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Books by Saul Alinsky
Reveille for Radicals /
John L. Lewis: An Uuauthorized Biography
Rules for
Radicals
A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals
By Saul D. Alinsky
Prologue
(excerpts)
Opening Statement
THE REVOLUTIONARY FORCE today has two
targets, moral as well as material. Its young protagonists are
one moment reminiscent of the idealistic early Christians, yet
they also urge violence and cry, “Burn the system down!”
They have no illusions about the system, but plenty of illusions
about the way to change our world. It is to this point that I
have written this book. These are written in desperation, partly
because it is what they do and will do that will give meaning to
what I and the radicals of my generation have done with our
lives.
They are now the vanguard, and they had to
start almost from scratch. Few of us survived the Joe McCarthy
holocaust of the early 1950s and those there were even fewer
whose understanding the insights had developed beyond the
dialectical materialism of orthodox Marxism. My fellow radicals
who were supposed to pass on the torch of experience and
insights to a new generation just were not there. As the young
looked at the society around them, it was all, in their words
“materialistic, decadent, bourgeois in the values, bankrupt
and violent.” Is it any wonder that they rejected us in toto.
Today's Generation
Today’s generation is desperately trying to make some
sense out of their lives and out of the world. Most of them are
products of the middle class. They have rejected their
materialistic backgrounds, the goal of a well-paid job, suburban
home, automobile, country club membership, first-class travel,
status, security, and everything that meant success to their
parents. They have had it. They watched it lead to their parents
to tranquilizers, alcohol, long-term-endurance marriages, or
divorces, high blood pressure, ulcers, frustration, and the
disillusionment of “the good life.”
They have seen the almost unbelievable idiocy
of our political leadership—in the past political leaders,
ranging from the mayors to governors to the White House, were
regarded with respect and almost reverence; today they are
viewed with contempt. This negativism now extends to all
institutions, from the police and the courts to “the system:
itself. We are living in a world of mass media with daily
exposes society’s innate hypocrisy, its contradictions and the
apparent failure of almost every facet of our social and
political life.
The young have seen their “activist”
participatory democracy turn into its antithesis—nihilistic
bombing and murder. 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. The young are inundated
with a barrage of information and facts so overwhelming that the
world has come to seem an utter bedlam, which has them spinning
in a frenzy, looking for what man has always looked for from the
beginning of time, a way of life that has some meaning or sense.
A way of life means a certain degree of order where
things have some relationship and can be pieced together into a
system that at least provides some clues to what life is about.
Men have always yearned for and 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 cliché, “getting it
together”—despite the realization that all values and
factors are relative, fluid, and changing, and that it will be
possible to “get it all together” only relatively. The
elements will shift and move together just like the changing
pattern in a turning kaleidoscope.
In the past the “world,” whether in its
physical or intellectual terms, was much smaller, simpler, and
more orderly. It inspired credibility. Today everything is to
complex as to be incomprehensible. What sense does it make for
men to walk on the moon while other mean are waiting on welfare
lines, or in Vietnam killing and dying for a corrupt
dictatorship in the name of freedom? These are the days when man
has his hands on the sublime while he is up to his hips in the
muck of madness. The establishment in many ways is as suicidal
as some of the far left, except that they are infinitely more
destructive than the far left can ever be. The outcome of the
hopelessness and despair is morbidity. There are a feeling of
death hanging over the nation.
Today’s generation faces all this and says, “I
don’t want to spend my life the way my family and their
friends have. I want to do something, to create, to be men, to
‘do my own thing,’ to live. The older generation doesn’t
understand and worse doesn’t want to. I don’t want to be
just a piece of data to be fed into a computer or a statistic in
a public opinion poll, just a voter carrying a credit card.”
To the younger the world seems insane and falling apart.
Older Generation—The Generational Gap
On the other side is the older generation,
whose members are no less confused. If they are not as vocal or
conscious, it may be because they can escape to a past when the
world was simpler. They can still cling to the old values in the
simple hope that everything will work out somehow, some way.
That the younger generation will “straighten out” with the
passing of time. Unable to come to grips with the world as it
is, they retreat in any confrontation with the younger
generation with that infuriating cliché, “when
you get older you’ll understand.”
One wonders at their reaction if some
youngster were to reply, “When
you get younger which will never be then
you’ll understand, so of course you’ll never understand.
Those of the older generation who claim a desire to understand
say, “When I talk to my kids or their friends I’ll say to
them, ‘Look, I believe what you have to tell me is important
and I respect it. You call me a square and say that ‘I’m not
with it’ or ‘I don’t know where it at’ or ‘I don’t
know where the scene is’ and all the rest of the words you
use. Well, I’m going to agree with you.
So suppose you tell me. What do you want?
What do you want? What do you mean when you say ‘I want to do
my thing.’ What the hell is your thing? You say you want a
better world. Like what? And don’t tell me a world of peace
and love and all the rest of that stuff because people are
people, as you will find out when you get older—I’m sorry, I
didn’t mean to say anything about ‘when you get older.’ I
really do respect what you have to say. Now why don’t you
answer me? Do you know what you want? Do you know what you’re
talking about? Why can’t we get together?’ ”
And that is what we call the generation gap.
What
the Young Generation Wants
What the present generation wants is what all
generations have always wanted—a meaning, a sense of what the
world and life are—a chance to strive for some sort of order.
If the young were now writing our Declaration
of Independence they would begin, “When the course of inhuman
events …” and their bill of particulars would range from
Vietnam to our black, Chicano, and Puerto Rican ghettos, to the
migrant workers, to Appalachia, to the hate, ignorance, disease,
and starvation in the world. Such a bill of particulars would
emphasize the absurdity of human affairs and the forlornness and
emptiness, the fearful loneliness that comes from not knowing if
there is any meaning to our lives.
When they talk of values they’re asking for
a reason. They are searching for an answer, at least for a time,
man’s greatest question, “Why am I here?”
The young react to their chaotic world in
different ways. Some panic and run, rationalizing that the
system is going to collapse anyway of its own rot and corruption
and so they’re copping out, going hippie or yippie, taking
drugs, trying communes, anything to escape. Others went for
pointless sure-loser confrontations so they could fortify their
rationalization and say, “Well, we tried and did our part”
and then they copped out too. Others sick with guilt and not
knowing where to turn or what to do went berserk. These were the
Weathermen and their like: they took the grand cop-out, suicide.
To these I have nothing to say or give but pity—and in some
cases contempt, for such as those who leave their dead comrades
and take off for Algeria or other points.
Rules for Radicals
What I have to say in this book is not the arrogance of
unsolicited advice. It is the experience and counsel that so
many young people have questioned me about through all-night
sessions on hundreds of campuses in America. It is for those
young radicals who are committed to fight, committed to life.
Remember 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, but
there are rules for radicals who want to change their world;
there are certain central concepts of action in human politics
that operate regardless of the scene or the time. To know these
is basic to a pragmatic attack on the system. These rules make
the difference between being a realistic radical and being a
rhetorical one who uses the tired old words and slogans, calls
the police “pig” or “white fascist racist” or
“motherfucker” and has so stereotyped himself than others
react by saying, “Oh, he’s one of those,” and then
promptly turn off.
This failure of many of our younger activists
to understand the art of communication has been disastrous. Even
the most elementary grasp of the fundamental idea that one
communicates within the experience of his audience—and gives
full respect to the other’s values—would have ruled out
attacks on the American flag. The responsible organizer would
have known that it is the establishment that has betrayed the
flag while the flag, itself, remains the glorious symbol of
America’s hopes to his audience. On another level of
communication, humor is essential, for through humor much is
accepted that would have been rejected if presented seriously.
This is a sad and lonely generation. It laughs too little, and
this, too, is tragic.
For the real radical, doing “his thing”
is to do the social thing, for and with people. In a world where
everything is so interrelated that one feels helpless to know
where or how to grab hold and act, defeat set in; for years
there have been people who’ve found society too overwhelming
and have withdrawn, concentrated on “doing their own thin.”
Generally we have put them into mental hospitals and diagnosed
them as schizophrenics.
If the real radicals finds that having long
hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and
organization, he cuts his hair. If I were organizing in an
orthodox Jewish community I would not walk in their eating a ham
sandwich, unless I wanted to be rejected so I could have an
excuse to cop out. My “thing,” if I want to organize, is
solid communication with the people in the community. Lacking
communication I am in reality silent; throughout history silence
has been regarded as assent—in this case assent to the system.
Accepting the World As It Is—Working in the System
As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it
is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it
is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into
what we believe it should be—it is necessary to begin where
the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it
should be. That means working in the system.
There’s another reason for working inside
the system. Dostoevski said that taking a new step is what
people fear most. 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 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, among not only the middle class but the 40
per cent of American families—more than seventy million
people—whose income range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year. They
cannot be dismissed by labeling them blue collar or hard hat.
They will not continue to be relatively passive and slightly
challenging. If we fail to communicate with them, if we don’t
encourage them to form alliances with us, they will move to the
right. Maybe they will anyway, but lets it happen by default.
Our youth are impatient with the
preliminaries that are essential to purposeful action. Effective
organization is thwarted by the desire for instant and dramatic
change, or as I have phrased it elsewhere the demand for
revelation rather than revolution. It’s the kind of thing we
see in play writing; the first act introduces the characters and
the plot, in the second act the plot and characters are
developed as the play strives to hold the audience’s
attention. In the final act good and evil have their dramatic
confrontation and resolution. The present generation wants to go
right into the third act, skipping the first two, in which case
there is no play, nothing but confrontation for
confrontation’s sake—a fare-up and back to darkness. To
build a powerful organization takes time. It is tedious, but
that’s the way the game is played—if you want to play and
not just yell, “Kill the umpire.”
What is the alternative to working
“inside” the system? A mass of rhetorical garbage about
“Burn the system down!” Yippie yells of “Do it!” or
“Do your thing.” What else? Bombs? Sniping? Silence when
police are killed and screams of “murdering fascist pigs”
when other are killed? Attacking and baiting the police? Public
suicide? “Power comes out of the barrel of a gun!” is an
absurd rallying cry when the other side has all the guns. Lenin
was 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!
Militant mouthing? Spouting quotes from Mao, Castro, and Che
Guevara, which are as germane to our highly technological,
computerized, cybernetic, nuclear-powered, mass media society as
a stagecoach on a jet runaway at Kennedy airport?
Let us in the name of radical pragmatism not forget
that in our system with all its repressions we can still speak
out and denounce the administration, attack its policies, work
to build an opposition political base. True, there is government
harassment, but there still is that relative freedom to fight. I
can attack my government, try to organize to change it. That’s
more than I can do in Moscow, Peking, or Havana. Remember the
reaction of the Red Guard to the “cultural revolution” and
the fate of the Chinese college students. Just a few of the
violent episodes of bombings or a courtroom shootout that we
have experienced here would have resulted in sweeping purge and
mass executions in Russia, China, or Cuba. Let’s keep some
perspective.
Revolution
by Reformation
We will start with the system, because there
is no other place to start from except political lunacy. It is
most important for those of us who want revolutionary change to
understand that revolution must be preceded by reformation. To
assume that a political revolution can survive without the
supporting base of a popular reformation is to ask for the
impossible politics.
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.
“The Revolution was effected before the war
commenced,” John Adams wrote. “The Revolution was in the
hearts and minds of the people … This radical change in the
principles, opinions, sentiments and affections of the people
was the real American Revolution.” A revolution without a
prior reformation would collapse or become a totalitarian
tyranny.
A reformation means that masses of our people
have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and
values. They don’t know what will work but they do know that
the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and
hopeless. They won’t act for change but won’t strongly
oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for revolution.
Those who, for whatever combination of
reasons, encourage the opposite of reformation, become the
unwitting allies of the far political right. Parts of the far
left have gone so far in the political circle that they are now
all but indistinguishable from the extreme right. It reminds me
of the days when Hitler, new on the scene, was excused for his
actions by “humanitarians” on the grounds of a paternal
rejection and childhood trauma. When there are people who
espouse the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy or the Tate
murders or the Marin County Courthouse kidnapping and killings
or the University of Wisconsin bombing and killing as
“revolutionary acts,” then we are dealing with people who
are merely hiding psychosis behind a political mask. The masses
of people recoil with horror and say, “Our way is bad and we
were willing to let it change, but certainly not for this
murderous madness—no matter how bad things are now, they are
better than that.” So they begin to turn back. They regress
into acceptance of a coming massive repression in the name of
“law and order.”
In the midst of the gassing and violence by the Chicago
Police and National Guard during the 1968 Democratic Convention
many students asked me, “Do you still believe we should try to
work inside our system?”
Learning
a Lesson
These were students who had been with Eugene
McCarthy in New Hampshire and followed him across the country.
Some had been with Robert Kennedy when he was killed in Los
Angeles. Many of the tears that were shed in Chicago were not
from gas. “Mr. Alinsky, we fought in primary after primary and
the people voted no on
Vietnam. Look at that convention. They’re not paying any
attention to the vote. Look at your police and the army. You
still want us to work in the system?”
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.”
Remember: once you organize people around
something as commonly agreed upon as pollution., then an
organized people is on the move. From there it’s a short and
natural step to political pollution, to Pentagon pollution.
It is not enough just to elect your
candidates. You must keep the pressure on. Radicals should keep
in mind Franklin D. Roosevelt’s response to a reform
delegation, “Okay, you’re convinced me. Now go on out and
bring pressure on me!” Action comes from keeping the heat on.
No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough.
As for Vietnam, I would like to see our nation be the
first in history of man to publicly say, “We were wrong! What
we did was horrible . We got in and kept getting in deeper and
deeper and at every step we invented new reasons for staying. We
have paid part of the price in 44,000 dead Americans. There is
nothing we can ever do to make it up to the people of
Indo-China—or to our people—but w will try. We believe that
our world has come of age so that it is no longer a sign of
weakness or defeat to abandon a childish pride and vanity, to
admit we were wrong.” Such an admission would shake up the
foreign policy concepts of all nations and open the door to a
new international order. This our alternative to
Vietnam—anything else is the old makeshift patchwork. If this
were to happen, Vietnam may even have been somewhat worth it.
A
Final Word on the System
A final word on our system. The democratic
ideal springs from the idea of liberty, equality, majority rule
through free elections, protections of the rights of minorities,
and freedom to subscribe to multiple loyalties in matters of
religion, economics, and politics rather than to a total loyalty
to the state. The spirit of democracy is the idea of importance
and worth in the individual, and faith in the kind of world
where the individual can achieve as much of his potential as
possible.
Great dangers always accompany great
opportunities. The possibility of destruction is always implicit
in the act of creation. Thus the greatest enemy of individual
freedom is the individual himself.
From the beginning the weakness as well as
the strength of the democratic ideal has been the people. People
cannot be free unless they are willing to sacrifice some of
their interests to guarantee the freedom of others. The price of
democracy is the ongoing pursuit of the common good by all
the people. One hundred and thirty-five years ago Tocqueville*
gravely warned that unless individual citizens were regularly
involved in the action of governing themselves, self-government
would pass from the scene. Citizen participation is the
animating spirit and force in a society predicated on
voluntarism.
We are not here concerned with people who
profess the democratic faith but yearn for the dark security of
dependency where they can be spared the burden of decisions.
Reluctant to grow up, or incapable of doing so, they want to
remain children and be cared for by others. Those who can,
should be encouraged to grow; for the others, the fault lies not
in the system but in themselves.
Here we are desperately concerned with the
vast mass of our people who, thwarted through lack of interest
or opportunity, or both, do not participate in the endless
responsibilities of citizenship and are resigned to lives
determined by others. To lose your “identity” as a citizen
of democracy is but a step from losing your identity as a
person. People react to this frustration by not acting at all.
The separation of the people from the routine daily functions of
citizenship is heartbreak in a democracy.
It is a grave situation when a people resign
their citizenship or when a resident of a great city, though he
may desire to take a hand, lacks the means to participate. That
citizen sinks further into apathy, anonymity, and
depersonalization. The result is that he comes to depend on
public authority and state of civic-sclerosis sets in.
From time to time there have been external
enemies at our gates; there has always been the enemy within,
the hidden and malignant inertia that foreshadows more certain
destruction to our life and future than any nuclear warhead.
There can be no darker or more devastating tragedy than the
death of man’s faith in himself and in his power to direct his
future.
I salute the present generation. Hang on to
one of your most precious parts of youth, laughter—don’t
lose it as many of you seem to have done, you need it. Together
we may find some of what we’re looking for—laughter, beauty,
love, and the chance to create.
Notes
* “It must not be forgotten that it is
especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life.
For my own part, I should be inclined to think freedom less
necessary in great things than in little ones, if it were possible
to be secure of the one without possessing the other.
“Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every
day, and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately. It does
not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn,
till they are led to surrender the exercise of their will. Thus
their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated;
whereas the obedience, which is exacted on a few important but
rare occasions, only exhibits servitude at certain intervals, and
throws the burden of it upon a small number of men. It is vain to
summon a people, which has been rendered so dependent on the
central power, to choose from time to time the representatives of
that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice,
however, important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually
losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for
themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of
humanity.”—Alexis
de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Source: Saul D.Alinsky. Rules For Radicals New
York: Random House, Inc., 1971
*
* * * *
The
Way Ahead (excerpts)
The
Significance of the Middle Class
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. Large
parts of the middle class, the “silent majority,” must be
activated; action and articulation are one, as are silence and
surrender.
We are belatedly beginning to understand this,
to know that even if all the low-income parts of our population
were organized—all the blacks, Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans,
Appalachian poor whites—if through some genius of organization
they were all united in a coalition, it would not be powerful
enough to get significant, basic, needed changes. It would have to
do what all minority organizations, small nations, labor unions,
political parties or anything small, must do—seek our allies.
The pragmatics of power will not allow any alternative.
The only potential allies for America’s poor would be
in various organized sectors of the middle class. We have seen
Cesar Chavez’ migrant farm workers turn to the middle class with
their grape boycott. In the fight against Eastman Kodak, the
blacks of Rochester, New York, turned to the middle class and
their proxies.
Attitudes
of Radicals Toward Middle Class
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.
Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the
values and way of life of 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 are if we are to build power for
change, and the power and the people are in the big middle-class
majority. Therefore, it is useless self-indulgence for an activist
to put his past behind him. Instead, he should realize the
priceless value of his middle-class experience.
His middle-class identity, his familiarity with
the values and problems, are invaluable for organization of his
“own people.” He has the background to go back, examine, and
try to understand the middle-class way; now he has a compelling
reason to know, for he must know if he is to organize. He must
know so he can be effective in communication, tactics, creating
issues and organization. He will look very differently upon his
parents, their friends, and their way of life.
Instead of the infantile dramatics of
rejection, he will now begin to dissect and examine the way of
life as he never has before. 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.
Turning back to the middle class as an
organizer, he will find that everything now has a different
meaning and purpose. He learns to view actions outside of the
experience of people as serving only to confuse and antagonize
them. He begins to understand the differences in value definition
of the older generation regarding “the privilege of college
experience,” and their current reaction to the tactics a
sizeable minority of students uses in campus rebellions. He
discovers what their definition of the police is, and their
language—he discards the rhetoric that always says “pig.”
Opening Lines of Communication
Instead of hostile rejection he is seeking bridges of
communication and unity over the gaps, generation, value, or
others. He will view with strategic sensitivity the nature of
middle-class behavior with its hang-ups over rudeness or
aggressive, insulting, profane actions. All this and more must be
grasped and used to radicalize parts of the middle class.
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.
Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the
values and way of life of 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 are if we are to build power for
change, and the power and the people are in the big middle-class
majority. Therefore, it is useless self-indulgence for an activist
to put his past behind him. Instead, he should realize the
priceless value of his middle-class experience.
His middle-class identity, his familiarity with
the values and problems, are invaluable for organization of his
“own people.” He has the background to go back, examine, and
try to understand the middle-class way; now he has a compelling
reason to know, for he must know if he is to organize. He must
know so he can be effective in communication, tactics, creating
issues and organization. He will look very differently upon his
parents, their friends, and their way of life.
Instead of the infantile dramatics of
rejection, he will now begin to dissect and examine the way of
life as he never has before. 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.
Turning back to the middle class as an
organizer, he will find that everything now has a different
meaning and purpose. He learns to view actions outside of the
experience of people as serving only to confuse and antagonize
them. He begins to understand the differences in value definition
of the older generation regarding “the privilege of college
experience,” and their current reaction to the tactics a
sizeable minority of students uses in campus rebellions. He
discovers what their definition of the police is, and their
language—he discards the rhetoric that always says “pig.”
Instead of
hostile rejection he is seeking bridges of communication and unity
over the gaps, generation, value, or others. He will view with
strategic sensitivity the nature of middle-class behavior with its
hang-ups over rudeness or aggressive, insulting, profane actions.
All this and more must be grasped and used to radicalize parts of
the middle class.
Cultural
Differences of the Middle Classes
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.
In the lower middle class we encounter
people who have struggled all their lives for what relatively
little they have.
With a few exceptions, such as teachers, they
have never gone beyond high school. 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. To escape their frustration they
grasp at a last hope that their children will get that college
education and realize those unfulfilled dream.
They are a fearful people, who feel threatened
from all sides: the nightmare of pending retirement and old age
with a Social Security decimated by inflation; the shadow of
unemployment from a slumping economy, with blacks, already
fearsome because the cultures conflict, threatening job
competition; the high cost of long-term illness; and finally with
mortgages outstanding, they dread the possibility of property
devaluation from non-whites moving into their neighborhood.
They are beset by taxes on incomes, food, real
estate, and automobiles, at all levels—city, state, and
national. Seduced by their values into installment buying, they
find themselves barely able to meet long-term payments, let along
the current cost of living. 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. Their pleasures are bungalow, or
ticky-tacky, in a monotonous subdivision on the fringe of suburbs;
going on a Sunday drive out to the country, having a once-a-week
dinner out at some place like a Howard Johnson’s. Many of the
so-called hard hats, police, fire, sanitation workers,
schoolteachers, and much of civil service, mechanics,
electricians, janitors, and semiskilled workers are in this class.
Attitudes Toward the Poor
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.” They see the poor
going to colleges with the waiving of admission requirements and
given special financial aid. 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. They hear the poor demanding
welfare as “right.” To them this is i8nsult on top of injury.
Seeking some meaning in life, they turn to an
extreme chauvinism and become defenders of the “American”
faith. Now they even develop rationalizations for a life of
futility and frustration. “It’s the Red menace!” Now they
are not only the most vociferous in their espousal of law and
order but ripe victims for such as demagogic George Wallace, the
John Birch Society, and the Red-menace perennials.
Insecure in this fast-changing world, they cling to
illusory fixed points—which are very real to them. Even
conversation is charted toward fixing your position in the world:
“I don’t want to argue with you, just tell me what our flags
means to you?” or “What do you thin of those college punks who
never worked a day in their lives?” They use revealing
adjectives such as “outside agitators” or “troublemakers”
and other “When did you last beat your wife?” questions.
Attitudes
Toward the Liberal Suburban Middle Classes
On the other side they see the middle middle
class and the upper middle class assuming a liberal,
democratic, holier-than-thou position, and attacking the bigotry
of the employed poor. They see that through all kinds of
tax-evasion devices the middle middle and upper middle can elude
their share of the tax burdens—so that most of it comes back (as
they see it) upon themselves, the lower middle class.
They see a United States Senate in which
approximately one-third are millionaires and the rest with rare
exception very wealthy. The bill requiring full public disclosure
of senators’ financial interests and prophetically titled Senate
Bill 1993 (which is probably the year it will finally passed) is
“in committee,” they see, and then they say to themselves,
“The government represents the upper class but not us.”
Many of the lower middle class are
members of labor unions, churches, bowling clubs, fraternal,
service, and nationality organizations. They are organizations and
people that must be worked with as one would work with any other
part of our population—with respect, understanding, and
sympathy.
Reforming the Lower Middle Class
To reject them is to lose them by default. They will
not shrivel and disappear. You can’t switch channels and get rid
of them. This is what you have been doing in your radicalized
dream world but they are here and will be. If we don’t win them
Wallace or Spiro T. Nixon will. Never doubt it that the voice may
be Agnew’s but the words, the vindictive smearing, is Nixon’s.
There never was a vice-president who didn’t either faithfully
serve as his superior’s faithful sounding board or else be
silent.
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 pay in the essential
prelude of 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 to may be definite or certain, but move
we must.
People must be “reformed”—so they cannot be
deformed into dependency and driven through desperation to
dictatorship and the death of freedom. The “silent majority,”
now, are hurt, bitter, suspicious, feeling rejected and at bay.
This sick condition in many ways is as explosive as the current
race crisis. Their fears and frustrations at their helplessness
are mounting to a point of a political paranoia which can demonize
people to turn to the law of survival in the narrowest sense.
These emotions can go either to the far right of totalitarianism
or forward to Act II of the American Revolution.
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.
The
Suburban Middle Classes & Its Issues
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. Nothing
seems to make sense. They thought that a split-level house in the
suburbs, two cars, two color TVs, country club membership, a bank
account, children in good prep schools and then in college, and
they had it made. They got it—only to discover that they
didn’t have it.
Many have lost their children—they dropped
out of sight into something called the generation gap. They have
seen values they held sacred or relics of the 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. If one wants to act, the dilemma is how and where;
there is no “when?” with time running out, the time is
obviously now.
There are enormous basic changes ahead. We
cannot continue or last in the nihilistic absurdities of our time
where nothing we do makes sense. The scene around us compels us to
look away quickly, if we are to cling to any sanity. 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.
Even a half-witted people, if sane, would long since
have done the simple and obvious—ban all detergents, develop new
non-polluting insecticides, and immediately build waste-disposal
units. Apparently we would rather be corpses in clean shirts. We
prefer a strangling ring of dirty air to a “ring around the
collar.” Until the last, we’ll be buried in bright white
shirts. Our persistent of our present insecticides may well ensure
that the insects shall inherit the world.
The
Pentagon & Weapons of Mass Destruction
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 deeper and wider, to the Pentagon reports that strained
even a moron’s intelligence that within the six months the war
would be “won,” to destroying more bridges in North Vietnam
than there are in the world, to counting and reporting the enemy
dead from helicopters, Okay, Joe, we’ve been here for fifteen
minutes; let’s go back and call it 150 dead,” to brutalizing
our younger generation with My Lais but ignoring our own
principles of the Nuremberg trials, to putting our soldiers in
conditions so conducive to drugs that we stand forth as
freedom’s liberating force of pot.
This Pentagon, whose economic waste and
corruption is bankrupting our nation morally as well as
economically, allows Lockheed Aircraft to put one-fourth of its
production in the small Georgia country town of the late Senator
Russell (a powerful man in military appropriation decisions), and
then transmits its appeals for federal millions to save it from
its financial fiascos. . . .
This the Pentagon that has manufactured nearly
16,000 tons of nerve gas, why and what for being unclear except to
overkill the overkill. No one has raised the questions, who got
the contracts? what it cost? where the pay-offs went? Now the big
question is how to dispose of it as it deteriorates and threatens
to get loose among us. The Pentagon announces that the sinking of
the nerve gas is safe but
from now on they will find a safe way!
The obvious American way of assuming personal
responsibility for one’s action is utterly ignored—otherwise,
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 the 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 at least
have given some hope for the nation’s future.
The record goes on without any deviations
toward sanity. The army chose the final day of hearings of the
President’s Commission investigating the National Guard killings
at Kent State, to announce that M-16 rifles would now be issued to
the National Guard. The President’s Commission report is doomed
not to be read until after the bowl games on New Year’s Day by a
President who watches football on TV the afternoon of the biggest
march in history on Washington, Moratorium Day.
There are our generals and their
“scientific” gremlins who after assurance of no radioactive
menace from the atomic tests in Nevada now more than a dozen years
later have sealed off 250 squares miles as “contaminated with
poisonous and radioactive plutonium 239.” (New
York Times, August 21, 1970.) This from the explosions in
1958! Will the “safe” disposition in 1970 of the nerve gas
still be as “safe” a dozen or less years from now?
One can only wonder how they will seal off some 250
miles in the Atlantic Ocean. We can assume that these same
“scientific” gremlins will be assigned to the disposition of
the thousands of tons of additional stockpiled nerve gas of which
approximately 15,000 tons are on Okinawa and to be moved to some
other island. . . .
The Fears of the Suburban Middle Classes
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. To say, “You cannot turn
away—look at it—let us change it together!” “Look at us.
We are your children. Let us not abandon each other for then we
all lost. Together we can change it for what we want. Let’s
start here and there—let’s go!”
It is a job first of bringing hope and doing
what every organizer must do with all people, all classes, places,
and times—communicate the means of tactics whereby the people
can feel that they have the power to do this and that and on. To a
great extent the middle class of today feels more defeated and
lost than do our poor.
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.
Tactics must begin with the experience of the
middle class, accepting their aversion to rudeness, vulgarity, and
conflict. Start them easy, don’t scare them off. The
opposition’s reactions will provide the “education” or
radicalization of the middle class. It does it every time. Tactics
here, as already described, will develop in the flow of action and
reaction. The chance for organization for action on pollution,
inflation, Vietnam, violence, race, taxes, and other issues, is
all about us. Tactics such as stock proxies and others are waiting
to be hurled into the attack.
Corporate Sector's Realistic Appraisal
The revolution must manifest itself in the
corporate sector by the corporations’ realistic appraisal of
conditions in the nation. The corporations must forget their
nonsense about “private sectors.” It is not just that
government contracts and subsidies have long since blurred the
line between public and private sectors, but that 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 double commitment and corporations had better recognize this
for the sake of their own survival.
Poverty, discrimination, disease,
crime—everything is as much a concern of the corporation as is
profits. The days when corporate public relations worked to keep
the corporation out of controversy, days of playing it safe, of
not offending Democratic or Republican customers, advertisers or
associates—those days are done. If the same predatory drives for
profits can 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.
A major battle will be pitched on quality and
prices of consumer goods, targeting particularly on the massive
misleading advertising campaigns, the costs of which are passed on
the consumer. It will be the people against Madison Avenue or
“The Battle of Bunkum Hill.”
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 the beginning. This is literally the revolution of
the soul.
The great American dream that reached out to
the stars has been lost to the stripes. 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.
Our way of life is symbolized to the world by
the stripes of military force. At home we have made a mockery of
being our brother’s keeper by being his jail keeper. When
American can no longer see the stars, the times are tragic. We
must believe that is the darkness before the dawn of a beautiful
new world; we will see it when we believe it.
Source: Saul D.Alinsky. Rules For Radicals. New
York: Random House, Inc., 1971/
Other Alinsky Books:
Reveille for Radicals /
John L. Lews
posted 18 December 2005 * * *
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updated 16 October
2007
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