Alinksy offers a list of rules of “power tactics,” meant as basic guidelines for organizers and community activists:
- Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
- Never go outside the experience of your people.
- Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy.
- Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
- Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
- A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
- A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
- Keep the pressure on.
- The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
- The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
- If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.
- The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
- Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.