Rules for Radicals

A short primer on Saul Alinsky; America's most effective radical.


Saul Alinsky is generally considered the father of community organizing, and one of Americas most effective radicals. His last book, Rules for Radicals, is one of the best primers in power tactics and effective methods of change. It was written in 1971. He died in 1972.

Alinsky is reviled by Catholics, feared by corporations, and compared to Osama Bin Laden.

As a criminologist in Chicago in the 1930’s, he quickly concluded that a massive portion of crime had a direct correlation to poverty. He realized that to combat crime, one must first take on poverty. In his new aspiration, he discovered that a lack of organizational prowess and power left the common person unable to defend their own rights. He devoted himself to making people self sufficient in these respects. He believed in democracy. His book “Rules for Radicals: A pragmatic primer for realistic radicals” was the culmination of his theories.

This work seems largely ignored, and underrated by activists, but corporations alone take his theories very seriously. Here is an excerpt, from a book published by the The Lukaszewski Group. The L.G. specializes in Management Communications Consultancy, which comprehensively provides Activist Counteraction tactics. One of the L.G.‘s well known clients was Enron, when they had a Communications Crisis in 2002. James Lukaszewski, the founder, lectured in Milan, in 2003, for seminars sponsored by AssoComunicazione ; a group representing more than 189 national and international advertising and public relations companies.

If this communications expert takes Alinsky to heart, why haven’t more progressive social movements made use his methodologies, or expanded them?

New World, New Rules

Alinsky states unequivocally, in his book, that protests are a known tactic and a piece of history. New tactics must be adopted.

He lists thirteen rules for power tactics in the book, and reiterates that the list is by no means exhaustive or concrete. His rules are:

1. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
2. Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat.
3. Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.
4. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.
5. Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.
6. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.
7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. Man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time, after which it becomes a ritualistic commitment.
8. Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
10. The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
11. If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative.
12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. you cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand and saying “You’re right—we don’t know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us.”
13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Legacy

The organization he started, the Industrial Areas Foundation, still exists today and is continuing to build its core. They even offer paid tryouts to become permanent staff.

Alinsky’s foundation, the IAF, and its affiliate organizations designed and passed the nation’s first living wage bill in Baltimore in 1994 and in New York in 1996. The IAF East affiliates launched a lawsuit against the Honeywell Corporation, which resulted in a ruling for Honeywell to spend up to $400 million removing toxic chromium from New Jersey City sites.

“The IAF is non-ideological and strictly non-partisan, but proudly, publicly, and persistently political.”

In his primer, he does not discuss issues but rather how to organize and effect change. For a book written in the seventies, it is surprising to find that most of the content is still relevant today. Anyone interested in being part of the process of change should certainly take a few notes from this book, regardless of your cause.

As Alinsky said:
Once you accept your own death all of a sudden you are free to live. You no longer care about your reputation…you no longer care except so far as your life can be used tactically — to promote a cause you believe in.