365 Books Worth Reading: #1 Alinsky's _Rules for Radicals_
Sharon July 29th, 2009
I’ve got a lot of books I’d love to review at length, but somehow there’s always something more urgent to do. So I’ve decided that I’m going to try and post regular (I doubt it will be every day…no, I’m sure it won’t be every day) short book reviews of a paragraph or so until I’ve done 365 of them. I know it’ll probably take me a lot longer than a year, but at least it is a way to get conversations going about my favorite books without having to take a month to write about them.
I’m not promising that every single one will be on a relevant topic to the main themes of this blog – in fact, again, I promise they won’t be. Everyone needs good escapist or imaginative literature sometimes, or simply to learn everything they can about something interesting, even if it has no direct application. Besides, it is very rare that I find I read something truly great and never use it again – it always shows up somewhere in my thinking.
Ok, the honor of being the very first book worth reading goes to Saul Alinsky’s superb book _Rules for Radicals_ – I picked it up at my school library when I was 14, and it was perhaps the first most important book I’ve ever read. I try and go back and look at it once a decade, at a minimum, and it keeps on being relevant. Alinsky gave us a model for how to do what needs doing long ago, when he wrote,
“The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals was written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”
What more urgently needed knowledge is there than that?
Sharon
- 365 Books
- Comments(11)
In 1986 I was canvassing for The Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy ( Sane) in Cambrdge MA. I was just at the beginning of an awakening from naive highschooler to political activist. This book was part of the evolution of that time in my life. It was given to me by my canvass director Steve.
Thankyou for reminding me about this book. I must go find my copy and read it again.
I’m sorry that I read that book in college. I’m even sorrier that you mentioned it.
That’s not enough information for me to risk my (very paranoid here) library record. I made my daughter pay cash for Hoffman’s F*** the System. What’s in it?
This book is “a model for how to do what needs doing long ago”? A book about a socialist revolution? And it’s long overdue?
Maybe another read is in order. Alinsky (and Obama) are all about power. It’s not about the “have nots”….the poor, illiterate, welfare class are meant to be used again, as a tool — they are the means to achieve the goal. HA! The “have nots” will remain as such, enslaved in a different but all-encompassing programmed life. You missed the point!
Respectfully disagree with you here. You say you want a revolution… Well, it’s here. And this socialist Utopia will dispense MORE poverty and injustice, not less. Socialism will be no friend to the independent small farmer, nor the small dairy, the backyard gardener, the independent nursery, the independent ANYTHING.
I’m not a socialist – what I find value in Alinsky is the model of community organizing and responding to power. But Alinsky’s techniques work beautifully in a distributist model as well.
Frankly, I think that “socialism” is a silly bogeyman in the US, and gets bandied about in kind of irrelevant ways to just mean “oh, bad.”
Sharon
I haven’t read Alinsky for many years but applaud your desire to give him another look. I am amazed at the reactions he still engenders even this many years later!
I think it is good to re-read him along with others who may take a different approach. What seems to be emerging during these tough times is that instituting change is very difficult indeed – and this despite the obvious “handwriting on the wall” with regard to climate change, crumbling health care infrastructure, general economic gloom etc.
Though some of the basic “rules” are valid observations on ethics, “ends and means”…his ideas didn’t work. The 60′s and 70′s radicals he catered too, all became insurance salesmen and soccer moms, in other words: “the HAVES”…not only that, but everyone benefits from the technology of the “haves”…just like this internet, computer, and the publishing industry that made money selling stuff like “STEAL THIS BOOK” and “The Strawberry Statement” and so on. I’m all for community organizing, and this happens all the time in my home town for charities and various other causes, peacefully and effectively without being a “radical” at all. I deepfully respect pacifists, and feel they serve a role in our society, but where is the anti-war-movement NOW? The one around during the beginning of the Iraq war was a flatulent shadow of the real thing. There are no radicals anymore, except perhaps for a few skinheads, and we all know how effective they are…
This is a poor choice for a book to read, out of date, an obsolete curiosity; an artifact from another century.
George, I think his ideas did work, in the context they were most adapted to – Alinsky was a community organizer, whose primary project was helping poor communities advocate for thesmelves. Did it fix everything? No, but while Alinsky was interested in enlisting the 60s radicals, his radicalism stemmed from older traditions, and older projects – the community model. Most of the 60s radicals didn’t get it, IMHO, and that’s why they often ended up becoming the haves.
Sharon
Ok I buy the first part of your reply…but the second part “didn’t get” What?? My whole generation went “belly up” on the “revolution”…not because they didn’t get it, (this was the brightest, most imaginative, creative, intelligent spoiled and stoned generation ever) but because it was unworkable. The idealism of the times was wonderful, but unrealistic…however, at least some of us boomers kept the idealism inside, and applied it when possible, maybe it wasn’t a radical revolution, but not 100% sell out either. On top of that theres a whole new 21st century community to organize out there now…better speak Spanish and Hmong…better be a geek and be knowedgable about video games and texting and social internet sights, better be able to deal with a baby boom as big as our own was, and the impact they will have on everything we think is important, ‘specially when they reject us for being old. Oh yea and don’t forget nano-technology, it’s coming.
After years tied to a chair in a bus with a dope at the wheel, we finally have reason for occasional guarded optimism.
I don’t fault the current peace movement. Before the Iraq invasion began, they performed the largest peace demonstrations – the largest demonstrations of any kind ever world wide. Peace demonstrations over Vietnam began late, grew slowly, and remained relatively small. Everyone would recognize this, except our news media shuns the job it did decades ago.
The number of comments from people who never read Alinsky, who think he’s communist, who fail to realize that his work was used against any powerful and privileged, communist governments as well as capitalist corporations…
You hit nerves.