“The organizer must begin the task of agitating: rubbing resentments, fanning hostilities, and searching out controversy. This is necessary to get people to participate. An organizer has to attack apathy and disturb the prevailing patterns of complacent community life where people have simply come to accept a bad situation. Alinsky would say, \u201cThe first step in community organization is community disorganization.\u201d<\/p>\n
Through a process combining hope and resentment, the organizer tries to create a \u201cmass army\u201d that brings in as many recruits as possible from local organizations, churches, services groups, labor unions, corner gangs, and individuals. ”<\/p>\n
Alinsky provides a collection of rules to guide the process. But he emphasizes these rules must be translated into real-life tactics that are fluid and responsive to the situation at hand.<\/p>\n
Rule 1: Power is not only what you have, but what an opponent thinks you have. If your organization is small, hide your numbers in the dark and raise a din that will make everyone think you have many more people than you do.<\/p>\n
Rule 2: Never go outside the experience of your people.
\nThe result is confusion, fear, and retreat. <\/p>\n
Rule 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of an opponent. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat. <\/p>\n
Rule 4: Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. \u201cYou can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rule 5: Ridicule is man\u2019s most potent weapon. It\u2019s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.<\/p>\n
Rule 6: A good tactic is one your people enjoy. \u201cIf your people aren\u2019t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rule 7: A tactic that drags on for too long becomes a drag. Commitment may become ritualistic as people turn to other issues.<\/p>\n
Rule 8: Keep the pressure on. Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period for your purpose. \u201cThe major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this that will cause the opposition to react to your advantage.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rule 9: The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself. When Alinsky leaked word that large numbers of poor people were going to tie up the washrooms of O\u2019Hare Airport, Chicago city authorities quickly agreed to act on a longstanding commitment to a ghetto organization. They imagined the mayhem as thousands of passengers poured off airplanes to discover every washroom occupied. Then they imagined the international embarrassment and the damage to the city\u2019s reputation.<\/p>\n
Rule 10: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. Avoid being trapped by an opponent or an interviewer who says, \u201cOkay, what would you do?\u201d<\/p>\n
Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don\u2019t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.<\/p>\n
According to Alinsky, the main job of the organizer is to bait an opponent into reacting. \u201cThe enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“The organizer must begin the task of agitating: rubbing resentments, fanning hostilities, and searching out controversy. This is necessary to get people to participate. An organizer has to attack apathy and disturb the prevailing patterns of complacent community life where people have simply come to accept a bad situation. Alinsky would say, \u201cThe first step […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2922"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2922\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}