I read Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (published 1971) in the 1990s and wanted to remind myself of what my thought was then of what Alinsky wrote long before his name became a conservative slur.
Alinsky was a successful organizer and a seasoned tactician. Alinsky, however, was not a strategist. The difference between strategy and tactics is often confused: Tactics are the means used to gain an objective and strategy is the general campaign plan or goal.
Here are some of the tactically radical rules of Saul Alinsky that I noted then and now note again:
Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
Never go outside the experience of your people.
Whenever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy.
Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
Keep the pressure on.
The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.
The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
Pick a target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
The real action is in the enemy’s reaction.
The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction is your major strength.
Tactics, like organization, like life, require that you move with the action.
For a different take on community organizing, my notes on Grace Lee Bogg’s The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century are at http://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-next-american-revolution.html
Mark L. Bail says
a conservative slur and his tactics became the conservative playbook.
merrimackguy says
Not in their organizing sense, but typically these work in campaigns as well. All of the below have failed.
petr says
… why is that, do you think?
(hint: for ridicule to work — to pick just one example — the recipient must have at least a passing understanding of shame… )
merrimackguy says
The paparazzi culture has left little to the imagination when it comes to celebrities. Presidential candidates move into that sphere.
The reality TV culture means than anything is okay to be exposed to the public. I’ll give you one example. You probably have not seen Bachelor/Bachelorette, but near the end, the contestant has three overnights with three aspiring mates. Many years ago we at least pretended people didn’t have sex before marriage. Now the contestant has sex with three people in three days, which is still considered trampy for either gender. And now that person is considered a star.
In fact, there’s zero shame in having kids out of wedlock. Everyone does it now.
Intelligence and knowledge is valued her on BMG, but many of the public don’t care. I overheard on conversion at Starbucks where the young woman didn’t understand 6 of one/half dozen of the other. Why? She didn’t know what a dozen was. We are surrounded by ignorance.
The overexposure of so many means that we assume everyone has flaws. Cruz a jerk? Seems like JFK was a total d-bag as well.
So it’s less the recipient than the societal concept of things like shame. What should one be ashamed of? The list is dwindling. Stealing from charities or creating fake charities. Abusing children. There’s more, but you can get away with a lot these days and not feel bad about it.
Those are just a few ideas. Clearly everyone (campaigns/media/political junkies) are surprised by 2016.
gmoke says
Seems like at least some of these are working for the Great and Glorious Donald: ridicule, getting your “enemy” (don’t think that particular term is useful in this context) to react, and target freezing, personalizing, polarizing all seem to be His stock in trade.
Maybe we can tar TrumpTrumpTrumpTrump with the Alinsky brush!
JimC says
That list is stunning.
Trickle up says
as Gmoke points out, this is tactics, not strategy.
R for R still qualifies as one of the top 5 written influences on my life.
It seems to me however that Grace Lee Boggs is more than pure tactics, including a good but of strategy and political philosophy as well.
gmoke says
My notes from Boggs’ last book are at
http://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-next-american-revolution.html
Yes, I think Boggs was more strategic than Alinsky. She also had a political philosophy (and she was a practiced philosopher) that reduced the differences between means and ends. For her, the means were, in many ways, the ends or a way to experience the projected end-states in the present. Politics was a social practice, a daily activity.
Her approach seems to me to be close to what is called Gandhian economics, an economic system based upon non-exploitation and non-violence. Rather than a village-based Constructive Programme that Gandhi devised, she built an urban neighborhood analogue which can be replicated and has been replicated around the USA. Here in Boston, MA, we can see that Mel King was doing much what Grace Lee Boggs did in much the same way, even, in some cases, before she did it herself.
Mark L. Bail says
tactic was the threat to have a “Fart In.” The protesters threatened to eat a lot of beans and buy tickets to the symphony and stink it up.
(I’m still an 8th grader at heart).
Christopher says
n/t