[ Resolving the conflict between being visionary and being
pragmatic is critical for those who want to transform society. Can we
be both visionary and strategic?]
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CHANGING THE ‘WORLD AS IT IS’ INTO THE ‘WORLD AS IT SHOULD
BE’  
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Mark Engler and Paul Engler
December 15, 2022
Waging Nonviolence
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_ Resolving the conflict between being visionary and being pragmatic
is critical for those who want to transform society. Can we be both
visionary and strategic? _

Graffiti mural made by the artist Banksy is seen on Israel's West
Bank wall, the barrier wall erected by Israeli n Abu Dis. He has
created nine of his murals on the walls that Israel erected on the
Palestinian territories of the West Bank., (Street Art Collection)

 

Organizations committed to changing the world for the better must deal
with a fundamental tension: On the one hand, they need to present a
vision for the kind of society they would like to create. On the other
hand, they are forced to reckon with everyday realities of the
existing economic and political order. In the community organizing
tradition in the United States, this tension is often described as the
conflict between “the world as it is” and “the world as it
should be.”

Over the past half-century, some of the most prominent community
organizing networks in the United States — ranging from
the Gamaliel Foundation [[link removed]] to Faith In Action
[[link removed]] to the Industrial Areas Foundation
[[link removed]], or IAF — have taught
about this divide as a key part of their introductory trainings, using
it as a means of orienting new organizers to their approach to
organizing. Over the years, the framework has been invoked by Barack
Obama, Saul Alinsky and countless rank-and-file organizers. For
advocates of this concept, understanding the “two worlds”
dichotomy is fundamental to developing the type of people who can
effectively produce change: namely, realistic radicals.

So what is the origin of this idea? And why might it be useful for us
today?

In his 2003 memoir, “Roots for Radicals,” Edward T. Chambers, who
led the Saul Alinsky-founded IAF from 1972 to 2009, explains the idea
this way: “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…”  Continuing, he writes, “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.”
Like it or not, these are the circumstances we are thrown into and the
conditions we must confront. They are _the_ _world as it is_.
 

Protest sign at the Women’s March in Oakland, California in 2019.
(Twitter/@aRachelBloom)
But that is only one side of the story. As Chambers notes, “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.” Our hopes and ideals for a better
society make up _the_ _world as it should be_. And these are
integral to who we are as people. “Cynics deride vision and values
as irrelevant in the real world,” Chambers wrote, “but the fact is
that they are indispensable to our sanity, integrity and
authenticity.”

To succeed, organizers are forced to deal with both worlds at once.
They have to figure out how to reconcile them without sacrificing
either a broader vision for change or the demand for concrete
improvements in the here and now. Radical movements seeking to alter
the material conditions of people’s daily lives must first contend
with the constraints created by those conditions — including the
despondency engendered by a system more accountable to moneyed
interests than ordinary people. They must deal with the reality of
power as a guiding force in the world. In the course of pushing for a
given demand or policy change, organizers might find that winning
requires navigating their way through very compromised institutions or
entering into unsavory alliances. Therefore, they must weigh the costs
and benefits of engaging with the system while also trying to remain
true to their values.

While the need to balance the two worlds is challenging, the ongoing
conflict between them can also become a creative force: “When these
two worlds collide hard enough and often enough, a fire in the belly
is sometimes ignited,” Chambers explains. “The tension between the
two worlds is the root of radical action for justice and
democracy[.]”

ALINSKY, OBAMA AND THE PROBLEM OF IDEOLOGY

By the time Chambers wrote his memoir, activists had been discussing
the tension between the two worlds for many decades. The roots of the
framework can be traced to Saul Alinsky
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a foundational figure in modern U.S. community organizing traditions,
who deployed it as an argument
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rejecting utopian self-isolation and being willing to interact with
the system, with all its flaws and limitations. Barack Obama, who
started his career as an Alinskyite community organizer, incorporated
the phrase as part of his political worldview and occasionally
[[link removed]] referenced
[[link removed]] it after
[[link removed]] becoming
president. However, it was Alinsky’s less famous successors who
fleshed out the framework and adapted it for their organizations,
weaving it into the DNA of community organizing networks such as the
IAF.

Even as the framework attracted adherents, it has also drawn
detractors. Critics of Alinsky’s model of community organizing see
focusing on “the world as it is” as a way of avoiding ideology and
hemming in a movement’s more radical aspirations. In a critique
for _Jacobin_, socialist writer Aaron Petcoff argues
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coming out of the 1960s, Alinsky “tried to convince a new generation
of radicalizing youth from the New Left to adopt his ‘pragmatic’
approach to organizing, which rested on accepting ‘the world as it
is’ and rejecting more militant politics.”

While they may not entirely agree with Petcoff’s critique, a variety
of organizers trained in the community organizing tradition have also
noted the anti-ideological biases that were baked into their
formation. In a 2018 essay for _The Nation, _journalist Nick
Bowlin quotes
[[link removed]] Detroit
organizer Molly Sweeney, who recalls that her training in Alinskyite
organizing lacked_ _“any analysis of the greater forces of white
supremacy and capitalism that shape our world.” As Sweeney explains,
“The ‘world as it is’ was articulated in my training void of any
analysis of how the world became that way.”

Expressing similar sentiments, Katie Horvath of the Symbiosis Research
Collective wrote
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a 2018 reflection for _The Ecologist_ about her experience with how
the framework was used: “It’s framed as pragmatism: We don’t
live in the world as it should be, we live in the real world, and we
have to act according to its rules to get what we want,” she
explains. “At training, this was always explained as a necessary
strategy in order to achieve the world as it should be,” but Horvath
found herself wondering about the limitations it imposed. Being overly
pragmatic, she reflects, “constricts what is politically possible,
as it means you end up working off of the lowest common denominator of
shared values for fear of alienating member institutions.” She
further argues, “The short-sighted focus on picking only concrete
and winnable issues means never getting at underlying systemic
problems that require longer campaigns or that cannot be solved at all
within the constraints of the current system.”

Some of this criticism is justified. Alinsky favored
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around narrow local demands that could be used to build community
power rather than taking on galvanizing, morally loaded, and possibly
divisive national issues. There are some positive aspects to this
approach: Community organizers have devoted themselves to reaching out
beyond self-identified groups of leftists, meeting people “where
they are at,” and building broad-based coalitions by working on
issues of concrete relevance in specific communities. And yet, the
approach can sometimes feel more small-minded than visionary, never
truly advancing an inspiring model of a different world. The IAF, in
particular, has tended to hew to traditional community organizing
principles, and it has been less flexible than many of its peer
networks at incorporating criticisms of a variety of different aspects
of the Alinskyite model.

That said, over the past two decades, the world of community
organizing as a whole has evolved considerably. Most major networks
have increasingly invested in political education and incorporated
more structural analysis into their outlook and strategies —
recognizing the need, as Oakland-based organizer Gary Delgado put it
in an influential 1998 essay
[[link removed]] entitled
”The Last Stop Sign,” to “proactively address issues of race,
class, gender, corporate concentration and the complexities of a
transnational economy.” As organizers Daniel Martinez HoSang, LeeAnn
Hall and Libero Della Piana recently wrote
[[link removed]] in
an article for _The Forge, _“Today, nearly every community
organizing group accepts the importance of centering racial
justice.” Additionally, these groups have shown greater interest in
campaigns that transcend neighborhood-level concerns, as well as in
electoral interventions, especially in the wake of Donald Trump’s
2016 victory.

Beyond mere pragmatism

As community organizing networks have begun to think bigger in their
analysis and aspirations, can the “two worlds” remain useful
guideposts?

Although, in practice, the framework has sometimes been used as a call
to mere pragmatism, in its richest form it can be more than that.
Indeed, its true value lies in its dialectical nature. The dichotomy
does not merely warn against unchecked utopianism; it also rejects the
impulse to become overly accommodating of the status quo. As Chambers
puts it, “Understanding the world as it is while ignoring the world
as it should be leads to cynicism, division and coercion.” In his
view, ethical behavior is rooted in “stepping up to the tension
between the two worlds” and recognizing the shortfalls inherent in
being either overly starry-eyed or inured to existing conditions.
Advancing a similar idea, leaders in IAF trainings highlight the role
of both power and love in creating change. Echoing
[[link removed]] Martin
Luther King Jr., they explain: “Power without love is tyranny. Love
without power is sentimentality.”

The need, then, is to cultivate individuals who can manage both sides
of the push-and-pull — or, in the words
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IAF Director Larry B. McNeil, the best community people with “double
vision.” According to McNeil, “They can actually see what is not
there, and they can see the practical organizing and political steps
that make that vision a reality.” As he further notes: “Most
people get stuck in the world as it is. They become so mired in the
present that they forget to imagine. Utopians make the opposite
mistake. They become so enthralled in their vision of the future that
they fail to do the dirty day-to-day work to make their vision
real.”

McNeil offered these words in a 1998 speech to a conference of the
​​Urban Parks Institute. At the conference, he promoted a
hard-headed approach to building power and carefully selecting issues
to organize around — “We have to take complex, multi-sided
problems and turn them into specific, concrete, immediate issues,”
he told the attendees. And yet, he insisted on the necessity of
unfettered imagination, telling his audience in his closing remarks,
to “make sure that your vision of _what could be_ never succumbs
to the limits of what is.”

CAN WE BE BOTH VISIONARY AND STRATEGIC?

Because the tension between pragmatism and idealism is such a
persistent issue for social movements, a variety of different
terminologies have been developed to discuss the dichotomy.
Sociologist Max Weber, for one, made a distinction
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the “ethic of ultimate ends” and the “ethic of
responsibility.” Someone operating with a focus on ultimate ends
acts according to ardent moral conviction; as Weber writes, this
person follows the religious slogan, “The Christian does rightly and
leaves the results with the Lord.” Meanwhile, political actors
motivated by the ethic of responsibility are more pragmatic; they are
concerned with the outcomes and with “the foreseeable results of
one’s action.” 

Pointing to other similar frameworks, movement theorist and trainer
Jonathan Matthew Smucker argues
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within movements, “We have to navigate and find a balance between
the _expressive_ and the _instrumental_ aspects of collective
action; between within-group _bonding_ and beyond-group _bridging_;
between the _life of the group _and_ what the group
accomplishes_ aside from its own existence.”

Such divides are perhaps most commonly discussed as a tension between
prefigurative and strategic politics. Popularized
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sociologist Wini Breines, this dichotomy makes a distinction between
groups oriented toward modeling a new society in the present
(prefigurative) and those more focused on influencing and moving
mainstream institutions (strategic). In principle, these two modes of
practice could be integrated with one another. For example, as it rose
to prominence with its sit-in actions in the early 1960s, the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, sought both to prefigure
the interracial “beloved community” imagined by the civil rights
movement and to push strategically for changes within businesses and
government. However, in her analysis of New Left groups, Breines
perceived a tension between the two approaches — one that has been
regularly borne out in recent decades. Often, the two tendencies lend
themselves to different theories of change: Those leaning
toward _prefigurative_ concerns tend to focus on building
alternative institutions or promoting personal transformation, while
those more focused on _strategic_ politics tend to gravitate toward
inside-game politics and structure-based organizing that seek to win
instrumental demands.

All of these frameworks attempt to provide language for discussing how
visionary aspirations and real-world conditions push against one
another in the pursuit of social change. One thing that makes the
“two worlds” idea distinctive is that it is firmly integrated into
the culture and training curriculum of networks such as the IAF. This
is not an abstract concept with a home in academic sociology. Rather,
it is something that community organizations talk about regularly and
include as a key point of orientation for new members. It is the way
they inoculate against ideological purists, on the one hand, and jaded
insiders, on the other — those who would have them work exclusively
within the channels of formal politics rather than deploying the power
of organized people from the outside. The lesson the organizers impart
is that we can afford neither to be ultra-righteous nor ultra-cynical.

There exist precedents for how other movements talk about this tension
in their day-to-day practice. Michael Harrington, a founder of the
Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, likened
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balance he thought radicals should strike to walking “a perilous
tightrope.” He believed that radical vision must be married to
“actual movements fighting not to transform the system, but to gain
some little increment of dignity or even just a piece of bread.” In
the early years of DSA and its predecessor organizations,
Harrington’s call to serve as the “left wing of the possible
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functioned as a slogan that oriented its members to the group’s
strategic outlook — in a manner similar to how the “two worlds”
framework has operated in many community organizing spaces. In both
cases, the rhetoric served as a way of making the tension a central
part of how organizations can describe their theory of change and
organizing vision.

An issue deeper than politics

What, then, is the proper balance between idealism and pragmatism?

Chambers and his colleagues do not give too much guidance for how to
balance the two worlds they describe, and this can be considered a
shortcoming of their dichotomy. At the same time, the “world as it
is” framework suggests that the strategic questions it raises are
not ones that can be answered in the abstract; they must always be
determined amid consideration of real-world conditions. Nor are they
questions that can be answered once and then regarded as definitively
resolved. Rather, they must be reckoned with again and again.

As much as this reckoning involves political considerations, it is
ultimately a spiritual and existential matter. Chambers insists,
“the tension I’m naming here isn’t a problem to be solved.
It’s the human condition.” For realistic radicals, “taking
responsibility for our destiny means deliberately embracing the
fearsome, creative tension that comes when we choose to live
resolutely in between the world as it is and the world as it should
be, refusing to be condemned either to materialism or false idealism
as a way of life.”

While various social movements may reach different conclusions about
how to act in accordance with their most deeply held values while also
operating within the flawed conditions of our present society, none
can avoid wrestling with the contradiction. The idea of “two
worlds” in tension — one a messy reality and one a precious ideal
of what could be — provides an accessible means of discussing this
critical dilemma, intuitively understandable even to those with no
prior experience in politics. For this reason alone, it is a concept
worth appreciating.

_[MARK ENGLER is a writer based in Philadelphia, an editorial board
member at Dissent, and co-author of "This Is An Uprising: How
Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-first Century" (Nation Books).
He can be reached via the website www.DemocracyUprising.com
[[link removed]]._

_PAUL ENGLER is the director of the Center for the Working Poor in Los
Angeles, and a co-founder of the Momentum Training
[[link removed]], and co-author, with Mark Engler,
of "This Is An Uprising [[link removed]]."]_

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