I have found great help from two truths God gave me at a time in my life when I was bombarded with a series of unexpected and unfair blows (from my perspective). In my darkest hours these principles still become my anchor of stability, my only means of survival.

Because they work for me, I pass them on to you. Memorize them. Write them on a card and carry it at all times.

• Nothing touches me that has not passed through the hands of my heavenly Father. Nothing. Whatever occurs, God has sovereignly surveyed and approved. We may not know why, but we do know our pain is no accident to Him who guides our lives.
• Everything I endure is designed to prepare me for serving others more effectively. Everything. Since my Heavenly Father is committed to shaping me into the image of His Son, He knows the ultimate value of this painful experience. It is being used to empty our hands of our own resources, our own sufficiency, and turn us back to Him—the faithful Provider. And God knows what will get through to us.

Things may not be logical or fair,
but when God is directing the events of our lives, they are right.

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.

This is part 5 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 6

On with the quotes:

The basic tactic in warfare against the Haves is a mass political jujitsu….since the Haves publicly pose as the custodians of responsibility, morality, law, and justice (which are frequently strangers to each other), they can be constantly pushed to live up to their own book of morality and regulations.  No organization, including organized religion, can live up to the letter of its own book.  You can club them to death with their “book” of rules and regulations.  This is what the great revolutionary, Paul of Tarsus, knew when he wrote to the Conrinthians:  “Who also hath made us able ministers of the New Testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit; for the letter killeth.”  (Page 152)

Alinsky leaves out the final words of the verse, 2 Corinthians 3:6, as well as the context of the passage – Israel having the Mosaic Law but not seeing Jesus of Nazereth in it.  Paul actually affirms the Mosaic Law later on in the same chapter (verses 15 ,16).  So Alinksy is taking the verse entirely out of context and implying a meaning which isn’t there. 

In Chicago the Haves slipped badly when both a judge and a district attorney muttered that the book of regulations banned attempts to induce the absence of public school students, and growled ominously about an injunction against all civil rights leaders taking part in the development of the boycott….Now was the time to start an intensive campaign of ridicule, insults, and taunting defiance, daring the district attorney and the judge either to live up to their regulations and issue the injunctions or stand publically exposed as fearful frauds who were afraid to put the law where their mouths were….the last thing the establishment wants is to indict and imprison every single civil rights leader….At this point, now that the civil rights leaders had the powerful weapon of the book of the laws of the Haves, they would have to stand fast publicly- once again taunting, insulting, demanding that the judge and the district attorney “obey the law,”…  (Page 153)

It is ironic that Alinksy is talking about fighting for a justifiable cause – desegregation of public schools in the 60′s – but advocating tactics of ridicule, insults, defiance, etc.  Yes, school segregation was ended, as it should have been, but it wasn’t ended because of subversive behavior on the part of civil rights leadership.  Also note that Alinsky uses the phrase, “the book of laws of the Haves”.  The implication is that Alinsky had no respect for the law, and saw it only as a tool of the Haves for perpetuating power.

 The reaction of the status quo in jailing revolutionary leaders is in itself a tremendous contribution to the development of the Have-Not movement as well as to the personal development of the revolutionary leaders….Jailing the revolutionary leaders and their followers performs three vital functions for the cause of the Have-Nots: (1) it is an act on the part of the status quo that in itself points up the conflict between the Haves and the Have-Nots; (2) it strengthens immeasurably the position of the revolutionary leaders with their people by surrounding the jailed leadership with an aura of martyrdom; (3) it deepens the identification of the leadership with their people since the prevalent reaction among the Have-Nots is that their leadership cares so much for them, and is so sincerely committed to the issue, that it is willing to suffer imprisonment for the cause.  (Page 155)

At the same time, the revolutionary leaders should make certain that their publicized violations of the regulations are so selected that their jail terms are relatively brief, from one day to two months.  (Page 156)

Alinsky sees purposely getting jailed for short periods of time as a calculated way to manipulate his followers. 

Life goes on, new issues arise, and new leaders appear; however, a periodic removal from circulation by being jailed is an essential element in the development of the revolutionary….To gain that privacy in which he can try to make sense out of what he is doing, why he is doing it, where he is going, what has been wrong with what he has done…the most convenient and accessible solution is jail…. The prophets of the Old Testament and the New found their opportunity for synthesis by voluntarily removing themselves to the wilderness.  It was after they emerged that they began propagandizing their philosophies.  (Page 156)

Once, though- and in rare circumstances even now- sit-downs were really revolutionary.  A vivid illustration was the almost spontaneous sit-down strikes of the United Automobile Workers Union in their 1937 organizing drive at General Motors.  The seizure of private property caused an uproar in the nation.  With rare exception every labor leader ran for cover- this was too revolutionary for them….Lewis, gave them their rationale.  He thundered, “The right to a man’s job transcends the right of private property!  The C.I.O stands squarely behind these sit-downs!”….The lesson here is that a major job of the organizer is to instantly develop the rationale for actions which have taken place by accident or impulsive anger.  Lacking the rationale, the action becomes inexplicable to its participants and rapidly disintegrates into defeat.  Possessing a rationale gives action meaning and purpose.  (Page 163)

Alinsky is advocating making up rationales for actions where there is or was no rationale.

Accident, unpredictable reactions to your own actions, necessity, and improvisation dictate the direction and nature of tactics.  (Page 165)

The organizer should never feel lost because he has no plot, no timetable or definite points of reference.  A great pragmatist, Abraham Lincoln, told his secretary in the month the war began: “My policy is to have no policy.”  Three years later, in a letter to a Kentucky friend, he confessed plainly: “I have been controlled by events.”  The major problem in trying to communicate this idea is that it is outside the experience of practically everyone who has been exposed to our alleged education system.  The products of this system have been trained to emphasize order, logic, rational thought, direction and purpose.  (Page 165)

I have two thoughts on this point.  First, I wonder that Alinsky thought so little of order, logic, rational thought, direction and purpose.  My second thought is that now that our education system is run by many whose world view runs closer to Alinsky’s than to that of your average person fifty years ago, it’s no mystery that those graduating from our education system today know so little of order, logic, rational thought, direction and purpose.

The mythology of “history” is usually so pleasant for the ego of the subject that he accepts it in a “modest” silence, an affirmation of the validity of the mythology.  After a while he begins to believe it.  The further danger of mythology is that it carries the picture of “genius at work” with the false implication of purposeful logic and planned actions.  This makes it more difficult to free oneself from the structured approach.  For this if no other reason, mythology should be understood for what it is.  (Page 168)

Alinksy has to discredit or change history itself in order to advocate his positions.

 The history of Chicago’s Back of the Yards Council reads, “Out from the gutters, the bars, the churches, the labor unions, yes, even the communist and socialist parties; the neighborhood businessmen’s associations, the American Legion and Chicago’s Catholic Bishop Bernard Sheil.  They all came together on July 14, 1939.  July 14, Bastille Day!  Their Bastille Day, the day they deliberately and symbolically selected to join together to storm the barricades of unemployment, rotten housing, disease, delinquency and demoralization.”  That’s the way it reads.  What really happened is that July 14 was selected because it was the one day the public park fieldhouse was clear…There wasn’t a thought of Bastille Day in any of our minds.  That day at a press conference before the convention came to order a reporter asked me, “Don’t you think it’s somewhat too revolutionary to deliberately select Bastille Day for your first convention?”  I tried to cover my surprise but I thought, “How wonderful!  What a windfall!”  I answered, “Not at all.  It is fitting that we do so and that’s why we did it.”  I quickly informed all the speakers about “Bastille Day” and it became the keynote of nearly every speech.  (Page 168)

In the quote above, Alinsky is bragging about his deception and dishonesty.

The difference between fact and history was brought home when I was a visiting professor at a certain Eastern university….I persuaded the president of this college to get me a copy of this examination and when I answered the questions the departmental head graded my paper, knowing only that I was an anonymous friend of the president.  Three of the questions were on the philosophy and motivations of Saul Alinsky.  I answered two of them incorrectly.  I did not know what my philosophy or motivations were; but they did!  (Page 169)

Alinsky’s example seems to be trying to question, discredit or marginalize learning and academia in general.  However this example, like many he gives, falls into the logic fallacy of  ”argumentum ad logicam” (argument to logic), which is assuming that just because one argument given on behalf of a thing is false, therefore all arguments given on behalf of that thing are false.  The examples in the book often fall  into the logic fallacy of  ”dicto simpliciter” or sweeping generalization as well.

In the second to the last chapter, “The Genesis of Tactic Proxy”, Alinsky develops the idea of getting regular people to assign stock proxies (designating a “proxy” means legally designating another individual to represent you as a stockholder) to radicals so those radicals can represent thousands of stockholder votes and play havoc with corporations.

Let’s see what happens when Flemington, New Jersey, with its one beat-up hotel and two motels, faces an invasion of 50,000 stockholders….But the real importance of these letters was that they showed a way for the middle class to organize….There will even be “fringe benefits.”  Trips to stockholder’s meetings will bring drama and adventure into otherwise colorless and sedentary suburban lives.  Proxy organizations will help bridge the generation gap, as parents and children join in the battle against the Pentagon and the corporations.  (Page 178)

One can envisage the scene where a general informs a corporate executive that a $50 million order will be coming to the corporation for the making of nerve gas, napalm, defoliants, or any other of the great products we export for the benefit of mankind…”Well, look, General, I appreciate your considering us for this contract but we’ve got a stockholders’ meeting coming up next month and the hell that would blow when these thousands of stockholders heard about it- well, General, I don’t want to think about it.”  (Page 179)

Another pot-shot at the U.S.  Alinsky accuses the U.S throughout the book of being dishonest about our own humanist, secular, power-hungry motivations.   But these are interpretations that he is projecting onto the U.S. because of his own world-view. 

 What will be required is a computerized operation that will quickly give (1) a breakdown of the holdings of any corporation, (2) a breakdown of holdings of other corporations that own shares in the target corporation, and (3) a breakdown of the individual stock proxies in the target corporation and in the corporations that have holdings in the target corporation….There will be a nationwide organization, set up either by myself or others, with national headquarters in Chicago or New York City, or both.  The New York office could handle all of the computerized operations; the Chicago office would serve as headquarters for a staff of organizers who would be constantly on the move through the various communities of America…  (Page 180)

Alinsky can’t seem to stop dreaming up outlandish ideas to use as threats to try to get an immediate advantage over someone he’s fighting.  That’s all the entire “Proxy” chapter apears to be - a proposal of  a wild scheme designed to put pressure on whatever target he was working on when this book came out.

Click here to continue on to Marxism, the heart of Community Organization: Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals Part 6

This is part 4 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 5
• Marxism, the heart of Community Organization: Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals Part 6

On with the quotes:

People hunger for drama and adventure, for a breath of life in a dreary, drab existence….It is a desperate search for personal identity- to let other people know that at least you are alive.  Let’s take a common case in the ghetto.  A man is living in a slum tenement…When the organizer approaches him part of what begins to be communicated is that through the organization and its power he will get his birth certificate for life, that he will become known, that things will change from the drabness of a life where all that changes is the calendar.”  (Page 121)

Always remember that “the guiding star is ‘the dignity of the individual.’”  This is the purpose of the program.  Obviously any program that opposes people because of race, religion, creed, or economic status, is the antithesis of the fundamental dignity of the individual.  (Page 122)

According to Alinksy’s definition above, “the dignity of the individual” means that anything goes and any creed is fine, so long as the creed does not claim an exclusive knowledge of the truth or require people to live up to any kind of a standard.  This reminds me of people talking about religion or philosophy and using the “elephant” analogy.  Several blind men are led to an elephant and one is at the leg, another at the trunk, another at the tail, and so on.  And one man says, “the object is big and round and stumpy and get’s wider at the bottom”, and another says, “No, it’s long and flexible and moves around a lot”, and another says, “no, it’s short and stringy…”, etc.  The person telling the elephant analogy then says that any attempt to understand religious or philosophical truth is the same way.  No one sees the big picture, and so it’s prideful and vain to imagine that your view is the correct one.  At first that would seem like wisdom, but on closer inspection the logic breaks down.  First off, it is really impossible to know truth?  No, it’s very possible to know the truth.  Second, if someone uses the elephant analogy it is actually they who are being arrogant, for they are claiming that no one else is able to see the whole picture except for them.  They are claiming to be the only one with an exclusive knowledge of the truth.

 In the world of give and take, tactics is the art of how to take and how to give.  Here our concern is with the tactic of taking; how the Have-Nots can take power away from the Haves.  (Page 126)

…the first rule of power tactics:  Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.  Power has always derived from two main sources, money and people.  Lacking money, the Have-Nots must build power from their own flesh and blood.  A mass movement expresses itself with mass tactics.  Against the finesse and sophistication of the status quo, the Have-Nots have always had to club their way.  (Page 127)

The third rule is:  Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy.  Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.”  (Page 127)

The fourth rule is:  Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.  You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian can live up to Christianity.  (Page 128)

The fourth rule carries with it the fifth rule:  Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.  It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule.  (Page 128)

If Alinsky’s rule is to ridicule his enemy, then it is very clear he considered the United States, the Founding Fathers, the U.S. Allies, Christianity, capitalism, the average citizen (i.e., the middle-class) and families to be his enemy.  His ridicule of these runs all through the book.  Note that all of these are institutions which Marxism and Communism consider an enemy and wish to eliminate or fundamentally redefine.

The seventh rule:  A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.  Man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time, after which it becomes a ritualistic commitment, like going to church on Sunday mornings.  (Page 128)

In a fight almost anything goes.  It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt.  (Page 129)

The thirteenth rule:  Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.  In conflict tactics there are certain rules that the organizer should always regard as universalities.  One is that the opposition must be singled out as the target and “frozen.”  (Page 130)

One of the criteria in picking your target is the target’s vulnerability- where do you have the power to start?  Furthermore, any target can always say, “Why do you center on me when there are others to blame as well?”  When you “freeze the target,” you disregard these arguments and, for the moment, all others to blame.  (Page 133)

The classic statement on polarization comes from Christ:  “He that is not with me is against me” (Luke 11:23).  He allowed no middle ground to the money-changers in the Temple.  One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.  A leader may struggle toward a decision and weigh the merits and demerits of a situation which is 52 per cent positive and 48 per cent negative, but once the decision is reached he must assume that his cause is 100 per cent positive and the opposition 100 per cent negative.  (Page 133)

In this section of the book, Alinsky is saying to arbitrarily pick a target, freeze it, and then paint the target as being 100% evil.

An excellent illustration of the importance of polarization here was cited by Ruth McKenney in Industrial Valley, her classical study on the beginning of organization of the rubber workers in Akron, Ohio:  “[John L.] Lewis faced the mountaineer workers of Akron calmly….The Lewis speech was a battle cry, a challenge…. ‘Partnership!’ he sneered.  ‘Well, labor and capital may be partners in theory, but they are enemies in fact.’….’Organize!’ Lewis shouted, and his voice echoed from the beams of the armory.  ‘Organize!’ he said, pounding the speaking pulpit until it jumped.  ‘Organize!  Go to Goodyear and tell them you want some of those stock dividends.  Say, So we’re supposed to be partners, are we?  Well, we’re no.  We’re enemies.‘”  (Page 134, Emphasis is Alinsky’s)

The next question was about my response to a bitter personal denunciation of me from W. Allen Wallis, the president of the University of Rochester and a present director of Eastman Kodak.  He has been the head of the Department of Business Administration, formerly, at the University of Chicago.  He was at the university when it was locked in bitter warfare with the black organization in Woodlawn.  “Wallis?” I replied.  “Which one are you talking about- Wallace of Alabama, or Wallis of Rochester – but I guess there isn’t any difference, so what was your question?”  This reply (1) introduced an element of ridicule and (2) it ended any further attacks from the president of the University of Rochester, who began to suspect that he was going to be shafted with razors, and that an encounter with me or with my associates was not going to be an academic dialogue.”  (Page 137)

Alinsky, in the quote above, is making a reference to Alabama Governor George Wallace.  Wallace was a staunch racist who aided Police Cheif Eugene Connor in loosing police dogs and fire hoses on black protesters demonstrating for an end to segregation in Birmingham, Alabama at the height of the civil rights struggle in the 60′s.  Coverage of Wallace’s actions helped galvanize the nation against racism and segregation, as it should have.  Alinsky compares the president of the University of Rochester to Wallace because the two happen to have last names that are pronounced the same, and because Alinksy was trying to stir up racial tension in order to get Kodak to allow a labor union.

 The resources of the Have-Nots are (1) no money and (2) lots of people.  All right, let’s start from there.  People can show their power by voting.  What else?  Well, they have physical bodies.  How can they use them?  now a melange of ideas begins to appear.  Use the power of the law by making the establishment obey its own rules.  Go outside the experience of the enemy, stay inside the experience of your people.  Emphasize tactics that your people will enjoy.  The threat is usually more terrifying than the tactic itself.  Once all these rules and principles are festering in your imagination they grow into a synthesis.  I suggested we might buy one hundred seats for one of Rochester’s symphony concerts.  We would select a concert in which the music was relatively quiet.  The hundred blacks who would be given the tickets would first be treated to a three-hour pre-concert dinner in the community, in which they would be fed nothing but backed beans, and lots of them; then the people would go to the symphony hall- with obvious consequences.  Imagine the scene when the action began!  (Page 138)

The reaction of the blacks in the ghetto- their laughter when the tactic was proposed- made it clear that the tactic, at least in fantasy, was within their experience.  it connected with their hatred of Whitey.  The one thing that all oppressed people want to do to their oppressors is shit on them.  Here was an approximate way to do this.”  (Page 140)

“O’Hare Airport became the target….You decide to wait until after landing to use the facilities in the terminal….the tactic becomes obvious- we tie up the lavatories.  In the restrooms you drop a dime, enter, push the lock on the door- and you can stay there all day….the ladies’ restrooms could be occupied completely; the only problem in the men’s lavatories would be the stand-up urinals.  This, too, could be taken care of, by having groups busy themselves around the airport and then move in on the stand-up urinals to line up four or five deep whenever a flight arrived….the nation’s first “shit-in”….One can see children yelling at their parents, “Mommy, I’ve got to go,” and desperate mothers surrendering, “All right- well, do it.  Do it right here.”  O’Hare would soon become a shambles.  The whole scene would become unbelievable and the laughter and ridicule would be nationwide.”  (Page 142)

The two tactics above were never utilized but they give further insight into how Alinksy’s mind worked. 

 With the universal principle that the right things are always done for the wrong reasons and the tactical rule that negatives becomes positives, we can understand the following examples….’I was lecturing at a college run by a very conservative, almost fundamentalist Protestant denomination.  Afterward some of the students came to my motel to talk to me.  Their problem was that they couldn’t have any fun on campus.  They weren’t permitted to dance or smoke or have a can of beer…I said, “Fine.  Gum becomes the weapon.  You get two or three hundred students to get two packs of gum each, which is quite a wad.  Then you have them drop it on the campus walks.  This will cause absolute chaos.”‘  (Page 144)

According to Alinsky the above tactic worked; the campus gave in and loosened its standards.

The middle class, too, must learn the nature of the enemy and be able to practice what I have described as mass jujitsu, utilizing the power of the one part of the power structure against the other part.  (Page 148)

The Haves possess and in turn are possessed by power.  Obsessed with the fear of losing power, their every move is dictated by the idea of keeping it….This opens a new vista- not only do we have a whole class determined to keep its power and in constant conflict with the Have-Nots; at the same time, they are in conflict among themselves….Here is the vulnerable belly of the status quo.  (Page 149)

The internecine struggle among the Haves for their individual self-interest is as shortsighted as the internecine struggle among the Have-Nots.  I have on occasion remarked that I feel confident that I could persuade a millionaire on a Friday to subsidize a revolution for Saturday out of which he would make a huge profit on Sunday even though he was certain to be executed on Monday.  (Page 150)

Alinksy’s comment above is the same in principle as the quote by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union:  “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”

Click here to continue on to Marxism, the heart of Community Organization: Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals Part 5

This is part 3 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 4
• Marxism, the heart of Community Organization: Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals Part 5
• Marxism, the heart of Community Organization: Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals Part 6

On with the quotes:

People only understand things in terms of their experience, which means that you must get within their experience.  Further, communication is a two way process.  If you try to get your ideas across to others without paying attention to what they have to say to you, you can forget the whole thing.  I know that I have communicated with the other party when his eyes light up and he responds, “I know exactly what you mean.  I had something like that happen to me once.  Let me tell you about it!”  (Page 81)

When you are trying to communicate and can’t find the point in the experience of the other party at which he can receive and understand, then you must create the experience for him.  (Page 85)

Taken together with the quotes from pages 64 and 68, the above quotes show Alinksy’s method of programming people:  Find an experience that has affected them, interpret it for them in light of an ideology, and then project emotions and memories as needed in order to manipulate a desired response. 

“In mass organization, you can’t go outside of people’s actual experience.  I’ve been asked, for example, why I never talk to a Catholic priest or a Protestant minister or a rabbi in terms of Judaeo-Christian ethic or the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount.  I never talk in those terms.  Instead I approach them on the basis of their own self-interest, the welfare of their church, even its physical property.  If I approached them in a moralistic way, it would be outside their experience, because Christianity and Judaeo-Christianity are outside the experience of organized religion.”  (Page 88)

Communication for persuasion, as in negotiation, is more than entering the area of another person’s experience.  It is getting a fix on his main value or goal and holding your course on that target.  You don’t communicate with anyone purely on the rational facts or ethics of an issue.  (Page 88)

Moses did not try to communicate with God in terms of mercy or justice when God was angry and wanted to destroy the Jews; he moved in on a top value and outmaneuvered God.  It is only when the other party is concerned or feels threatened that he will listen.  (Page 89)

But Moses kept his cool, and he knew that the most important center of his attack would have to be on what he judged to be God’s prime value.  As Moses read it, it was that God wanted to be No. 1.  All through the Old Testament one bumps into “there shall be no other Gods before me,” “Thou shalt not worship false gods,” “I am a jealous and vindictive God,” “Thou shalt not use the Lord’s name in vain.” And so it goes, on and on, including the first part of the Ten Commandments.  Knowing this, Moses took off on his attack.  He began arguing and telling God to cool it.  (At this point, trying to figure our Moses’ motivations, one would wonder whether it was because he was loyal to his own people, or felt sorry for them, or whether he just didn’t want the job of breeding a whole new people, because after all he was pushing 120 and that’s asking a lot.)  (Page 90)

In the above quotes, Alinsky takes a Bible passage from Exodus 32 – a passage where God Himself is teaching Moses about justice and mercy – and wrongly interprets it to imply that God is not God, or that at the very least God is stupid.

Much of the time, though, the organizer will have a pretty good idea of what the community should be doing, and he will want to suggest, maneuver, and persuade the community toward that action.  He will not ever seem to tell the community what to do; instead he will use loaded questions.  (Page 91)

Every weakness of every proposed tactic is probed by questions.  Eventually someone will suggest 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.  (Page 92)

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.  (Page 93)

The above quote is a fascinating look into how Alinsky viewed those he was helping.

I have always believed that birth control and abortion are personal rights to be exercised by the individual….I remember discussing it with the then Catholic Chancellor.  By then the argument was no longer limited to questions such as, “How much longer do you think the Catholic Church can hang on to this archaic notion and still survive?”  I remember seeing five priests in the waiting room who wanted to see the chancellor, and knowing his contempt for each one of them, I said, “Look, I’ll prove to you that you really do believe in birth control even though you are making all kinds of noises against it,” and then I opened the door, saying, “Take a look out there.  Can you look at them and tell me you oppose birth control?”  (Page 94)

“…Samuel Adams, at the time when he was allegedly planning the Boston Massacre; he was quoted as saying that there ought to be no less than three or four killed so that we will have martyrs for the Revolution, but there must be no more than ten, because after you get beyond that number we no longer have martyrs but simply a sewage problem.”  (Page 96)

Note:  I have never heard the above story except for Alinsky’s book and one other book written in 1994 where the writer borrows the story from Alinsky almost verbatim.

If the organizer begins with an affirmation of his love for people, he promptly turns everyone off.  If, on the other hand, he begins with a denunciation of exploiting employers, slum landlords, police shakedowns, gouging merchants, he is inside their experience and they accept him.  (Page 98)

Power means strength, whereas love is a human frailty the people mistrust.  It is a sad fact of life that power and fear are the fountainheads of faith.  (Page 99)

The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him, as a “dangerous enemy”.  The word “enemy” is sufficient to put the organizer on the side of the people, to identify him with the Have-Nots, but it is not enough to endow him with the special qualities that induce fear and thus give him the means to establish his own power against the establishment.  Here again we find that it is power and fear that are essential to the development of faith.”  (Page 100)

The City Council of Churches, representing the Protestant churches, approached me and asked me if I would be available to help organize….I replied, then, that the churches had a right to invite us to organize their people in their neighborhoods, but that they had no right to speak for, let alone invite anyone into, the…community.  I emphasized that we were not a colonial power like the churches who sent their missionaries everywhere whether they were invited or not.  (Page 101)

The organizer’s job is to inseminate an invitation for himself, to agitate, introduce ideas, get people pregnant with hope and a desire for change and to identify you as the person most qualified for this purpose.  Here the tool of the organizer, in the agitation leading to the invitation as well as the actual organization and education of the local leadership, is the use of the question, the Socratic method:  ORGANIZER: Do you live over in that slummy building?  ANSWER: Yeah.  What about it?  ORGANIZER: What the hell do you live there for?…  (Page 103)

Note:  Alinsky is advocating agitation because he believes the only morality is that which furthers taking from the Haves and giving to the Have Nots. 

Something else that comes with experience is the knowledge that the resolution of a particular problem will bring on another problem.  The organizer may know this, but he doesn’t mention it….He knows too that what we fight for now as matters of life and death will soon be forgotten, and changed situations will change desires and issues.  (Page 106)

Organizing, one must be aware of the tremendous importance of understanding the part played by rationalization….On a mass basis it is the community residents’ and leadership’s justification for why they have not been able to do anything until the organizer appeared.  It is primarily a subconscious feeling that the organizer is looking down on them, wondering why they did not have the intelligence, so to speak, and the insights, to realize that through organization and the securing of power they could have resolved many of the problems they lived with for these many years- why did they have to wait for him?  With this going on in their minds they throw up a whole series of arguments against various organizational procedures, but they are not real arguments, simply attempts to justify the fact that they have not moved or organized in the past.  (Page 109)

Remember that according to Alinsky’s method of programming, the organizer is trying to create a subjective reality and experiences for those being led by projecting emotions onto past events in order to manipulate a desired response.  If the people push back against a plan, Alinsky is saying the organizer’s response should be in reference to the people’s place of wounding and should belittle them, even if only in the organizer’s mind, so the organizer can push them into accepting the plan anyway.

The organizer’s job is to begin to build confidence and hope in the idea of organization and thus in the people themselves….It is almost like taking a prize-fighter up the road to the championship – you have to very carefully and selectively pick his opponents, knowing full well that certain defeats would be demoralizing….An example occurred in the early days of Back of the Yards, the first community I attempted to organize….we staged a cinch fight.  One of the major problems in Back of the Yards in those days was an extraordinarily high rate of infant mortality….about ten or fifteen years before I came to the neighborhood the Infant Welfare Society had been expelled….After checking it out, I found out that all we had to do to get Infant Welfare Society medical services back in to the neighborhood was to ask for it.  However, I kept this information to myself.  We called an emergency meeting, recommended we go in committee to the society’s offices and demand medical services. Our strategy was to prevent the officials from saying anything; to start banging on the desk and demanding that we get the services, never permitting them to interrupt us or make any statement.  The only time we would let them talk was after we got through.  With this careful indoctrination we stormed into the Infant Welfare Society downtown….All the time the poor woman was desperately trying to say, “Why of course you can have it.  We’ll start immediately.”  But she never had a chance to say anything and finally we ended up in a storm of “And we will not take ‘No’ for an answer!”  At which point she said, “Well, I’ve been trying to tell you…” and I cut in, demanding, “Is it yes or is it no?”  She said, “Well of course it’s yes.”  I said, “That’s all we wanted to know.”  And we stormed out of the place.  All the way back to the Back of the Yards you could hear the members of the committee saying, “Well, that’s the way to get things done:  you just tell them off and don’t give them a chance to say anything.”

In the quote above, Alinksy is arrogant and boastful about the way he is able to deceive members of the community and manipulate his followers.

…if your function is to attack apathy and get people to participate it is necessary to attack the prevailing patterns of organized living in the community.  The first step in community organization is community disorganization….The organizer dedicated to changing the life of a particular community must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression.  (Page 116)

An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent; provide a channel into which the people can angrily pour their frustrations….When those prominent in the status quo turn and label you an “agitator” they are completely correct, for that is, in one word, your function- to agitate to the point of conflict.  (Page 117)

Click here to continue on to Marxism, the heart of Community Organization: Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals Part 4

Language is the single most important issue facing conservatives today. It’s why we are losing the legislative, judicial and public opinion battles over abortion, immigration, family matters, education, entitlements, demographic issues, and more.

For example, to simply use the terms “pro-choice” and “pro-life” is to imply that abortion is OK; that “pro-choice” people want to let everyone choose, and “pro-life” people are simply a sub-set who choose against it. That is how the issue has been legally treated since 1973 by both sides of the aisle. The language the conservative side of the aisle should use instead is, “we are against taking an individual’s life.”  We should should make a point of rejecting the terms “pro-choice” and “pro-life” in conversation and correcting them to be “for taking individual’s lives” and “against taking individuals lives.”

The same principle applies in the definition-of-marriage debate. If we use the term “homosexual” as a noun instead of an adjective we are implying that a person can actually “be” their behavior. The truth is that all people have the gift of sexuality and simply decide how to use it. Using the terms “homosexual” or “gay” to define what a person is implies that the channeling of sexuality isn’t what someone does; that it’s not behavior. It also implies that a person choosing to use their sexuality in a given manner should be able to have that method of use protected as a special status, the same as protection for an inherent trait such as national origen . The terms a conservative should use instead are , “a person who practices homosexual behavior,” or, “a person who behaves homosexually.”  If we were careful to always make this distinction between people’s actions and what they are – simply fellow individuals – the entire nature of the debate would start to change.

Another example of terms that imply a false pretext are the words “race” and “racial”. Any good anthropologist will tell you that that there is no such thing as a separate human “race”. Instead, we are all of one race – the human race – and we all have familial traits and cultural identities. As far as variations of skin color, hair type, etc., you can never break down people into buckets on that basis because for every shade of skin tone or color of hair, etc., you will always find one tribe, one family, one person on the earth who is exactly in-between the trait you are trying to differentiate on. Now racial thinking is a hard problem to correct because everyone has been conditioned in society to identify with racial distinctions and to use racial language when talking about demographic issues. A good way for conservatives to start correcting this, though, would be to start replacing racial language with phrases that call out the specific situation or cultural identity and nationality being discussed. “Discrimination on the basis of skin color…” “Reparations to descendants of chattel slavery…” “Segregation on the basis of skin color…” Etc.

This is part 2 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 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
• Marxism, the heart of Community Organization: Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals Part 6

On with the quotes:

The means and end moralists, constantly obsessed with the ethics of the means used by the Have-Nots against the Haves, should search themselves as to their real political position.  In fact, they are passive – but real – allies of the Haves.  (Page 25)

I present here a series of rules pertaining to the ethics of means and ends:  first, that one’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue.  When we are not directly concerned our morality overflows….The second rule of ethics of means and ends is that the judgment of the ethics of means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgment….Those who opposed the Nazi conquerors regarded the Resistance as a secret army of selfless, patriotic idealists, courageous beyond expectation and willing to sacrifice their lives to their moral convictions.  To the occupation authorities, however, these people were lawless terrorists, murderers, saboteurs, assassins….To us the Declaration of Independence is a glorious document and an affirmation of human rights.  To the British, on the other hand, it was a statement notorious for its deceit by omission.  (Pages 26, 27.  Emphasis is Alinsky’s)

Alinsky continues on with nine more rules of the ethics of means and ends – an entire chapter’s worth – and the message throughout the chapter is that there is no such thing as right and wrong when it comes to politics and government.  Every example he uses to explain these rules of ethics is calcuated to descredit the  U.S. government, U.S. Allies or the Founding Fathers.  See Alinsky pages 28-47.

…by using combinations of words such as ‘harnessing the energy’ instead of the single word ‘power’, we begin to dilute the meaning; and as we use purifying synonyms, we dissolve the bitterness, the anguish, the hate and love, the agony and the triumph attached to these words, leaving an aseptic imitation of life.  In the politics of life we are concerned with the slaves and the Caesars, not the vestal virgins….it is a determination not to detour around reality.  (Page 49)

I agree with Nietzsche’s statement in The Genealogy of Morals on this point:

‘Why stroke the hypersensitive ears of our modern weaklings?  Why yield even a single step…to the Tartuffery [i.e., hypocritical piety] of words?  For us psychologists that would involve a Tartuffery of action…For a psychologist today shows his good taste (others may say his integrity) in this, if in anything, that he resists the shamefully moralized manner of speaking which makes all modern judgments about men and things slimy.’

I do not propose to be trapped by tact at the expense of truth.  (Page 50, Definition of the word Tartuffery added)

There is a non-sequitur logic problem with the above statement because the only truth Alinsky recognizes throughout the book is the idea of class struggle, a viewpoint that interprets everything through Marxist ideology and values.  Yet in the Prologue (on page xv) Alinsky says that, “all values and factors are relative, fluid, and changing.” 

The moment the word power is mentioned it is as though hell had been opened, exuding the stench of the devil’s cesspool of corruption.  It evokes images of cruelty, dishonesty, selfishness, arrogance, dictatorship, and abject suffering.  (Page 50, Emphasis is Alinsky’s)

The myth of altruism as a motivating factor in our behavior could arise and survive only in a society bundled in the sterile gauze of New England Puritanism and Protestant morality and tied together with the ribbons of Madison Avenue public relations.  It is one of the classic American fairy tales.  (Page 53)

…the United States in World War II fervently allied with Russia against Germany, Japan, and Italy, and shortly after victory fervently allied with its former enemies – Germany, Japan, and Italy – against its former ally, the U.S.S.R.  These drastic shifts of self-interest can be rationalized only under a huge, limitless umbrella of general “moral” principles such as liberty, justice, freedom, a law higher than man-made law, and so on.  Morality, so-called, becomes the continuum as self-interest shifts….With one breath we point out that we are utterly opposed to communism, but that we love the Russian people (loving people is in keeping with the tenets of our civilization).  What we hate is the atheism and the suppression of the individual that we attributed as characteristics substantiating the ‘immorality’ of communism.  On this we base our powerful opposition.  We do not admit the actual fact: our own self-interest.  (Page 55)

Another attack on the U.S.;  Alinksy is implying that the U.S. is just as corrupt and self-seeking as the communist countries, but we deceptively cloaks our self-interest in terms of morality we don’t really believe in - and so actually we are worse than the communists.

It is interesting that the communists do not seem to concern themselves with these moral justifications for their naked acts of self-interest.  In a way, this becomes embarrassing too; it makes us feel that they may be laughing at us, knowing well that we are motivated by self-interest too, but are determined to disguise it.  We feel that they may be laughing at us as they struggle in the sea of world politics, stripped to their shorts, while we flop around, fully dressed in our white tie and tails.  (Page 58)

A free and open society is an on-going conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises  – which then become the start for the continuation of conflict, compromise, and on ad infinitum.  (Page 59)

What Alinsky is describing here are the principles of Syncretism and Marxist Dialectics, which are part of the standard Marxist model for changing a society:  Create a conflict, any conflict.  Make it come to a head and then offer to solve the issue through compromise that benefits your side a little.  If you make 5% progress every time, then after arbitrarily manufacturing 20 conflicts, you will have reached your goal.  And so on.

 The leader is driven by the desire for power, while the organizer is driven by the desire to create.  The organizer is in a true sense reaching for the highest level for which man can reach – to create, to be a ‘great creator,’ to play God.  (Page 61)

Conflict is another bad word in the general opinion.  This is a consequence of two influences in our society:  one influence is organized religion, which has espoused a rhetoric of ‘turning the other cheek’ and has quoted the Scriptures as the devil never would have dared because of their major previous function of supporting the Establishment.  The second influence is probably the most subversive and insidious one, and it has permeated the American scene in the last generation:  that is Madison Avenue public relations, middle-class moral hygiene, which has made conflict or controversy something negative and undesirable.  (Page 61)

Again we see that Alinsky views religion – and the middle class – as being corrupt.   He sees them through the Marxist world view as simply being vehicles for the continuation of power of the Haves over the Have-nots.

The education of an organizer requires frequent long conferences on organizational problems, analysis of power patterns, communications, conflict tactics, the education and development of community leaders, and the methods for introduction of new issues.  (Page 64)

Always the potential organizer’s personal experience was used as the basis for teaching.  Always after the problem was solved there would be long sessions in which a postmortem would dissect the specifics and then stitch them together into a synthesis, a body of concepts.  All experiences are significant only insofar as they are related to and illuminating a central concept.  (Page 64)

Alinsky is interpreting people’s experiences for them;  this is a common programming technique which cults use and Alinsky is using it the same way (see the second quote below as well.)

Then there were those who had trained in schools of social work to become community organizers.  Community organization 101, 102, and 103.  They had done ‘field work’ and acquired even a specialized vocabulary.  They call it ‘C.O.’ (which to us means Conscientious Objector) or ‘Community Org.’  (which to us evokes a huge Freudian fantasy).  Basically the difference between their goals and ours is that they organize to get rid of four-legged rats and stop there; we organize to get rid of four-legged rats so we can get on to removing two-legged rats.  (Page 67)

I have improvised teaching approaches.  For example, knowing that one can only communicate and understand in terms of one’s experience, we had to construct experience for our students….Happenings become experiences when they are digested, when they are reflected on, related to general patterns, and synthesized….Our job was to shovel those happenings back into the student’s system so he could digest them into experience.  (Page 68)

The organizer, in his constant hunt for patterns, universalities, and meaning, is always building up a body of experience.  (Page 70)

Here is a list of the ideal elements of an organizer….Curiosity…He is driven by a compulsive curiosity that knows no limits….The organizer becomes a carrier of the contagion of curiosity, for a people asking ‘why’ are beginning to rebel.  The questioning of the hitherto accepted ways and values is the reformation state that precedes and is so essential to revolution.  Here, I couldn’t disagree more with Freud.  In a letter to Marie Bonaparte, he said, ‘The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick.’  (Page 72)

Alinksy is looking for someone who will channel people’s curiosity into rebellion against authority, and who will question the value of human life.  He continues to expand on this in the following pages:

Irreverence….’Just because this has always been the way, is this the best or right way of life, the best or right religion, political or economic value, morality?’  To the questioner nothing is sacred.  He detests dogma, defies any finite definition of morality, rebels against any repression of a free, open search for ideas no matter where they may lead.  (Page 73)

Imagination….There was a time when I believed that the basic quality that an organizer needed was a deep sense of anger and injustice and that this was the prime motivation that kept him going.  I know that it is something else: this abnormal imagination that sweeps him into a close identification with mankind and projects him into its plight.  He suffers with them and becomes angry at the injustice and begins to organize rebellion.  (Pages 73, 74)

A sense of humor….The organizer, searching with a free and open mind void of certainty, hating dogma, finds laughter not just a way to maintain his sanity but also a key to understanding life.  Essentially, life is a tragedy; and the converse of tragedy is comedy…the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule.  A sense of humor enables him to maintain his perspective and see himself for what he really is:  a bit of dust that burns for a fleeting second.  A sense of humor is incompatible with the complete acceptance of any dogma, any religious, political, or economic prescription for salvation.  (Pages 74, 75)

It’s amazing what dark and hopeless view of life Alinsky had.  It’s so ironic, hearing stuff like this, that Marx thought, “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness.”  Keep in mind that the atheist has no more factual basis for the reinforcement of their belief than the religionist has for theirs; the atheist is choosing to have faith that darkness and hopelessness are the nature of reality.

For a variety of reasons, the organizer must develop multiple issues.  First, a wide-based membership can only be build on many issues.  (Page 76)

In a multiple-issue organization, each person is saying to the other, ‘I can’t get what I want alone and neither can you.  Let’s make a deal:  I’ll support you for what you want and you support me for what I want.’  Those deals become the program.  Not only does a single – or even dual – issue organization condemn you to a small organization, it is axiomatic that a single-issue organization won’t last.  (Page 77)

In the above two quotes, Alinksy is talking about a core strategy.  Because all morals are fluid and changing, he believes, therefore the only causes which really matter are anything that you can use to further your agenda.  The program is literally made up of anything so long as its components can be used as paybacks to get people to support you and give you power and influence.

An organizer must become sensitive to everything that is happening around him.  He is always learning, and every incident teaches him something.  He notices that when a bus has only a few empty seats, the crowd trying to get on will push and shove; if there are many empty seats the crowd will be courteous and considerate; and he muses that in a world of opportunities for all there would be a change in human behavior for the good.  (Page 78)

In response to Alinsky’s quote above, I would say that first, some people just don’t respond to opportunity.  Second, he’s mistakenly equating equal distribution of goods (which is inherently unjust) with equal opportunity.  Pretend a little brother breaks a toy that both he and his older brother play with, and the mother comes to the older brother and says, “Tommy, I know your younger brother broke this toy, but he doesn’t have any money and you’re getting a $5 a week allowance.  So I think it would be fair to take your $5 for the next four weeks and use it to replace the toy.”  What’s the older brother going to say?  Even a child knows that to do this would be unjust because it violates the concepts of personal responsibility and property ownership that every person is born with.

This brings up a good point:  The social planner views people as being products of their environment rather than being products of their own freewill.  As such, the social planner believes that people don’t have personal responsibility for anything and that it is society’s duty to compensate people for perceived social injustices because it’s society’s fault that they are criminal, unemployed, poverty-stricken, or what have you.  This thinking leads to all kinds of injustices such as people who are clearly at fault not being convicted, or parties that are not at fault but happen to have deep pockets being held responsible for the actions of other parties, etc.

Click here to continue on to 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 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
• Marxism, the heart of Community Organization: Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals Part 6

I recently read Saul Alinsky’s book Rules for Radicals, and while I was reading it I found myself making highlights and writing notes in the side margins. 

Alinsky is a primary influence on President Barack Obama, whose first job was working as a community organizer for an offshoot of the Saul Alinsky network, the Developing Communities Project.  President Obama said of Alinsky, “[he] understated the degree to which people’s hopes and dreams…were just as important in organizing as people’s self-interest.”

President Obama is one of many national figures who have been influenced by Saul Alinsky.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was personally offered a job by Alinsky when she was in college.  At the time she was in the process of writing a year long thesis about his philosophy and strategies.

Here are select quotes from the book, written in 1971, along with some of my responses written in the margins while reading.  My copy of the book is the Vintage Books Edition, originally printed in October 1989.  

Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgement to the very first radical:  from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins- or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that at least he won his own kingdom -Lucifer.  (page ix)

Few of us survived the Joe McCarthy holocaust of the early 1950s and of those there were even fewer whose understanding and insights had developed beyond the dialectical materialism of orthodox Marxism.  (Page xiii)

The political panaceas of the past, such as the revolutions in Russia and China, have become the same old stuff under a different name.  The search for freedom does not seem to have any road or destination.  (Page xiv)

Note:  Alinsky calls the Russian and Chinese revolutions panaceas.

Men have always yearned for a sought direction by setting up religions, inventing political philosophies, creating scientific systems like Newton’s, or formulating ideologies of various kinds.  This is what is behind the common cliche, “getting it all together” -despite the realization that all values and factors are relative, fluid, and changing.  (Page xv)

The above thought echo’s Marx’s belief that, “[religion] is the opium of the people…”  

Remember that we are talking about revolution, not revelation; you can miss the target by shooting too high as well as too low.  First, there are no rules for revolution any more than there are rules for love or rules for happiness.  (Page xviii)

Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people.  They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future.  This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution.  To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system.  (Page xix)

‘Power comes out of the barrel of a gun!’ is an absurd rallying cry when the other side has all the guns.  Lennin was a pragmatist; when he returned to what was then Petrograd from exile, he said that the Bolsheviks stood for getting power through the ballot but would reconsider after they got the guns!  (Page xx)

The above statement is a side note Alinsky makes when listing a series of revolutionary sayings from the 60′s that he thinks have become outdated and should be avoided because they turn people off.  He’s basically saying he agrees with the quote, but implies that it shouldn’t be used because it’s not effective.

Men don’t like to step abruptly out of the security of familiar experience; they need a bridge to cross from their own experience to a new way.  A revolutionary organizer must shake up the prevailing patterns of their lives- agitate, create disenchantment and discontent with the current values, to produce, if not a passion for change, at least a passive, affirmative, non-challenging climate.  (Page xxi)

…gassing and violence by the Chicago Police and National Guard during the 1968 Democratic Convention….It hurt me to see the American army with drawn bayonets advancing on American boys and girls.  But the answer I gave the young radicals seemed to me the only realistic one:  ‘Do one of three things.  One, go find a wailing wall and feel sorry for yourselves.  Two, go psycho and start bombing-but this will only swing people to the right.  Three, learn a lesson.  Go home, organize, build power and at the next convention, you be the delegates.’  (Page xxiii, Emphasis is Alinsky’s)

This is the first example in a pattern of using negative examples about the U.S., Christianity and the Founding Father’s throughout the book.  Alinsky seemed to be fixated throughout his writing with trying to convince his readers that the U.S., Christians and the Founders were all entirely corrupt and hypocritical.  By contrast most of the comments he makes about Russia and China are either neutral or positive.

As for Vietnam, I would like to see our nation be the first in the history of man to publicly say, ‘We were wrong!  What we did was horrible…’  Such an admission would shake up the foreign policy concepts of all nations and open the door to a new international order.  (Page xxiv)

The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power.  Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.  In this book we are concerned with how to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people; to realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace, cooperation, equal and full opportunities for education, full and useful employment, health…  (Page 3)

In the first paragraph of the book, in one broad stroke Alinsky divides humanity into the Marxist constructs of the “Haves” and the ”Have-Nots”, and then pits them against one another.  Then in explaining this he implies that the democratic dream of equality means the rationing of goods rather than equality of opportunity and the right to self-govern.

 Dogma is the enemy of human freedom.  Dogma must be watched for and apprehended at every turn and twist of the revolutionary movement.  The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with complete certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain and injustice.  (Page 4)

To diminish the danger that ideology will deteriorate into dogma…no ideology should be more specific than that of America’s founding fathers:  ‘For the general welfare.’  (Page 4)

Alinsky’s  implication is that the phrase “general Welfare” in the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted as collectivism rather than guarding  political individualism by preventing special-interest plunder.

We have permitted a suicidal situation to unfold wherein revolution and communism have become one.  These pages are committed to splitting that political atom, separating the exclusive identification of communism with revolution.  If it were possible for the Have-Nots of the world to recognize and accept the idea that revolution did not inevitably mean hate and war, cold or hot, from the United States, that alone would be a great revolution in world politics and the future of man.  (Page 9)

Believing in people, the radical has the job of organizing them so that they will have the power and opportunity to best meet each unforeseeable future crisis as they move ahead in their eternal search for those values of equality, justice, freedom, peace, a deep concern for the preciousness of human life, and all those rights and values propounded by Judaeo-Christianity and the democratic political tradition.  Democracy is not an end but the best means toward achieving these values.  This is my credo for which I live and, if need be, die.  (Page 11)

Saul’s credo paraphrased (and the quotes I present from the book bear this out):  There are no absolute values or right and wrong; the only thing that matters is a series of endless revolutions in which the Have-Nots, searching for undefined values, seize power, destroy the establishment and redistributed all goods and services evenly.  Democracy is not an end in-and-of itself; it is simply the most expedient vehicle currently available for bringing about revolution.

Political realists see the world as it is:  an arena of power politics moved primarily by perceived immediate self-interests, where morality is rhetorical rationale for expedient action and self-interest.  (Page 12)

We live in a world where ‘good’ is a value dependent on whether we want it.  In the world as it is, the solution of each problem inevitably creates a new one.  In the world as it is there are no permanent happy or sad endings.  Such endings belong to the world of fantasy, the world as we would like it to be, the world of children’s fairy tails where, ‘they lived happily ever after.’  In the world as it is, the stream of events surges endlessly onward with death as the only terminus.  One never reaches the horizon; it is always just beyond, every beckoning onward; it is the pursuit of life itself.  This is the world as it is.  This is where you start.  (Page 14)

The above statements, along with several others in the book, line up with the Marxist moral frameworks Perspectivism and Nihilism.

Life seems to lack rhyme or reason or even a shadow of order unless we approach it with the key of converses.  Seeing everything in its duality, we being to get some dim clues to direction and what it’s all about….We then recognize that for every positive there is a negative, and that there is nothing positive without its concomitant negative, nor any political paradise without its negative side.  (Page 15)

The idea Alinsky is promoting above is moral dualism.

The grasp of the duality of all phenomena is vital in our understanding of politics.  It frees one from the myth that one approach is positive and another negative.  There is no such thing in life.  One man’s positive is another man’s negative.  (Page 17)

This is the kind of rationale which led Lenin to say in 1920, “We repudiate all morality that proceeds from supernatural ideas or ideas that are outside class conceptions. Morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of class war. Everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting social order and for uniting the proletariat.” 

 The setting for the drama of change has never varied.  Mankind has been and is divided into three parts:  the Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Have-a-Little, Want Mores.  (Page 18)

They [the Have-Nots] hate the establishment of the Haves with its arrogant opulence, its police, its courts, and its churches.  Justice, morality, law, and order, are mere words when used by the Haves, which justify and secure their status quo.  (Page 19)

Yet in the conflicting interests and contradictions within the Have-a-Little, Want Mores is the genesis of creativity.  Out of this class have come, with few exceptions, the great world leaders of change of the past centuries:  Moses, Paul of Tarsus, Martin Luther, Robespierre, Georges Danton, Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon Bonaparte, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Nikolai Lenin, Mahatma Gandhi, Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-tung, and others.  (Page 19)

Note that as Alnisky chronologically tracks the history of  ”great world leaders of change”, the most recent leaders in his list are mostly Communist revolutinaries.

A major revolution to be won in the immediate future is the dissipation of man’s illusion that his own welfare can be separate from that of all others….it was a disservice to the future to separate morality from man’s daily desires and elevate it to a plane of altruism and self-sacrifice.  The fact is that it is not man’s ‘better nature’ but his self-interest that demands that he be his brother’s keeper.  We now live in a world where no man can have a loaf of bread while his neighbor has none.  If he does not share his bread, he dare not sleep, for his neighbor will kill him….I believe man is about to learn that the most practical life is the moral life and that the moral life is the only road to survival.  He is beginning to learn that he will either share part of his material wealth or lose all of it….This is the low road to morality.  There is no other.  (Page 23, Emphasis is Alinsky’s)

To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles.  The real arena is corrupt and bloody.  Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life.  (Page 24)

…in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one’s individual conscience and the good of mankind.  The choice must always be for the latter.  Action is for mass salvation and not for the individual’s personal salvation.  He who sacrifices the mass good for his personal conscience has a peculiar conception of ‘personal salvation’; he doesn’t care enough for people to be ‘corrupted’ for them.  (Page 25)

The above thought mirrors the earlier quote by Lenin that the only valid morality is that which results in “anihilation of the old exploiting social order.”  Of course the danger of separating morality from the Judeo-Christian belief in the value of the individual is that if only the good of the whole matters, then taking lives frivolously for the perceived good of the state is the next logical next step, as we saw in Hitler’s Final Solution, Stalin’s Holodomor, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, Pol Pot’s Killing Fields, etc.  This mass killing winds up happening every time an atheistic state takes power, and it’s already starting to happen in the U.S. in the form of abortion.  By contrast, the Judeo-Christian viewpoint teaches that man is made in the image of God and that the State alone can execute capital punishment, and then only when punishing capital crimes or legitimately defending the citizens from some mortal threat ( treason, war, etc.)

Click here to continue on to Marxism, the heart of Community Organization: Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals Part 2

The story is at:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/7646540/Baby-boy-survives-for-nearly-two-days-after-abortion.html

How passionately I long for the day when society looks back on abortion the way we now look back on slavery and say:  What were we thinking?  How could we ever been so callous and unjust to fellow human individuals?

Republicans could start doing this.  We could begin saving lives after 37 years of effectively doing nothing (we haven’t saved a single child’s life from abortion in all that time of voting for “pro-life” candidates) by making the following language our official stance:

We believe every human individual is precious and must be respected in our culture and our laws. We stand with the founders in declaring that everyone has a fundamental, unalienable right to life. We support:· Protection of innocent human life, pre-born or born, from the moment of conception through all stages of life, sickness and disability; and

· Legislative prohibitions on human cloning, infanticide, euthanasia, eugenics, assisted suicide and fertility or contraceptive techniques that involve the destruction of a human individual; and

· Our official stand on abortion is that the Supreme Court is limited to appellate jurisdiction in cases not involving federal officials or the States directly as plaintiffs or defendants, and therefore Roe vs. Wade applied only to Roe and Wade.  It is therefore the duty of all government officials to ignore Roe vs. Wade since it is not the law of the land.  Furthermore, if the Supreme Court did rule in favor of abortion in a case involving federal officials or the States directly, government officials would still be bound to ignore the ruling because it would explicitly violate the Fourth and Fifth Amendments protection of life and therefore be unconstitutional.

My reason for suggesting this as official language for the Republican party is this:  The above interpretation of the constitutionality of the issue (which is the correct interpretation, by the way) would allow us to act in deeds that were in keeping with our beliefs.  The bottom line would be, “Listen, the Constitution protects individual’s lives, and therefore any legislation, executive proclamation or judicial ruling that deprives human individuals of life without the due process of law is inherently unconstitutional and should be ignored.”  That is a valid use of the separation of powers and that is how Republicans should respond to Roe vs. Wade:  It doesn’t exist because it’s not really law.  It’s unconstitutional.  If we had been doing this for the past four decades we could have saved literally millions of innocent lives.