Marxism, the heart of Community Organization: Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals Part 1

This is part 1 of 6 parts.  Also see:

• 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