Rules for Radicals (Saul Alinsky)
Summary
Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (Random House, 1971) is the primal text of modern community organizing — the practical rules of a successful organizer, the ethics of means-ends, and the politics of self-interest. The book underpins the broad-based-organizing and organizing traditions in the wiki.
Body
Alinsky’s 13 rules of a successful organizer: power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have; never go outside the experience of your people; whenever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy; make people reach and choose; a tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag; keep the pressure on; the threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself; keep trying new things; a vow to poverty gives one the freedom of action; do not accept the gifts of your opponent; don’t do anything your enemy can defeat; the price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative; pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. [source: rules-for-radicals]
The book is the original doctrine of community organizing; it grounds Alinsky/fr-based organizations (the Industrial Areas Foundation, Citizens’ Committee for the Welfare of Children, and many derivations). The German-language companion is alinsky-fr’s boîte à outils.
Use it for
Reading the foundational rules; choosing between direct and indirect action; calibrating pressure tactics; refusing the opponent’s framing.
Related
- affinity-groups
- campaigns-vs-movements
- citizen-lobbying
- civil-resistance
- coalition-building
- constructive-programme
- distributed-organizing
- framing-and-narrative
- incidencia-politica
- leadership-development
- one-to-ones
- pillars-of-support
- power-mapping
- public-narrative
- spectrum-of-allies
- the-campaign-cycle
- the-tactic-star
- theory-of-change
- three-and-a-half-percent-rule
Learn more
- On Wikipedia: Rules for Radicals — CC BY-SA 4.0