The essence of community organizing is convincing people that you know better than they do, and that they should follow you. Since you need a “them” to fight a war, it normally consists in extorting money from people who have it, but doing it in such a way that no one involved in the process learns anything about business, how to create jobs, how to run a business, or has any creative economic ideas.
In spite of what are no doubt some temporary victories, then, the net effect is community impoverishment. If Van Jones had gotten his “green jobs in the ghettoes” program going, it would have been dead in ten years, at considerable expense not just to the taxpayers, but to the economies unfortunate enough to have allowed actually viable business enterprises to atrophy due to competition happening outside the free market.
The reality is you can’t extort money from intelligent people–and by definition those who own businesses know how to run them, or they would go out of business anyway–forever. If you are doing it in the form of coerced unionism, you will steadily lose jobs over decades, as has happened in the Northeast, with Detroit being particularly hard hit. What happens is that the business owners know that to stay competitive, they have to cut costs. If Unionism makes that impossible, then they avoid the unions by going somewhere beyond their reach. Had activists in Seattle not been so greedy, they would have a lot of jobs that instead went to South Carolina.
Given their choice, most people are intelligent enough to realize that a job with lower wages is better than unemployment, since even the most generous unemployment packages run out eventually, and are always combined with a loss of self esteem and typically depression and anti-social behavior. Not working too long is psychologically damaging.
Likewise, you can extort “blood money” from governments, but eventually the people paying that money rebel, and either change the government, or move out of the jurisdiction involved; again, as happened in Detroit.
One would think that the organizers would realize the damage they are causing at some point. One would think that common sense at some point would cause them to question whether or not their hard work to create a legally sanctioned labor monopoly–which denies individual workers the right to self determination, and by extension the use of their own judgement, rather than that of the community organizer–was a good idea.
Here is the reality: Marxists like Trumpka and Van Jones think of people as consisting in generic types. How you classify them depends on the particular radicalization you are working on–inner city blacks require a different set of lies than suburban unionists–but fundamentally you assume they are stupid, homogeneous, and without the capacity for self determination without the “enlightened” intervension of their future dictators.
The rhetoric of class warfare does not admit of personal consciousness. It never considers that the “rich” might in fact be providing some needed service, like jobs; and that the poor might be poor because they are unintelligent and unmotivated, and just fine with their station in life. Most of Appallachia is like that. They just want to be left alone.
As I think about it, once you think of people as generic, where does the qualitative outlier come from, that enables their organization? Is it not the “leader”, and have we not directly derived the “Fuehrerprinzip”? Hitler’s entire argument rested on the idea that the German people were generically perfect, but rudderless without him. The Jews were generically wicked, and could thus be judged, condemend and slaughtered en masse. There was no room for qualitative variation.
The Soviets, and Chinese, and Vietnamese did the same thing. They decided that having a certain amount of wealth, in and of itself, and without regard to the sources or uses made of that wealth, constituted a capital crime. Of course, there was always the enticement of legalized theft, rape, torture and murder, for people of a psychopathically sadistic mindset. Imagine what Ted Bundy could have made of the opportunities granted the Cheka, and NKVD. They never took human beings into those dungeons: their class membership told them all they needed to know.
Yet all developed societies reject the notion of collective guilt. Most white southerners–something like 95%–were not slave owners. Many were uncomfortable with slavery. They fought for their homes, under invasion–Unconstitutionally–from the North.
Presumably in our day and time, not all Arabs are comfortable with the idea of slavery either, even thought it is explicitly authorized in the Koran, including the taking of sex slaves (and in unlimited quantities; only wives were limited to four).
In our own day and time, manifestly (Allan West and Herman Cain being two examples) not all black Americans are happy about the implicit paternalism and smug arrogance with which leftists assume that they can arrogate to themselves the right to speak for people they don’t understand. Is Van Jones “one of the people”? He went to Yale Law School. I don’t know where he gets his suits, but it probably isn’t JC Penny, where I have always bought mine.
Obama went to a prep school where he smoked pot, drank, and snorted cocaine “when he could get it”. This was the sort of place where Biff and Buffy go, and where tennis and golf are the big sports. He followed this with trips to very expensive Ivy League schools, where the power elite and political radicals congregate. He is no more ghetto than I am, and likely less, since I have spent a lot of time working alongside normal people who will wear a hard hat the rest of their lives. I’m not anti-union: I’m against using the power of law to prevent people from making their own decision as to whether or not to join.
Obama’s only apparent talent is convincing people who should know better than he knows what is best for them. The implicit message of “hope and change” was “you don’t need the details, because I am all that and a bag of chips: trust me”. Newsflash: not only does he not have the faintest clue how to help people in actuality, he is leading them to hell in a handbasket. Moreover, he will never personally have to face ANY of the consequences of his actions. The Party members never do. They just blame bourgeois traitors and foreign influences for failures occasioned by stupidity, and the predictable results that follow it.