Reveille for Radicals - Saul Alinsky by Saul Alinsky

Author:Saul Alinsky
Language: eng
Format: epub

CHAPTER 8 Conflict Tactics

APeople’s Organization is a

conflict group. This must be openly and fully recognized. Its sole reason for coming into being is to wage war against all evils which cause suffering and unhappiness. A People’s Organization is the banding together of multitudes of men and women to fight for those rights which insure a decent way of life. Most of this constant conflict will take place in orderly and conventionally approved legal procedures—but in all fights there come times when “the law spoke too softly to be heard in such a noise of war.”

The building of a People’s Organization is the building of a new power group. The creation of any new power group automatically becomes an intrusion and a threat to the existing power arrangements. It carries with it the menacing implication of displacement and disorganization of the status quo.

Agnes E. Meyer of the Washington Post points this out in a study of a People’s Organization in Chicago:

These serious-minded, inhabitants of Packingtown have never picked a fight, nor have they avoided one when great issues and principles were involved. They have fought because in a competitive city like Chicago, any new power group has to go through battles if it is going to survive. Their thinking on pressure is very simple.

"We believe that democracy is a government constantly responding to the pressure of its people," a group of council members said to me. “The biggest hope for democracy is that Americans will overcome their lethargy and that more and more people and groups will become articulate and formulate their needs.”1

A People’s Organization is not a philanthropic plaything nor a social service’s ameliorative gesture. It is a deep, hard-driving force, striking and cutting at the very roots of all the evils which beset the people. It recognizes the existence of the vicious circle in which most human beings are caught and strives viciously to break this circle. It thinks and acts in terms of social surgery and not cosmetic cover-ups. This is one of the reasons why a People’s Organization will find that it has to fight its way every foot of the road towards its destination—a people’s world.

Because the character of a People’s Organization is such that it will frequently involve itself in conflict, and since most attempts at the building of People’s Organizations have been broken by the attacks of an opposition which knows no rules of fair play or so-called ethics, it is imperative that the organizers and leaders of a People’s Organization not only understand the necessity for and the nature and purpose of conflict tactics, but become familiar with and skillful in the use of such tactics.

A People’s Organization is dedicated to an eternal war. It is a war against poverty, misery, delinquency, disease, injustice, hopelessness, despair, and unhappiness. They are basically the same issues for which nations have gone to war in almost every generation.

A war is not an intellectual debate, and in the war against social evils there are no rules of fair play.

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