Where Have All The Flowers Gone? The counter-culture and anti-war movements of the 1960s put the US "Establishment" on the back foot. Saul Alinsky's Rules For Radicals was born out of the optimism and confidence of the period. But every action begets a reaction. Alinsky's rules proved to be no match for the Establishment's 44 year fightback.
SAUL ALINSKY died in 1972, but
his 1971 book, Rules For Radicals,
has inspired thousands of activists – including Barack Obama. “Community Organisers”, from Chicago to Christchurch, have applied
Alinsky’s ideas with considerable success – especially in low-income urban
communities. Forty-four years on, however, the optimism and confidence that
fueled the radical campaigns of the 1970s is much less in evidence, and the
power of the government institutions and private corporations against which
Alinsky preached his gospel of radical resistance has grown exponentially.
When Rules For Radicals was being written, progressivism, both in the
USA and around the world, was on a roll. The “counter-culture” of the 1960s had
shaken the confidence of the Establishment to the point where it had begun to
question how long its ability to “manufacture consent” could endure. Mass
movements from below were forcing the issues of racial and gender equality onto
the political agenda. Likewise, the new environmental movement. The latter’s
power was demonstrated in 1970 by the astonishing public response to the first
“Earth Day”.
Environmentalism Surges: "Earth Day" 1970
Corporate America’s fears were
not allayed when their Republican President, Richard Nixon, responded to the
electorate’s concerns about industrial pollution by setting up the
Environmental Protection Agency, and by shepherding a swag of bills designed to
protect the environment through Congress.
By 1974, the situation was
even worse. Progressive America had driven Nixon from office, and leading
members of the Democratic Party were drafting a bill mandating massive federal
intervention in the US economy to guarantee full employment. The year before,
in the United Kingdom, the Conservative Prime Minister, Edward Heath, beset by
a nationwide miners’ strike, had appealed to the British electorate for an
answer to the question: “Who Governs Britain?” The response he’d been hoping for
was: “You do, Prime Minister!” What he got was much closer to “The unions – you
Tory git!” Clearly, something had to be done.
In many ways The
Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies, a 1975 report, written
by Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, for the Trilateral
Commission, was Corporate America’s answer to Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals. According to the report, the lesson to be drawn
from the 1960s is that the “impulse
of democracy is to make government less powerful and more active, to increase
its functions, and to decrease its authority”. The result was “governments
overloaded with participants and demands”. What was needed, according to
Crozier et al, was for the political stage to become much less crowded:
“balance is to be restored between governmental activity and governmental
authority”.
Lewis F Powell - Author of The Powell Memorandum and saviour of the 1 Percent.
Complementing The Crisis of Democracy is the document which
has come to be known as The Powell
Memorandum. Written in 1971 by Lewis F. Powell, a corporate lawyer and
tobacco industry lobbyist (later to become a Justice of the US Supreme Court)
to Eugene Syndor at the US Chamber of Commerce, the document (originally
entitled The Attack on the American Free
Enterprise System) is, essentially, a call-to-arms to the people who ran US
capitalism in the 1970s. The Left, Powell argued, had stolen a whole series of marches
on the Right, and were now poised to undermine the entire system. Powell was in
no doubt as to the sources of this left-wing subversion: “The most disquieting
voices joining the chorus of criticism came from perfectly respectable elements
of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual
and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.” If these
voices couldn’t be silenced, Powell advised, then, at the very least, they should
be drowned out.
The British
geographer, anthropologist, and fierce critic of the culture of Late Capitalism,
David Harvey, has argued that the advance of what we now call Neoliberalism can
be traced back to The Powell Memorandum.
Many of the think tanks still informing the global free market
counter-revolution: the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative
Exchange Council, for example, were propelled into existence by Powell’s
infamous missive.
Alinsky condensed
the subject matter of his “pragmatic primer for realistic radicals” into 13
basic rules. These are listed below – accompanied by commentaries informed by
the 44 intervening years of steadily expanding neoliberal hegemony:
1. “Power is not only what you have, but what the
enemy thinks you have.” Power is derived from 2 main sources – money and
people. “Have-Nots” must build power from flesh and blood.
Still true. But activists
should never forget that one of the most important things that money buys is
the expertise and technology to get inside the heads of the “Have-Nots”. The
“enemy” you see may not be the enemy they see.
2. “Never go outside the expertise of your people.”
It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone
of anyone.
Forty-four years of “dumbing
down” has emptied the well of popular expertise to an alarming degree. People’s
security in their own knowledge – and hence their backbone – may be harder to
locate than you think.
3. “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of
the enemy.” Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty.
One of the results of The Powell Memorandum has been a
burgeoning of the expertise available to the “enemy”. That’s what think tanks
are for: to increase the security, confidence and certainty of the
powers-that-be.
4. “Make the enemy live up to its own book of
rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You
can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own
rules.
Rules? What are they?
5. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is
no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure
point to force the enemy into concessions.
But ridicule is a two-edged
sword – a weapon the “enemy” mastered long ago. Just think of the front-page
headlines of The Sun, or Paddy Gower.
On the other hand, you could think of John Stewart and be reassured that, in
the right hands, ridicule can still be a very powerful force for Good.
6. “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.”
They’ll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They’re doing
their thing, and will even suggest better ones.
Except that, these days, the
thing people enjoy doing most is clicking “Like” on Facebook and taking
selfies!
7. “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a
drag.” Don’t become old news.
Even more true today than it
was in 1971. With a 24-hour news cycle, “dragging on” can be measured in
minutes.
8. “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.” Keep
trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters
one approach, hit them from the flank with something new.
Absolutely sound advice. Now,
if we could just come up with a tactic nobody’s used before!
9. “The threat is usually more terrifying than the
thing itself.” Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any
activist.
And Crown Law can dream up
consequences that activists would rather not think about.
10. “The major premise for tactics is the
development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the
opposition.” It is this unceasing pressure that results in the reactions from
the opposition that are essential for the success of the campaign.
The problem today is that any
group of activists involved in the “development of operations” will almost
certainly be placed under intense surveillance by the SIS, the GCSB, ODESC and
Police Intelligence. Eliciting the reaction that you want from the “opposition”
is much harder when they know exactly what you’re planning.
11. “If you push a negative hard enough, it will
push through and become a positive.” Violence from the other side can win the
public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog.
Alinsky was wrong about this
even in 1971. Police violence against demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic
Party Convention in Chicago led to an outpouring of public support for – not against – the Chicago Police. The “Great Silent Majority” is an
evil beast.
12. “The price of a successful attack is a
constructive alternative.” Never let the enemy score points because you’re
caught without a solution to the problem.
This was what let down the
Occupy movement. They gave us the symbol of the “1 Percent”, but they didn’t
give us a solution to the psychopathology of Finance Capitalism.
13. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it,
and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from
sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than
institutions.
Read Rule 13 again, and ask
yourself if this hasn’t been the exact tactic employed against us by the
political representatives of Neoliberalism since the late 1970s. Except that
Alinsky was wrong about institutions – they’re every bit as easy to hurt as
people.
The hardest thing for those of
us who can still remember when Rules For Radicals
was new, is coming to terms with the fact that the bastards beat us with our
own weapons.
This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 28 September 2015.
