Saul+Alinsky's+12+Rules+for+Radicals

Saul Alinsky's 1971 work "Rules for Radicals" has attracted recent attention as tools of the trade for community organizing - both online and in face to face environments. For example, Markos Moulitsas's "[|Taking Back The System]" discusses how these rules inform community organization and action in the American progressive blog [|Daily Kos], an individual blog that's become a veritable political force of the "netroots" and has grown to a community blog staffed by nine and spawned thousands of community member diaries.

Alinsky's 12 Rules are summarized [|here] (broken link!). The language is strident and confrontational (e.g., talking about those who oppose you as "enemies") but they are a good road map for not only understanding political dynamics, but acting locally to change them. While nominally set up for the progressive movement, these rules are rather non-ideological and can apply to all issues.

Excessive confrontation is not necessarily the best tactic in all circumstances. This is hardly the only apporach - we'll summarize ideas for a more cooperative, consensual approach soon.

The twelve rules are posted below - feel free to edit this page with examples or questions on what they mean to you.

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 * 1) **Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.**
 * 2) **Never go outside the experience of your people.**
 * 3) **Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy.**
 * 4) **Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.**
 * 5) **Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.**
 * 6) **A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.**
 * 7) **A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.**
 * 8) **Keep the pressure on.**
 * 9) **The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.**
 * 10) **If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.**
 * 11) **The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.**
 * 12) **Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.**