Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky

Author:Saul Alinsky
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780307756893
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-06-29T20:00:00+00:00

ORGANIZER: Yeah. We also know that unless we put out all the things that won’t work, we’ll never get to the one that will. Right?

LEADER No. 1 (fervently): Absolutely!

And so the guided questioning goes on without anyone losing face or being left out of the decision-making. Every weakness of every proposed tactic is probed by questions. Eventually someone suggests tactic Z, and, again through questions, its positive features emerge and it is decided on.

Is this manipulation? Certainly, just as a teacher manipulates, and no less, even a Socrates. As time goes on and education proceeds, the leadership becomes increasingly sophisticated. The organizer recedes from the local circle of decision-makers. His response to questions about what he thinks becomes a non-directive counterquestion, “What do you think?” His job becomes one of weaning the group away from any dependency upon him. Then his job is done.

While the organizer proceeds on the basis of questions, the community leaders always regard his judgment above their own. They believe that he knows his job, he knows the right tactics, that’s why he is their organizer. The organizer knows that even if they feel that way consciously, if he starts issuing orders and “explaining,” it would begin to build up a subconscious resentment, a feeling that the organizer is putting them down, is not respecting their dignity as individuals. The organizer knows that it is a human characteristic that someone who asks for help and gets it reacts not only with gratitude but with a subconscious hostility toward the one who helped him. It is a sort of psychic “original sin” because he feels that the one who helped him is always aware that if it hadn’t been for his help, he would still be a defeated nothing. All this involves a skillful and sensitive role-playing on the part of the organizer. In the beginning the organizer is the general, he knows where, what, and how, but he never wears his four stars, never is addressed as nor acts as a general—he is an organizer.

There are times, too—plenty of them—when the organizer discovers in the course of discussions like the one above that tactic Z, or whatever it was he decided on ahead of time, is not the appropriate tactic. At this point, let’s hope his ego is strong enough to allow someone else to have the answer.

One of the factors that changes what you can and can’t communicate is relationships. There are sensitive areas that one does not touch until there is a strong personal relationship based on common involvements. Otherwise the other party turns off and literally does not hear, regardless of whether your words are within his experience. Conversely, if you have a good relationship, he is very receptive, and your “message” comes through in a positive context.

For example, I have always believed that birth control and abortion are personal rights to be exercised by the individual. If, in my early days when I organized the Back of the Yards neighborhood in Chicago,

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