The Radical Torch

...Alinsky asserts that until people—youth, the poor, racial minorities—actually have political power, it is pointless to ask them what they want to do with that power...

...Noting that there simply are not enough poor people and racial minor- ities to form a ruling power base in a democratic America, he contends that the middle class is really the happy hunting ground in which tomorrow's radicals can convert a minority posi- tion into a majority one...

...Not only the blue collar "hard hats" and "pigs," but complacent upper-middle-class America is frus- trated and, in many ways, deprived...

...No one has more direct, pragmatic experience in mounting radical chal- lenges to the sophisticated American establishment than Alinsky...

...With that faith, then, he proceeds to sketch the ground rules of a relevant American "science of revolution...

...He believes in "call- ng audibles," in shifting tactics rapidly s circumstances shift...

...He reminds one of the pen, opportunistic flexibility of a pro- essional quarterback approaching the ine of scrimmage...

...His own horough appreciation of situation thics keeps him from getting bogged own in questions of "ends" versus means...

...And it should be required wading for such people—if for noth- ig else, because of Alinsky's success in ving up to those adjectives "pragmat- and "realistic...

...Ideas in that dimension seldom come to focus until real possibilities are presented by the seizure of power...

...Alinsky feels that today's oung radicals give away far too many oints by forgetting that a sense of hu- lor is not only a respectable human uality, but also a highly effective tac- cal weapon...

...He believes in iadgering the opposition until it is re- ponding to his moves—and then keep- rig it off balance by making his own ntentions hard to decipher...

...he is a thorough professional with a lifetime dedication to radical reform in anybody's community...

...Alinsky notes in Rules for Radicals that few effective American radical leaders from the Depression era sur- vived the onslaught of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy—and that most of those have since been severely limited by their own inability to rise above and beyond conventional Marxist rhetoric...

...The tactical style Alinsky espouses 5 not a rigid doctrine from a military ield manual...

...Rules for Radicals is his effort to transfuse the current youth-activism movement with the realism of this experience...

...And he offers an ideological base: his faith "that if people have the power to act, in the long run they will, most of the time, reach the right decision...

...The Radical Torch Rules for Radicals, by Saul D. Alinsky...

...Alinsky's book is ot a manifesto...

...Now a new generation of radical acti- vists is on the march—and too often, Alinsky feels, they are floundering pointlessly around inappropriate tacti- cal doctrines spawned in the cane patches of Cuba and the rice paddies of China, doctrines which are inad- equate to the quest for power in highly technical post-industrial America...

...Saul David Alinsky is of a different breed...

...Alinsky believes young radicals are making a blind tactical error in dis- playing their contempt for the "middle class" population from which most of them came...

...Alinsky reminds America's dissident student activists that while most of them have no real credentials for lead- ing the poor and the culturally de- prived, they have perfect backgrounds for infiltrating the middle class from which they came—for providing the necessary tactical leadership and man- power in this one crucial arena in which the balance of power can be hifted to an America willing to accept lew values and new challenges...

...Rules for Radicals is not a detailed program for the radical Left...

...Rules for Radicals proposes a spe- ial demand on community organizers nd reform-campaigners: that they put n a good, interesting show for their blowers...

...He cautions that any ictic which "drags on too long" begins 3 sag under its own weight...

...He, too, takes it personally—but one quick- ly discovers that his community is not "Back of the Yards" Chicago, where he first earned his spurs as an effec- tive goad to complacent establish- ments, but the complete world of the "have-nots" who are struggling for the power to act against their own deprivations...

...He knows that his age makes him suspect, but he plows on with a "sense of des- peration" because he feels so strongly about what must be done—and can be done—in these "days when man has his hands on the sublime while he is up to his hips in the muck of madness...

...The subtitle is A Pragmatic Primer ir Realistic Radicals...

...In the same spirit in which he coun- seled young peace-campaigners out- side the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 that their only real hope was to come back to the next convention as delegates, not observers, he makes the actual seizure of power by the "have-nots" the essential goal of his Rules for Radicals...

...Reviewed by John Huenefeld Home-grown social action organiz- -*¦¦** ers like Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King rise out of their own communities' frustrations to lead their people in what is, very personally, as much their own cause as the people's...

...it is a frame of ref- rence for those who would write man- estoes...