Today everything is so complex as to be incomprehensible. What sense does it make for men to walk on the moon while other men are waiting on welfare lines, or in Vietnam killing and dying for a corrupt dictatorship in the name of freedom? Open in Kindle

What the present generation wants is what all generations have always wanted—a meaning, a sense of what the world and life are—a chance to strive for some sort of order. Open in Kindle

In this book we are concerned with how to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people; to realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace, cooperation, equal and full opportunities for education, full and useful employment, health, and the creation of those circumstances in which man can have the chance to live by values that give meaning to life. We are talking about a mass power organization which will change the world into a place where all men and women walk erect, in the spirit of that credo of the Spanish Civil War, ‘Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.’ This means revolution. Open in Kindle

picketing Open in Kindle

Radicals must be resilient, adaptable to shifting political circumstances, and sensitive enough to the process of action and reaction to avoid being trapped by their own tactics and forced to travel a road not of their choosing. In short, radicals must have a degree of control over the flow of events. Open in Kindle

If it were possible for the Have-Nots of the world to recognize and accept the idea that revolution did not inevitably mean hate and war, cold or hot, from the United States, that alone would be a great revolution in world politics and the future of man. Open in Kindle

The prerequisite for an ideology is possession of a basic truth. Open in Kindle

Believing in people, the radical has the job of organizing them so that they will have the power and opportunity to best meet each unforeseeable future crisis as they move ahead in their eternal search for those values of equality, justice, freedom, peace, a deep concern for the preciousness of human life, and all those rights and values propounded by Judaeo-Christianity and the democratic political tradition. Open in Kindle

I believe that man is about to learn that the most practical life is the moral life and that the moral life is the only road to survival. He is beginning to learn that he will either share part of his material wealth or lose all of it; that he will respect and learn to live with other political ideologies if he wants civilization to go on. This is the kind of argument that man’s actual experience equips him to understand and accept. This is the low road to morality. There is no other. Open in Kindle

the real and only question regarding the ethics of means and ends is, and always has been, “Does this particular end justify this particular means?” Open in Kindle

To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life. Open in Kindle

The practical revolutionary will understand Goethe’s “conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action”; in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one’s individual conscience and the good of mankind. The choice must always be for the latter. Action is for mass salvation and not for the individual’s personal salvation. He who sacrifices the mass good for his personal conscience has a peculiar conception of “personal salvation”; he doesn’t care enough for people to be “corrupted” for them. Open in Kindle

The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means. Open in Kindle

I present here a series of rules pertaining to the ethics of means and ends: first, that one’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue. Open in Kindle

one’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s distance from the scene of conflict. Open in Kindle

The second rule of the ethics of means and ends is that the judgment of the ethics of means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgment. Open in Kindle

The opposition’s means, used against us, are always immoral and our means are always ethical and rooted in the highest of human values. Open in Kindle

The third rule of the ethics of means and ends is that in war the end justifies almost any means. Open in Kindle

The fourth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that judgment must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point. Open in Kindle

Ethical standards must be elastic to stretch with the times. In politics, the ethics of means and ends can be understood by the rules suggested here. Open in Kindle

In the politics of human life, consistency is not a virtue. To be consistent means, according to the Oxford Universal Dictionary, “standing still or not moving.” Men must change with the times or die. Open in Kindle

The fifth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa. Open in Kindle

To me ethics is doing what is best for the most. Open in Kindle

The sixth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that the less important the end to be desired, the more one can afford to engage in ethical evaluations of means. Open in Kindle

The seventh rule of the ethics of means and ends is that generally success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics. Open in Kindle

The eighth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that the morality of a means depends upon whether the means is being employed at a time of imminent defeat or imminent victory. Open in Kindle

In short, ethics are determined by whether one is losing or winning. From the beginning of time killing has always been regarded as justifiable if committed in self-defense. Open in Kindle

The ninth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical. Open in Kindle

The tenth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that you do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments. Open in Kindle

Eight months after securing independence, the Indian National Congress outlawed passive resistance and made it a crime. It was one thing for them to use the means of passive resistance against the previous Haves, but now in power they were going to ensure that this means would not be used against them! No longer as Have-Nots were they appealing to laws higher than man-made law. Open in Kindle

Moral rationalization is indispensable at all times of action whether to justify the selection or the use of ends or means. Open in Kindle

Rousseau noted the obvious, that “Law is a very good thing for men with property and a very bad thing for men without property. Open in Kindle

The eleventh rule of the ethics of means and ends is that goals must be phrased in general terms like “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” “Of the Common Welfare,” “Pursuit of Happiness,” or “Bread and Peace.” Open in Kindle

Democracy is not an end; it is the best political means available toward the achievement of these values. Open in Kindle

Means and ends are so qualitatively interrelated that the true question has never been the proverbial one, “Does the End justify the Means?” but always has been “Does this particular end justify this particular means?” Open in Kindle

A Word About Words Open in Kindle

THE PASSIONS OF MANKIND have boiled over into all areas of political life, including its vocabulary. The words most common in politics have become stained with human hurts, hopes, and frustrations. All of them are loaded with popular opprobrium, and their use results in a conditioned, negative, emotional response. Open in Kindle

POWER Open in Kindle

why not use other words—words that mean the same but are peaceful, and do not result in such negative emotional reactions? Open in Kindle

reasons for rejecting such substitution. Open in Kindle

we begin to dilute the meaning; and as we use purifying synonyms, we dissolve the bitterness, the anguish, the hate and love, the agony and the triumph attached to these words, leaving an aseptic imitation of life. Open in Kindle

In the politics of life we are concerned with the slaves and the Caesars, not the vestal virgins. Open in Kindle

It is not just that, in communication as in thought, we must ever strive toward simplicity. Open in Kindle

It is more than that: it is a determination not to detour around reality. Open in Kindle

To travel down the sweeter-smelling, peaceful, more socially acceptable, more respectable, indefinite byways, ends in a failure to achieve an honest understanding of the issues that we must come to grips with if we are to do the job. Open in Kindle

The word power is associated with conflict; it is unacceptable in our present Madison Avenue deodorized hygiene, where controversy is blasphemous and the value is being liked and not offending others. Power, in our minds, has become almost synonymous with corruption and immorality. Open in Kindle

Alexander Hamilton, in The Federalist Papers, put it this way: “What is a power, but the ability or faculty of doing a thing? What is the ability to do a thing, but the power of employing the means necessary to its execution?” Pascal, who was definitely not a cynic, observed that: “Justice without power is impotent; power without justice is tyranny.” St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuit order, did not shrink from the recognition of power when he issued his dictum: “To do a thing well a man needs power and competence.” We could call the roll of all who have played their parts in history and find the word power, not a substitute word, used in their speech and writings. Open in Kindle

Power must be understood for what it is, for the part it plays in every area of our life, if we are to understand it and thereby grasp the essentials of relationships and functions between groups and organizations, particularly in a pluralistic society. To know power and not fear it is essential to its constructive use and control. In short, life without power is death; a world without power would be a ghostly wasteland, a dead planet! Open in Kindle

SELF-INTEREST Open in Kindle

Self-interest, like power, wears the black shroud of negativism and suspicion. Open in Kindle

From the great teachers of Judaeo-Christian morality and the philosophers, to the economists, and to the wise observers of the politics of man, there has always been universal agreement on the part that self-interest plays as a prime moving force in man’s behavior. Open in Kindle

Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, noted that “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard of their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantage.” Open in Kindle

These drastic shifts of self-interest can be rationalized only under a huge, limitless umbrella of general “moral” principles such as liberty, justice, freedom, a law higher than man-made law, and so on. Morality, so-called, becomes the continuum as self-interests shift. Open in Kindle

side. In essence, what we are saying is that we do not care what kind of a communist you are so long as you do not threaten our self-interest. Open in Kindle

We repeatedly get caught in this conflict between our professed moral principles and the real reasons why we do things—to wit, our self-interest. We are always able to mask those real reasons in words of beneficent goodness—freedom, justice, and so on. Such tears as appear in the fabric of this moral masquerade sometimes embarrass us. Open in Kindle

George Orwell describes his self-interest in entering the trenches during the Spanish Civil War as a matter of trying to stop the spreading horror of fascism. Yet once he was in the trenches, his self-interest changed to the goal of getting out alive. Open in Kindle

COMPROMISE Compromise is another word that carries shades of weakness, vacillation, betrayal of ideals, surrender of moral principles. Open in Kindle

But to the organizer, compromise is a key and beautiful word. It is always present in the pragmatics of operation. It is making the deal, getting that vital breather, usually the victory. If you start with nothing, demand 100 per cent, then compromise for 30 per cent, you’re 30 per cent ahead. Open in Kindle

A society devoid of compromise is totalitarian. If I had to define a free and open society in one word, the word would be “compromise.” Open in Kindle

EGO Open in Kindle

Anyone who is working against the Haves is always facing odds, and in many cases heavy odds. If he or she does not have that complete self-confidence (or call it ego) that he can win, then the battle is lost before it is even begun. Open in Kindle

Nothing antagonizes people and alienates them from a would-be organizer more than the revealing flashes of arrogance, vanity, impatience, and contempt of a personal egotism. Open in Kindle

The ego of the organizer is stronger and more monumental than the ego of the leader. The leader is driven by the desire for power, while the organizer is driven by the desire to create. Open in Kindle

Egotism is mainly a defensive reaction of feelings of personal inadequacy—ego is a positive conviction and belief in one’s ability, with no need for egotistical behavior. Open in Kindle

CONFLICT Open in Kindle

Conflict is another bad word in the general opinion. This is a consequence of two influences in our society: one influence is organized religion, which has espoused a rhetoric of “turning the other cheek” and has quoted the Scriptures as the devil never would have dared because of their major previous function of supporting the Establishment. The second influence is probably the most subversive and insidious one, and it has permeated the American scene in the last generation: that is Madison Avenue public relations, middle-class moral hygiene, which has made of conflict or controversy something negative and undesirable. This has all been part of an Advertising Culture that emphasizes getting along with people and avoiding friction. Open in Kindle

Conflict is the essential core of a free and open society. If one were to project the democratic way of life in the form of a musical score, its major theme would be the harmony of dissonance. Open in Kindle

The Education of an Organizer Open in Kindle

THE BUILDING of many mass power organizations to merge into a national popular power force cannot come without many organizers. Since organizations are created, in large part, by the organizer, we must find out what creates the organizer. Open in Kindle

The education of an organizer requires frequent long conferences on organizational problems, analysis of power patterns, communication, conflict tactics, the education and development of community leaders, and the methods of introduction of new issues. Open in Kindle

Maintaining interest and activity, keeping the group’s goals strong and flexible at once, is a different operation but still organization. Open in Kindle

Mass organization is a different animal, it is not housebroken. There are no fixed chronological points or definite issues. The demands are always changing; the situation is fluid and ever-shifting; and many of the goals are not in concrete terms of dollars and hours but are psychological and constantly changing, like “such stuff as dreams are made on.” Open in Kindle

I have improvised teaching approaches. For example, knowing that one can only communicate and understand in terms of one’s experience, we had to construct experience for our students. Most people do not accumulate a body of experience. Most people go through life undergoing a series of happenings, which pass through their systems undigested. Happenings become experiences when they are digested, when they are reflected on, related to general patterns, and synthesized. Open in Kindle

There is a difference between honesty and rude disrespect of another’s tradition. The organizer will err far less by being himself than by engaging in “professional techniques” when the people really know better. It shows respect for people to be honest, as in the Mexican dinner episode; they are being treated as people and not guinea pigs being techniqued. Open in Kindle

Here is the list of the ideal elements of an organizer—the items one looks for in identifying potential organizers and in appraising the future possibilities of new organizers, and the pivot points of any kind of educational curricula for organizers. Open in Kindle

Curiosity. What makes an organizer organize? He is driven by a compulsive curiosity that knows no limits. Open in Kindle

Irreverence. Curiosity and irreverence go together. Curiosity cannot exist without the other. Curiosity asks, “Is this true?” “Just because this has always been the way, is this the best or right way of life, the best or right religion, political or economic value, morality?” To the questioner nothing is sacred. He detests dogma, defies any finite definition of morality, rebels against any repression of a free, open search for ideas no matter where they may lead. He is challenging, insulting, agitating, discrediting. He stirs unrest. As with all life, this is a paradox, for his irreverence is rooted in a deep reverence for the enigma of life, and an incessant search for its meaning. Open in Kindle

Imagination. Imagination is the inevitable partner of irreverence and curiosity. How can one be curious without being imaginative? Open in Kindle

A sense of humor. Back to Webster’s Unabridged: humor is defined as “The mental faculty of discovering, expressing, or appreciating ludicrous or absurdly incongruous elements in ideas, situations, happenings, or acts …” or “A changing and uncertain state of mind …” The organizer, searching with a free and open mind void of certainty, hating dogma, finds laughter not just a way to maintain his sanity but also a key to understanding life. Open in Kindle

Essentially, life is a tragedy; and the converse of tragedy is comedy. Open in Kindle

Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule. Open in Kindle

A bit of a blurred vision of a better world. Much of an organizer’s daily work is detail, repetitive and deadly in its monotony. In the totality of things he is engaged in one small bit. Open in Kindle

An organized personality. The organizer must be well organized himself so he can be comfortable in a disorganized situation, rational in a sea of irrationalities. It is vital that he be able to accept and work with irrationalities for the purpose of change. Open in Kindle

The organizer should know and accept that the right reason is only introduced as a moral rationalization after the right end has been achieved, although it may have been achieved for the wrong reason—therefore he should search for and use the wrong reasons to achieve the right goals. He should be able, with skill and calculation, to use irrationality in his attempts to progress toward a rational world. Open in Kindle

The organizer recognizes that each person or bloc has a hierarchy of values. Open in Kindle

Not only does a single- or even a dual-issue organization condemn you to a small organization, it is axiomatic that a single-issue organization won’t last. An organization needs action as an individual needs oxygen. With only one or two issues there will certainly be a lapse of action, and then comes death. Multiple issues mean constant action and life. Open in Kindle

A well-integrated political schizoid. The organizer must become schizoid, politically, in order not to slip into becoming a true believer. Before men can act an issue must be polarized. Men will act when they are convinced that their cause is 100 per cent on the side of the angels and that the opposition are 100 per cent on the side of the devil. He knows that there can be no action until issues are polarized to this degree. Open in Kindle

the organizer must be able to split himself into two parts—one part in the arena of action where he polarizes the issue to 100 to nothing, and helps to lead his forces into conflict, while the other part knows that when the time comes for negotiations that it really is only a 10 per cent difference—and yet both parts have to live comfortably with each other. Only a well-organized person can split and yet stay together. But this is what the organizer must do. Open in Kindle

Ego. Throughout these desired qualities is interwoven a strong ego, one we might describe as monumental in terms of solidity. Here we are using the word ego as discussed in the previous chapter, clearly differentiated from egotism. Ego is unreserved confidence in one’s ability to do what he believes must be done. An organizer must accept, without fear or worry, that the odds are always against him. Having this kind of ego, he is a doer and does. Open in Kindle

A free and open mind, and political relativity. The organizer in his way of life, with his curiosity, irreverence, imagination, sense of humor, distrust of dogma, his self-organization, his understanding of the irrationality of much of human behavior, becomes a flexible personality, not a rigid structure that breaks when something unexpected happens. Having his own identity, he has no need for the security of an ideology or a panacea. He knows that life is a quest for uncertainty; that the only certain fact of life is uncertainty; and he can live with it. He knows that all values are relative, in a world of political relativity. Open in Kindle

the organizer is constantly creating the new out of the old. He knows that all new ideas arise from conflict; that every time man has had a new idea it has been a challenge to the sacred ideas of the past and the present and inevitably a conflict has raged. Curiosity, irreverence, imagination, sense of humor, a free and open mind, an acceptance of the relativity of values and of the uncertainty of life, all inevitably fuse into the kind of person whose greatest joy is creation. Open in Kindle

ONE CAN LACK any of the qualities of an organizer—with one exception—and still be effective and successful. That exception is the art of communication. It does not matter what you know about anything if you cannot communicate to your people. Open in Kindle

communication is a two-way process. If you try to get your ideas across to others without paying attention to what they have to say to you, you can forget about the whole thing. Open in Kindle

When you are trying to communicate and can’t find the point in the experience of the other party at which he can receive and understand, then, you must create the experience for him. Open in Kindle

people react strictly on the basis of their own experience. Open in Kindle

Christianity is beyond the experience of a Christian-professing-but-not-practicing population. Open in Kindle

In mass organization, you can’t go outside of people’s actual experience. Open in Kindle

Communication for persuasion, as in negotiation, is more than entering the area of another person’s experience. It is getting a fix on his main value or goal and holding your course on that target. You don’t communicate with anyone purely on the rational facts or ethics of an issue. Open in Kindle

It is only when the other party is concerned or feels threatened that he will listen—in the arena of action, a threat or a crisis becomes almost a precondition to communication. Open in Kindle

Another maxim in effective communication is that people have to make their own decisions. It isn’t just that Moses couldn’t tell God what God should do; no organizer can tell a community, either, what to do. Much of the time, though, the organizer will have a pretty good idea of what the community should be doing, and he will want to suggest, maneuver, and persuade the community toward that action. He will not ever seem to tell the community what to do; instead, he will use loaded questions. Open in Kindle

The organizer recedes from the local circle of decision-makers. His response to questions about what he thinks becomes a non-directive counterquestion, “What do you think?” His job becomes one of weaning the group away from any dependency upon him. Then his job is done. Open in Kindle

The organizer knows that it is a human characteristic that someone who asks for help and gets it reacts not only with gratitude but with a subconscious hostility toward the one who helped him. Open in Kindle

In the beginning the organizer is the general, he knows where, what, and how, but he never wears his four stars, never is addressed as nor acts as a general—he is an organizer. Open in Kindle

One of the factors that changes what you can and can’t communicate is relationships. There are sensitive areas that one does not touch until there is a strong personal relationship based on common involvements. Otherwise the other party turns off and literally does not hear, regardless of whether your words are within his experience. Conversely, if you have a good relationship, he is very receptive, and your “message” comes through in a positive context. Open in Kindle

Communication on a general basis without being fractured into the specifics of experience becomes rhetoric and it carries a very limited meaning. Open in Kindle

It is what was implicit in the reputed statement of that organizational genius Samuel Adams, at the time when he was allegedly planning the Boston Massacre; he was quoted as saying that there ought to be no less than three or four killed so that we will have martyrs for the Revolution, but there must be no more than ten, because after you get beyond that number we no longer have martyrs but simply a sewage problem. Open in Kindle

This element of the specific that must be small enough to be grasped by the hands of experience ties very definitely into the whole scene of issues. Issues must be able to be communicated. It is essential that they can be communicated. It is essential that they be simple enough to be grasped as rallying or battle cries. They cannot be generalities like sin or immorality or the good life or morals. They must be this immorality of this slum landlord with this slum tenement where these people suffer. Open in Kindle

communication occurs concretely, by means of one’s specific experience. Open in Kindle

General theories become meaningful only when one has absorbed and understood the specific constituents and then related them back to a general concept. Unless this is done, the specifics become nothing more than a string of interesting anecdotes. That is the world as it is in communication. Open in Kindle

IN THE BEGINNING the incoming organizer must establish his identity or, putting it another way, get his license to operate. He must have a reason for being there—a reason acceptable to the people. Open in Kindle

The answers to these questions must be acceptable in terms of the experience of the community. If the organizer begins with an affirmation of his love for people, he promptly turns everyone off. If, on the other hand, he begins with a denunciation of exploiting employers, slum landlords, police shakedowns, gouging merchants, he is inside their experience and they accept him. People can make judgments only on the basis of their own experiences. And the question in their minds is, “If we were in the organizer’s position, would we do what he is doing and if so, why?” Until they have an answer that is at least somewhat acceptable they find it difficult to understand and accept the organizer. Open in Kindle

It is not enough to persuade them of your competence, talents, and courage—they must have faith in your ability and courage. Open in Kindle

It is a sad fact of life that power and fear are the fountainheads of faith. Open in Kindle

Here again we find that it is power and fear that are essential to the development of faith. This need is met by the establishment’s use of the brand “dangerous,” for in that one word the establishment reveals its fear of the organizer, its fear that he represents a threat to its omnipotence. Now the organizer has his “birth certificate” and can begin. Open in Kindle

This advantage is the dividend of reputation, but the important issue here is how the organizer without a reputation gets the invitation. Open in Kindle

The organizer’s job is to inseminate an invitation for himself, to agitate, introduce ideas, get people pregnant with hope and a desire for change and to identify you as the person most qualified for this purpose. Here the tool of the organizer, in the agitation leading to the invitation as well as actual organization and education of local leadership, is the use of the question, the Socratic method: Open in Kindle

One of the great problems in the beginning of an organization is, often, that the people do not know what they want. Open in Kindle

The issue that is not clear to organizers, missionaries, 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. Open in Kindle

It is when people have a genuine opportunity to act and to change conditions that they begin to think their problems through— Open in Kindle

romantic myth. But here you see that the first requirement for communication and education is for people to have a reason for knowing. Open in Kindle

powerless people will not be purposefully curious about life, and that they then cease being alive. Open in Kindle

An organizer knows that life is a sea of shifting desires, changing elements, of relativity and uncertainty, and yet he must stay within the experience of the people he is working with and act in terms of specific resolutions and answers, of definitiveness and certainty. Open in Kindle

Here the organizer serves as a protective shield: if anything goes wrong it is all his fault, he has the responsibility. If they are successful all credit goes to the local people. Open in Kindle

RATIONALIZATION Open in Kindle

A large shadow over organizing efforts, in the beginning, is, then, rationalization. Everyone has a reason or rationalization for what he does or does not do. No matter what, every action carries its rationalization. Open in Kindle

Chasing rationalizations is like attempting to find the rainbow. Rationalizations must be recognized as such so that the organizer does not get trapped in communication problems or in treating them as the real situations. Open in Kindle

Learn to search out the rationalizations, treat them as rationalizations, and break through. Do not make the mistake of locking yourself up in conflict with them as though they were the issues or problems with which you are trying to engage the local people. Open in Kindle

THE PROCESS OF POWER From the moment the organizer enters a community he lives, dreams, eats, breathes, sleeps only one thing and that is to build the mass power base of what he calls the army. Until he has developed that mass power base, he confronts no major issues. He has nothing with which to confront anything. Until he has those means and power instruments, his “tactics” are very different from power tactics. Open in Kindle

Change comes from power, and power comes from organization. In order to act, people must get together. Open in Kindle

Power and organization are one and the same. Open in Kindle

The organizer knows, for example, that his biggest job is to give the people the feeling that they can do something, that while they may accept the idea that organization means power, they have to experience this idea in action. The organizer’s job is to begin to build confidence and hope in the idea of organization and thus in the people themselves: to win limited victories, each of which will build confidence and the feeling that “if we can do so much with what we have now just think what we will be able to do when we get big and strong.” Open in Kindle

if your function is to attack apathy and get people to participate it is necessary to attack the prevailing patterns of organized living in the community. The first step in community organization is community disorganization. The disruption of the present organization is the first step toward community organization. Open in Kindle

All change means disorganization of the old and organization of the new. Open in Kindle

He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act. Open in Kindle

In private they resent these circumstances, complain, talk about the futility of “bucking the big shots” and generally succumb to frustration—all because of the lack of opportunity for effective action. Open in Kindle

No one can negotiate without the power to compel negotiation. Open in Kindle

In the beginning the organizer’s first job is to create the issues or problems. Open in Kindle

An issue is something you can do something about, but as long as you feel powerless and unable to do anything about it, all you have is a bad scene. The people resign themselves to a rationalization: it’s that kind of world, it’s a crumby world, we didn’t ask to come into it but we are stuck with it and all we can do is hope that something happens somewhere, somehow, sometime. Open in Kindle

Organizations are built on issues that are specific, immediate, and realizable. Organizations must be based on many issues. Organizations need action as an individual needs oxygen. The cessation of action brings death to the organization through factionalism and inaction, through dialogues and conferences that are actually a form of rigor mortis rather than life. It is impossible to maintain constant action on a single issue. Open in Kindle

To organize a community you must understand that in a highly mobile, urbanized society the word “community” means community of interests, not physical community. Open in Kindle

“You know, Sadie. You know what the trouble with life is? There just ain’t any background music.” Open in Kindle

Let us look at what is called process. Process tells us how. Purpose tells us why. But in reality, it is academic to draw a line between them, they are part of a continuum. Process and purpose are so welded to each other that it is impossible to mark where one leaves off and the other begins, or which is which. The very process of democratic participation is for the purpose of organization rather than to rid the alleys of dirt. Process is really purpose. Open in Kindle

Even freedom, as a gift, is deficient in dignity; hence the political sterility of Liberia. Open in Kindle

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. Open in Kindle

Without the learning process, the building of an organization becomes simply the substitution of one power group for another. Open in Kindle

Tactics Open in Kindle

TACTICS MEANS doing what you can with what you have. Tactics are those consciously deliberate acts by which human beings live with each other and deal with the world around them. In the world of give and take, tactics is the art of how to take and how to give. Here our concern is with the tactic of taking; how the Have-Nots can take power away from the Haves. Open in Kindle

Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.* Open in Kindle

The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. Open in Kindle

The third rule is: Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy. Open in Kindle

The fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. Open in Kindle

The fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. Open in Kindle

The sixth rule is: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. Open in Kindle

The seventh rule: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. Open in Kindle

The eighth rule: Keep the pressure on, Open in Kindle

The ninth rule: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself Open in Kindle

The tenth rule: The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. Open in Kindle

The eleventh rule is: If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside; Open in Kindle

The twelfth rule: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative Open in Kindle

The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Open in Kindle

There is a constant squirming and moving and strategy—purposeful, and malicious at times, other times just for straight self-survival—on the part of the designated target. The forces for change must keep this in mind and pin that target down securely. If an organization permits responsibility to be diffused and distributed in a number of areas, attack becomes impossible. Open in Kindle

The other important point in the choosing of a target is that it must be a personification, not something general and abstract Open in Kindle

As we have indicated before, all issues must be polarized if action is to follow. The classic statement on polarization comes from Christ: “He that is not with me is against me” (Luke 11:23). Open in Kindle

There can be no prescriptions for particular situations because the same situation rarely recurs, any more than history repeats itself. People, pressures, and patterns of power are variables, and a particular combination exists only in a particular time— Open in Kindle

Tactics must be understood as specific applications of the rules and principles Open in Kindle

With the universal principle that the right things are always done for the wrong reasons and the tactical rule that negatives become positives, we can understand the following examples. Open in Kindle

The pressure that gave us our positive power was the negative of racism in a white society. We exploited it for our own purposes. Open in Kindle

Remember the rule—the threat is often more effective than the tactic itself, but only if you are so organized that the establishment knows not only that you have the power to execute the tactic but that you definitely will. Open in Kindle

Once one understands this internal battle for power within the status quo, one can begin to appraise effective tactics to exploit it. Open in Kindle

From the moment the tactician engages in conflict, his enemy is time. Open in Kindle

Lacking the rationale, the action becomes inexplicable to its participants and rapidly disintegrates into defeat. Possessing a rationale gives action a meaning and purpose. Open in Kindle

THE GREATEST BARRIER to communication between myself and would-be organizers arises when I try to get across the concept that tactics are not the product of careful cold reason, that they do not follow a table of organization or plan of attack. Accident, unpredictable reactions to your own actions, necessity, and improvisation dictate the direction and nature of tactics. Open in Kindle

Remember that the objective of the proxies approach is not simply a power instrument with reference to our corporate economy, but a mechanism providing for a blast-off for middle-class organization—beginning with the proxy, it will then begin to ignite other rockets on the whole political scene from local elections to the congress. Once a people are organized they will keep moving from issue to issue. People power is the real objective; the proxies are simply a means to that end. Open in Kindle