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Saul Alinksy. A household name for some, but not quite so much anymore.

Active from the Great Depression up through the sixties, Alinsky was a formidable force in political organizing, as he calls it. Devoted to progressive reform and with no hand-wringing around underhanded tactics, he proved quite astute in negotiation and keeping the pressure on against the powers that be.

In all this, shortly before his death, he left a little handbook behind Rules for Radicals (1971).

We will not devote time to his biography, of which many anecdotes can be found in this book, but say a few words on his legacy.

Aside from the individual labor reforms and agreements he extracted from his opposition, aside from the communities and movements he knitted together, Alinsky has left behind a philosophy of sorts that far outshines the ideas other activists such as Eugene Debs or John Lewis have left to today's world.

Working primarily in Chicago, one could argue that Alinsky single handedly forged the metropolis into America's foremost crucible in left-wing or liberal policy.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both have their indirect ties to Alinsky.

Clinton having written her dissertation on him (though not an entirely positive one) and Obama using Alinsky as his waystar in Chicago activism in the eighties.

It has been a conservative talking point to contend that Clinton and Obama were acolytes of Alinsky and therefore dangerous for letting loose the dragon of left-wing radicalism across the nation. This emerged across election cycles.

But the reader should be evaluated to compare what Alinsky teaches in Rules for Radicals versus the actions of these political figures and evaluate for themselves the extent to which they were true disciples of Saul Alinsky.

A few journalists have even suggested that Donald Trump himself is the truest incarnation of an Alinsky president the United States has seen in recent years. Again let the reader judge for themselves on this front.

Here are some summary notes from my reading of Rules for Radicals. I will perhaps offer just one or two thoughts following that.

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Rules for Radicals

The young today have grown up in a world where, if they do not suffocate in the nihilism of middle class consumerism, they will grow cynical and disillusioned by the corruption of activism.

The older and younger generation cannot even speak the same language on this issue, and the young are left without purpose or meaning.

Some of the disillusioned youth turn to radicalism, to revolution, in the hopes of changing our society.

But what so many of these individuals miss is that while there may be no rules for revolution, there are rules for radicals who want to make change in the world, rather than simply talking about it.

A real radical is the one who gets things done.

By contrast, a rhetorical radical is the one who:

• Uses pejorative language and soapbox speeches to signal to others how deeply they feel about the cause.
• Believes that shock value wins sympathy from the broader population.
• Relies upon moralistic preaching, angry words, or sulky language rather than humor to try to win their audience.
• Withdraws from the community to do "their own thing" in isolation or in a niche group whether writing books or music, thinking this will advance the cause.
• Fails to recognize that bombings and high-profile assassinations will only mobilize public sympathies against your cause, pushing them to the other side.

These rhetorical radicals are all the same in that all their words or chest-thumping around revolution or change have a net-zero or net-negative effect on making such change happen.

One must start inside the world, from where it is, to lead it to where you want to be. You must work inside the system.

Young people who are too impatient or arrogant to work inside the system do not understand how purposeful action happens.

Those who cling most strongly to these pseudo-principles will remain political lunatics and outcasts their entire careers.

All revolution must begin from the comfort of popular experience. The masses must be led passively from what they are used to, to this new thing.

The Purpose

One cannot lose sight of the end goal either. This book is concerned witht eh rpoduction of mass organization to seize power and give it to the people for the sake of equality, justice, peace, and full opportunities. Dignity for the common man.

All this rests in the principle of change. That all is changing and operates in free flux.

Dogma is the suppressor of change and emerges at every step to arrest progress or revolution. We have cast the American Revolution in sacred garb, but we have completely forgotten what it even means to instigate and fight a revolution in the way the Founding Father had.

One cannot limit oneself to ideology as that only stunts and constricts your freedom of movement.

Ideology fails to keep pace with the change of the world, and the fact that the you must change your politics as the world changes. It is painful to accept this necessary truth, but you must shatter your illusions year by year, to ensure you do not fall behind.

Anything you envision as "the good" you desire is dependent not on objective reality but whether you want it or not. Life is merely struggle, and we must move past this illusion of good versus evil. Everything is interconnected and counter balances one another.

What could be a force for "good" in one generation may very well be a force for "evil" in the next. Do not get caught up in the name and heritage of organizations or entities as it is fairly easily for them to become the opposite of what they once were.

All society can be divided into three classes:

1. The Haves: Those who hold the cards and most dearly want to preserve the status quo
2. The Have Nots: Those most oppressed and most likely to want change but least able to effect it without mass, brute force.
3. The Have a Little, Want Mores: Those who are relatively well-rewarded by the current state of affairs but hunger for what the Haves possess. Also more open to societal change to topple the hiearchy.

It is from this third class that all mass, social change has come throughout history. That is one reason why we can always have optimism for change.

Of Means and Ends

Many people tend to question the legitimacy of means from a moral standpoint, however, morality is merely a luxury. Anyone who can honestly evaluate their own decision making in their life can attest to this.

It is not that we a priori decide the most moral means to pursue, but rather that we act and then justify our actions to ourselves or others.

Those who spend their time disputing means and ends will never wind up with their ends as they have eliminated all their available means.

Here are a series of rules to realistically consider means and ends:

1. The more one is personally interested in an issue, the less they are concerned with justifying means toward ends.
2. The legal judgment of means depends upon the views of those who hold political power.
3. In war, the ends almost always justify the means.
4. Judgment on means can only be made in the context of the time in which the decision was made. No other vantage point in time can provide the immediacy with which to understand the decision.
5. The more means one has, the more one is concerned with ethics
6. The less important an end is, the more leniency there is to evaluate means.
7. The success or failure of an action often determins how ethical it was.
8. Morality of a means depends upon how close to defeat or victory one is in the moment.
9. Any effective means will automatically be labeled as unethical by your opposition.
10. Do what you can with what you have and rationalize it morally to the extent you can.
11. All political goals must be phrased in general (i.e. generic) terms that are easy to understand and easy to apply to various circumstances.

A Word about Words

Many are deluded or led astray by the misuse of words. Here are some general key terms to consider:

• Power: A succinct, efficacious term that cuts straight to the point. All life is built on power.
• Self-interest: The principle of all human activity, the true impulse that finds itself rationalized under infinitely various moral terms.
• Compromise: The key of operation. When you want 30%, demand 100%, then compromise for 30%.
• Ego: The ego of the organizer is stronger than that of the leader. The leader wants power for themselves, the organizer wants to create power outside themselves.
• Conflict: The essence of a free, open society.

The Education of an Organizer

Organizers can come from literally any background, but not everyone can be an organizer.

Organizers must have a deep sense of power, conflict, and communication from personal experience. They must be prepared to sacrifice other things for the cause.

They must be prepared to connect with the community they hope to organize, donning any form of costume or rhetoric that can help them fit in. (This is why labor union organizers are poor political organizers. They can only think interms of strikes, wages, and benefits.)

An organizer cannot simply memorize rules or statements or quotes or even this book and hope to have all the answer.

No situation repeats itself in exactly the same way, only principles can guide the decision making of the organizer.

An organizer should never try to communicate to an audience outside the range of that audience's experience. Nor should they try to patronize or condescend to that audience.

Honesty and humor are the key to winning people's hearts.

Just as curiosity and irreverence as the ingredients of organizing, of a willingness to see outside the box and a playfulness to demolish the current system. It is a task of imagination, to create new out of the old.

Lastly, the organizer must be organized. Disorganized and undisciplined personalities have no place in political organizing and do more to hamstring progress in seats of leadership than if there were no mass gathering at all.

Communication

An organizer can lack many qualities and be successful, but they can never lack the skill of communication.

Communication again must always start from the experience of the community and never outside of it. They must always mediate the feelings and thoughts of the others around them, even if this means acceding to a plan they may not necessarily agree with.

One never tries to impose their thoughts or ideology upon the community around them, in political organizing. If a controversial issue divides you and a group, never voice your true opinion on that issue. It will be merely counter-productive.

It is the art of identifying the problems that most people do not know they even have and creating actionable issues out of those problems to wake people up, and drive them toward a solution.

In the Beginning

Any organizer needs to establish credibility with the community, particularly if they are an outsider who has just entered the scene.

Credentials and degrees do little here. The people must be convinced of your ability.

You must demonstrate that you have skin in the game. No true political organizer has stayed out of jail their entire life.

They must put themselves in cahoots with the community, whether this means forcing themsleves into the same constraints and problems the community suffers, demonstrating the opposition loathes you, or through general notoreity.

Then you must work to convince the community of the problems they face through the articulation of key issues. The organizer will have to overcome decades or centuries of rationalizations as to why change is not possible, in the minds of these people.

It is through the coalescing of the community around these issues that you can build power to effect change.

To build an organization not based only one issue but in a nicely chained series of issues that can continue to feed the lifeblood and fire of its members even after a primary issue has been resolved. There must be a sense of immediacy and urgency in what is to be solved, at a very specific level, at least to keep people motivated.

And in all this you must respect the people you work with, no matter what background they may have. And you cannot fake this respect. They will sense when they are being patronized, and this will only discredit and alienate you.

Tactics

Tactics is doing what you can with what you have. Some rules of tactics:

1. Power is what the enemy thinks you have.
2. Never go outside the experience of your people.
3. Go outside the experience of your enemy wherever possible.
4. Compel the enemy to live by their own moral rulebook.
5. Ridicule is the most powerful weapon.
6. A good tactic is one your people enjoy.
7. A tactic cannot drag on too long without losing enthusiasm.
8. Keep the pressure on.
9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
10. Tactics depend upon operations that maintain a constant pressure on the enemy.
11. If you push a negative hard and long enough, it will break through.
12. The price of a successful attack is providing your own proposed alternative.
13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Outside this, a few other things to keep in mind.

You can force the hand of the rich and powerful by their deep desire and need to maintain their power or the status quo. This makes them easy to manoeuvre.

Those without power should never go up directly against those with power. They must yield and capitulate in such a way as to exhaust or humiliate those with power. The tactics for this are dependent upon if one lives in a free society or a totalitarian one.

Jail time is not just important for establishing your legitimacy as an organizer but also to block out all distraction and force you to sit, think, plan, and write what is next.

Timing is the difference btween success and failure. The nature of human motivation must always be accounted for in the deployment of tactics.

Lastly, the organizer must always provide their people with a "why" behind everything, to keep them coming back.

The Genesis of Tactic Proxy

Mobilizing the middle class often depends on using both their numbers and incremental capital to force the hand of big corporations. Targeted boycotts are one tactic, but one cannot discount the power of having each organized household buy some shares in a company and so through mass organization take over a company and dictate its policy.

The Way Ahead

Coming into the seventies, power resides with the white middle class. It is they who must be organized and mobilized for change.

It is pig-headed and foolish for radicals and rebels to reject and denounce the middle class as they are turning down the fuel that they need to enact revolution. So long as young radicals have these emotional hang-ups and their own personal resentments against the middle class, they will never be able to realize their true potential to effect social and political change.

"To reject them is to lose them by default. They will not shrivel and disappear. You can't switch channels and get rid of them. This is what you have been doing in your radicalized dream world but they are here and will be." (189)

It is only once you win a people over that you can gradually begin to "reform" them and remold their views and desires. You can never do this before you have them on your side.

This is the only way to combat the nihilistic trajectory of our society and to fight for the dignity of the common man in a true sense. Do not consign yourselves to rhetoric and philosophizing in the corner, if you truly do mean what you say about change.

Believe it or not, there is optimism for radical change and this is to be found in the middle class, and the corporate sector, of all places. For their own survival or aggrandizement, they will hand you the keys to your mission, if you play your cards right.

This is how we can achieve the American dream that has so long been lost to us in this industrial America.

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A Thought or Two

I will not comment upon the content of what Alinsky has said, but a tangential consideration that taps into one of the key distinction he makes in the book.

In my limited time in this life, across both personal and professional spheres, I have noticed there is commonly a negative correlation between intelligence and effectiveness.

Verbal intelligence whether in speech or writing enables the brightest individuals to rationalize themselves out of many forms of actions or responsibilty. Intelligence thus becomes an instrument of laziness. Compile excuses or speeches that will intimidate, bore, or impress those around you out of asking further questions.

Or it feeds the specter of perfectionism and fear. One can see so many adverse possibilities that they fail to start out on the path at all. Timidty instead of temerity. Or in starting down the path, they are bogged down by all their various anxieties and never quite get far.

Or they have grown so accustomed to thinking in terms of a niche theoretical dialect that they have lost their ability to vocalize their ideas in a way the normal person would understand. Conversely, perhaps they simply fail to even translate such theoretical frameworks to concrete particular experience and action. This is often identifiable in those who self-describe as the ones who "ask questions rather than provide answers" or who think their pet philosophy project will somehow be transmutated to social change through indescribable means.

Or worse yet. They know how to translate their ideas into common parlance but because of how much they identify themselves as smart, intelligent, or better-than-thou, they become unlikeable scolds who can range from passive-aggressive condescenension to outright hostility. Some of these would sooner alienate the entire world than give up the right to be right on one niche issue.

Or it could be that aside from or in conjunction with the above, this lauded person of intelligence believes they will always have time to get around to it once they complete some other pre-requisite step. Thus they may accumulate a lifetime of busy work before they get to the actual work, even if it is all supposedly completed in the name of the mission.

The ways in which intelligence undermines efficacy are many.

Those who get things done can be intelligent, but this is often tempered by discipline, humility, or other character traits that can keep the "smarts" in check, so to speak, and wield those abilities and mobilize them for the sake of the mission.

This can be said of political action just as much as of any organization or work.

What is undeniable in this book and its various anecdotes is that Saul Alinsky is incredibly sharp. Sharp enough to see through all the bloated buttresses that an intellectual mind may erect to justify inaction. Clever enough to outwit his opposition. And to inspire those to action who may never have stepped out the door in the first place without that proper motivation.

A master at the art of organization.