In modern times, many social movements arose in the leftist ideological trend, which profoundly influenced and changed the world. The traditional old left hoped to implement its doctrine through violent revolution at the political level and establish a paradise on earth. But after the failure, the left ideal still has a wide audience, so a new left emerges. They change the way of struggle, try to take the long march within the system through the ideological reform at the cultural level, disintegrate the old morality and ethics from within, reshape the emerging values, and grab the power of ruling in the gradual change.
Saul Alinsky is one of them. Born in 1909 to Russian Jewish immigrants in Chicago, Illinois, he was the only surviving son of his father, Benjamin Alinsky, and his second wife. Mr. Arinski said in an interview that his parents had never been involved in the New Socialist Movement. They were, he added, “strict Orthodox, and their whole life revolved around work and synagogues… I remember being told as a child the importance of learning.” Growing up in a Mixed Russian, Polish, German and Italian Ghetto in Chicago, he often clashed on the streets with Polish children and learned his first lesson: “Power is not something that has been built, it is what your opponents think you have.” He attended Marshall High School in Chicago until his parents divorced, then left his father to move to California and graduated from Hollywood High School in 1926.
Asked if his Chicago years had encountered anti-Semitism because of his strict Jewish upbringing, Arinski replied, “It was so pervasive that it hardly needed to be thought about; That’s a fact of life that you have to accept.” He considered himself a devout Jew until the age of 12, after which he began to worry that his parents would force him to become a rabbi.
In 1930, Alinsky graduated from the University of Chicago with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, majoring in his favorite subject, archaeology. Plans to become a professional archaeologist have changed as a result of the continuing economic depression. He later said, “Archaeologists need as much as horses and buggies. All the country survey patrons have been stripped by Wall Street.”
After two years of graduate work at the University of Chicago, Alinsky focused on organized crime with sociologist Clifford Shaw and became known as a criminologist, working in the Illinois State Government’s Crime Research unit and then in prison. In his spare time, Alinsky worked for the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), a militant union with military overtones founded by John Lewis, a leader of the American Labor Movement. Alinsky was deeply struck by Lewis’s organization. He quit the Labour movement in 1939 to set up backyard, a neighbourhood organisation in poor Chicago’s South Side that brought together conflicting ethnic groups such as Serbs and Croats, Czechs and Slovaks, Poles and Lithuanians. His early efforts “turned scattered, silent grievances into a united protest.” He won the admiration of Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson II, who said Arinski’s goals “most faithfully reflect our ideals of brotherhood, tolerance, charity and personal dignity.”
As a result of his efforts and success in helping slum communities, Alinsky spent the next decade organizing nationwide, “from Kansas City and Detroit to Barrios in Southern California.” In 1941, Arinski founded the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the first community movement organization in the United States, to support backyard organizations, and promoted the establishment of similar community organizations. These include the Gamaliel Foundation, the Pacific Institute for Community Organization (PICO), and the Direct Action Research and Training Center (DART). These four national networks, dedicated to building local communities, control more than 130 active local communities, employ more than 4,000 people and have between 1 million and 3 million members. These groups, founded by And in the style of Arinski, are even called “Arinski groups” and hold at least 30 percent of the urban population. By 1950, he had turned his attention to the black ghetto of Chicago. Mr Alinski’s actions drew the ire of Richard J. Daley, the city’s mayor, who admitted that “He loves Chicago as much as I do”. He traveled to California at the request of the Bay Area Presbyterian Church to help organize Oakland’s black Jewish ghetto. Upon hearing of his plans, “the alarmed Auckland City Council promptly tabled a resolution to ban him from the city.”
Arinski died of a heart attack near his home in Carmel, Calif., on June 12, 1972, at age 63. He was cremated in Carmel and his ashes were buried in Chicago’s Mayriv Hill Cemetery (which now includes Zion Garden Cemetery). Shortly before his death, he discussed life after death in Playboy magazine:
A: If there was an afterlife, I would choose hell without reservation.
Flower: Why?
A: Hell is heaven to me. I have been with the poor all my life. Here, if you are a poor man, you are short of money. If you are a poor man in hell, you are wicked. Once I go to hell, I will start organizing the poor there.
Flower: Why these people?
A: Because they are my people.
Arinski’s ideals are truly extraordinary. His life has left the world with a wealth of topics and taught countless disciples, such as Obama, Hillary…
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