Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals
“What sense does it make for men to walk on the moon while other men are waiting on welfare lines, or in Vietnam killing and dying for a corrupt dictatorship in the name of freedom?” Page xv.
Communicate within the experiences of your audience
there are no rules for revolution any more than there are rules for love or rules for happiness, but there are rules for radicals who want to change their world; there are certain central concepts of action in human politics that operate regardless of the scene or the time. To know these is basic to a pragmatic attack on the system. These rules make the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one who uses the tired old words and slogans, calls the police “pig” or “white fascist racist” or “motherfucker” and has so stereotyped himself that others react by saying, “Oh, he’s one of those,” and then promptly turn off.
This failure of many of our younger activists to understand the art of communication has been disastrous. Even the most elementary grasp of the fundamental idea that one communicates within the experinces of his audience—and gives full respect to the other’s values—would have ruled out attacks on the American flag. The responsible organizer would have known that it is the establishment that has betrayed the flag while the flag, itself, remains the glorious symbol of America’s hopes and aspirations, and he would have conveyed this message to his audience. On another level of communication, humor is essential, for through humor much is accepted that would have been rejected if presented seriously.
Page xviii.
As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be—it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system.
It’s also necessary to exhaust what works in the system to bring the level of frustration up in the majority of people to the point that they’re willing to let it go.
Page xix.
If we fail to communicate with them [the “blue collar” (lower middle class, working poor), 40% of families with incomes $5,000 to $10,000], if we don’t encourage them to form alliances with us, they will move to the right. Maybe they will anyway, but let’s not let it happen by default.
Page xx.
What is the alternative to working “inside” the system? A mess of rhetorical garbage about “Burn the system down!” Yippie yells of “Do it!” or “Do your thing.” What else? Bombs? Sniping? Silence when police are killed and screams of “murdering fascist pigs” when others are killed? Attacking and baiting the police? Public suicide? “Power comes out of the barrel of a gun!” is an absurd rallying cry when the other side has all the guns. Lenin was a pragmatist; when he returned to what was then Petrograd from exile, he said that the Bolsheviks stood for getting power through the ballot but would reconsider after they got the guns! Militant mouthings? Spouting quotes from Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara, which are as germane to our highly technological, computerized, cybernetic, nuclear-powered, mass media society as a stagecoach on a jet runway at Kennedy airport?
Let us in the name of radical pragmatism not forget that in our system with all its repressions we can still speak out and denounce the administration, attack its policies, work to build an opposition political base. Ture, there is government harassment, but there still is that relative freedom to fight. I can attack my government, try to organize to change it. That’s more than I can do in Moscow, Peking, or Havana.
Pages xx to xxi.
Violence or the endorsement of violence pushes people who were dissatisfied with the status quo to support it and accept repression.
Pages xxii to xxiii.
It is not enough to elect your candidates. You must keep the pressure on. Radicals should keep in mind Franklin D. Roosevelt’s response to a reform delegation, “Okay, you’ve convinced me. Now go on out and bring pressure on me!” Action comes from keeping the heat on.
Page xxiii.
The democratic ideal springs from the ideas of liberty, equality, majority rule through free elections, protection of the rights of minorities, and freedom to subscribe to multiple loyalties in matters of religion, economics, and politics rather than to a total loyalty to the state. The spirit of democracy is the idea of importance and worth of the individual, and faith in the kind of world where the individual can achieve as much of his potential as possible.
Page xxiv.
The Purpose
“All societies discourage and penalize ideas and writings that threaten the status quo.” Writings on social change and in support of revolution are few and far between; literature justifying the status quo is a veritable flood. (Page 7). Have-nots can find writings on revolution only from the communists. (Page 8).
The Ideology of Change
“The prerequisite for an ideology is possession of a basic truth.”
An organizer workin in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma. To begin with, he does not have a fixed truth—truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing. He is a political relativist. He accepts the late Justice Learned Hand’s statement that “the mark of a free man is that ever-gnawing inner uncertainty as to whether or not he is right.” The consequesce is that he is ver on the hund for the causes of man’s plight and the general propositions that help to make some sense out of man’s irrational world. He must constantly examine life, including his own, to get some idea of what it is all about, and he must challenge and test his own findings. Irreverence, essential to questioning, is a requisite. Curiosity becomes compolsive. His most frequent word is “why?”
[...] the free-society organizer is loose, resilient, fluid, and on the move in a society which is itself in a state of constant change. To the extent that he is free from the shackles of dogma, he can respond to the realities of the widely different situations our society presents. In the end he has one conviction—a belief that if people have the power to act, in the long run they will, most of the time, reach the right decisions. The alternative to this would be rule by the elite—either a dictatorship or some form of political aristocracy.
Pages 10 to 11.
, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Random House, 1971).
How I came across the book: my edition is a 1972 Vintage Books paperback that I bought through ABEbooks.com because it was on the list of recommended books for the Labor Studies class "Organizing" and because I wanted it based on what Dad had said about Alinsky.
Standard note on the notetaking: Passages in blockquote format or in quotation marks have been typed out verbatim. Deviations, including notes, omissions (...) and corrections of apparent errors, are in brackets []. And all periods are followed by two spaces, even though they aren’t in the book. All quotation is fair use and for educational and not for commercial purposes.
Read starting 2003 May 28.
Review written 2003 May 28 to June .