Guides young revolutionaries in the art of human communication and explains the tactics of organizing others to work within the system for social change
Saul Alinsky's manual for community organizing has now become a seminal text for activists and politicians hoping to enact change at the local level. Alinsky came of age in during the Depression in Chicago, where he studied criminology. Attacking what he felt were the roots of crime, Alinsky began organizing the immigrants and blue-collar workers of the Windy City in order to get them educated and empowered. His activist methods worked so well that they were adopted by other regional leaders across the country and a formula for communal organization began to emerge. One year before his death in 1972, Alinsky published RULES FOR RADICALS, which compiles the wisdom he accrued over a lifetime of fighting to change the system from the ground up. The Alinsky method focuses on organizing impoverished and disenfranchised citizens into a majority, such that they can incrementally begin to take part in the political system, with the hopes of one day taking it over entirely. Alinsky's supporters include Barack Obama, who began his political career as a community organizer in Chicago, practicing and teaching the Alinsky method.
- Genre: Political Science, Social Science
- Publisher: Vintage Books
- Pages: 196
- Edition: Reissue
- Language: English
- Format: paperback
- Release Date: October 1, 1989
- Date Published: October 1, 1989
- Author: Saul David Alinsky