By SAUL ALINSKY*
Author's prologue to the newly published book
The revolutionary force today has two targets, both morally and materially. Its young protagonists at times remind us of the idealistic Christians of old, who urge violence and shout “Burn the system!” They are not deluded by the system, but they are full of illusions about how to change our world. This is the point on which I wrote this book. The words came out in desperation, partly because what they do and will do is what will give meaning to what I and the radicals of my generation have done with our lives.
They are now the vanguard, and they have had to start almost from scratch. Few of us survived the Joe McCarthy holocaust of the early 1950s, and of those, there were even fewer whose understanding and notions had evolved beyond the dialectical materialism of orthodox Marxism. My radical comrades, who had been expected to pass on the baton of experience and ideas to a new generation, were simply not there anymore. When the young looked at the society around them, everything was, according to them, “materialistic, decadent, bourgeois in its values, ruined and violent.” It is a wonder that they rejected us. in whole?
Today's generation is desperately trying to make sense of life, and that is outside of this world. Most of them are products of the middle class. They have rejected their materialistic background, the goal of having a well-paying job, a suburban home, an automobile, membership in the country clubs, travel first class, have status, security, and everything that meant success to their mothers and fathers. They had it. They saw how it led their mothers and fathers to tranquilizers, alcohol, long marriages or divorces, high blood pressure, ulcers, frustration and disillusionment with “the good life.”
They have seen the almost unbelievable idiocy of our political leadership – in the past, political leaders, from mayors to the White House to governors, were regarded with respect and almost reverence; today, they are regarded with contempt. Now this negativity extends to every institution, from the police and the courts to the “establishment” itself. We live in a world of mass media that daily expose the innate hypocrisy of society, its contradictions and the manifest failure of almost every facet of our social and political life. Young people have seen their “activist” participatory democracy turn into its antithesis – nihilistic bombs and assassinations. The political panaceas of the past, like the revolutions in Russia and China, have turned into the same old thing with a different name. The quest for freedom seems to follow no route and have no destination.
Young people are inundated with a flood of information and facts so overwhelming that the world seems like a complete mess, leading them to run around frantically in search of what human beings have always sought since the beginning of time, namely, a way of life that has some meaning or makes some sense. A way of life means a certain degree of order, where things have some relationship to one another and can fit together like pieces in a system that, at the very least, provides some clues as to what life is all about.
Humans have always yearned and sought guidance by founding religions, inventing political philosophies, creating scientific systems like Newton’s, or formulating ideologies of various kinds. This is what lies behind the cliché “having it all under control” – despite the realization that all values and factors are relative, fluid, and changing, and that it will be possible to “have it all under control” only relatively. The elements will change and move together just like the changing pattern in a rotating kaleidoscope.
In the past, the “world,” whether in physical or intellectual terms, was much smaller, simpler, and more orderly. It inspired credibility. Today, everything is so complex that it seems incomprehensible. What sense does it make for humans to set foot on the moon while other humans are waiting in line for welfare or are in Vietnam killing and dying for a corrupt dictatorship in the name of freedom? These are the days when humans are reaching out for the sublime while they are waist-deep in the swamp of madness.
O establishment is in many ways as suicidal as some of the far left, only he is infinitely more destructive than the far left can ever be. The result of hopelessness and despair is morbidity. There is a sense of death hanging over the nation.
The current generation looks at all this and says, “I don’t want to spend my life the way my family and friends did. I want to do something, create, be myself, ‘mind my own business,’ live. The older generation doesn’t get it, and what’s worse, doesn’t want to get it. I don’t want to be just a data set to feed a computer or a statistic in a public opinion poll, just a voter with a credit card.” To the young, the world seems crazy and in a process of degradation.
On the other side of the spectrum is the older generation, whose members are no less confused. If they are less vocal or self-aware, it may be because they can escape to a past when the world was simpler. They may still cling to old values in the simple-minded hope that somehow or other everything will work out. That the younger generation will eventually “straighten out” over time. Unable to come to terms with the world as it is, they retreat from any confrontation with the younger generation with the provocative cliché: “When you’re older, you’ll understand.”
How would you react if a young person were to say to you, “When you’re younger, which will never happen, you’ll understand, which is to say, of course you’ll never understand”? The older generation who claim to want to understand say, “When I talk to my kids or their friends, I tell them, ‘Look, I believe that what you have to tell me is important, and I respect that.’ You call me a square and say, ‘I don’t care,’ or ‘I don’t know anything,’ or ‘I don’t know what’s up,’ and all the other expressions you use. Well, I agree. So how about you explain it to me? What do you want? What do you mean when you say, ‘mind my own business’? But what is your business anyway? You say you want a better world. How can it be? And don’t tell me it’s a world of peace and love and all that talk, because people are people, as you’ll find out when you get older – I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything about ‘when you get older.’ I really 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 be together?”
And this is what we call the generation gap, the generation gap.
What the present generation wants is what every generation has always wanted – a meaning, a sense of what the world and life are like, a chance to fight for some kind of order.
If young people were to write our Declaration of Independence today, they would begin with this: “When, in the course of inhuman events…” and their list of particular demands would range from Vietnam to our black ghettos, chicanos and Puerto Ricans, migrant workers, Appalachians, hatred, ignorance, disease, and world hunger. This list of particular demands would emphasize the absurdity of human affairs and the helplessness and emptiness, the fearful loneliness that comes from not knowing whether our lives have any meaning.
When they talk about values, they are asking for a reason. They are looking for an answer, at least temporary, to the greatest human question: “Why am I here?”
Young people react to their chaotic world in different ways. Some panic and run away, reasoning that the system will collapse anyway due to its own rot and corruption, and so they drop out, become hippies ou yippies, they use drugs, they try to live in communes, they do anything to escape.
Others went into meaningless and hopeless confrontations in order to reinforce their rationalization, to say, “Well, we tried and did our part,” and then get out too. Others, filled with guilt and not knowing where to turn, went mad. These were the prophets and the like: they took the grand exit, suicide. To these I have nothing to say or give, except pity—and in some cases contempt, as for those who left their dead comrades behind and went to Algeria or other places.
My goal with this book is not to give unsolicited, arrogant advice. It is to articulate the experience and advice that so many young people have asked me about during late-night sessions in hundreds of fields in the United States. It is aimed at young radicals who are committed to the struggle, committed to life.
Remember, we are talking about revolution, not revelation; you can miss the target just as much by shooting too high as by shooting too low. First, there are no more rules for revolution than there are for love or 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 setting or time.
Knowing them is essential for a pragmatic attack on the system. These rules make the difference between being a realist radical and being a rhetorical radical who uses catchphrases and Slogans old and worn out, who calls police officers “pigs in uniform”, “white fascist racists” or “sons of bitches” and, in this way, assumes a stereotype, to which the others react by saying “Oh, that’s one of those” and promptly ignore him.
This lack of understanding of the art of communication by many young activists has been disastrous. Even the most basic understanding of the fundamental idea that one must communicate within the experience of one's listeners and fully respect the values of others would have prevented attacks on the American flag. The responsible organizer would have been aware that the one who betrayed the flag was the establishment, while the flag itself remains the glorious symbol of the hopes and aspirations of the United States of America and would have conveyed that message to its listeners.
On another level of communication, humor is essential, because through it many things are accepted that would be rejected if presented in a serious tone. This is a sad and lonely generation. They laugh very little, and that is also tragic.
For the authentic radical, taking care of “his life” means taking care of social issues for and with people. In a world where everything is so interconnected that we feel incapable of knowing what or how to support ourselves and act, defeatism sets in; for years there have been people who found society too overwhelming and withdrew into themselves, concentrating on “taking care of their own life.” We usually put these people in mental hospitals and diagnose them as schizophrenic. If the authentic radical discovers that having long hair creates psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair.
If I were organizing something in an Orthodox Jewish community, I wouldn’t go in there eating a ham sandwich unless I wanted to be rejected and have an excuse to leave. My “business,” if I want to organize something, is solid communication with the people in the community. Without communication, I am, in effect, silent; throughout history, silence has been seen as assent—in this case, assent to the system.
As an organizer, I start from where the world is and how it is, not from how I would like it to be. Accepting the world as it is in no way mitigates our desire to change it to what we think it should be—we must start from where the world is if we are to change it to what we think it should be. This means operating within the system.
There is another reason for operating within the system. Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by an acquiescent, affirmative, non-objectionable attitude toward change on the part of the mass of our people. People must feel frustrated, defeated, lost, so hopeless in the dominant system that they are willing to leave the past behind and take their chances in the future.
This acceptance is the essential reform of any revolution. Introducing this reform requires that the organizer operate within the system not only among the middle class but also among the 40 percent of American families—more than 70 million people—whose annual income is between $5 and $10. They cannot be dismissed with the label of blue necklace [blue collar] or hard has [helmet][I]. They will not continue to be relatively acquiescent and unchallenging. If we fail to communicate with them, if we fail to encourage them to make alliances with us, they will move to the right. They may do so anyway, but let's not let it happen by default.
Our youth are impatient of the preliminaries that are essential to purposeful action. Effective organization is frustrated by the desire for instant and dramatic change, or, as I have put it in another context, the demand is for revelation rather than revolution. This is the sort of thing we see in playwriting; the first act introduces the characters and the plot; in the second act, plot and characters are developed as the play seeks to hold the audience's attention.
In the final act, good and evil come to a dramatic confrontation and resolution. The current generation wants to go straight to the third act, skipping the first two; in this case, there is no play, only confrontation for the sake of confrontation – a sudden flash of light and a return to darkness. Building a strong organization takes time. It is tedious, but that is how the game is played – if you want to play and not just shout “death to the empire”.
What is the alternative to operating “within” the system? A lot of rhetorical garbage about “burn the system!” yippie yelling “do it yourself!” or “mind your own business.” What else? Bombs? Snipers? Silence when police officers are murdered and shouts of “death to fascist pigs’ feet” when others are murdered? Attacking and harassing the police? Public suicide? “Power comes from the barrel of a gun!” is an absurd slogan when the other side has all the weapons.
Lenin was a pragmatist; when he returned from exile to what was then Petrograd, he said that the Bolsheviks advocated taking power by vote, but would reconsider once they had weapons! Militant statements? Reciting quotes from Mao, Castro and Che Guevara, which are as pertinent to our high-tech, computerized, cybernetic, nuclear-armed, mass-media-wielding society as a stagecoach on the runway at Kennedy Airport?
In the name of radical pragmatism, let us not forget that in our system with all its repressions, we can still speak out and denounce the administration, attack its policies, and work to build a political base of opposition. It is true that there is intimidation by the government, but there is also this relative freedom to fight back.
I can attack the government, try to organize something to change it. That is more than I can do in Moscow, Beijing or Havana. Think of the Red Guard response to the “Cultural Revolution” and the fate of Chinese university students. Some of the violent episodes of bombings or a courthouse shooting that we have experienced here would have resulted in widespread purges and mass executions in Russia, China or Cuba. Let’s keep things in perspective.
We start with the system because there is nowhere else to start but political insanity. It is vitally important that we who want revolutionary change understand that revolution must be preceded by reform. To assume that a political revolution can survive without the support of popular reform is to ask for the political impossible.
We humans do not like to leave the security of familiar experience abruptly; we need a bridge by which we can cross from our experience to a new path. The revolutionary organizer must shake up the dominant patterns of his life, agitate, create disenchantment and discontent with current values, aiming to produce, if not a passion for change, at least an acquiescent, affirmative, non-challenging climate.
“The revolution was effected before the war began,” wrote John Adams.[ii]. “The revolution was in the hearts and minds of the people. […] This radical change in the principles, opinions, feelings, and emotions of the people was the real American revolution.” Revolution without prior reform would either collapse or become a totalitarian tyranny.
Reform means that masses of the population have reached a point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They do not know what will work, but they do know that the prevailing system is self-destructive, frustrating, and irredeemable. They will not act for change, but they will not resolutely oppose those who do. The time will then be ripe for revolution. Those who, for some combination of reasons, encourage the opposite of reform will unwittingly become allies of the political far right.
Parts of the far left have gone so far into the political circuit that they are no longer distinguishable from the far right. This reminds me of the days when “humanitarians” excused the actions of Hitler, who was new to the world scene, on the grounds of some parental rejection and some childhood trauma he had suffered. When we deal with people who defend the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy, or the murder of actress Sharon Tate, or the kidnapping and killings at the Marin Civic Center courthouse, or the bombing and killings at the University of Wisconsin as “revolutionary acts,” we are dealing with people who are merely hiding their psychosis behind a political mask.
The masses of the population withdraw in horror and say: “Our way of doing things is bad and we were willing to allow it to change, but certainly not to this murderous madness – it doesn’t matter how bad things are now, because they are better than that.” At this they begin to retreat. They return to accepting future massive repression in the name of “law and order.”
Amid the use of tear gas 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 operate within the system?”
These were students who had been with Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire and had followed him around the country. Some had been with Robert Kennedy when he was killed in Los Angeles. Many of the tears shed in Chicago were not because of tear gas. “Mr. Alinsky, we fought one primary after another, and the people voted no on Vietnam. But look at that convention. They don’t give a damn about the vote. Look at your police and your army. Do you still want us to operate within the system?”
It hurt me when I saw the American army with bayonets drawn advancing on the young men and women of their own country. But the answer I gave to the young radicals seemed the only realistic one. “Do one of three things: First, go to a wailing wall and feel sorry for yourself. Second, go crazy and start setting off bombs – but that will only drive people to the right. Third, learn a lesson. Go home, organize, build your power, and at the next convention, be the delegates.”
Remember, when you organize people around a common cause, like the pollution issue, an organized people are in motion. From there, it’s just a short, natural step until the pollution issue gets into politics, into the Pentagon. It’s not enough to elect your candidates. You have to keep pushing. Radicals should remember Franklin D. Roosevelt’s response to a reform delegation: “Okay, you’ve convinced me. Now go out there and push me!” Action comes from keeping the temperature high. No politician can hold the potato in his hands if you heat it up enough.
When it comes to Vietnam, I would like to see our nation be the first in human history to say publicly: “We were wrong! What we did was horrible. We went in there and kept going deeper and deeper, and at every turn, we invented new reasons to stay. We paid part of the price with the deaths of 44 Americans. There is nothing we can do to make it up to the people of Indochina — or to our people — but we will try.
We believe that the world has come of age and that it is no longer a sign of weakness to abandon childish pride and vanity and admit that we were wrong.” Such an admission would shake the foreign policy concepts of all nations and open the door to a new international order. This is our alternative to Vietnam – everything else is the old patchwork quilt. If that were to happen, Vietnam would somehow have been worth it.
A final word about our system. The democratic ideal stems from the ideas of liberty, equality, majority rule through free elections, protection of minority rights, and the freedom to choose multiple loyalties in terms of religion, economics, and politics rather than total loyalty to the state. The spirit of democracy is the idea of the importance and dignity of the individual and faith in the kind of world in which the individual can realize his or her full potential.
Great dangers always go hand in hand with great opportunities. The possibility of destruction is always implicit in the act of creation. Consequently, the greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.
From the beginning, both the weakness and the strength of the democratic ideal have been the people. The people cannot be free if they are not willing to sacrifice some of their interests to secure the freedom of others. The price of democracy is the continued pursuit of the common good by all members of the people. 135 years ago, Tocqueville[iii] issued a stern warning that unless individual citizens were regularly involved in the action of governing themselves, self-government would disappear. Citizen participation is the spirit and force that animates a society based on voluntarism.
We are not referring here to people who profess the democratic faith but long for the dark security of dependence in which they can be spared the burden of making decisions. Unwilling or incapable of growing up, they want to remain children and be cared for by others. Those who are capable should be encouraged to grow up; as for the others, the fault lies not with the system but with themselves.
Here we are desperately concerned about the great mass of our people who, frustrated by lack of interest or opportunity, or both, do not participate in the endless responsibilities of citizenship and resign themselves to a life determined by others. To lose their “identity” as citizens of a democracy is a step toward losing their identity as human beings. People react to this frustration by not taking action at all. Their withdrawal from the routine daily functions of citizenship is a disgust with democracy.
The situation is serious when a person renounces his or her citizenship or when a resident of a large city, even if he or she wishes to lend a hand, loses the means to participate. This citizen remains mired in apathy, anonymity, and depersonalization. The result is that he or she becomes dependent on public authority, and a 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 malevolent inertia that portends a more certain destruction of our lives and our future than any nuclear warhead. There can be no tragedy more terrifying or more devastating than the death of the faith that human beings have in themselves and in their power to direct their future.
I salute this generation. Hold on to one of the most precious parts of youth, laughter – don’t lose it, as so many seem to have done; you will need it. Together we can find some of what we are looking for: laughter, beauty, love, and the opportunity to create.
*Saul Alinsky (1909-1972) was a writer and political activist. Author, among other books, of John L. Lewis: an unauthorized biography (Must Have Books).
Reference
Saul Alinsky. Rules for Radicals: A Practical Guide to Social Struggle. Translation: Nélio Schneider. São Paulo, Boitempo, 2024, 240 pages. [https://amzn.to/4dSS8ZZ]
Notes
[I] In American slang, both expressions refer to people with reactionary or conservative positions. (NT)
[ii] See available letter using this link.
[iii] “It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave people in the small matters of life. For my part, I would be inclined to think that freedom is less necessary in great matters than in small ones, if it is possible to secure the latter without possessing the former. Subjection in small matters breaks out every day and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately. It does not lead people to resistance, but disturbs them at every step, until they are led to renounce the exercise of their will. Thus their spirit is gradually broken, and their character weakened; while the obedience exacted on some important but rare occasions only requires servitude at certain intervals and throws the burden of it on a few people. It is useless to call upon a people who have become 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 (London, Saunders and Otley, 1835) [ed. bras.: Democracy in America. Translated by Julia Da Silva, New York, Edipro, 2019].
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