RULES FOR A Pragmatic Primer RC/LES FOR RADICALS RULES FOR RADICALS A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals SAUL D. ALINSKY VINTAGE BOOKS A Division of Random House, Inc./New York VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 1989 Copyright €> 1971 by Saul D. Alinsky All rights reserved under International and Pan- American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published, in hardcover, by Random House, Inc., in 1971. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Alinsky, Saul David, 1909-1972. Rules for radicals : a practical primer for realistic radicals / Saul D. Alinsky. — Vintage Books ed, p. cm. Reprint. Originally published: New York: Random House, 1971. ISBN 0-679-72113-4 : $7.95 1. Community organization — United States. 2. Political participation — United States. 3. Radicalism — United States. I. Title. HN65.A675 1989 89-14823 303.48'4 — dc20 CIP “On the Importance of Being Unprincipled,” by John Herman Randall, Jr., is reprinted by permission of the publishers from The American Scholar, Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 1938. Copyright 1938 by the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa. A Selection from Industrial Valley, by Ruth McKenney, is reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd. Copyright © 1939 by Ruth McKenney MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA E987654 P erso n a l Acknowledgments To Jason Epstein for his prodding, patience and understanding, and for being a beautiful editor. To Cicely Nichols for the hours of painstaking editorial assistance. To Susan Rabiner for being the shock absorber between the corporate structure of Random House and this writer To Georgia Harper my heartfelt gratitude for the months of typing and typing and for staying with me through the years of getting this book together. “Where there are no men, be thou a man.” — RABBI HILLEL “Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul.. — THOMAS PAINE Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment 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 he at least won his own kingdom —Lucifer. — SAUL ALINSKY Contents Prologue Tiii The Purpose 3 Of Means and Ends 24 A Word About Words 48 The Education of an Organizer 63 Communication 81 In the Beginning 98 Tactics 125 The Genesis of Tactic Proxy 165 The Way Ahead 184 Prologue THE REVOLUTIONARY FORCE today has two targets, moral as well as material. Its young protagonists are one moment reminiscent of the idealistic early Christians, yet they also urge violence and cry, “Bum the system downl” They have no illusions about the system, but plenty of illusions about the way to change our world. It is to this point that I have written this book. These words are written in desperation, partly because it is what they do and will do that will give meaning to what I and the radicals of my generation have done with our lives. They are now the vanguard, and they had to start almost from scratch. Few of us survived the Joe Mc­ Carthy 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. My fellow radicals who were supposed to pass on the torch of experience and insights to a new genera­ P r o l o g u e xiv tion Just were not there. As the young looked at the society around them, it was all, in their words, “materialistic, decadent, bourgeois in its values, bankrupt and violent." Is it any wonder that they rejected us in to to. Todays generation is desperately trying to make some sense out of their lives and out of the world. Most of them are products of the middle class. They have rejected their materialistic backgrounds, the goal of a well-paid job, sub­ urban home, automobile, country club membership, first- class travel, status, security, and everything that meant success to their parents. They have had it. They watched it lead their parents to tranquilizers, alcohol, long-term- endurance marriages, or divorces, high blood pressure, ulcers, frustration, and the disillusionment of “the good life.” They have seen the almost unbelievable idiocy of our political leadership—in the past political leaders, rang­ ing from the mayors to governors to the White House, were regarded with respect and almost reverence; today they are viewed with contempt. This negativism now extends to all institutions, from the police and the courts to “the system” itself. We are living in a world of mass media which daily exposes societys innate hypocrisy, its contradictions and the apparent failure of almost every facet of our social and political life. The young have seen their “activist” participatory democracy turn into its an­ tithesis—nihilistic bombing and murder. 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. The young are inundated with a bar­ rage of information and facts so overwhelming that the world has come to seem an utter bedlam, which has them spinning in a frenzy, looking for what man has always Prologue xv looked for from the beginning of time, a way of life that has some meaning or sense. A way of life means a certain degree of order where things have some relationship and can be pieced together into a system that at least provides some clues to what life is about. Men have always yearned for and sought direction by setting up religions, inventing political philosophies, creating scientific systems like New­ ton’s, 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, and that it will be possible to “get it all together" only relatively. The elements will shift and move together just like the changing pattern in a turn­ ing kaleidoscope. In the past the “world,” whether in its physical or in­ tellectual terms, was much smaller, simpler, and more orderly. It inspired credibility. Today everything is so com­ plex as to be incomprehensible. 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? These are the days when man has his hands on the sublime while he is up to his hips in the muck of madness. The establishment in many ways is as suicidal as some of the far left, except that they are infinitely more destructive than the far left can ever be. The outcome of the hopelessness and despair is morbidity. There is a feeling of death hanging over the nation. Today's generation faces all this and says, MI don't want to spend my life the way my family and their friends have. I want to do something, to create, to be me, to ‘do my own thing/ to live. The older generation doesn't under­ stand and worse doesn't want to. I don't want to be just a P r o l o g u e piece of data to be fed into a computer or a statistic in a public opinion poll, just a voter carrying a credit card.” To the young the world seems insane and falling apart. On the other side is the older generation, whose mem- bers are no less confused. If they are not as vocal or con­ scious, it may be because they can escape to a past when the world was simpler. They can still cling to the old values in the simple hope that everything will work out somehow, some way. That the younger generation will “straighten out” with the passing of time. Unable to come to grips with the world as it is, they retreat in any con­ frontation with the younger generation with that infuriat­ ing cliche, “when you get older youll understand* One wonders at their reaction if some youngster were to reply, “When you get younger which will never be then you'll understand, so of course youll never understand.” Those of the older generation who claim a desire to understand say, “When I talk to my kids or their friends 111 say to them, ‘Look, I believe what you have to tell me is im­ portant and I respect it. You call me a square and say that Tm not with it’ or *1 don't know where its at* or T don't know where the scene is' and all of the rest of the words you use. Well, I'm going to agree with you. So suppose you tell me. What do you want? What do you mean when you say ‘I want to do my thing.’ What the hell is your thing? You say you want a better world. Like what? And don't tell me a world of peace and love and all the rest of that stuff because people are people, as you will find out when you get older—I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say anything about when you get older/ I really do respect what you have to say.