Quotes: Saul Alinsky on Rules for Radicals
Saturday, August 2nd, 2008Passages below are from Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. He well expresses my beliefs:
- that any person or group of people can figure out what they want and what to do about it,
- that you cannot give someone what they want, and
- that people learn by doing.
ANY PERSON OR GROUP CAN FIGURE OUT WHAT THEY WANT AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT:
“One of the great problems in the beginning of [a democratic] organization is, often, that the people do not know what they want.
…
The issue that is not clear to organizers,…educators, or any outsider, is simply that if people feel they don’t have the power to change a bad situation, then they do not think about it. Why start figuring out how you are going to spend a million dollars if you do not have a million dollars or are ever going to have a million dollars — unless you want to engage in fantasy?”
A SPECIFIC SERIES OF QUESTIONS:
“Once people are organized so that they have the power to make changes, then, when confronted with questions of change, they begin to think and to ask questions about how to make the changes. If the teachers in the schools are bad then what do we mean by a good teacher? What is a good teacher? How do we get good teachers? When we say our children do not understand what the teachers are talking about and our teachers do not understand what the children are talking about, then we ask how communication can be established. Why cannot teachers communicate with the children and the latter with the teachers. What are the hangups? Why don’t the teachers understand what the values are in our neighborhood? How can we make them understand? All these and many other perceptive questions begin to arise.
It is when people have a genuine opportunity to act and to change conditions that they begin to think their problems through — then they show their competence, raise the right questions, seek special professional counsel and look for the answers. Then you begin to realize that believing in people is not just a romantic myth.
But here you see that the first requirement for communication and education is for people to have a reason for knowing. It is the creation of the instrument or the circumstances of power that provides the reason and makes knowledge essential. Remember, too, that a powerless people will not be purposefully curious about life, and that they then cease being alive.”
YOU CANNOT GIVE SOMEONE WHAT THEY WANT:
“We learn, when we respect the dignity of the people, that they cannot be denied the elementary right to participate fully in the solutions to their own problems. Self-respect arises only out of people who play an active role in solving their own crises and who are not helpless, passive, puppet-like recipients of private or public services. To give people help, while denying them a significant part of the action, contributes nothing to the development of the individual. In the deepest sense it is not giving but taking — taking their dignity. Denial of the opportunity for participation is the denial of human dignity and democracy. It will not work.
In Reveille for Radicals I described an incident in which the government of Mexico once decided to pay tribute to Mexican mothers. A proclamation was issued that every mother whose sewing machine was being held by the Monte de Piedad (the national pawn shop of Mexico) should have her machine returned as a gift on Mother’s Day. There was tremendous joy over the occasion. Here was a gift being made outright, without any participation on the part of the recipients. Inside of three weeks the exact same number of sewing machines was back in the pawn shop.”
LEARN BY DOING:
“Real education is the means by which the membership will begin to make sense out of their relationship as individuals to the organization and to the world they live in, so that they can make informed and intelligent judgments. The stream of activities and programs of the organization provides a never-ending series of specific issues and situations that create a rich field for the learning process.
The concern and conflict about each specific issue leads to a speedily enlarging area of interest. Competent organizers should be sensitive to these opportunities. Without the learning process, the building of an organization becomes simply the substitution of one power group for another.”
[From pages 104, 105, and 123.]
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