Rules for Radicals, by Saul Alinksy

A rough guide to being a radical (not a revolutionary)

Yeah this guy is good at something. Book was briefly controversial during the Obama era, because 1) Obama was supposedly inspired by Alinsky, and 2) Rules for Radicals starts with a (tongue in cheek) dedication to Satan, the original radical.

This is yet another book I read a while ago and forgot to bookthought promptly, and therefore only have vague memories of. Still weird to me I keep doing this, because [the usual boring list: I clearly have time to do thing X at time T, I know it will be better if I do thing X at time T, instead I do thing X at time T+123123, everything is worse and nothing is better]

The main thing I actually remember from this book are a couple of anecdotes where e.g. Alinsky goes to organise in the Mexican community in Chicago, they host a dinner and he says the food sucks ass. He says they were so used to patronising white people pretending to like their food while obviously lying that it was just really refreshing for them to have someone willing to say not just "I don't like this" but even just "this sucks". (He says a few people came up to him and said actually they didn't like those particular dishes either]). Obviously I'm taking Alinsky's word for it here, I don't know the perspectives of any other attendees, but the story at least rings true to me.

The other interesting part of this book was the ending, where Alinsky tries to answer the question: why are you actually writing this manual, and publishing it so that everyone (your enemies as well as your friends) can read it? He actually raises this explicitly (iirc) right around the point I was starting to wonder. Like, why should we trust a guy who claims to have the answers to everything, and to be sharing them with everyone, even people you disagree with? Alinsky is teaching a bunch of strategies, and for most of them there's no reason why they would be effective for the left and not for the right

You could easily argue that the reason is 1) the information alone is not worth much, it's the practice that counts, and 2) the book is a kind of magnet/lighthouse to get other people who are aligned with him to reach out to him and learn the actual practice, which he won't be willing to do for the people who oppose him.

Another easy explanation is just that people are self-important and want to tell other people what to do / how to live, whether or not it's in their own self-interest. And honestly this seems like a sufficient explanation a lot of the time, people do love telling other people their thoughts/opinions on everything (says the person pestering your inbox with a weekly email about books they've read, etc).

Anyway, the reason Alinsky gives for writing the book is kind of interesting. He says the future of radical politics is corporate governance: getting shareholders to vote at the big companies they're invested in, and push those companies in different directions. He says he wrote the book to get the attention of the middle-class American stockholder, and to get them involved in the new political movement / shareholder organising groups he's launching.

This book was written in 1971, and I haven't actually heard of any Alinsky Corporate Activism movement taking off in the time since then, though maybe it did and I just don't know about it. I do know we've seen a tiny bit of corporate activism since then, e.g. with the Little Engine board seat battle at Exxon.

It does make me wonder whether this is still a huge opportunity for someone who 1) actually understands corporate finance, 2) is good at organising. So much of modern wealth is amalgamated through pension funds and universities and so on, and I suspect that those institutions are potentially lobbyable by their stakeholders for whatever various political or social purposes the stakeholders believe in. This seems even more true at a time when a lot of those funds have lost (vast) amounts of money through traditional profit-motivated investing – it's not that corporate-social investing can't lose equally vast amounts of money, only that the fund managers are presumably in a more precarious position in years when they've lost a bunch of cash. Anyway, I do wonder if this is a lever that could still be pulled, or whether it has the same principal-agent problem as most things: the people who are able to execute such a plan necessarily have better corporate finance knowledge than the people commissioning it, and can personally benefit strongly by giving advice that is in their own interest rather than their customers'.