While published in 1971, Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals is ever so relevant to modern community organizing. While reading the prologue and chapter one, I had no idea that the book was written over 47 years ago. The tone and points made by Alinsky are highly perceptive, honest, and relatable to today.
Beginning in his introduction, he speaks about his audience. To a group of people trying to “make some sense out of their lives and out of this world.” A group of people that do not wish to follow the their parents’ path to find a well-paying job and end up with some type of addiction, a divorce, or the “disillusioned good life.” This seems like my generation. People deciding between the open directed path to finance, medicine, law, or consulting but also can steer left. Going left is affiliated with being radical. Becoming an activist and veering away from the structures of our system.
Further, Alinsky describes the exact circumstances we observe before us. Where “the young have seen their activists participatory democracy turn into its antithesis – nihilistic bombing and murder.” Whether it be the mass shootings taking place directed at innocent children attending academic institutions or good humans attending their church, or larger global threats from ISIS or North Korea, the antithesis of a activist democracy surrounds us. It even spams to the undermining of our democracy by the Russian government in the 2017 Presidential election. Fighting for what is right and searching for meaning in our society is difficult when confronted with daily threats to freedom. With all this in the back of my head and on the front page of our popular news, it’s sensible that Alinsky’s words feel ever so prevalent.
His words of advice are empowering but hard to put into action. He suggests that the revolution we are waiting for will only come about after reformation. Asking for our revolution is asking for “the impossible in politics.” Instead of jumping 10 immediate steps forward to a foreign island, we must create a “bridge” to connect our old understandings and values to a new “way.” But how exactly do we create this reformation in a political climate so extreme? Robin Kirk noted that today’s political climate is so different due to the fact that there is so much to be done and people are enraged in a new way because of the extreme climate. She explains “extreme” as the immense division on several issues and little bi-partisanship. Alinsky’s bridge that we must create from the old to the new seems far too fetched. Perhaps multiple bridges must be constructed first between the divisions in our community.
His most compelling point that I hope to carry with me in our developing activism project is that the individual in a free democratic society who wants to see change happen must be willing to give up their own interests to see hope and freedom for others. In this way, we are fully accountable for lack of progress due to self interest.
While we cherish the Duke endowment for its commitment to provide new educational endeavors, more scholarship opportunities, pivotal research, and attracting highly acclaimed academic professionals, if we are not willing to exchange these interest momentarily to divest in big oil companies, then we fail to allow the change. This is change in our climate and the change needed to provide freedom to vulnerable populations exploited by foreign oil extraction.
Citations:
Alinsky, S. D. (1971). Prologue and The Purpose. In Rules for Radicals: A practical primer for realistic radicals (pp. Xiii-24). New York: Random House.
