| Author
|
Post |
 
|
|
untanglingwebs
El Supremo
|
www.DiscoverTheNetwork.org Date: 10/24/2009 9:16:34 AM
CLOWARD-PIVEN STRATEGY (CPS)
Strategy for forcing political change through orchestrated crisis
First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue a black man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an article titled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty" in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called "crisis strategy" or "Cloward-Piven Strategy," as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.
In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when "the rest of society is afraid of them," Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would "the rest of society" accept their demands.
The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven's early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. "Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules," Alinsky wrote in his 1972 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system's failure to "live up" to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist "rule book" with a socialist one.
The authors noted that the number of Americans subsisting on welfare -- about 8 million, at the time -- probably represented less than half the number who were technically eligible for full benefits. They proposed a "massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls." Cloward and Piven calculated that persuading even a fraction of potential welfare recipients to demand their entitlements would bankrupt the system. The result, they predicted, would be "a profound financial and political crisis" that would unleash "powerful forces … for major economic reform at the national level."
Their article called for "cadres of aggressive organizers" to use "demonstrations to create a climate of militancy." Intimidated by threats of black violence, politicians would appeal to the federal government for help. Carefully orchestrated media campaigns, carried out by friendly, leftwing journalists, would float the idea of "a federal program of income redistribution," in the form of a guaranteed living income for all -- working and non-working people alike. Local officials would clutch at this idea like drowning men to a lifeline. They would apply pressure on Washington to implement it. With every major city erupting into chaos, Washington would have to act.
This was an example of what are commonly called Trojan Horse movements -- mass movements whose outward purpose seems to be providing material help to the downtrodden, but whose real objective is to draft poor people into service as revolutionary foot soldiers; to mobilize poor people en masse to overwhelm government agencies with a flood of demands beyond the capacity of those agencies to meet. The flood of demands was calculated to break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears into gridlock, and bring the system crashing down. Fear, turmoil, violence and economic collapse would accompany such a breakdown -- providing perfect conditions for fostering radical change. That was the theory.
Cloward and Piven recruited a militant black organizer named George Wiley to lead their new movement. In the summer of 1967, Wiley founded the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). His tactics closely followed the recommendations set out in Cloward and Piven's article. His followers invaded welfare offices across the United States -- often violently -- bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law "entitled" them. By 1969, NWRO claimed a dues-paying membership of 22,500 families, with 523 chapters across the nation.
Regarding Wiley's tactics, The New York Times commented on September 27, 1970, "There have been sit-ins in legislative chambers, including a United States Senate committee hearing, mass demonstrations of several thousand welfare recipients, school boycotts, picket lines, mounted police, tear gas, arrests - and, on occasion, rock-throwing, smashed glass doors, overturned desks, scattered papers and ripped-out phones."These methods proved effective. "The flooding succeeded beyond Wiley's wildest dreams," writes Sol Stern in the City Journal. "From 1965 to 1974, the number of single-parent households on welfare soared from 4.3 million to 10.8 million, despite mostly flush economic times. By the early 1970s, one person was on the welfare rolls in New York City for every two working in the city's private economy."As a direct result of its massive welfare spending, New York City was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1975. The entire state of New York nearly went down with it. The Cloward-Piven strategy had proved its effectiveness.
The Cloward-Piven strategy depended on surprise. Once society recovered from the initial shock, the backlash began. New York's welfare crisis horrified America, giving rise to a reform movement which culminated in "the end of welfare as we know it" -- the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which imposed time limits on federal welfare, along with strict eligibility and work requirements. Both Cloward and Piven attended the White House signing of the bill as guests of President Clinton.
Most Americans to this day have never heard of Cloward and Piven. But New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani attempted to expose them in the late 1990s. As his drive for welfare reform gained momentum, Giuliani accused the militant scholars by name, citing their 1966 manifesto as evidence that they had engaged in deliberate economic sabotage. "This wasn't an accident," Giuliani charged in a 1997 speech. "It wasn't an atmospheric thing, it wasn't supernatural. This is the result of policies and programs designed to have the maximum number of people get on welfare."
Cloward and Piven never again revealed their intentions as candidly as they had in their 1966 article. Even so, their activism in subsequent years continued to rely on the tactic of overloading the system. When the public caught on to their welfare scheme, Cloward and Piven simply moved on, applying pressure to other sectors of the bureaucracy, wherever they detected weakness.
In 1982, partisans of the Cloward-Piven strategy founded a new "voting rights movement," which purported to take up the unfinished work of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Like ACORN, the organization that spear-headed this campaign, the new "voting rights" movement was led by veterans of George Wiley's welfare rights crusade. Its flagship organizations were Project Vote and Human SERVE, both founded in 1982. Project Vote is an ACORN front group, launched by former NWRO organizer and ACORN co-founder Zach Polett. Human SERVE was founded by Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, along with a former NWRO organizer named Hulbert James.
All three of these organizations -- ACORN, Project Vote and Human SERVE -- set to work lobbying energetically for the so-called Motor-Voter law, which Bill Clinton ultimately signed in 1993. The Motor-Voter bill is largely responsible for swamping the voter rolls with "dead wood" -- invalid registrations signed in the name of deceased, ineligible or non-existent people -- thus opening the door to the unprecedented levels of voter fraud and "voter disenfranchisement" claims that followed in subsequent elections.
The new "voting rights" coalition combines mass voter registration drives -- typically featuring high levels of fraud -- with systematic intimidation of election officials in the form of frivolous lawsuits, unfounded charges of "racism" and "disenfranchisement," and "direct action" (street protests, violent or otherwise). Just as they swamped America's welfare offices in the 1960s, Cloward-Piven devotees now seek to overwhelm the nation's understaffed and poorly policed electoral system. Their tactics set the stage for the Florida recount crisis of 2000, and have introduced a level of fear, tension and foreboding to U.S. elections heretofore encountered mainly in Third World countries.
Both the Living Wage and Voting Rights movements depend heavily on financial support from George Soros's Open Society Institute and his "Shadow Party," through whose support the Cloward-Piven strategy continues to provide a blueprint for some of the Left's most ambitious campaigns. |
|
|
Sat Oct 24, 2009 8:21 am |
|
|
Domet
F L I N T O I D
|
Sadly I have a birthday for my nephew and a trip to the north this weekend, so I won't have the time to really get into the meat of this article, but I'll take a quick second. Interesting article, webs - especially the bit of Cloward-Piven - having immersed myself in the past with social movement literature I am vaguely familiar with at least Piven. I kind of want to read that article, the theory sounds interesting.
I don't have the time, sadly, to go point by point here. Basically, this article argues well developed and planned conspiracy, which is in its own right unlikely. Apart from the many holes this article has, it also fails to reflect a key issue: ACORN is a major supporter and lobbyist for Universal Voter Registration, which would be an automatic process, not one which adds paperwork and overloads the bureaucracy. They have lobbyists on the hill actively pursuing these actions and have been trying to form a strong coalition on it for at least the past year. It is confusing that an org bent on overloading the government would be actively looking for an avenue which would disengage it from that process. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you aren't going to argue "they are using it for cover" because that's baseless, idiotic and without merit/reason/reality.
Beyond anything else, the Motor-Voter Act created potential situation in which the government should be prepared for burden. If a government is prepared for a large influx of paperwork, you can't blame organizations such as ACORN - a law was passed, government infrastructure should respond. If it doesn't, then you should expect problems to arise.
Finally, the connection between ACORN and Project Vote is tenuous at best. Less than half of the directors for Project Vote are ACORN National members - not employees. Boards of directors often share members with other corporations - it is difficult to generalize in those cases and it is just as difficult to generalize here unless, of course, you are trying to make an opinionated point instead of a factual one.
This article lacks research merit as well - it doesn't even make the connection from Piven to Wiley to Rathke to Lewis. At least there you have a sequence of connections you can implicate, but instead it focuses on this bizarre conspiracy theory to overthrow the government. Conspiracies look about as good on paper as Piven-Clowens theory probably does, unfortunately difficult to prove in practice.
Have a nice weekend folks. |
_________________
Lack of support for your assertions does not make you a sage, it just makes the rest of us doubt your reasoning skills. - Elias12, Flint Talk Poster |
|
|
Sat Oct 24, 2009 11:39 am |
|
|
back again
F L I N T O I D
|
1. there was a hell of a lot more cause to the watts riots than police attempting to stop a black man with billy clubs. thats laughable but typical of writers such as whomever wrote this.....this.........manifesto.
2. dude, 2tap ain't gonna read that!
3."exposing the inadequacy of the welfare state" by banckrupting
the country? sounds like treason to me.
4. using those feared and evil poor blacks to do their bidding?
oh my. cloward and piven sound like a couple commies to me. |
_________________
even a small act of goodness may be a tiny raft of salvation across the treacherous gulf of sin, but one who drinks the wine of selfishness, and dances on the little boat of meaness, sinks in the ocean of ignorance.
P.Y. |
|
|
Sat Oct 24, 2009 5:15 pm |
|
|
Dan Moilanen
F L I N T O I D
|
| Regulating the Poor by Piven and Cloward is actually one of the more interesting social welfare theory books I've read. Solid stuff. |
_________________
-Dan
"I am not a Marxist."
-Karl Marx |
|
|
Sun Oct 25, 2009 1:58 am |
|
|
untanglingwebs
El Supremo
|
| Domet- I am aware of the role of Wade Rathke and his brother. This is some of the basis for calling Obama and his proposals socialist. Cloward and Piven never denied they esposed socislist theories and those theories led to the origin of ACORN. |
|
|
|
Sun Oct 25, 2009 1:08 pm |
|
|
Domet
F L I N T O I D
|
quote:
Dan Moilanen schreef:
Regulating the Poor by Piven and Cloward is actually one of the more interesting social welfare theory books I've read. Solid stuff.
Well, I'll have to add it to my read list.
quote:
untanglingwebs schreef:
Domet- I am aware of the role of Wade Rathke and his brother.
Sorry if I miscommunicated that statement, but I was more or less just noting that the article seems to have missed out on it somehow, not suggesting you didn't know (I assumed you did actually). I think the article is interesting but leaves open a number of gaps that they don't really fill in and, as a result, kind of makes author appear to be making logical leaps in places. One of my biggest issues with the article's argument is this concept of overthrow - perhaps I read to much into it, but it sort of reads like the author believes that Voter Registration Drives are related to overthrowing the government by overload. Simply put, I just take issue with the argument on a number of grounds. |
_________________
Lack of support for your assertions does not make you a sage, it just makes the rest of us doubt your reasoning skills. - Elias12, Flint Talk Poster |
|
|
Sun Oct 25, 2009 3:23 pm |
|
|
back again
F L I N T O I D
|
| someday i'd love to see a theory that puts no particular group in harms way. this sounds like a couple ivory league types looking down on a downtrodden group from above and playing with "theories" that do nothing except make them poorer and/or destroy a government. i have no use for it. i see nothing helpful about it. it may be a great read and an interesting "theory" but what good does it do? |
_________________
even a small act of goodness may be a tiny raft of salvation across the treacherous gulf of sin, but one who drinks the wine of selfishness, and dances on the little boat of meaness, sinks in the ocean of ignorance.
P.Y. |
|
|
Sun Oct 25, 2009 5:04 pm |
|
|
Domet
F L I N T O I D
|
Well, doing a quick search for Piven confirms my assumptions concerning her background - she hails from the Marxist school of Sociology. I will attempt to summarize what that can indicate. Basically she has a background of understanding the working poor as being oppressed by a structure which enables elites. There is no change possible from within that structure as any gaps which appear will be filled in with other elites. Power struggle, then, is symbolically located amongst the masses (voting) but really is limited amongst those with access to wealth or power. I know very few people who call themselves Marxists and do not advocate for the destruction of government under the guise of the ruling elite "representing" everybody's interests. Basically - society and societal norms are a function of conflict between the power elites and the poor, a situation in the which the poor, outside of sheer size of population, are inherently in a weaker position and thus are not really the rule makers as much as the rule responders.
quote:
back again schreef:
it may be a great read and an interesting "theory" but what good does it do?
That's more or a less a personal thing, I would guess. Without reading her work in-depth I can't comment on the relative merit of it. I will say that "good," back again, can be taken in a lot of different ways. It may have academic merit, defining various structural positions the poor have in relation to the power elite, and giving rise to a framework in which lower classes or particular groups can be more effectively analyzed. The social movement piece above may not be an advocacy as much as it is an analysis, teaching social movement people how to look at radical movements looking to overthrow governments. Beyond any of that, there are those who would view overthrowing the government as a good thing, especially if it equates into more power for the lower classes, while there are always those who like the status quo. In the end, it is difficult to define good in a context that doesn't include the self, especially when regarding the "good" of a theory you may disagree with inherently because of its end process. |
_________________
Lack of support for your assertions does not make you a sage, it just makes the rest of us doubt your reasoning skills. - Elias12, Flint Talk Poster |
|
|
Sun Oct 25, 2009 8:29 pm |
|
|
back again
F L I N T O I D
|
| i understand what your saying although i fail to see what needs to be "effectively analyzed". what questions do social scientists need answers to as they pertain to blacks in the lower economic / class? |
_________________
even a small act of goodness may be a tiny raft of salvation across the treacherous gulf of sin, but one who drinks the wine of selfishness, and dances on the little boat of meaness, sinks in the ocean of ignorance.
P.Y. |
|
|
Sun Oct 25, 2009 10:54 pm |
|
|
Domet
F L I N T O I D
|
That's a fair question - I can try to quickly answer. Social scientists have a lot of questions about people in various positions of society. Piven, for example, asked a number of questions pertaining to welfare in the US - how it functions, in which ways do people respond to it, how is it used, how does it reflect power relations between the rich and the poor - what does it mean to be a person on welfare? Piven also asked questions about mobilization - how to mobilize the poor as a social movement. From what I have managed to gleam from Piven's perspective - any advances made by the poor throughout history is related to their ability to disrupt the elites who implement systems/structures.
As to looking specifically at blacks? I don't know that she did that. I do know that questions do exist which pertain specifically to ethnic groups, because minority groups are disproportionately representing in lower classes as compared to the dominant cultural group. It's always important to understand the social structures which have in many ways helped in generating that situation. |
_________________
Lack of support for your assertions does not make you a sage, it just makes the rest of us doubt your reasoning skills. - Elias12, Flint Talk Poster |
|
|
Mon Oct 26, 2009 8:54 am |
|
|
back again
F L I N T O I D
|
actually, my naive mind says all any social scientist has to do is write down every advantage a majority has had the past 250 years and reverse it. theres your answer, which begs the next question. what do we do about it.
problem solved. |
_________________
even a small act of goodness may be a tiny raft of salvation across the treacherous gulf of sin, but one who drinks the wine of selfishness, and dances on the little boat of meaness, sinks in the ocean of ignorance.
P.Y. |
|
|
Mon Oct 26, 2009 4:08 pm |
|
|
|
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Register
Profile
FlintTalk.com Forum Index
> Political Talk
