Marxism, the heart of Community Organization: Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals Part 6

This is a continuation of quotes from Saul Alinsky’s book Rules for Radicals, along with my commentary. 

This is part 6 of 6 parts.  Also see:

• Marxism, the heart of Community Organization: Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals Part 1
• Marxism, the heart of Community Organization: Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals Part 2
• Marxism, the heart of Community Organization: Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals Part 3
• Marxism, the heart of Community Organization: Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals Part 4
• Marxism, the heart of Community Organization: Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals Part 5

On with the quotes:

Organization for action will now and in the decade ahead center upon America’s white middle class.  That is where the power is.  When more than three-fourths of our people from both the point of view of economics and of their self-identification are middle class, it is obvious that their action or inaction will determine the direction of change.  (Page 184)

Alinsky wants to get the middle class in America to agree to plunder the rich.

Activists and radicals, on and off our college campuses- people who are committed to change- must make a complete turnabout.  With rare exceptions, our activists and radicals are products of and rebels against our middle-class society.  All rebels must attack the power states in their society.  Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and way of life in the middle class.  They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized, and corrupt.  They are right; but we must begin from where we are if we are to build power for change, and the power and the people are in the big middle-class majority.   (Page 185)

He will know that a “square” is no longer to be dismissed as such- instead, his own approach must be “square” enough to get the action started….He will view with strategic sensitivity the nature of middle-class behavior with its hangups over rudeness or aggressive, insulting, profane actions.  All this and more must be grasped and used to radicalize parts of the middle class.  (Page 185)

The rough category “middle class” can be broken down into three groups:  lower middle class, with incomes from $6,000 to $11,000; middle middle class, $12,000 to $20,000; and upper middle class, $20,000 to $35,000.  There are marked cultural differences between the lower middle class and the rest of the middle class.  (Page 186)

Alinsky is arbitrarily dividing up the middle class so that he can pit people against each other.

In the lower middle class we encounter people who have struggled all their lives for what relatively little they have….They have been committed to the values of success, getting ahead, security, having their “own” home, auto, color TV, and friends.  Their lives have been 90 per cent unfulfilled dreams…they are a fearful people, who feel threatened from all sides….Victimized by TV commercials with their fraudulent claims for food and medical products, they watch the news between the commercial with Senate committee hearings showing that the purchase of these products is largely a waste of their hard earned money.  Repeated financial crises result from accidents that they thought they were insured against only to experience the fine-print evasions of one of our most shocking confidence rackets of today, the insurance racket….they look at the unemployed poor as parasitical dependents, recipients of a vast variety of massive public programs all paid for by them, “the public.”….In many cases the lower middle class were denied the opportunity of college by these very circumstances.  Their bitterness is compounded by their also paying taxes for these colleges, for increased public services, fire, police, public health, and welfare.  (Page 186)

Remember that even if you cannot win over the lower middle-class, at least parts of them must be persuaded to where there is at least communication, then to a series of partial agreements and a willingness to abstain from hard opposition as changes take place.  They have their role to play in the essential prelude to reformation, in their acceptance that the ways of the past with its promises for the future no longer work and we must move ahead- where we move may not be definite or certain, but move we must.  (Page 189)

The last half of that statement above sounds like it could have been taken verbatim from a Barack Obama speech.  This book – and the knowledge that Obama was a community organizer in the tradition of Saul Alinsky – explains the Obama administration’s slow response to issues and its seeming aimlessness for the first year he was in office.  The principles Obama seems operate on are:  1.  redistribute wealth;  2.  opportunistically take advantage of individual circumstances, and 3. try to redefine traditional words and values to have a secular progressive meaning.

The issues of 1972 would be those of 1776, “No Taxation Without Representation.”  To have real representation would involve public funds being available for campaign costs so that the members of the lower middle class can campaign for political office.  This can be an issue for mobilization among the lower middle class and substantial sectors of the middle middle class.  (Page 190)

Actually in 1776 there were restrictions on who could vote and run for office.  Part of the reasons for these restrictions was to avoid the tendency towards legalized plunder.  However, that didn’t mean that only the wealthy could be influential.  Samuel Adams himself (regardless of how Alinsky portrays him) was actually for the most part a citizen legislator, and he was quite poor. 

The rest of the middle class, with few exceptions, reside in suburbia, living in illusions of partial escape.  Being more literate, they are even more lost….They have seen values they held sacred sneered at and found themselves ridiculed as squares or relics of a dead world.  The frenetic scene around them is so bewildering as to induce them to either drop out into a private world, the nonexistent past, sick with its own form of social schizophrenia- or to face it and move into action….We are the age of pollution, progressively burying ourselves in our own waste.  We announce that our water is contaminated by our own excrement, insecticides, and detergents, and then do nothing….We prefer a strangling ring of dirty air to ring around the collar….Our persistent use of our present insecticides may well ensure that the insects shall inherit the world.  Of all the pollution around us, none compares to the political pollution of the Pentagon.  From a Vietnam war simultaneously suicidal and murderous to a policy of getting out by getting in deeper and wider…  (Page 190)

Alinsky’s entire message is based on fear and manipulation.  He has to, 1.  Create arbitrary divisions between people (you make $11,000, you’re lower middle class; you make $12,000, you’re middle middle class…) and then, 2.  Project hopelessness, meaninglessness, anger and discontent onto them, and finally, 3.  Pit them against one another in any way possible so that he can implement Marxist redistribution of wealth.

This is the Pentagon that has manufactured nearly 16,000 tons of nerve gas….since the Pentagon made it, it should keep it, and have it all stored in the basements of the Pentagon; or, since the President as Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces believed that the sinking in the ocean of 67 tons of nerve gas was so safe, why didn’t he attest to his belief by having it dumped into the waters off San Clemente, California?  Either action would have given some hope for the nation’s future.  (Page 192)

Alinsky’s attacks on Vietnam and American military production frankly sound like Soviet propaganda. 

The middle classes are numb, bewildered, scared into silence.  They don’t know what, if anything, they can do.  This is the job for today’s radical- to fan the embers of hopelessness into a flame to fight.  (Page 194)

So you return to the suburban scene of your middle class with its variety of organizations from PTAs to League of Women Voters, consumer groups, churches, and clubs.  The job is to search out the leaders in these various activities, identify their major issues, find areas of common agreement, and excite their imagination with tactics that can introduce drama and adventure into the tedium of middle class life….Start them off easy, don’t scare them off.  The opposition’s reactions will provide the “education” or radicalization of the middle class.  (Page 194)

 The revolution must manifest itself in the corporate sector by the corporation’ realistic appraisal of conditions in the nation….every American individual or corporation is public as well as private; public in that we are Americans and concerned about our national welfare.  We have a double commitment and corporations had better recognize this for the sake of their own survival….If the same predatory drives for profits can be partially transmuted for progress, then we will have opened a whole new ball game.  I suggest here that this new policy will give its executives a reason for what they are doing- a chance for a meaningful life.  (Page 195)

Alinsky’s arrogance here is astounding.  I’m reminded of what Frederic Bastiat wrote about one of the main instigators of the French Revolution:  “At what a tremendous height above the rest of mankind does Robespierre here place himself! And note the arrogance with which he speaks. He is not content to pray for a great reawakening of the human spirit. Nor does he expect such a result from a well-ordered government. No, he himself will remake mankind, and by means of terror.”

Any timetable would be speculation but the writing of middle-class organization had better be on the walls by 1972.  The human cry of the second revolution is one for a meaning, a purpose for life- a cause to live for and if need be die for.  Tom Paine’s words, “These are the times that try men’s souls,” are more relevant to Part II of the American Revolution than to the beginning.  This is literally the revolution of the soul….We have forgotten where we came from, we don’t know where we are, and we fear where we may be going.  Afraid, we turn from the glorious adventure of the pursuit of happiness to a pursuit of an illusionary security in an ordered, stratified, striped society….When Americans can no longer see the stars, the times are tragic.  We must believe that it is the darkness before the dawn of a beautiful new world; we will see it when we believe it.  (Page 196)

So concludes Saul Alinksy’s book Rules for Radicals.  Here, in the very last section of the book, Alinksy tries again to draw a correlation between the American Revolution and the French Revolution, even though the two were profoundly different.  The French Revolution was about wealth redistribution, social planning and guillotines.  The American Revolution was about God being the source of law and freedom, and about cutting ties with the King because he was breaking covenant and acting in tyranny.  What Alinksy is calling for is actually the French Revolution II, not the American Revolution II.

Alinsky believed that there is no real meaning to life aside from manipulating an endless series of revolutions with indefinite goals.  Indefinite goals lead to anxiety, and Alinsky takes his own anxiety and hopelessness and projects them onto everything he sees.  Then he tries to use that anxiety and hopelessness to agitate for revolution.  In terms the book this is somewhat disingenuous, because he tells the reader outright that his game plan is to manipulate a response from his followers, and then he immediately sets about trying to manipulate a response with the book itself.

My hope in providing these excerpts is to give people insights into how the far Left progressives view America, and how they operate to bring about their kind of change.  If reading this has given you better insight into what America is facing from secular progressives and the current liberal leadership in our country, please forward a link to Part 1 to your friends and family and ask them to read this series of posts.

Advertisement