Rules for

Radicals
 A Word About Words
• The passion of mankind have boiled over
into all areas of political life, including its
vocabulary.
• Even the word POLITICS..
 Power
• Let us look at the word power. Power,
meaning “ability, whether physical, mental, or
moral, to act,” has become an evil word, with
overtones and undertones that suggest the
sinister, the unhealthy, the Machiavellian.
 Self-interest
• In all the reasoning found in The Federalist
Papers, no point is so central and agreed upon
as “Rich and poor alike are prone to act upon
impulse rather than pure reason and to
narrow conceptions of self-interest…” To
question the force of self-interest that
pervades all areas of political life is to refuse
to see man as he is, to see him only as we
would like him to be.
 Compromise
• Compromise is another word that carries
shades of weakness, vacillation, betrayal of
ideas, surrender of moral principles.
• But to the organizer, compromise is a key and
beautiful word. It is always present in the
pragmatics of operation.
• A free and open society is an on-going conflict,
interrupted periodically by compromise..
 Ego
• The ego of the organizer is stronger and more
monumental than the ego of the leader. The
leader is driven by the desire for power, while
the organizer is driven by the desire to create.
The organizer in a true sense reaching for the
highest level for which man can reach “to
create, to be a “great creator”, to God.
 Conflict
• Conflict is the essential core of a free and
open society. If one were to project the
democratic way of life in the form of a musical
score, its major theme would be the harmony
of dissonance.
 The Education of an
Organizer
The building of many mass power
organizations to merge into a
national popular power force
cannot come without many
organizers.
 always the potential organizer’s
personal experience was used as the
basis for teaching.

 curiosity, irreverence,
imagination, a sense of humor, a
free and open mind, an
acceptance of the relativity of
values and of the uncertainty of
life, all inevitably fuse into the kind of
person whose greatest joy is creation.
 Communication
“If you can’t communicate you can’t agitate”

To communicate the organizer must;

1. Speak in familiar terms the people understand
and;
2. Listen
• Another maxim in effective communication is
that the people have to make their own
decisions.

• Communication on a general basis without

being fractured into the specifics of
experience becomes rhetoric and it carries a
very limited meaning.
 In the Beginning
• The job of the organization is to maneuver and
bait the establishment so that it will publicly
attack him as a dangerous enemy.
• An organizer knows that life is a sea of shifting
desires, changing, elements of relativity and
uncertainty.
• Learn to search out the rationalizations, treat
them as rationalizations and break through
• Change comes from power, and power comes
from organizations.
 Tactics
Tactics means doing what you can with
what you have. Tactics are those
consciously deliberate acts by which
human beings live with each other and
deal with the world around them.
 THE WAY AHEAD

• In this chapter, Alinsky will examine the white

middle-class, Alinsky’s “Silent Majority”
• The white middle-class serves as Alinsky’s
majority. He says the other races combined
could not overtake the white middle class for
the role of majority.
• Alinsky says that the majority today’s activist
were the white middle-class.
• “Fan the embers of hopelessness into a flame
to fight” Fire up the other radicals to stand up.