Saul Alinsky

<infobox> <title source="name"/> <image source="image">

</image> <group> <label>Aliases</label> <label>Relatives</label> <label>Affiliation</label> </group> <group> <header>Biographical information</header> <label>Marital status</label> <label>Date of birth</label> <label>Place of birth</label> <label>Date of death</label> <label>Place of death</label> </group> <group> <header>Physical description</header> <label>Species</label> <label>Gender</label> <label>Height</label> <label>Weight</label> <label>Eye color</label> </group> </infobox>Saul David Alinsky (1909 - 1972) was a community organizer, writer and philosopher.

Life

Saul was born in 1909 in Chicago, Illinois, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, the only surviving son of Benjamin Alinsky's marriage to his second wife, Sarah Tannenbaum Alinsky. They never became involved in the socialist movement and were strict Orthodox Jews, with a life centered around work and a synagogue. Although he abandoned his Jewish faith for agnosticism at age 12, he faced constant anti-semitism growing up. He moved to Los Angeles in the 1920s and finished high school in 1926.

He graduated with a bachelor in philosophy from the university of Chicago in 1930, and major in archeology. He planned to be a professional archeologist, but the Great Depression put plans away for this. He began to work as a criminologist for the State of Illinois, and began organizing with the Congress of Industrial Organizations. But slowly became less active in the labor movement and more with general community organizing. He successfully organized slum communities, and also began organizing in Kansas City, Detroit and Southern California.

He never joined a political party, but identified as a 'small c communist' and became a legendary community organizer. But died of a heart attack in California. Before his death, he expressed a desire to go to hell, to organize it, culminating in an uprising against satan.

Ideas

Saul developed 13 'rules' for radicals to follow in order to successfully challenge the wealthy and power. They are:

1. "Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have."
2. "Never go outside the expertise of your people."
3. "Whenever possible go outside the expertise of the enemy."
4. "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."
5. "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon."
6. "A good tactic is one 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. "The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition."
11. "If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside."
12. "The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative."
13. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

Works

• Rules for Radicals