Replies

Saul Alinsky’s Rules from Rules for Radicals

Saul Alinsky describes 24 rules in Rules for Radicals. Of those 24 rules, 13 are rules of “power tactics”:

1. “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy
thinks you have.”

2. “Never go outside the experience of your people.”

3. “Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the
enemy.”

4. “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.”

5. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”

6. “A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.”

7. “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.”

8. “Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and
actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.”

9. “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing
itself.”

10. “The major premise for tactics is the development of
operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.”

11. “If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will
break through into its counterside.”

12. “The price of a successful attack is a constructive
alternative.”

13. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

The remaining 11 rules Alinsky describes are concerned with “the ethics of means and ends”:

1. “One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue … Accompanying this rule is the parallel one that one’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s distance from the scene of conflict.”

2. “The judgment of the ethics of means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgment.”

3. “In war the end justifies almost any means.”

4. “Judgment must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point.”

5. “Concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa.”

6. “The less important the end to be desired, the more one can afford to engage in ethical evaluations of means.”

7. “Generally success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics.”

8. “The morality of a means depends upon whether the means is being employed at a time of imminent defeat or imminent victory.”

9. “Any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.”

10. “You do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments.”

11. “Goals must be phrased in general terms like ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,’ ‘Of the Common Welfare,’ ‘Pursuit of Happiness,’ or ‘Bread and Peace.’”