (back in 2010) were using his book Rules for Radicals as an instruction manual for their own organising and agitating.

Gene Sharp I don't know much about, except that he works at the Albert Einstein Institute and studies revolutions for a living.

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

Saul Alinsky was basically the godfather of modern community organization. Politically he was somewhere between a progressive (American-style) liberal and a social democrat. Considering that social democracy is considered radical even by Democrat standards here in the States, it's no wonder that the American right is terrified of him......even though I'm convinced that most of them don't even know who he was.

But hey, I'll take it.

[Red Commissar]

I've only heard of Saul Alinsky, not Gene Sharp. And I only know of Alinski for the same reasons that has been said before, the fear-mongering around him as some sort of radical ideologue who is about to pull of his coup from beyond the grave by way of Obama and/or Clinton. As you pointed out, this is ironic considering the Tea Party's organizers took notes from Alinksi's work.

I guess I'll have to look up who Gene Sharp is but I'd appreciate a brief summary of who he was and why he has recognition.

[VivalaCuarta]

Ford Foundation & CIA

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

Ford Foundation & CIA

I'd love if you could elaborate a bit on this or provide some links. It's not that I particularly doubt it, it's just not a thing I've heard previously.

I'm totally unfamiliar with Gene Sharpe. But Saul Alinsky? A brilliant anti-communist strategist. I mean that in the worst way possible.

I think Alinsky's thinking has been a fantastic weapon in the hands of the state, and a guiding voice for countless "community organizers" whose project has fundamentally been about preventing the development of an autonomous and combative class politics. Sorta the "community" version of AFL-business unionism (to which, unsurprisingly, "community organizations" are often closely tied). It's insidious. It's dangerous. It poaches good capable and radical organizers and makes them into careerists, makes their organizing into a "front" for the state, etc.

Yuck.