Vic Socotra

13 August 2009

Rules for Radicals

(Cover of the 1971 Issue of Rules)

There is enough about Saul Alinsky to write a damn thesis about.

Hillary Clinton did at Wellesley was kind enough to lock it up while she and her husband lived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW. It was not as explosive as one would think, a little more polished, perhaps, than Michele Obama’s whiney treatise from Princeton, which was also locked up, but really, what sort of wisdom do we expect from college seniors?

Anyhow, Mrs. Clinton was not starry-eyed about Old Bolshie Saul, but she clearly was impressed by his commitment to The Cause.

The respect was reciprocated. Alinsky offered her a job in 1968, who said he was “searching for competent political literates" to move to Chicago to build grass-roots organizations.”

Saul Alinksy remains an icon of the left who translated the struggle of the oppressed working class in Chicago’s south side into the rage of the young Boomer bourgeoisie against the comfort of their parents. Saul was authentic. Born in 1909 to Jewish immigrants from Russia, he was a lifelong student of the dynamics of power.

Radicalized by the Great Depression, he helped organize the Back-of-the-Yards Neighborhood Council in Chicago. It was historically an Irish slum, but he was able to build an impressive coalition of previously segregated ethnic groups of Serbs, Croats, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles and Lithuanians all linked by their Catholic faith. He followed the BOTY Council with the Industrial Areas Foundation in 1939 to spread his reform tactics to other neighborhoods on the skids.

His approach depended on uniting ordinary citizens around immediate grievances in their neighborhoods and in protesting vigorously and outside of the ‘established’ ways of expressing dissent. He concentrated on recruiting and training indigenous ‘organizers’ to take a lead in the communities. His first book Reveille for Radicals outlines the principles and practice of community organizing and just one month after its publication in 1946 it made the New York Times best-seller list

In it, he concluded that the city's famed Democratic machine remained unmoved unless pushed. His books could be construed as a sort of Sun Tsu for Dummies, if you were uncharitable.

Here is an example, from his other great work, “Rules for Radicals:”

“Tactics means doing what you can with what you have. In the world of give and take, tactics is the art of how to take and how to give. Here our concern is with the tactic of taking; how the Have Nots can take power away from the Haves.”

   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 the one that your people enjoy.
   7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
   8. Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions…
   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.
  12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
  13. Pick the target. Freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Seventeen years after Hilary was offered a job with his organization, another young honor student was offered a job as an organizer in Chicago. Alinsky had died in 1972, but a group of his disciples were running the Developing Communities Project, a church-based consortium in Chicago's south side.

Unlike Hilary, Barack Obama, took the job, which the recruiter called "very romantic, until you do it." That is where the future President directed the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) Project VOTE.

We will get around to how this all works in the context of the health care initiative tomorrow. It is sort of interesting, and along the way, we will meet the others who read Mr.Alinsky’s wisdom, and why everything seems so noisy these days.

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