Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Alinsky's Power Tactics (Rules for Radicals Excerpt)

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Aug. 6, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

06:25

Alinsky's Power Tactics (Rules for Radicals Excerpt)

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	It is Alinsky's power tactics for which Rules for Radicals is most famous.
	They are as follows.
	Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.
	Never go outside the experience of your people.
	Wherever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy.
	Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
	Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.
	A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
	A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
	Keep the pressure on.
	The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
	The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure on the opposition.
	If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through to its counterside.
	The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
	And finally, pick the target, freeze it, personalise it and polarise it.
	So beginning at the start, power is as much about perception as it is ability.
	If your enemy thinks you have power that you do not have, not only can you take advantage of that, you can use their beliefs to help understand their worldview.
	Contrast this with the worldview of your side, so you can ensure that you know the limits of the experience of your people and theirs.
	To make the enemy live up to their own set of rules is to demand that they adhere to an unrealistic standard that they have theoretically pledged to adhere to.
	This is of course impossible as nobody lives up to the letter of their own rules, merely the spirit.
	When they fail this, turn to ridicule as there is rarely a good response to being mocked, and to get your opponent emotionally excited increases the chances that they will make a mistake.
	It's also likely that ridicule will be a tactic that your people enjoy and rarely becomes a drag, but you can't keep making the same joke over and over.
	You have to constantly find new things to mock.
	If you're lucky, your enemy will have many qualities that can be mocked.
	But either way, don't give them time to regroup.
	If they are on the defensive, keep going because, as Alinsky says, the threat is usually more terrifying, because power is often about perception.
	Living with the terrifying event is often easy enough after the fact, but the fear and pressure will force your opponent's hand.
	This should be the point of all tactical operations of the organisation, even if the action seems ineffective, as Gandhi showed when he pushed the negative of passive resistance hard enough to make the anti-British protesters the sympathetic side in the conflict.
	Perception is important.
	If people outside of the conflict see one side taking an absolute battering, they will feel sympathy for them, and that becomes a weapon against the status quo, because it shows that the current batch of haves can't be responsible with their own power.
	And who can blame them after being provoked by an enemy they don't understand is constantly one step ahead of them and uses their own standards as a weapon and subjects them to ridicule when they fail and have fun doing it.
	It's no wonder that they would lash out.
	To discredit the status quo is exactly the point, which is precisely what this does.
	So an alternative must be available to begin constructing a new power structure around, while the components of the old, as Alinsky so eloquently puts it, are picked, frozen, personalised and polarised.
	Choose an issue on which your people can be 100% against, and nobody reasonable can be 100% for, and you cannot fail to discredit that person.
	Dismantling the power structure begins by discrediting individuals.
	However, these tactics are meaningless.
	If you cannot be honest with yourself.
	If you can't gauge outside perceptions of your actions, if you are not perceived to be in the right on an issue, you will fail and discredit yourself.
	It is a very powerful, but also very risky, strategy.
	Quote: I have emphasized and re-emphasized that tactics means you have to do what you can with what you've got, and that power in the main has always gravitated towards those who have money and those whom people follow.
	The resources of the have-nots are, one, no money, and two, lots of people.
	Alright, let's start there.
	People can show their power by voting.
	What else?
	Well, people have physical bodies.
	How can they use them?
	Now a melange of ideas begin to appear.
	I once suggested that we buy 100 seats for one of Rochester's symphony concerts.
	We would select a concert in which the music was relatively quiet.
	The hundred blacks who would be given the tickets would first be treated to a three-hour pre-concert dinner in the community, in which they would be fed nothing but baked beans, and lots of them.
	Then the people would go to the symphony hall, with obvious consequences.
	Let's examine this tactic in terms of the concepts mentioned above.
	First, the disturbance would be utterly outside the experience of the establishment, which was expecting the usual stuff of mass meetings, street demonstrations, confrontations and parades.
	Not in their wildest fears would they expect an attack on their prized cultural jewel, their famed symphony orchestra.
	Second, the action would ridicule and make a farce of the law, for there is no law, and probably never will be, banning natural physical functions.
	There will be nothing here that the police department or the ushers or any other servants of the establishment could do about it.
	The law would be completely paralyzed.
	People would recount what happened in the Symphony Hall, and the reaction of the listener would be to crack up in laughter.
	It would make the Rochester Symphony and the establishment look utterly ridiculous.
	There would be no way for the authorities to cope with any future attacks of a similar character.
	What could they do?
	To directly apply Alinsky's power tactics, any tactic proposed must be legal.
	It must be unexpected and almost impossible for the establishment to deal with without becoming totalitarian, bigoted, or simply ridiculous, and preferably all three.

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