Rules for Unrestricted Warfare: Change Agents as the new Leftist Radicals

Introduction

This essay aims to analyse the changing character of warfare, including world-wide development of so-called “unrestricted warfare” strategies, and the issues this raises for how analysts assess emerging threats to security interests and military operations.^[1] Starting from this discussion, this paper looks to analyse Saul Alinsky’s developed theories of community organizing and social change, as systematically self-conscious strategies of a new type of warfare, which we now understand as unrestricted warfare. Their aim was to irreversibly transform society, by creating and organizing change agents, that would maintain constant operational pressure on the target. Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals denotes a pivoting of the leftist front from traditional forms of warfare and insurrection, displayed in the Marxists seizures of power throughout Eurasia, to a gradual, slow-paced advancement expounded by Fabian socialists, and Antonio Gramsci’s Theory of Cultural Hegemony. This new strategy would preclude the emergence of a political reaction and implement permanent results without arising much resistance.

What is Unrestricted Warfare?

Unrestricted Warfare is the People’s Liberation Army (中国人民解放军) manual for asymmetric warfare and the waging of war, strategically and tactically, using non-kinetic means. It expands the definition, scope, means and methods of warfare, in order to impede the enemy’s national resolve, by targeting its economy, its civil institutions, its governmental structures, and its actual belief system.^[2] In its concepts it is not very different from the Fourth-generation warfare (4GW), characterized by a blurring of the distinction between war and politics, and of the distinction between combatants and civilians, although its American opponent prefers violent non-state actors, instead of the non-violent of unrestricted warfare.^[3]

This is not a manual for achieving a rapid decisive victory. Rather, it is a recipe for a slow but inexorable assault on an enemy’s institutions, often without the enemy’s knowledge that it is even being attacked. As Sun Tzu 孙子 once wrote, “If one party is at war with another, and the other party does not realize it is at war, the party who knows it is at war almost always has the advantage and usually wins.” And this is the strategy set forth in Unrestricted Warfare, waging a war on an adversary with methods so covert at first and seemingly so benign that the party being attacked does not realize it is being attacked.^[4]

Doctrinal Differences

By definition, unrestricted warfare 超限站 (lit.‘warfare beyond bounds’) sets itself apart from conventional forms of warfare, by clearly determining its definition, scope, ideology, agents and methods of warfare.^[5] In a world where, Qiao乔 and Wang王 argue, everything can be considered interdependent, the significance of boundaries is merely relative. “To exceed limits”^[6] means to go beyond things which are called or understood to be boundaries or limits,^[7] be they either physical, spiritual, technical, ethical, or be they called “limits”, “defined limits,” “constraints,” “borders,” “rules,” “laws,” “maximum limits,” or even “taboos.” When applied to warfare, this could mean the boundary between the battlefield and what is not conventionally considered the battlefield, between what is a weapon and what is not, between soldier and noncombatant, between state and non-state or supra-state agents. In summary, it means all boundaries which restrict warfare to within a specified range.^[8]

By actors, the theory of Unrestricted Warfare,^[9] proposes far-reaching changes to the nature of active participants thus making a break with history where soldiers had an exclusive monopoly on war.^[10] Whereas in the past, warfare was strictly the domain of the military, now however, previously non-militarized actors can be mobilized for war operations. Non-military civil society can also be mobilized for unconventional types of warfare, that follow strict non-kinetic methods of engagement.

As such, the developing doctrine of Unrestricted warfare expands the domains of warfare, and forms of warfare. Everything can be weaponized, and warfare be conducted everywhere. Every cultural, social, economic, even ecological domain can now be weaponized by non-violent, non-state actors.^[11]

Since even before its explicit conceptualization, the theory of Unrestricted Warfare has ushered in innumerable, ever expanding doctrinal differences. Whereas conventional warfare clearly defined military agents, unrestricted warfare carries out operations by non-military agents, such as civil groups. Conventional warfare is being carried out overtly, while unrestricted warfare prefers more covert means. Near-peer opponents would often oppose each other by conventional means, while opposing forces that differ greatly in size, often favour asymmetric warfare. The ethics governing conventional forms of warfare are systematically codified, whereas unrestricted warfare tends towards being ethically fluid in the extra-ethical grey zone. As a corollary, conventional warfare can be ideological, whereas unrestricted warfare, tends towards realpolitik. Therefore, conventional warfare is as a general rule dogmatically strict, being politically prescriptive, whereas unrestricted warfare dogmatically open, politically pragmatic. In conventional warfare, opposition comes from outside the system, whereas in unrestricted warfare, operations can be carried out from within the system. Conventional warfare favours a chronologically limited war, a “short war”, whereas unrestricted warfare can support a protracted or an eternal war. These aforementioned doctrinal differences are not exhaustive and merely purport to illustrate the rapidly changing nature of warfare, that keeps expanding constantly, shifting the nature of political power from “growing out of a barrel of a gun”^[12] to Verbum Vincet.^[13] It transformed warfare from being merely “the continuation of politics by different means”^[14] to unrestricted politics by any means, where "politics is the art of the possible."^[15]

All these doctrinal differences, that defined the changing character of warfare, ushered in new forms of warfare, that were seldomly seen before. For a quick overview see the table below:

Expanding upon existing war-making practices,^[16] unrestricted warfare opens new potential fields of warfare, which, this paper argues, Saul Alinsky adroitly identified, and expanded into, decades before them being systematically conceptualized by military theorists.

Specifically, I am referring to his methods of community organizing as a self-conscious form of unrestricted warfare, that he waged relentlessly via his expanding network of change agents. My thesis is that Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, can be read as a manual of unrestricted warfare techniques waged by the left.

Saul Alinsky

Biographical Data

Saul David Alinsky (January 30, 1909 - June 12, 1972), was born in Chicago to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents and grew up in the slums of the city, then a battlefield between left-wing and right-wing politics. Despite both parents being strictly Orthodox, Alinsky later in life considered himself an agnostic,^[17] but when asked about his religion he would "always say Jewish.”

Intellectual Background and Vocational Training

The extend of leftist ideological influence on Saul Alinsky’s entire life and career as a political activist and community organizer cannot be overstated. He grew out of the leftist structures active in the interbellum America’s disadvantaged communities, in its industrial slums, and dislodged rural communities.

In 1926, Alinsky entered the University of Chicago where he studied in America’s first sociology department under Ernest Burgess (1886-1966) and Robert E. Park (1864-1944). Their theories that social disorganization, not hereditary factors, were the main causes of disease, crime, and other characteristics of slum life, made a life-long lasting influence on Alinsky. After graduating with a degree in criminology, he joined the Institute for Juvenile Research, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, that he resigned in 1938, in order to devote himself full-time as a political activist.

His political career was begun by raising funds for the International Brigade (organized by the Communist International) in the Spanish Civil War, and for Southern Sharecroppers, organizing for the Newspaper Guild and other fledgling unions, agitating for public housing and fighting against evictions, and other leftist fronts. There he learnt the mechanisms for community organizing, and inner works of group power structures. His understanding of the underbelly of society was deepened, after his hanging out with Chicago’s Al Capone mob gang, where he learnt the "the terrific importance of personal relationships"^[18], in the exercise of power, and the formation of power structures.

Throughout his formative decades Alinsky maintained close contacts with the Communist structures active in the United States. In a 1972 Playboy interview, Saul Alinsky acknowledged his intellectual debt to the leftist fronts:

PLAYBOY: What was your own relationship with the Communist Party?

ALINSKY: I knew plenty of Communists in those days, and I worked with them on a number of projects. Back in the Thirties, the Communists did a hell of a lot of good work; they were in the vanguard of the labor movement, and they played an important role in aiding blacks and Okies and Southern sharecroppers. Anybody who tells you he was active in progressive causes in those days and never worked with the Reds is a goddamn liar. Their platform stood for all the right things, and unlike many liberals, they were willing to put their bodies on the line. Without the Communists, for example, I doubt the C.I.O. could have won all the battles it did. I was also sympathetic to Russia in those days, not because I admired Stalin or the Soviet system but because it seemed to be the only country willing to stand up to Hitler. I was in charge of a big part of fund raising for the International Brigade and in that capacity, I worked in close alliance with the Communist Party.^[19]

ALINSKY: When the Nazi-Soviet Pact came, though, and I refused to toe the party line and urged support for England and for American intervention in the war, the party turned on me tooth and nail. Chicago Reds plastered the Back of the Yards with big posters featuring a caricature of me with a snarling, slavering fanged mouth and wild eyes, labelled, "This is the face of a warmonger." But there were too many Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians, and Latvians in the area for that tactic to go over very well. Actually, the greatest weakness of the party was its slavish parroting of the Moscow line. It could have been much more effective if it had adopted a relatively independent stance, like the western European parties do today. But all in all, and despite my own fights with them, I think the Communists of the Thirties deserve a lot of credit for the struggles they led or participated in. Today the party is just a shadow of the past, but in the Depression, it was a positive force for social change. A lot of its leaders and organizers were jerks, of course, but objectively the party in those days was on the right side and did considerable good.”^[20]

Alinsky’s post-war rise to prominence in leftist circles, came through his community organizing work. His idea was to apply the organizing skills he believed he had mastered "to the worst slums and ghettos, so that the most oppressed and exploited elements could take control of their own communities and their own destinies. Up until then, specific factories and industries had been organized for social change, but never whole communities."^[21] His ulterior goal was to organize the communities of the disadvantaged, “Have-Nots” for power, and mobilize them against capitalist society, i.e. to "train agitators" and teach "Marxist” doctrines of class conflict.

In 1940, with some support from others, Alinsky founded the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), a national community organizing network. The mandate was to partner with religious congregations, mainly Catholic, and civic organizations to build "broad-based organizations" that could train up local leadership, i.e. change agents, that would agitate on shared issues across community divides. For the remainder of his life, Alinksy honed his community organizer skills, and distilled all his experience in his last book Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971). It was intended as a guide for future community organizers, to use in uniting low-income communities, or "Have-Nots", in order for them to gain by any effective, non-violent means social, political, legal, environmental, and economic wealth and power. His target audience was the 1960s new generation of radicals, that wished to move away from past tactics that had proven bankrupt.

Alinsky’s engagement with the disadvantaged was not driven by an altruistic desire to do community charity work for the needy, and improve democratic representation, but by his ideological drive to develop a second leftist front in the 1930’s after it had become apparent that the classical Marxist front lost its momentum because it getting too close to Moscow.^[22]

Alinsky’s positioning in the Leftist Movement

Alinsky’s ideological position remained solidly on the left, throughout his entire life, a fact undisputed by both sides of the political spectrum. He never self-identified as a socialist or Communist, but he was a self-professed radical, and a man of the left. However, he distanced himself from classical Marxists, then the dominant leftist groups in the United States, and directed sharp criticism against their tactics and dogmatic ossification.

The New Left activists of the 1960s were seen by Alinsky as too stuck in the tactics of the past, tactics to whom their adversary has adapted. Historian Thomas Sugrue writes: “He viewed activists in “Students for a Democratic Society” as naive and impractical, and denounced the tactics of the New Left's militant fringe, as represented by groups like the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground, as doomed to failure for their violent tactics and unwillingness to compromise."^[23] Sugrue notes that this is in keeping with Alinsky's stance in the 1930s, when he "had little patience for the bona fide socialists and card-carrying Communists" and "repudiated Marxism."^[24]

Against the New Left (Students for a Democratic Society, SDS), that grew in university campuses in the 1960s, Alinsky opposed “participatory democracy”, because it made the more centrist-moderate segments abandon the leftist front and allow themselves to be coopted by relatively narrow political bargaining.^[25] Alinsky deemed “participatory democracy” as unrealistic for real change to be allowed to happen, and instead emphasized the need for a front under a strong leadership, structure and centralized decision-making to achieve radical change. This concept, however, isn’t far from Lenin’s position of a “vanguard” of the proletariat, albeit redirected here from revolutionary tasks towards community organizing to establish a permanent front of pressure against the system.^[26]

The new Leftists, and not classical Marxists, would have to be the vanguard, and had to start almost from scratch, as only few leftists survived the Joe McCarthy purges of the early 1950s and of those there were even “fewer whose understanding and insights had developed beyond the dialectical materialism of orthodox Marxism.” Furthermore, fellow radicals who were supposed to pass on the torch of experience and insights to a new generation just were not there, so a new one had to be forged.^[27] Here, Alinsky’s experience in organizing Chicago’s underclass, and his community organizing past positioned him to become a figurehead of this new leftist vanguard.

Unlike classical Marxists who advocated militant, often violent action against the system from outside, Alinsky preferred inexhaustible, unrelenting pressure via non-violent community organizing means directed from the inside the system. He points: “What is the alternative to working "inside" the system? A mess of rhetorical garbage about "Burn the system down!" Yippie yells of "Do it!" or "Do your thing." What else? Bombs? Sniping? Silence when police are killed and screams of "murdering fascist pigs" when others are killed? Attacking and baiting the police? Public suicide? "Power comes out of the barrel of a gun!" is an absurd rallying cry, when the other side owns all the guns.”^[28] Here, Alinsky was drawing a clear line between the overt warfare tactics of the classical Marxist, and the covert tactics of unrestricted warfare waged relentlessly by the New Left ever since the 1960s.

Strategic Considerations

What were the strategic considerations that impacted Alinsky to propose a radical change in tactics, and a pivoting to unconventional forms of warfare? Again, it was the anti-Communist campaigns of the McCarthy era, which squashed a generation of radicals, that forced Alinsky to reevaluate the entire leftist front. Governmental social programs further eroded at the power base of the leftist front, and further support for radical causes withered.^[29] So a new strategy was needed for the new generation of radicals emerging, to restructure the dying left.^[30]

A considerable dearth of non-Marxist revolutionary literature also spurred Alinsky towards this strategic pivoting. He proposed a rethinking and separation between the notions of revolution and leftism and set about developing new tactics. He accused the ineffectiveness of leftist tactics on their uncompromising overt Marxist dogmatism: “The Have-Nots of the world, swept up in their present upheavals and desperately seeking revolutionary writings, can find such literature only from the communists, both red and yellow. Here they can read about tactics, manoeuvres, strategy, and principles of action in the making of revolutions. Since in this literature all ideas are imbedded in the language of communism, revolution appears synonymous with communism.^[31]” The exclusive dogmatic mould of Marxist revolutionary tactics precluded any revolutionary inroads in the American mainstream.

Alinsky insisted that if a new leftist front was to be reestablished, revolutionary tactics would have to be emptied from their Marxist ideological content, and established as a non-dogmatic revolutionary praxeology: “We have permitted a suicidal situation to unfold wherein revolution and communism have become one. These pages are committed to splitting this political atom, separating this exclusive identification of communism with revolution […] This is a major reason for my attempt to provide a revolutionary handbook not cast in a communist or capitalist mold, but as a manual for the Have-Nots of the world regardless of the color of their skins or their politics.”^[32]

Therefore, Alinsky proposed a definitive break with classical Marxists and New Leftists, with regards to the concept of revolution, pivoting towards a form of unrestricted warfare. Instead of revolution in the Bolshevik mould, and the seizure of power by force, he proposed an alternative that would be much more operationally feasible. Instead, he pursued relentless agitating action, that would enact gradual but irreversible change in society.

Alinsky viewed tactics not in the one-dimensional plan of conventional warfare, of one dimensionally well-defined field of battle, but as something more, that should be leading to the establishment of an operational front, that would be mounting constant pressure on the target, leading to constant change. Alinsky insisted: “Society fears the massive changes connoted by the idea of revolution, but in fact, everything in the world is always changing, and all truths are relative. Organizers must learn to embrace this law of change.”^[33] The revolution need not mean, a violent upheaval, but a series of significant changes, which some may call evolution. An evolution, argues Alinsky, can be brought about by relentless incremental change, that would force a constant reforming pressure on target. “It is important for those of us who want revolutionary change to understand that revolution must be preceded by reformation.”^[34] Humanity, he insisted quoting Dostoyevsky’s observations, does not like to step abruptly out of the security of familiar experience, but need a bridge to cross to a new experience. That should be the strategic scope of community organizers, and the change agents they forge. For Alinsky, the proposed incremental relentless changes, are more effective because they can be 1) carried out from within the system 2) they preclude the emergence of a counter-revolutionary front, and thus break the cycle of action and reaction of revolution, rendering these incremental changes permanent. Alinsky looked up to John Adams (1735 –1826), who recounted how similar processes occurred before the American revolutionary war, that “the revolution was effected before the war commenced,” where “revolutionaries [need] to build bridges so that others can follow.^[35] Thus, in order to accomplish their desired changes, Alinsky insisted that “…organizers must be patient. They must understand that change requires time and pragmatism.”^[36] Alinsky’s breakthrough was proposing a non-dogmatic praxeology of change, instead of the Marxist ideology of revolution. This praxeology of change would be implemented by an army of change agents, the Community Organizers. Reflecting on previous failed revolutions, and somewhat mirroring Antonio’s Gramsci critique of the Bolshevik revolution, Alinsky concluded: “A revolution without a prior reformation would collapse or become a totalitarian tyranny.”^[37]

Desired Strategic Impact

Alinsky displayed an understanding of realpolitik when he penned Rules for Radicals with a clear desired strategic impact in mind. Addressing the 1960s generation of New Left radicals Alinsky stated: “What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”^[38] Hence the main objective of Alinsky is to organize for power, his reference to Machiavelli preparing readers for a high degree of ruthlessness and realpolitik.^[39] Power for the left, is the unapologetic strategic objective driving his lifework and reiterated repeatedly throughout this book: “My aim here is to suggest how to organize for power: how to get it and how to use it.”^[40]

Alinsky insists that community organizers should focus without respite on only one thing, on building the mass power base of what he calls the army, and until he has created it, he confronts no major issues, that could potentially divide his power base. Change comes only from power, and power comes from organization, power being the reason for being in organizations. Power and organization are one and the same.^[41] The resource poor, i.e. the leftist front, must create power out of flesh and bones, which can only be coagulated into a movement by organization. A mass movement expresses itself with mass tactics, and energy of action,^[42] thus power is the very essence, the dynamo of life. Alinsky was of a similar position on this matter to St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuit order, saying: “To do a thing well a man needs power and competence.”^[43]

Therefore, the most widely quoted part of the book, even in distilled form, is Alinsky’s 13 rules of organising radicals for Power. To know these is basic to a pragmatic attack on the system. These rules make the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical, that achieves little：

1. “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.” Power is derived from 2 main sources – money and people. “Have-Nots” must build power from flesh and blood.
2. “Never go outside the expertise of your people.” It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone.
3. “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.” Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety, and uncertainty.
4. “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.
5. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.
6. “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” They’ll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They’re doing their thing and will even suggest better ones.
7. “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” Don’t become old news.
8. “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.” Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new.
9. “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist.
10. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.” It is this unceasing pressure that results in the reactions from the opposition that are essential for the success of the campaign.
11. “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.” Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog.
12. “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” Never let the enemy score points because you’re caught without a solution to the problem.
13. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

Here, Alinsky formulates a series of rules for waging unrestricted warfare towards seizing power, and codifies it into a science of revolution, a form of political unrestricted warfare, by waging social unrestricted warfare. His designs are reminiscent of Nechayev’s (1847-1882) Catechism of a Revolutionary, whose aim was to draw a rule book to help forge the revolutionary, but Alinsky pitched this concept towards change agents and not violent insurrectionists.

ETHICS OF WAR

“Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgement to the very first radical: from our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins- or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom- Lucifer.”-Saul Alinsky

Rules for Radicals reads on its dedication page an epigraph to Lucifer, whom Saul Alinsky admiringly acknowledged as the first radical. This lucidly illustrates the code of ethics that Saul proposes for his change agents to follow, against any traditional code of ethics. Following Machiavelli who drafted his manual for the Haves on how to keep power, Alinsky drafted his manual for the Have-nots on how to take power away.

Saul insisted that in the quest for power, there should not be any self-imposed ethical limits, because an act of rebellion, presupposes the rejection of the enemy’s power structures. A system of ethics, was viewed by Alinsky, as being the codified power structure of the enemy. The questions about the morality of means and ends, should end if radicals viewed morality as a means of repression of the Haves to maintain the status quo over the Have-Nots.^[44] Alinsky here predicts and mirrors Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, who claim that the ideology of going beyond limits (unrestricted/ translimited warfare), means also going beyond the limits of perceived restricted morality. Power is the only measure of ethics, and no means are restricted, Alinsky mirroring Machiavellian ethical considerations.^[45]

If the code of ethics governing conventional forms of warfare tends to be systematically codified and ratified internationally, then unrestricted warfare tends towards being ethically fluid with its operations taking place in the extra-ethical grey zone. In the Zhongguo Qingnian Bao 中国青年报interview, Qiao was quoted as stating that “the first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden.”^[46] Academic discussion on unrestricted warfare agrees that the only rule is that there are no rules.^[47] That is because, the effectiveness of a particular means in unrestricted warfare, cannot be measured by some moral standard.^[48] Unrestricted warfare employs both surprise and deception and uses both civilian technology and military weaponry to break the opponent’s will.^[49]

Power defines means and ends, and the moral value of an action can only be judged by looking at the consequence it has. Alinsky harboured a consequentialist view towards ethics to mask his true political intentions, that an act is right if and only if the act will produce the absence of pain, and broader notions of the “general good”. Alinsky incessantly instilled this mindset into all of his change agents, to weaponize them in their Marxist class struggle campaign. Alinsky then draws up a list of 11 rules of "means and ends" in this vein, to guide his radicals striving for power^[50] :

1. One's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue.
2. The judgment of the ethics of means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgment.
3. In war, the end justifies almost any means.
4. Judgment must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point.
5. Concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa.
6. The less important the end to be desired, the more one can afford to engage in ethical evaluations of means.
7. The ethics of means and ends is that generally success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics.
8. The morality of a means depends upon whether the means is being employed at a time of imminent defeat or imminent victory.
9. Any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.
10. You do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments.
11. Goals must be phrased in general terms like "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," "Of the Common Welfare," "Pursuit of Happiness" or "Bread and Peace."^[51]

The dominant idea here is that ethics ought to be firmly subordinated to the pursuing of power, similar to Machiavelli’s position that the “ends justify the means”.^[52] However, in contrast to Machiavelli, and mirroring perhaps modern military techniques of counter-intelligence, such as Maskirovka, Alinsky insists that moral camouflage is absolutely necessary when undertaking certain means. Alinsky maintains that moral rationalization is indispensable at all times of action and Machiavelli’s blindness to the necessity for moral clothing for all acts and actions, saying “politics has no relation to morals,” was his major weakness, for having overlooked the obvious fluidity of every man’s self-interest, and that power and ethics is also a game of perception.^[53] Alinsky insists: “All effective action require the passport of morality.”^[54] He reminds the young leftist the successful tactics of Lenin, who cynically remarked how the Bolsheviks had to say they were for peace, until they didn’t ‘have to say they were for peace. In a fight, the means always justify the ends, and everything is allowed “to the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt.”^[55]

Doctrinal Differences

Alinsky insists on an uncompromising break with dogma, thus Rules for Radicals is not explicitly ideological, despite the author’s life-long commitment to left-wing activism. Instead, it can be read as a praxeological manual of leftist field tactics.^[56] If conventional warfare can be ideological, Alinsky’ s form of unrestricted warfare, tends towards the realpolitik. Thus, Alinsky rejects the dogmatic Marxist model and pivots towards searching for power in any group or unlikely alliance, wherever power may be derived from. Alinsky critiques Marxist forms of conventional warfare that are dogmatically strict, and politically prescriptive, and favours tactics of unrestricted warfare that tend to be dogmatically open, and politically pragmatic: “This book will not contain any panacea or dogma; I detest and fear dogma.”^[57] He admiringly quoted Disraeli who put it succinctly: “Political life must be taken as you find it.”

Therefore, the actors of community organizing, are not actors of war in the conventional sense, but in the unrestricted warfare sense, being non-militarized actors mobilized to wage the left’s social guerilla warfare. The change agent leads his life under the ethos, that all life is partisan, with no dispassionate objectivity: “The life of man upon earth is a warfare, and his days are like the days of a hireling.”- Job 7:1-2. Having taking over the monopoly to wage warfare from the military, the change agent seeks to establish a monopoly on non-military social warfare. He remains undeterred in his actions as Marxist agitator, doggedly carrying out his unconventional social warfare tactics, reminiscent of Hannibal: “We will either find a way or make one.”^[58]

Against this background, the timeframes for warfare have also changed. Whereas conventional warfare prefers chronologically limited wars, so-called “short wars”, unrestricted warfare can support an eternal war: “A People's Organization is dedicated to an eternal war…”^[59] If classical Marxism therefore prefers violent revolutionary upheavals carried out over a short-term period, Saul Alinsky’s form of unrestricted social guerilla warfare, can be carried out slowly over an extended period, and be waged as an eternal war. In this regard, Alinsky’s form of unrestricted warfare adopts a similar outlook as Antonio Gramsci’s (1891-1937) proposed long march through the institutions of his Theory of Cultural Hegemony.^[60]

Conclusion

This paper analysed Saul Alinsky’s magnum opus, as a praxeological manual of leftist field tactics for the unrestricted warfare that has been waged by the New Left front. Its main influences include the Democratic Party of the United States, with both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton quoting Saul Alinsky as their most important mentor. The question then arises, what will we, on the receiving end of the Globalist onslaught do against this new form of warfare. Will we adopt a counterplan that mirrors Alain de Benoist’s proposed Pour un Gramscisme de Droite,^[61] or will we remain impotently reactionary.

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