{"id":13377,"date":"2014-02-25T16:22:06","date_gmt":"2014-02-25T21:22:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=13377"},"modified":"2014-02-25T16:22:06","modified_gmt":"2014-02-25T21:22:06","slug":"saul-alinsky-video","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=13377","title":{"rendered":"Saul Alinsky on video"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I am teaching about Saul Alinsky (with due consideration to both his strengths and his weaknesses). I enjoyed showing my class actual footage of the man at work&#8211;from a 1968 Canadian documentary.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/izs02wlisUA?feature=player_detailpage\" height=\"360\" width=\"640\" allowfullscreen=\"\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>In this excerpt:<\/p>\n<p>[o:00 to 0:55] A Chicago woman complains about rats the size of cats in her apartment. This is not a &#8220;one-on-one&#8221; interview in which she tells her own story and displays her agency as a human being. It is a documentary filmmaker&#8217;s invasion of her apartment to demonstrate her poverty. However, it does reveal some of the problems that would emerge in a one-on-one.<\/p>\n<p>[0:55-1:42]: Two Alinksy-trained organizers plan &#8220;direct actions,&#8221; including pickets and a rent strike. In the ideal model, they would choose the topic and target only after much consultation with residents in one-on-ones and house meetings. But sooner or later, they would have to deal, as they do here, with practical issues like babysitting the moms who picket.\u00a0By the way, a rent strike is a classic collective action problem: an individual renter who fails to pay will be evicted, but a whole building can obtain relief from the landlord if they act together. Even a picket line works a lot better if everyone joins it. That&#8217;s why I enjoy this exchange between the organizers at 0:58:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>How many tenants in the building?<\/p>\n<p>Ah, the building has, I think something like 27-30 tenants.<\/p>\n<p>Tell you what&#8211;why don&#8221;t we turn out all 30 of them?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>[1:43-3:40] A dignified picket line and some interaction with police.<\/p>\n<p>[3:40-5:15] A debate with a neighbor (a young White man) who doesn&#8217;t like to see picketing on his street. The resident seen earlier talking about rats in her bedroom expresses herself pretty effectively.<\/p>\n<p>[5:15-6:41] Alinsky himself, trying to establish his credibility as an anti-racist organizer with a group, probably from Dayton, OH, that is considering hiring him.<\/p>\n<p>[6:41-8:09 ] The committee deliberates on whether to employ him.<\/p>\n<p>In the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=y3ae-1ubBx8\">next segment<\/a>, he argues with a Canadian hippie about building utopian alternatives. (Alinksy is against.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I am teaching about Saul Alinsky (with due consideration to both his strengths and his weaknesses). I enjoyed showing my class actual footage of the man at work&#8211;from a 1968 Canadian documentary. In this excerpt: [o:00 to 0:55] A Chicago woman complains about rats the size of cats in her apartment. This is not a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13377"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13393,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13377\/revisions\/13393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}