Has anyone read "Rules for Radicals", by Saul Alinsky. This was a popular book in the 1970's. I read it many years ago and thought it had some interesting insights. Anyone else have any reaction to or comments about it? The book is very compatible with our goals as Communists/lefties in general and easy to understand for people even without any political experience.
PDF:chisineu.files.wordpress.com
Rules For Radicals
Aaron Hernandez
Other urls found in this thread:
jacobinmag.com
youtu.be
twitter.com
Ayden Sullivan
I got slightly bored halfway through. It's not bad, per se; it's just that it's a relatively basic book about tactics and I'm not terribly interested.
Tyler Harris
it's bad.
Camden Gonzalez
How so?
Liam Garcia
Understandable,the most important part of the book is the 13 rules he provides, IMO every serious activist should know those
Adam Flores
it's liberal bullshit.
Andrew Wilson
Comrade Obama read this book as a young man and successfully applied its principles to push through Obamacare. Every socialist should read this book.
Jonathan Hughes
I think some valid critiques about this book are pretty easy to find elsewhere, but here are some I wish to articulate: First, these rules are not exactly a revelation, and I think most groups can imagine these quite spontaneously. The Situationists even articulated something similar to the first rule just as an offhand comment in their Anthology, which is that the point of a scandal is to go as far as possible with it; any sign of hesitation gleans weakness.
Thus, we start out with an air of the "expert" who wants to drift into local communities and pit fights. And Alinsky seems to be fine with this. He sees nonviolent conflict as not a tool, but a principle. In the first place, Marxists and most anarchists are not nonviolent because we accept violence as a historical necessity and nonviolence is a liberal principle. In the second place, to be concerned about organizing the community means more than starting shit; it means building relations, social programmes, utilities, getting people involved with each other. This means that conflict is also a tool and not a principle.
This book may contain rules for radicals, depending on how you define "radical", but it doesn't contain very much for revolutionaries.
Luke Murphy
There are people on Holla Forums who've read this bullshit?
James Ward
Yes but since we're in a position of lesser monetary power and political connections, so we may well have to fight like this. Admittedly there are definite aspects of Alinsky's book that are getting a little outdated.