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Rules for Radicals comes to Carrum
Labor’s campaigning in Victoria had a lineage stretching back to community activist Saul Alinsky via Barack Obama
AS THE VICTORIAN Liberals begin the dispiriting task of working out why they lost last month’s winnable election campaign, they could do worse than to ferret out a copy of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.
Alinsky, a radical activist who emerged from 1930s Chicago, has been largely forgotten in Australia, especially perhaps within the Coalition, which he would undoubtedly have numbered among the “enemy.”
But Rules for Radicals, written just before Alinsky’s death in 1972, stands as the foundation text of what has become known as “community organising” – building the capacity of marginalised communities to take collective action to improve their living conditions. Unexpectedly, Alinsky has also become a guiding influence in electoral campaign management, as political parties and candidates adapt the principles of community organising to the electoral contest.
For this is reason it is possible to trace a direct line of descent from Alinsky, via community organising, to US president Barack Obama, and from there to the electoral success of the newly minted Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews…
