Roots for Radicals

Organizing for Power, Action, and Justice

Edward T. Chambers

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350043138
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

The successor to the legendary activist Saul Alinsky, Edward T. Chambers pioneered a set of principles and practices that have guided community organizations throughout the US and the world. Roots for Radicals remains his definitive reflection on these fundamental principles of community activism: how, as public citizens, we can navigate the gap between the world as it is and as it should be, between self-interest and self-sacrifice and in doing so create lasting change for our communities. In the face of the increasingly turbulent politics of the 21st-century, Chambers's book has never been more relevant.

Chapter 1

The World As It Is and the World As It Should Be

“Out of such crooked timbers as man is made, nothing entirely straight can be fashioned.”

Immanuel Kant

The Two Worlds

Until we die, we live with a tension under our skin at the center of our personhood. We are born into a world of needs and necessities, opportunities and limitations, and must survive there. No one has the luxury of ignoring these realities. Self-preservation, food, clothing, shelter, safety, health care, education, and work are necessary for everyone. Large numbers of people agonize over these things every day of their lives; many of us think of nothing else. This demanding set of real circumstances, which we didn’t create but which we are thrown into, is the world as it is. When people refer to the “real world” in conversation, this is what they mean.

We also have dreams and expectations, yearnings and values, hopes and aspirations. We exist from day-to-day with the awareness that things not only might, but could be, should be, different for ourselves and our children. We know that we don’t fulfill ourselves, that there is an ideal, a greater good that matters. We are a mysterious combination of matter and spirit, body and soul, sexuality and power. We aren’t born with realized vision and values. We inherit them from our parents, teachers, and the received culture, which is all around us. It’s like the air we breathe—we can’t escape it. As we grow and move into adulthood, these formative patterns of the good and meaningful life must be acted upon to become real. The guiding ideals that we receive from our culture and predecessors make up the world as it should be. Cynics deride vision and values as irrelevant in the real world, but the fact is that they are indispensable to our sanity, integrity, and authenticity.

“As is” and “should be”—is and ought—are abstractions. They don’t exist as such. You can break them apart the way I just did, but only for the purpose of understanding. In real life, the two always exist conjugally. Just as there is no such thing as culture without society, and no such thing as person without family, so it is with the two worlds. Like the encircling polarities of the Chinese yin/yang symbol, the two worlds always function in relationship to each other. Just as good/evil, active/passive, and light/dark have no meaning if you break them in half, so it is with the two worlds. Their reality is their relationship, the tense, constantly shifting interplay between them. The hard existential truth is that from the awakening of our consciences until we lay down in death, we feel an unrelenting struggle between is and ought.

Let’s pause for a minute. Is this two-world stuff fair? No. We are crooked timbers by nature, made of matter and spirit, and brought into being by parents nobody asked us about. We are given a short life, one of constant struggle. We are supposed to love ourselves and others. So why in God’s name do we have to live in two worlds? Why aren’t we born straight instead of crooked, with no in-betweens, no more-or-less? The answer is freedom—to think, to feel, to imagine, to will, and to act. There is the trade-off for being born crooked: In the midst of the tension of living in between the two worlds, our spirit is free.

Having just described the relationship between the two worlds as tense, let me be clear about what I mean by tension. In today’s culture, tension is a bad word, always quickly followed in advertising by “relief.” The media teaches that tensions mean we’re “stressed out” or “uptight” or “wound up”—all undesirable states calling for immediate medication, therapy, or exercise. But the tension I’m naming here isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s the human condition. It’s the gap that people who aren’t completely lost in the culture of self-centeredness feel between the reality that surrounds them and their ideals. Philosophers use the word “dialectical” to name a back-and-forth tension between interrelated poles, and I will sometimes use it to describe the relationship between the two worlds.

Whenever I draw attention to one of the two worlds, I’m always conscious that its partner is present, and you should be, too. It’s sunup and sundown. One makes no sense without the other. I call the world as it is and the world as it should be conjugal concepts. Like all relational partners, they shape and inform each other. You can’t understand sexual intercourse by looking at one partner in isolation, and you can’t grasp the two worlds by dividing them. The foundational conviction of the IAF organizing tradition is that it is the fate of human beings to exist in-between the world as it is and the world as it should be. Reflective people of conscience are constantly and painfully aware of the gap between our so-called values and the facts of life in the everyday world within which we operate. When these two worlds collide hard enough and often enough, a fire in the belly is sometimes ignited. The tension between the two worlds is the root of radical action for justice and democracy—not radical as in looting or trashing, but as in going to the root of things.

Wind, rain, and fog confronted Carol Reckling, a senior leader in Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD), when she left her office and dashed toward her car on a miserable midwinter dusk in downtown Baltimore. This was the night that BUILD had chosen for an action involving 1,000 leaders with Maryland state legislators in Annapolis.

She recalled that the weather had also been miserable on that night seven years before when she began her work with BUILD. Although she had been aware of the organization since its inception, she had shied away from participating until she learned of a meeting that would focus on a matter near to her heart: schools. The meeting was a caucus of the just-forming BUILD education committee. The subject was not curriculum or funding or the condition of buildings, but something more basic—a lack of supplies. No paper. No pencils. No books. She remembered her feelings—shock, then anger—at hearing that litany. No paper. No pencils. No books. Reckling herself had received a good education in Baltimore elementary and high schools, at Howard University, and in the master’s program of Washington University Business School. She had found teachers along the way who worked hard and worked her hard. And she had lived, firsthand, what her parents and their peers had always said: “Education is the key.” So she understood full well the whole equation facing too many of Baltimore’s children: No paper, no pencils, no books = no career, no future, no hope.

In the years since that first meeting, she had worked hard and well. She had become a driving force in education strategy in Baltimore. She had negotiated with three mayors and many corporate leaders. She had been one of the founders of BUILD’s Commonwealth Strategy, which guarantees full funding for postsecondary education or initial employment opportunities to all graduates of the Baltimore public schools who meet specified attendance and performance criteria.

Carol Reckling had been taught by her parents and her church to appreciate the value of education—so much so, that when she saw large numbers of Baltimore’s children being denied its basics, she was moved to act. The constant tension between the world as it is and the world as it should be is the primary motivation leading people like Carol Reckling to seek the common good. What I mean by being moral or ethical is stepping up to the tension between the two worlds. As I hope to make plain in the final section of this chapter, understanding the world as it is while ignoring the world as it should be leads to cynicism, division, and coercion. Concern for the world as it should be divorced from the capacity for analysis and action in the world as it is marginalizes and sentimentalizes morality and ethics. IAF’s position is that maintaining a good enough tension between the two worlds is the hallmark of authentically moral and ethical human living. Embracing this tension every day is our spiritual destiny.

In a world conscious of cultural diversity, I need to add a nuance here. The tension between the two worlds is a tension between interpretations. The world as it is and the world as it should be are not raw facts or simple objective realities. We don’t have objective, uninterpreted access to either world. People from different histories see the two worlds differently. Any group’s readings of what’s happening in a situation (the world as it is) and the key values in that situation (the world as it should be) are interpretations from that group’s perspective. When we meet in public life, I bring my group’s interpretations of the world as it is and as it should be, and you bring your group’s interpretations. What you and I can create for our respective groups or institutions and the larger community depends on bringing our respective interpretations together in a better reading of our common situation and obligations than we could do alone, one that enables us to act together with power despite our differences.

Uneasiness in the face of the disparity between the two worlds haunts us throughout our lives. It isn’t a problem that can be fixed, or a temporary state of affairs that we can end by getting things right. It’s the human condition. It’s possible to reduce the tension between the two worlds through consumption, addiction, or just giving in to the frenetic pace of modern life. We can and do numb ourselves to the gap between the social reality we encounter and our best hopes and aspirations. When this numbness sets in, our humanity is diminished; when it takes over, our humanity is lost.

Living In-Between the Two Worlds

It is useful to break down the relationship between the two worlds into four polarities, each of which contributes to the overall tension. The four are represented in the following diagram, which is an abstraction.

Polarities Between the Two Worlds

The World As It Is ← tension → The World As It Should Be

Self-Interest ↔ Self-Sacrifice
Power ↔ Love
Change ↔ Unity
Imagination ↔ Hope

Self-Interest ↔ Self-Sacrifice

The first polarity between the two worlds is between self-interest and self-sacrifice. Self-interest evokes a range of responses. To realists centered on the world as it is, self-interest is obviously the prime motivator of human behavior. Pursuing self-interest is as natural as breathing. For idealists focused on the world as it should be, self-interest is another word for selfishness. It’s an isolating form of individualism with little regard for others. Both of these views convey a partial truth, but miss a deeper one.

Self-interest is the natural concern of a creature for its survival and well-being. It’s the fundamental priority underlying the choices we make. Self-interest is based on nature’s mandate that we secure the basic needs and necessities of life, and develops further to include more complex desires and requirements. Healthy self-interest is one of the marks of integrity or wholeness in a person. It is the source of the initiative, creativity, and drive of human beings who are fully alive.

The English word “interest” is a combination of two Latin words, inter, meaning “between” or “among,” and esse, meaning “to be.” Our interests do not reside inside our skins but in between, within our relationships with others. Philosopher Hannah Arendt writes, “. . . the language of the Romans, perhaps the most political people we have known, used the words ‘to live’ and ‘to be among men’ (inter homines esse) or ‘to die’ and ‘to cease to be among men’ (inter homines esse desinere) as synonyms.”¹ To live is to be among people, to have interests. Human beings are interpersonal beings, relational selves.

Self-preservation, self-recognition, self-determination, and self-respect are components of self-interest. Self-preservation is the drive for survival; it’s so strong that we can take life to defend ourselves. Self-recognition is the ability to claim our place and space in the world whether others have acknowledged it yet or not. Self-determination is the capacity to expand and deepen our abilities through creative, self-initiated action. Self-respect is recognition of our uniqueness. Self-interest rightly understood includes all of these dimensions. The opposite of self-interest is suicide or self-destruction.

Genuine self-interest is illustrated in the following story.

For thirty years, Sister Mary Beth Larkin has been a member of a Catholic women’s religious order. Although interested in religious life, she did not want to teach or work in a hospital. She thought she wanted to do social work, but seven years of experience with providing crisis intervention and direct service for the poor was so frustrating that she nearly left her community. She knew how to help people work the system, but what about getting the system to work for people?

She found a way to do just that. While working in a Los Angeles parish, she became involved in the United Neighborhoods Organization (UNO). She was deeply impressed with the power and effectiveness of the organization in getting real changes for people living in poor neighborhoods. One of her first public actions involved getting up on the stage before the city council and translating a speech f or a Spanishspeaking leader. “I was so nervous that I was literally sick. I thought about calling in and saying I couldn’t make it. But when the UNO leaders who were present in that hall called the meeting to order and the council members ignored us, I suddenly got very angry, angry for myself and for all those people who deserved better treatment than that. Once I got angry, I was fine. I realized that there is a public person in me that I never knew was there. It was a liberating experience.”

Her commitment to religious life renewed, Sister Mary Beth knew that what she wanted was to organize people and work with them so they could get what they wanted. She knew that this was where she belonged, but no one in her order had ever been involved in anything like IAF organizing before, and there were feelings within the order that this kind of work might not be appropriate for a sister. Eventually, she was permitted to take a position as a full-time organizer and went on to organize in Queens, New York, in San Antonio, and in other parts of Texas. As an IAF organizer, she is usually unable to live with her community of sisters in California. She calls that one of the sacrifices she had to make to do the work that allows her religious convictions to have meaning.

Her work as an organizer has allowed Sister Mary Beth to stay with her commitment to religious life. She expresses her delight with this role by explaining that “religious life is public life. It’s about making a difference and doing the difficult work of seeking justice in a society. It’s the work of the Gospel—we must take action to achieve justice.”

Self-interest defined too narrowly becomes selfishness. This occurs, for example, when self-interest is reduced to how many cars or homes you own, or how large your stock portfolio is. Whether self-interest degenerates into selfishness and meaninglessness or not depends upon how well it is held in creative tension with its conjugal partner.

Self-sacrifice is the counterpart of self-interest. If self-interest involves knowing when and how to assert your concerns effectively, self-sacrifice means being able to suppress your own interests for others.

Self-interest and self-sacrifice are forever joined in a give-and-take relationship. Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and other traditions long ago highlighted the great paradox of human existence: Giving up one’s life for another is the highest good. In real life, we are always more or less concerned with self and others. Good parents, teachers, friends, and leaders understand that there are times when their well-being requires curbing or postponing action on their own behalf to take account of others’ interests. They also know that there are moments when they must strongly pursue their own inter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Foreword to the Bloomsbury Revelations Edition Edward Chambers—A Life in Organizing Michael A. Cowan
• Foreword to the First Edition Studs Terkel
• Introduction The Industrial Areas Foundation: Social Knowledge, Power, and Politicalness
• 1 The World As It Is and the World As It Should Be
• 2 The Relational Meeting
• 3 Broad-Based Organizing: An Intentional Response to the Human Condition
• 4 Relationships: Private and Public
• 5 The Practice of Public Life: Research, Action, and Evaluation
• 6 Reflections of an Organizer
• 7 Broad-Based Organizing for the Twenty-First Century: United Power for Action and Justice
• 8 Thoughts on Twenty-First-Century Challenges
• Appendix: Industrial Areas Foundation Network
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright