Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals

Saul Alinksy is considered the father of modern community organizing.  In the 1930s, he was a labor organizer for the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) and then turned to organizing poor people in slum areas, first in his native Chicago and then nationwide.

Saul Alinsky

His community organizations, like labor unions, existed for the purpose of putting pressure on established authorities in order to force concessions.  Alinsky sought confrontation rather than conciliation because he thought this taught poor people they were capable of exercising power.  In 1971, a year before his death at age 63, he wrote a book called Rules for Radicals in which he shared the lessons of his experience.

1.  Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.

2.  Never go outside the experience of your people.

3.  Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy.

4.  Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.

5.  Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.

6.  A good tactic is one your people enjoy.

7.  A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

8.  Keep the pressure on.

9.  The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

10.  The major premise for tactics is the deployment of operations that will maintain a constant pressure on the opposition.

11.  If you push a negative hard enough, it will break through into its counterside.

12.  The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

13.  Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it.

Alinksy was invited to Rochester, N.Y., in the 1960s to help the black FIGHT organization in his campaign to open Eastman Kodak Co. employment to African-Americans.   In Rules for Radicals he gave an example of how his mind worked:

I suggested we buy one hundred seats for one of Rochester’s symphony concerts.  We would select a concert in which the music was relatively quiet.  The hundred blacks who would be given the tickets would be treated to a three-hour pre-concert dinner in which they would be fed nothing but baked beans, and lots of them;  then the people would go to the symphony hall — with obvious consequences.  Imagine the scene when the action began!  The concert would be over before the first movement!

Alinksy didn’t actually do this.  He may have floated a rumor that he would.  See Rule 9.  What he actually did was to get proxies from Kodak stockholders, and ask embarrassing questions and make embarrassing proposals at stockholders meetings.

Barack Obama, like Saul Alinsky, was a community organizer in Chicago, but that’s about all that they have in common.  Obama is a kind of anti-Alinsky.  Through his whole career, he has sought small step-by-step gains by showing his understanding of others’ points of view, by being willing to meet his opponents halfway and by showing that his goals did not threaten their interests.  These are the qualities that got him elected Illinois state senator, U.S. Senator and President of the United States.

Notice how Alinksy’s rules refer to “the enemy.”  I can’t remember Obama calling anyone “the enemy” except al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Click on Saul Alinsky Wiki for Alinsky’s biography.

Tags: Community organizer, Saul Alinksy