Customer Review 10 of 11 people found the following review helpful 1.0 out of 5 stars A review of Alinsky using his own words, July 27, 2014 By Ted C. This review is from: Rules for Radicals (Vintage) (Kindle Edition) Alinsky is a primary influence on President Obama from before Obamas first job working as a community organizer in the Saul Alinsky network. Secretary Clinton was personally offered a job by Alinsky when she was in college writing a year long thesis titled, An Analysis of the Alinsky Model. Select quotes, Vintage Books Edition, October 1989. Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgement to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins- or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that at least he won his own kingdom -Lucifer. (page ix) Few of us survived the Joe McCarthy holocaust of the early 1950s and of those there were even fewer whose understanding and insights had developed beyond the dialectical materialism of orthodox Marxism. (Page xiii) Remember that we are talking about revolution, not revelation; you can miss the target by shooting too high as well as too low. First, there are no rules for revolution any more than there are rules for love or rules for happiness. (Page xviii) The political panaceas of the past, such as the revolutions in Russia and China, have become the same old stuff under a different name. The search for freedom does not seem to have any road or destination. (Page xiv) Men have always yearned for a sought direction by setting up religions, inventing political philosophies, creating scientific systems like Newtons, or formulating ideologies of various kinds. This is what is behind the common cliche, getting it all together -despite the realization that all values and factors are relative, fluid, and changing. (Page xv) Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system. (Page xix) Power comes out of the barrel of a gun! is an absurd rallying cry when the other side has all the guns. Lennin 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! (Page xx) Men dont like to step abruptly out of the security of familiar experience; they need a bridge to cross from their own experience to a new way. A revolutionary organizer must shake up the prevailing patterns of their lives- agitate, create disenchantment and discontent with the current values, to produce, if not a passion for change, at least a passive, affirmative, non-challenging climate. (Page xxi) ...gassing and violence by the Chicago Police and National Guard during the 1968 Democratic Convention....But the answer I gave the young radicals seemed to me the only realistic one: `Do one of three things. One, go find a wailing wall and feel sorry for yourselves. Two, go psycho and start bombing-but this will only swing people to the right. Three, learn a lesson. Go home, organize, build power and at the next convention, you be the delegates. (Page xxiii) As for Vietnam, I would like to see our nation be the first in the history of man to publicly say, `We were wrong! What we did was horrible... Such an admission would shake up the foreign policy concepts of all nations and open the door to a new international order. (Page xxiv) 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. In this book we are concerned with how to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people. (Page 3) Dogma is the enemy of human freedom. Dogma must be watched for and apprehended at every turn and twist of the revolutionary movement. The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with complete certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain and injustice. (Page 4) We have permitted a suicidal situation to unfold wherein revolution and communism have become one. These pages are committed to splitting that political atom, separating the exclusive identification of communism with revolution. (Page 9) Political realists see the world as it is: an arena of power politics moved primarily by perceived immediate self-interests, where morality is rhetorical rationale for expedient action and self-interest. (Page 12) We live in a world where `good is a value dependent on whether we want it. In the world as it is, the solution of each problem inevitably creates a new one. In the world as it is there are no permanent happy or sad endings. Such endings belong to the world of fantasy, the world as we would like it to be, the world of childrens fairy tails where, `they lived happily ever after. In the world as it is, the stream of events surges endlessly onward with death as the only terminus. (Page 14) The grasp of the duality of all phenomena is vital in our understanding of politics. It frees one from the myth that one approach is positive and another negative. There is no such thing in life. One mans positive is another mans negative. (Page 17) The setting for the drama of change has never varied. Mankind has been and is divided into three parts: the Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Have-a-Little, Want Mores....They [the Have-Nots] hate the establishment of the Haves with its arrogant opulence, its police, its courts, and its churches. Justice, morality, law, and order, are mere words when used by the Haves, which justify and secure their status quo. (Pages 18,19) Yet in the conflicting interests and contradictions within the Have-a-Little, Want Mores is the genesis of creativity. Out of this class have come, with few exceptions, the great world leaders of change of the past centuries: Moses, Paul of Tarsus, Martin Luther, Robespierre, Georges Danton, Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon Bonaparte, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Nikolai Lenin, Mahatma Gandhi, Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-tung, and others. (Page 19) A major revolution to be won in the immediate future is the dissipation of mans illusion that his own welfare can be separate from that of all others....it was a disservice to the future to separate morality from mans daily desires and elevate it to a plane of altruism and self-sacrifice. The fact is that it is not mans `better nature but his self-interest that demands that he be his brothers keeper. We now live in a world where no man can have a loaf of bread while his neighbor has none. If he does not share his bread, he dare not sleep, for his neighbor will kill him....I believe man is about to learn that the most practical life is the moral life and that the moral life is the only road to survival. He is beginning to learn that he will either share part of his material wealth or lose all of it....This is the low road to morality. There is no other. (Page 23) To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life. (Page 24) ...in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with ones individual conscience and the good of mankind. The choice must always be for the latter. Action is for mass salvation and not for the individuals personal salvation. He who sacrifices the mass good for his personal conscience has a peculiar conception of `personal salvation; he doesnt care enough for people to be `corrupted for them. (Page 25) The means and end moralists, constantly obsessed with the ethics of the means used by the Have-Nots against the Haves, should search themselves as to their real political position. In fact, they are passive - but real - allies of the Haves. (Page 25) I present here a series of rules pertaining to the ethics of means and ends: first, that ones concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with ones personal interest in the issue. When we are not directly concerned our morality overflows....The second rule of ethics of means and ends is that the judgment of the ethics of means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgment....Those who opposed the Nazi conquerors regarded the Resistance as a secret army of selfless, patriotic idealists, courageous beyond expectation and willing to sacrifice their lives to their moral convictions. To the occupation authorities, however, these people were lawless terrorists, murderers, saboteurs, assassins....To us the Declaration of Independence is a glorious document and an affirmation of human rights. To the British, on the other hand, it was a statement notorious for its deceit by omission. (Pages 26, 27) The myth of altruism as a motivating factor in our behavior could arise and survive only in a society bundled in the sterile gauze of New England Puritanism and Protestant morality and tied together with the ribbons of Madison Avenue public relations. It is one of the classic American fairy tales. (Page 53) ...the United States in World War II fervently allied with Russia against Germany, Japan, and Italy, and shortly after victory fervently allied with its former enemies - Germany, Japan, and Italy - against its former ally, the U.S.S.R. These drastic shifts of self-interest can be rationalized only under a huge, limitless umbrella of general moral principles such as liberty, justice, freedom, a law higher than man-made law, and so on. Morality, so-called, becomes the continuum as self-interest shifts....With one breath we point out that we are utterly opposed to communism, but that we love the Russian people (loving people is in keeping with the tenets of our civilization). What we hate is the atheism and the suppression of the individual that we attributed as characteristics substantiating the `immorality of communism. On this we base our powerful opposition. We do not admit the actual fact: our own self-interest. (Page 55) It is interesting that the communists do not seem to concern themselves with these moral justifications for their naked acts of self-interest. In a way, this becomes embarrassing too; it makes us feel that they may be laughing at us, knowing well that we are motivated by self-interest too, but are determined to disguise it. We feel that they may be laughing at us as they struggle in the sea of world politics, stripped to their shorts, while we flop around, fully dressed in our white tie and tails. (Page 58) They call it `C.O. (which to us means Conscientious Objector) or `Community Org. (which to us evokes a huge Freudian fantasy). Basically the difference between their goals and ours is that they organize to get rid of four-legged rats and stop there; we organize to get rid of four-legged rats so we can get on to removing two-legged rats. (Page 67) I have improvised teaching approaches. For example, knowing that one can only communicate and understand in terms of ones experience, we had to construct experience for our students....Happenings become experiences when they are digested, when they are reflected on, related to general patterns, and synthesized....Our job was to shovel those happenings back into the students system so he could digest them into experience. (Page 68) Moses did not try to communicate with God in terms of mercy or justice when God was angry and wanted to destroy the Jews; he moved in on a top value and outmaneuvered God. It is only when the other party is concerned or feels threatened that he will listen....But Moses kept his cool, and he knew that the most important center of his attack would have to be on what he judged to be Gods prime value. As Moses read it, it was that God wanted to be No. 1. All through the Old Testament one bumps into there shall be no other Gods before me, Thou shalt not worship false gods, I am a jealous and vindictive God, Thou shalt not use the Lords name in vain. And so it goes, on and on, including the first part of the Ten Commandments. Knowing this, Moses took off on his attack. He began arguing and telling God to cool it. (At this point, trying to figure our Moses motivations, one would wonder whether it was because he was loyal to his own people, or felt sorry for them, or whether he just didnt want the job of breeding a whole new people, because after all he was pushing 120 and thats asking a lot.) (Pages 89,90) ...Samuel Adams, at the time when he was allegedly planning the Boston Massacre; he was quoted as saying that there ought to be no less than three or four killed so that we will have martyrs for the Revolution, but there must be no more than ten, because after you get beyond that number we no longer have martyrs but simply a sewage problem. (Page 96) Power means strength, whereas love is a human frailty the people mistrust....power and fear are the fountainheads of faith....The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him, as a dangerous enemy. The word enemy is sufficient to put the organizer on the side of the people, to identify him with the Have-Nots, but it is not enough to endow him with the special qualities that induce fear and thus give him the means to establish his own power against the establishment. Here again we find that it is power and fear that are essential to the development of faith. (Page 100) ...if your function is to attack apathy and get people to participate it is necessary to attack the prevailing patterns of organized living in the community. The first step in community organization is community disorganization....The organizer dedicated to changing the life of a particular community must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. (Page 116) The fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian can live up to Christianity....The fourth rule carries with it the fifth rule: Ridicule is mans most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. (Page 128) In a fight almost anything goes. It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt. (Page 129) The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. In conflict tactics there are certain rules that the organizer should always regard as universalities. One is that the opposition must be singled out as the target and frozen. (Page 130) OHare Airport became the target....You decide to wait until after landing to use the facilities in the terminal....the tactic becomes obvious- we tie up the lavatories. In the restrooms you drop a dime, enter, push the lock on the door- and you can stay there all day....the ladies restrooms could be occupied completely; the only problem in the mens lavatories would be the stand-up urinals. This, too, could be taken care of, by having groups busy themselves around the airport and then move in on the stand-up urinals to line up four or five deep whenever a flight arrived....the nations first shit-in....One can see children yelling at their parents, Mommy, Ive got to go, and desperate mothers surrendering, All right- well, do it. Do it right here. OHare would soon become a shambles. The whole scene would become unbelievable and the laughter and ridicule would be nationwide. (Page 142) The internecine struggle among the Haves for their individual self-interest is as shortsighted as the internecine struggle among the Have-Nots. I have on occasion remarked that I feel confident that I could persuade a millionaire on a Friday to subsidize a revolution for Saturday out of which he would make a huge profit on Sunday even though he was certain to be executed on Monday. (Page 150) Activists and radicals, on and off our college campuses- people who are committed to change- must make a complete turnabout. With rare exceptions, our activists and radicals are products of and rebels against our middle-class society. All rebels must attack the power states in their society. Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and way of life in the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized, and corrupt. They are right; but we must begin from where we are if we are to build power for change, and the power and the people are in the big middle-class majority. (Page 185) So you return to the suburban scene of your middle class with its variety of organizations from PTAs to League of Women Voters, consumer groups, churches, and clubs. The job is to search out the leaders in these various activities, identify their major issues, find areas of common agreement, and excite their imagination with tactics that can introduce drama and adventure into the tedium of middle class life.... (Page 194) Help other customers find the most helpful reviews Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Report abuse | Permalink Your post was added to the end of the discussion. Add another? Comments Track comments by e-mail Sort: Oldest first | Newest first Showing 1-1 of 1 posts in this discussion Your initial post: Aug 16, 2014 10:38:52 PM PDT OtterRose says: Amazing what a little evil, manipulative Salesmanship can do to destroy a society...
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