Saul Alinsky on means and ends

A few paragraphs transcribed by your friendly moderator.  In the chapter's
totality Alinsky lists eleven rules of means and ends

John Lacny

**********
from *Rules for Radicals*, Chapter 2: "Of Means and Ends"

"We cannot think first and act afterwards.  From the moment of birth we are
immersed in action and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought."
-- Alfred North Whitehead

That perennial question, "Does the end justify the means?" is meaningless as
it stands; the real and only question regarding the ethics of means and ends
is, and always has been, "Does this *particular* end justify this
*particular* means?"

Life and how you live it is the story of means and ends.  The *end* is what
you want, and the *means* is how you get it.  Whenever we think about social
change, the question of means and ends arises.  The man of action views the
issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms.  He has no other
problem; he thinks only of his actual resources and the possibilities of
various choices of action.  He asks of ends only whether they are achievable
and worth the cost; of means, only whether they will work.  To say that
corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of
ends and principles.  The real arena is corrupt and bloody.  Life is a
corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off
against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears
corruption fears life.

The practical revolutionary will understand Goethe's "conscience is the
virtue of observers and not of agents of action"; in action, one does not
always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one's
individual conscience and the good of mankind.  The choice must always be
for the latter.  Action is for mass salvation and not for the individual's
personal salvation.  He who sacrifices the mass good for his personal
conscience has a peculiar conception of "personal salvation"; he doesn't
care enough for people to be "corrupted" for them.

The men who pile up the heaps of discussion and literature on the ethics of
means and ends -- which with rare exception is conspicuous for its sterility
-- rarely write about their own experiences in the perpetual struggle of
life and change.  They are strangers, moreover, to the burdens and problems
of operational responsibility and the unceasing pressure for immediate
decisions.  They are passionately committed to a mystical objectivity where
passions are suspect.  They assume a nonexistent situation where men
dispassionately and with reason draw and devise means and ends as if
studying a navigational chart on land.  They can be recognized by one of two
verbal brands: "We agree with the ends but not the means," or "This is not
the time."  *The means-and-end moralists or non-doers always wind up on
their ends without any means.*

The means-and-ends moralists, constantly obsessed with the ethics of the
means used by the Have-Nots against the Haves, should search themselves as
to their real political position.  In fact, they are passive -- but real --
allies of the Haves.  They are the ones Jacques Maritain referred to in his
statement, "The fear of soiling ourselves by entering the context of history
is not virtue, but a way of escaping virtue." These non-doers were the ones
who chose not to fight the Nazis in the only way they could have been
fought; they were the ones who drew their window blinds to shut out the
shameful spectacle of Jews and political prisoners being dragged through the
streets; they were the ones who privately deplored the horror of it all --
and did nothing.  This is the nadir of immorality.  The most unethical of
all means is the non-use of any means.  It is this species of man who so
vehemently and militantly participated in that classically idealistic debate
at the old League of Nations on the ethical differences between defensive
and offensive weapons.  Their fears of action drive them to refuge in an
ethics so divorced from the politics of life that it can apply only to
angels, not to men.  The standards of judgment must be rooted in the whys
and wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our
wished-for fantasy of the world as it should be.

I present here a series of rules pertaining to the ethics of means and ends:
first, that *one's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies
inversely with one's personal interest in the issue.*  When we are not
directly concerned our morality overflows; as La Rochefoucauld put it, "We
all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others." Accompanying
this rule is the parallel one that *one's concern with the ethics of means
and ends varies inversely with one's distance from the scene of conflict.*

*The second rule of the ethics of means and ends is that the judgment of the
ethics of means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in
judgment.*  If you actively opposed the Nazi occupation and joined the
underground Resistance, then you adopted the means of assassination, terror,
property destruction, the bombing of tunnels and trains, kidnapping, and the
willingness to sacrifice innocent hostages to the end of defeating the
Nazis.  Those who opposed the Nazi conquerors regarded the Resistance as a
secret army of selfless, patriotic idealists, courageous beyond expectation
and willing to sacrifice their lives to their moral convictions.  To the
occupation authorities, however, these people were lawless terrorists,
murderers, saboteurs, assassins, who believed that the end justified the
means, and were utterly unethical according to the mystical rules of war.
Any foreign occupation would so ethically judge its opposition.  However, in
such conflict, neither protragonist is concerned with any value except
victory.  It is life or death.


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--Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 31

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