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      Rules for Radicals

      By Saul Alinsky 1971

      Watch this video before reading the excerpt:

       

      TACTICS MEANS doing what you can with what you have. Tactics are those consciously deliberate acts by which human beings live with each other and deal with the world around them. In the world of give and take, tactics is the art of how to take and how to give. Here our concern is with the tactic of taking; how the Have-Nots can take power away from the Haves.

      1. Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

      2. Never go outside of the experience of your people. (Avoid confusion in your people)

      3. Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.

      4. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.

      5. Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage. 

      6. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic. 

      7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. Man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time, after which it becomes a ritualistic commitment, like going to church on Sunday mornings. New issues and crises are always developing, and one’s reaction becomes, “Well, my heart bleeds for those people and I’m all for the boycott, but after all there are other important things in life”—and there it goes.

      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. You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand and saying “You’re right—we don’t know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us.”

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

       

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