Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals

You know you're in for a ride when the author dedicates his book to the "first radical who at least won his own kingdom"--Lucifer.

I read this book as I kept hearing about it being the "bible" for liberals. Sitting on the other end of the political spectrum, I felt like it was important for me to understand why those currently (and recently) in power do the things they do. It was a "know thine enemy" kinda thing.

Quite frankly, Saul Alinsky was a pretty brilliant strategist. I find his divisiveness and outlook on life in general and on America specifically quite repugnant, but I can't disagree with much of his tactics and logic. It is terrifying, however, that Obama is a big believer in Alinsky's beliefs...something that can easily be show more seen in how he reacts to issues and runs his administration.

The beauty of America is that Alinsky is free to write books that encourage people to essentially take what isn't theirs and find justifications to take it.

I found the second half of the book more interesting than the first as it offers more case studies and examples and wasn't quite so abstract. I'd encourage anyone to read it, but most especially those who are conservative so they can better understand what drives people like our Community Organizer in Chief and his ilk. show less

I think that Saul Alinsky is disingenuous when he represents the views of communities that he was never a part of. I laugh picturing him lecturing Black Panthers about “working within the system.” If a system is fundamentally opposed to your values and aggressively tries to disenfranchise you, how could you truly work within it? How could you hope to work within a system that strips you of your rights? Obviously radicals should try to build mass support for change, but that change should be precluded by the very institutions Alinsky tries to protect.

Working outside the established system is the only thing that has ever brought about real change. The system itself has a too slow an inertia to accept change. Society is on course for show more environmental catastrophe, mass starvation, and the impending nightmare of climate change. Sometimes radical action is necessary in the short term to prevent devastation in the long term.

I find his ideas about what is needed for a critical mass have been debunked by history. Small groups of people have always been the catalysts for major change. show less

I won't go so far as to say that what you can't learn about organizing and about standing up to the powerful from this book isn't worth knowing, but Saul Alinsky has penned a book that contains nearly all of what you need to know.

How effective was Alinsky? Forty years after his death, the Right still foams at the mouth when they spit out his name, demonstrating the depths of their fear and hatred. When they're using your name as invective, that's proof positive that you've succeeded.

It is no exaggeration to claim that Saul Alinsky was an organizing genius. The numerous examples in his book as well as his continued influence 40 years after he died have shown he knew how to organize citizens to influence the powers-that-be. Saul Alinsky writes in 1971 to the radicals of the 1960s who have grown disillusioned with the ideas of success their parents have passed on to them. His hope is to provide rules or guidelines for those who want to change their world. He begins, “The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away (3).”

Alinsky starts his argument by calling his readers to fully recognize “how the world is” without show more seeing it as we want it to be. In this way he is intensely pragmatic in his suggestions. “We must begin with where we are and what we have,” he repeats. He also has a low view of humanity. “The way the world is,” according to Alinsky, is corrupt and broken. The only way for change to be made is to fight one power with another. Further, for Alinsky there are no altruistic acts. Everything is done for one’s self-interest. Part of what motivates his continual fight for justice and equality is the belief that no one is an island. He writes, “A major revolution to be won... is the dissipation of man’s illusion that his own welfare can be separate from that of all others. As long as man is shackled to this myth, so long will the human spirit languish (23).” Therefore, by helping and empowering others, Alinsky sees such causes as helping himself. These assumptions and others undergird his worldview and rules for changing the way things are.

The two chapters people most often reference from Rules for Radicals are “Of Means and Ends” and “Tactics.” No doubt that many would have trouble to embrace many of the tactics he proclaims, and especially the ethics determined by his rules on means and ends. The tactic I had most trouble with was his last: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” He argues that often issues are so big there is not one person or even one entity responsible; therefore, to make any sort of progress someone in power must be chosen, “frozen,” so that responsibility is not simply pushed onto someone else. The example he gave was targeting the Director of the School Board for the issue of segregation in public schools. He was no doubt not (fully) responsible for segregation – it had a lot to do with segregated neighborhoods. But by polarizing the issue and making it personal for the Director, they were able to see change. The end result of desegregation justified the means of falsely accusing him. But Alinsky also recognized the inconsistencies of this method by claiming an essential characteristic for an organizer is that they must be “a well-integrated political schizoid.... Before [people] will act an issue must be polarized (78).” Therefore the better organizer can polarize an issue “100 to nothing” but they know that nothing is really black and white.

My bigger trouble with Alinsky is what many others have claimed before – his ethics are questionable. “Consistency” for Alinsky “is not a virtue.” Consistency is to be standing still or not moving. He writes, “Men must change with the times or die (31-32).” Truth is relative; ethics are relative. Repeatedly he looks at the ethical inconsistencies in history, notably Abraham Lincoln, and sees justification for acting inconsistently today. His third rule for ethics sums it up: “In war the end justifies almost any means.” The power struggles of both the corporate and public sectors are seen as a type of war. People resort to almost anything to accomplish their goal, and it usually victory or defeat which determines its morality. I believe Alinsky offers profound insight on the way things are corruptly carried out, but I cannot follow their example. Repeated deceit will tarnish the soul. show less

Why didn't I learn about Alinsky back in school? I've been flirting with both the philosophical and practical significance of organizing and activism for sometime now. Alinksy makes the irrefutable argument as to its importance.

A disclaimer: our author is clear that activists start by oversimplifying and polarizing a situation, then moving into nuance and compromise at the negotiation stage. And that is what he does with this book. It's monolithic, iconic, archetypal. And, if taken with a grain of salt, invaluable. As Saul might whisper to you in private, it's also not a totally accurate appraisal of reality, or even organizing. But I'm totally fine with that.

The book gets rolling with raising priority number one: communication. How show more will you ever influence your community if you alienate them? The example he gives: you wouldn't come into a Jewish community eating a ham sandwich... And yet this is constantly what "radicals" do, and where they fail—begin by insulting those with whom they need to work with.

To core narrative of this book is about power—about how the "have nots" can take power from the "haves" and distribute it more equitably. It's also pragmatic to the point of being atheistic. Maybe that's partially why Alinsky could both be a significant influence for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and why Clinton and Obama could become totally unmoored from their essential values.

More on this thread of relativism—Alinsky argues that principles are worthless. Charles Eisenstein makes this point as well, but in a very different way. The common ground would be in what Carol Sanford refers to as "regeneration." Frameworks are useful when they help us custom-tailor solutions to the endless diversity of experience we encounter in life. Models and best practices hobble us when we use them "out of the box," without any attempt to regenerate them in each specific instance. I think there's a middle ground which bridges both values and flexibility.

Almost fifty years on, the book could not be better suited to our time. His analysis of the political dynamics at the time strongly mirror what we see today—when the left fails to integrate working-class whites, they join the jingoistic right. You want to resist Trump? Pick up a copy of this book.

I'm fascinated to learn who has picked up where Alinksy left off. Bill McKibben—obviously. I've heard the names of Jonathan Smucker and Jane McAlevey mentioned as well, although I haven't had the opportunity to explore their works thus far. show less

1CRules for Radicals 1D is a useful and revealing exposition of the art of community organizing by someone who was effective at it. The late Saul D. Alinsky (1909-1972) not only presents a set of maxims for the person trying to persuade people to become more politically active, but he illustrates his points with examples from his own career (while warning readers not to try to reenact the exact same tactics but to try to extract the principles behind them). A particularly well taken point is that it is crucial to understand the people one works with and what their experience has been. Alinsky was trying to impress this upon a couple of would-be community organizers over a meal at a diner. Seeing that they didn 19t understand what he was show more telling them, Alinsky demonstrated his point through an experiment: He predicted that if he gave the waiter an order that was not exactly what was on the menu, the waiter would inevitably get the order wrong. His prediction was correct because the restaurant 19s simple, fixed menu was a routine with which the waiter was familiar; forcing him outside of his usual experience complicated his already busy routine and made it more likely that he would not be able to communicate a special order to the kitchen. Now imagine an audience of people who do not need to buy what you are selling and imagine talking over their heads about things they are not familiar with, and you have lost them.

Alinsky advises his radical students to remain flexible and maintain a sense of humor. Flexibility allows the strategist or tactician to look at the bigger picture as well as the situation immediately confronting him and adjust his responses. Alinsky seems to imply that he is so skilled, he can turn his strategy on a dime, but I would take that with a grain of salt; changing tactics is easier than changing strategy, which is more a back-to-the-drawing-board proposition.

Keeping a sense of humor is always valuable both to one 19s own health and to keeping one 19s opponent off balance and audience amused. Alinsky notes the importance, too, of making the campaign interesting to the actors, the people actually carrying out the campaign, those whom one is organizing and trying to keep organized. Doing the same protest over and over or for an extended period of time will result in people dropping out and going back to their work-a-day lives. The classic example of keeping the participants interested was the 1Cfart-in 1D that Alinsky staged 14or threatened to stage; it isn 19t always easy to tell the difference since he writes as vividly about his plans as he does about the realization of them 14in Rochester New York in the 1960s. Eastman Kodak was seen as not hiring enough African-Americans so someone brought in Alinsky. By this point in his career, Alinsky had such a reputation that his very approach was enough to send shock waves through the political and economic hierarchy of the city. Alinsky recognized that this made his opponents vulnerable. They were attacking him before he had done anything; they were hysterical and off-balance. By having African-Americans go to the city 19s vaunted symphony and have a fart-in to clear the concert hall of the comfortable and respectable, Alinsky alleges that he rocked the city and amused both the participants and the larger audience.

Like all good agitators/community organizers, Alinsky seems to have had a sense that there are three components to the guerilla theater that he arranged: the participants, the opponents, and the audience. Not that he was always clear that the audience is not necessarily the same as the opponents, but he seems to have at least intuited that sometimes, particularly when he discusses the middle class and his goal of at least persuading them to have enough sympathy for his goals not to oppose radical change.

One thing that floored me was that for someone who intuitively gets one of Mohandas K. Gandhi 19s more subtle principles (The organizer is in control, not the opponents; they must be made to respond to the agenda set by the organizer.), Alinsky has an utterly oversimplified view 14not to say an erroneous one 14of what Gandhi did. First, he calls Gandhi 19s method 1Cpassive resistance. 1D As Gandhi said, he was never in favor of 1Cpassive 1D anything. Second, Alinsky focuses only on the general acquiescence of Hindus in India after more than a century of increasing British domination of their country. Alinsky flippantly says that Gandhi merely noted that the Indians tended to sit, so he said, 1Cinstead of sitting there, why don 19t you sit over here and while you 19re sitting, say 18Independence Now! 19 1D (p. 42) and thereby obstructed the British. In historical fact, Gandhi had to damp down a lot of violent tendencies in his followers. (Indeed, he was ultimately assassinated by a fellow Hindu!)

Moreover, it is one thing to merely sit in the way of British rule, but quite another for row after row of men to walk deliberately into club-bearing guards, each row of these men allowing themselves to be beaten half to death without resistance. On page 41, Alinsky expresses the unexamined opinion that Gandhi 19s method 1Cwould never have had a chance against a totalitarian state such as the Nazis, 1D but no one should make the mistake of thinking that Gandhi 19s approach was not dynamic enough to be adaptable to different and arguably more difficult circumstances. 1CNon-violent non-cooperation 1D 14as Gandhi 19s approach is properly called 14can be applied flexibly, something that the self-styled master of flexibility, Alinsky, ought to but here seems not to understand. (It also infuriates me when my fellow conservatives 14and this is but one reason I hesitate to call them fellows 14discount Gandhi 19s achievement by saying that it was the gentleness of the British that made Gandhi 19s success possible; you couldn 19t have sold that to the survivors of the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, where a British general had his men fire on an unarmed meeting of Indians and murdered over 350 and wounded some 1,500.) You might also notice that unlike Alinsky, Gandhi did not worry about making his protests 1Cfun 1D for his followers; there was nothing fun about getting beat up or murdered. Gandhi 19s followers knew that there were real life-and-death issues at stake.

What I perceive as a lack of respect for Gandhi (hmm, Alinsky 19s rivalry with a true master?) leads me also to comment on a possibly troubling lack of respect for the communities Alinsky nominally served. As in the great fart-in, Alinsky seems to have little concern for the human dignity of the cogs in his escapades. It isn 19t just the indignity of using bodily functions as a form of protest (Alinsky almost did this again at an airport by planning to stage a run on airport restrooms, but his opponents caved at the mere threat; Alinsky seems disappointed not to have actually had the chance to execute it.), but Alinsky seems to distrust the persistence of the community, assuming they will drop out if not amused or otherwise stimulated, even going to the length of feeding the Rochester Symphony protesters baked beans to ensure that they would expel gas virtually on cue. In this, Alinsky inadvertently raises several questions, not least of which is, why did those who supposedly (but not necessarily?) called him to Rochester need him to goose their motivation to get them to engage in a protest for concessions they supposedly felt they needed from the city 19s largest employer?

Consider these quotations from 1CRules for Radicals 1D:

1CPeople cannot be free unless they are willing to sacrifice some of their interests to guarantee the freedom of others. The price of democracy is the ongoing pursuit of the common good by ALL of the people. 1D Saul D. Alinsky, 1CRules for Radicals, 1D p. xxv (emphasis in original though in italics rather than all capitals).

1CI will argue that the failure to use power for a more equitable distribution of the means of life for all people signals the end of the revolution and the start of the counterrevolution. 1D Ibid., p. 10.

Most unsettling about the book is Alinsky 19s crypto-ideology. Alinsky is one of those who would claim not to have an ideology, but those are always the people who not only have one but have a bad one because they have never examined their premises. Alinsky offers a simple analysis by dividing the world into Haves and Have-Nots, with the addition of the middle class, whom Alinsky calls the 1CHave-a-Little, Want Mores. 1D At root, Alinsky 19s assumption is that the only way that the Have-Nots and Have-a-Little, Want Mores (so awkward a term that Alinsky himself stops using it after the first chapter) can get more is by employing his services to help protest until the Haves give away their power to the less fortunate; in other words, Alinsky assumes that society is a static, zero-sum game where individual effort does not play a role in the poor and middle class rising above the economic circumstances life has dealt them at the outset, and getting 1CMore 1D of what they 1CWant 1D always means agitating for it, not earning it. This is a Marxist assumption. (It is a socialist assumption, but Marx long ago virtually wiped all other socialist theorists off the map, so that it is his view that informs most central planners whether Marxist or progressive.)

Alinsky, in his final chapter on how to drum up support for radical change among the middle class, seems to assume that he and others like him can set the agenda for middle-class demands for concessions from government to, for example, fund political campaigns so that middle-class candidates can run for office on the taxpayers 19 dime. (This policy, as eventually enacted, tends to fund wealthy incumbent politicians at taxpayer expense; yet another leftist dream with unintended opposite consequences.) Nowhere does Alinsky show an understanding that what makes people middle-class 14indeed, what makes many people whose income does not suggest middle class label themselves middle class anyway 14is the belief that they can do better if the government gets out of their way than they can if they scream until the government gives them something for nothing. A recurring refrain in this book is Alinsky 19s wonder at why the world as it is does not make sense to him. Even when he swerves into a partial answer, he doesn 19t get it. In a footnote on page 170, Alinsky notes that one of the concessions made by the Xerox Corporation was to launch a collaboration with an Alinsky-founded protest group to build a factory owned and managed by African-Americans. This idea could work if the factory went on to produce instead of expecting that Xerox would subsidize the factory whether it produced or not. One way of helping those who have been left out of the capitalist system might be to help them to become effective practitioners of capitalism, but such a possibility never occurred to Alinsky except when he swerved into it by accident. Although turning accidents into advantages was a talent that Alinsky cultivated his whole career, in this case he did not recognize it as a goal in itself. This was because his (crypto)-ideology prohibited it.

Two things vie for most surprising insights that I had while reading this book: After his lack of understanding of Gandhi, a second was how useful and thoughtful Alinsky 19s approach to tactics and short-term strategy are, although the best of this kind of thinking could be gleaned from a careful reading of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Alinsky 19s attitude toward the middle class is not naked on every page, but he despises the values of the middle class and allows that lumpen middle-class radicals are right in their rejection of middle-class values, which are unrecognizable as Alinsky enumerates them: 1Cmaterialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized and corrupt. 1D More than half of these modifiers refer to qualities and ideologies that the middle class has opposed 14has had to oppose and could not help but oppose 14since its inception! These are rather the values of an empire based on cronyism and patronage, not the free republic envisioned by the Enlightenment that grew out of the middle-class and capitalist revolutions of the early modern era. As Hayek points out in 1CThe Road to Serfdom, 1D it is precisely out of liberal capitalism that the humane values of charity and tolerance came. (Even as a lapsed Christian, I must admit that Hayek is incomplete in not crediting the Judeo-Christian tradition with the inculcation of these values, but he is right that liberal capitalism shaped them into their modern, ecumenical and even humanistic forms and, ironically, gave them as an intellectual heritage to the founders of the various socialisms that oppose the very well-springs of their professed concern with social welfare.)

Much of what Alinsky has to say is valuable to anyone trying to effect social or political change, no matter what their politics. I am afraid I cannot remember who it was, but someone involved in training leaders of the TEA Party has said that he gave them Alinsky 19s book and emphasized to them the benefit of reading it. The book is difficult to read if you disagree with something on just about every page, but understanding this system for motivating people in politics is useful even if it should not be regarded as the final word on the subject. Reading this book will also help anyone who wants to understand our current president, Barack Obama. He was taught to be a community organizer with this book as the text, and he taught a course in community organizing using this book as his text. (Every time the president or one of his surrogates talks about how he has fought for the middle class, I think of how this book shows both a misunderstanding of and contempt for the middle class and reinforces and breeds that misunderstanding and contempt in everyone who has taken Alinsky 19s work to heart.) show less

So this is the infamous Rules for Radicals. Believed by some on the far right as the Gospel according to St. Stalin of the Church of Satanic-Marxism-Leninism.

To be fair, it does hold interesting discussions of community organization, communication, across class and racial bounds to demand reform. Something which will upset conservatives, naturally, as they prefer for things to stay the same, or changed more slowly. There is much valuable to be learned here, for both left and right.

The big gripe is his discussion of ends and means, and his ultra-pragmatic view of them, and avocation of any tactic necessary. If one is in a position of lesser monetary power or political connections, you may well fight like this. It is perhaps the only way show more to win.

Of course, any good little boy or girl who has read their Robert Caro (or god forbid, entered the system) knows that power and power struggles are everything in politics. Everybody uses these ugly tactics, from socialists to reactionaries. The moral element in politics is either a covering, a fools errand, or a reserved for visionaries and prophets, whether deranged or true. But even Christ said, "I come not to bring peace, but a sword". I accept it, but I do not pretend to love it.

And what happens to the radical or the organizer once they gain power? Shall the revolutionary become the tyrant? Of course, power struggles are always an ugly thing. If I ever decide to go into politics for good, I will refer to this book almost biblically, and then delete this review. show less