I started this current series to discuss what is wrong with our country and what we need to do to fix it. I have since expanded this series to not only include the United States but the rest of the world as well. While I have discussed some of the topics that I will be including in this series, they have been included in other articles. In this series I will concentrate on a single topic. This will also mean that some of the articles may be slightly shorter than my readers have grown accustomed to, however they will still be written with the same attention to detail. This series will have no set number of articles and will continue to grow as I come across additional subjects.

This article is about a plan to force the US government to implement guaranteed minimum income. Not to be confused with Communist revolution, White genocide conspiracy theory, Cultural Marxism, or Kalergi plan.

The Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. The strategy aims to utilize “militant anti poverty groups” to facilitate a “political crisis” by overloading the welfare system via an increase in welfare claims, forcing the creation of a system of guaranteed minimum income and “redistributing income through the federal government”.

History

Cloward and Piven were both professors at the Columbia University School of Social Work. The strategy was outlined in a May 1966 article in the liberal magazine The Nation titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty”.

Strategy

Cloward and Piven’s article is focused on compelling the Democratic Party, which in 1966 controlled the presidency and both houses of the United States Congress, to redistribute income to help the poor. They stated that full enrollment of those eligible for welfare “would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments” that would: “…deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor. To avoid a further weakening of that historic coalition, a national Democratic administration would be constrained to advance a federal solution to poverty that would override local welfare failures, local class and racial conflicts and local revenue dilemmas.”

They further wrote:

The ultimate objective of this strategy – to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income – will be questioned by some. Because the ideal of individual social and economic mobility has deep roots, even activists seem reluctant to call for national programs to eliminate poverty by the outright redistribution of income.

Michael Reisch and Janice Andrews wrote that Cloward and Piven “proposed to create a crisis in the current welfare system – by exploiting the gap between welfare law and practice – that would ultimately bring about its collapse and replace it with a system of guaranteed annual income. They hoped to accomplish this end by informing the poor of their rights to welfare assistance, encouraging them to apply for benefits and, in effect, overloading an already overburdened bureaucracy.”

Focus on Democrats

The authors pinned their hopes on creating disruption within the Democratic Party:

“Conservative Republicans are always ready to declaim the evils of public welfare, and they would probably be the first to raise a hue and cry. But deeper and politically more telling conflicts would take place within the Democratic coalition…Whites – both working class ethnic groups and many in the middle class – would be aroused against the ghetto poor, while liberal groups, which until recently have been comforted by the notion that the poor are few… would probably support the movement. Group conflict, spelling political crisis for the local party apparatus, would thus become acute as welfare rolls mounted and the strains on local budgets became more severe.”

Theoretical Framework
The Cloward-Piven strategy is grounded in the following key principles:

Mass Mobilization: Encouraging a large number of eligible individuals to apply for welfare benefits simultaneously to create a systemic overload.

Crisis Creation: By overwhelming the welfare system, the strategy seeks to precipitate a fiscal and operational crisis, demonstrating the insufficiency of current social policies.

Policy Change: The ultimate goal is to force the government to address the crisis through significant policy reforms, ideally leading to more comprehensive welfare provisions and a stronger social safety net.

Historical Context and Implementation
The strategy was formulated in a period of heightened social and political activism in the United States. The 1960s saw significant movements advocating for civil rights, women’s rights, and economic justice. Cloward and Piven’s proposal was part of this broader tapestry of social change efforts.

In practice, the strategy found partial application during welfare rights movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Organizations like the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) worked to enroll more individuals in welfare programs, aligning with Cloward and Piven’s vision. These efforts contributed to some welfare reforms but did not lead to the systemic overhaul the authors envisioned.

Criticisms and Controversies
The Cloward-Piven strategy has been the subject of significant debate and controversy. Critics argue that deliberately creating a crisis is irresponsible and can lead to unintended negative consequences. Some conservative commentators have accused the strategy of promoting social chaos and undermining governmental stability.

Supporters, however, contend that the strategy brings attention to the inadequacies of social welfare systems and forces necessary reforms. They argue that without such bold tactics, the status quo would persist, leaving systemic poverty unaddressed.

Legacy and Contemporary Relevance
The Cloward-Piven strategy continues to be a point of reference in discussions about social welfare and political activism. While the original goals of Cloward and Piven have not been fully realized, their work has influenced subsequent generations of activists and scholars.

In contemporary contexts, the strategy is often invoked in debates about the role of government in addressing poverty and inequality. It serves as a reminder of the potential for grassroots mobilization to effect policy change, as well as the challenges and ethical considerations inherent in such efforts.

We are witnessing the implementation of a lot of radical approaches to social change, rooted in the belief that systemic pressure can lead to transformative policy reforms.

Reception and criticism

Michael Tomasky, writing about the strategy in the 1990s and again in 2011, called it “wrongheaded and self-defeating”, writing: “It apparently didn’t occur to [Cloward and Piven] that the system would just regard rabble-rousing black people as a phenomenon to be ignored or quashed.”

Impact of the strategy

In papers published in 1971 and 1977, Cloward and Piven argued that mass unrest in the United States, especially between 1964 and 1969, did lead to a massive expansion of welfare rolls, though not to the guaranteed-income program that they had hoped for.^[9] Political scientist Robert Albritton disagreed, writing in 1979 that the data did not support this thesis; he offered an alternative explanation for the rise in welfare caseloads.

In his 2006 book Winning the Race, political commentator John McWhorter attributed the rise in the welfare state after the 1960s to the Cloward–Piven strategy, but wrote about it negatively, stating that the strategy “created generations of black people for whom working for a living is an abstraction”.

According to historian Robert E. Weir in 2007: “Although the strategy helped to boost recipient numbers between 1966 and 1975, the revolution its proponents envisioned never transpired.”

The Right’s Attack on Frances Fox Piven

by Peter Dreier, Occidental College

Former ASA President Frances Fox Piven often receives requests from students who want to interview her about her political theories and activism. So when Kyle Olson phoned her, told her he was a college student in Michigan, and asked if he could videotape an interview with her about her recent book, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America, Piven agreed.

Frances Fox Piven Temporarily housebound after an auto accident, Piven invited Olson to her New York apartment. On February 1, for about an hour, Piven and Olson sat at her dining room table and talked about everything from the founding fathers to Fox News, while his friend videotaped them.

“Students these days use cameras to ‘write’ term papers,” Piven said later. “It didn’t seem unusual that he wanted to use a video.”

Two weeks later, Piven, who teaches at the City University of New York, learned that eight minutes of the interview appeared in three segments on Big Government, a conservative news website. The same outlet achieved national prominence last year when it published the highly edited but hugely destructive hidden-camera recordings of ACORN employees.

Olson is not a college student. He is a 31-year-old Republican Party operative, conservative activist, and would-be journalist. He runs a Michigan-based conservative advocacy organization, the Education Action Group (EAG), which primarily attacks teachers unions.

The real reason for Olson’s interview with Piven was a 1966 article in The Nation magazine, “A Strategy to End Poverty,” co-authored with Richard Cloward, which has become the centerpiece of a right-wing conspiracy theory. Olson no doubt hoped to trap Piven into saying something outrageous to confirm the Right’s view that the article is the blueprint for a radical takeover of American society.

The video segments posted on Big Government featured no major revelations about America’s imminent socialist uprising. In one snippet, Piven remarks that Thomas Jefferson “would be stunned by the oligarchical character of American society.” In another segment, she remarks that the current wave of foreclosures could trigger mass protest if “millions of people refuse to go along with foreclosure procedures and refuse to pay off those mortgages that are under water.” In the third video clip, Piven calls Glenn Beck’s efforts to find an easy “scapegoat” for the country’s troubles typical of “right-wing ideologues.”

In their Nation article, Cloward (who died in 2001) and Piven proposed organizing the poor to demand welfare benefits they were eligible for and to pressure the federal government to expand the nation’s social safety net and establish a guaranteed national income. To put their strategy into practice, Cloward and Piven worked with George Wiley to create the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). At its peak in the late 1960s, NWRO had affiliates in 60 cities and had some success increasing participation in the federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children program by organizing protests at welfare offices and elsewhere. In 1970, NWRO organizer Wade Rathke started ACORN to build a broader movement for economic justice. ACORN eventually grew into the nation’s largest community organizing group, with chapters in 103 cities in 37 states.

Cloward and Piven soon concluded that a successful anti-poverty movement had to combine grassroots protest with electoral politics. They wrote Why Americans Don’t Vote and helped build a movement to expand voting among the poor. Their idea led to the National Voter Registration Act (e.g., the “motor voter” law), which President Clinton signed in 1993 at a White House ceremony at which Piven spoke.

Conservatives have been attacking Cloward and Piven’s ideas—outlined in many articles and in Regulating the Poor, Poor People’s Movements, and other books—for decades. But the demonization of the couple by the extreme Right has escalated since Obama’s election.

The right-wing has transformed the duo into Marxist Machiavellis whose ideas have not only spawned a radical movement dedicated to destroying modern-day capitalism but also, in their minds at least, almost succeeded, as evidenced by what they consider Obama’s “socialist” agenda.

Conservative radio jockeys Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin have, on multiple occasions, warned their listeners about the nefarious sociologists. “The Cloward-Piven strategy is essentially what Obama and a number of these people are following,” Limbaugh told his listeners, “and its ultimate objective is to have everybody in the country on welfare, by destroying it.”

Other right-wing outlets, including American Spectator, FrontPage, Washington Times, American Thinker, Free Republic, NewsMax, and WorldNetDaily, have all warned readers about how the Cloward-Piven has infected society like a dangerous left-wing virus. Beck has mentioned the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” 33 times on his Fox News show since March 2009. In September, he connected Cloward and Piven to Woodrow Wilson, Che Guevara, Bill Ayers, ACORN, the SEIU, the Apollo Alliance, the Tides Foundation, George Soros, Van Jones, Valerie Jarrett, and Obama—some of the right’s favorite villains. In March he said that Obama’s health-care proposal followed the Cloward-Piven strategy to “melt the system down and have it collapse into a new system.”

At February’s Tea Party convention, WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah devoted eight minutes of his 38-minute keynote speech to fulminating about what he called Cloward and Piven’s “manifesto.”

Obama is still employing the Cloward-Piven strategy, not as a community organizer but today as the community organizer in chief,” Farah explained. “He’s still creating crises as a means of empowerment.…The goal remains the same as when it was first outlined in 1966. Bring the system to its knees, and ultimately to collapse.”

These attacks are meant to whip up anger and resentments, to discredit Obama’s liberal policy agenda, and to destroy the progressive movement that pushes the president and the Democratic Party to be bolder, as they did in the recent health-care battle. This maneuver is hardly new. As far back as Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, Republican politicians and hired strategists have perfected the art of linking liberal Democrats to communists, socialists, radicals, subversives, “welfare queens,” and terrorists.

It is this world of right-wing opinion-shapers to which Olson aspires. After graduating from Michigan State in 2001, Olson worked as a Realtors’ lobbyist and then for a Republican state Senator. In 2006 he lost his campaign for county .office but served on the state GOP committee. In 2007, Olson started EAG, which served as a platform for his op-ed columns and to get quoted in the Michigan media in his crusade against teachers’ unions. But Olson soon revealed his broader conservative agenda. For example, EAG’s political arm recently paid for a billboard depicting a Democratic candidate for the state Senate as a supporter of partial-birth abortions.

Olson has branched out beyond the GOP anti-union and anti-abortion mainstream. His pieces on the Big Government website rant about health care reform, ACORN, SEIU president Andy Stern, and Obama. Greg Steimel, a researcher for the Michigan Education Association, calls him a “Glenn Beck wannabe.”

Olson manipulated his way into Piven’s home hoping to entrap her into saying something outrageous that he could use to further his own career. However his tapes have produced no mainstream controversy. That’s because, watching Piven answer his questions, most viewers would be hard-pressed to disagree with her basic analysis of America’s current condition. Big corporations have too much power. The concentration of wealth has gotten out of hand. Only an outraged and organized movement for change among the poor and the middle class is likely to bring about the reforms we need.

Piven admits to being “unnerved” by Olson’s lying in order to get her to agree to the interview. “He made no impression on me. Perhaps I should have wondered why he’d drive all the way from Michigan, just for an interview.”

“He interviewed me under false pretenses,” Piven says. “If I’d known he was a right-wing operative, I wouldn’t have let him into my apartment. I might have talked to him in my office or over the phone.”

Contacted by phone at his Michigan office, Olson hung up when asked about his interview with Piven. When called again for comment, his colleague, Steve Gunn, answered for him. “He doesn’t have any interest in talking with you. He doesn’t care anything about you,” Gunn said. “If you call again, I’ll call 911. You have a miserable day.”

Reprinted with permission from Peter Dreier, “The ACORN Conspiracy, Continued,” The American Prospect Online: March 23, 2010. The American Prospect, 1710 Rhode Island Ave. NW Floor 12, Washington, DC 20036. All rights reserved.

A Moment for Movements

AN INTERVIEW WITHFRANCES FOX PIVEN

Frances Fox Piven on the failure of welfare reform and the promise of new movements.

Right-wing talk-show host Glenn Beck has called her “one of the nine most dangerous people in the world.” Democratic Socialists of America is proud to call her an honorary chair.

Political scientist and sociologist Frances Fox Piven has inspired and angered political activists for decades. Almost fifty years ago, the Nation published an article by her and her colleague and husband Richard Cloward in which they argued that, with Democrats in control of the White House and Congress, poor people should claim the welfare benefits to which they were entitled. The result would swamp the system and lead to something new, a guaranteed annual income, which would end poverty as we knew it.

The Cloward-Piven strategy, as it became known, was seen as a way for powerless people to take advantage of disruptive moments to make more than incremental gains. Later, the strategy was expanded to include massive voter registration drives. Cloward and Piven, with George Wiley, also helped found the National Welfare Rights Organization, which, for a few years, was the militant voice of heretofore voiceless welfare clients.

Michele Rossi, a member of the Philadelphia chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, recently spoke with Piven about Bill Clinton’s “welfare reform,” Hillary Clinton’s feminism, and Bernie Sanders’s bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.

It has been almost twenty years since then-president Bill Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), also known as welfare reform. You were a prominent critic of the legislation, maintaining that it wrongly focused on the morality of poor women’s highly constrained personal choices and deflected attention from crises in the labor market. What consequences has the reform had for the women who were its target? And what has been its impact more broadly?

FRANCES FOX PIVEN

The passage of PRWORA meant the elimination of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which had been the main cash assistance program for poor families with children. It was replaced by Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, which imposed time restrictions on the length of assistance as well as work requirements.

In addition, it gave the states a big incentive to restrict aid, because they could use the block grant funds for other purposes. This, the states proceeded to do. Welfare caseloads plummeted, from about 14 million people in 1995 to a little over 4 million today. This has meant a doubling of households living in extreme poverty. Some three million children live in such households.

Of course, the effects are also felt more widely. AFDC functioned as a kind of unemployment insurance program for people who were not eligible for unemployment insurance benefits because they worked irregularly or in jobs that were not covered. With that safety net gone, many millions of precarious workers are much more vulnerable to the harsh terms of work at the bottom of the labor market.

Hillary Clinton calls herself “a lifelong fighter for women’s issues.” Apparently, she does not see revisiting welfare reform as part of that fight. And neither do the prominent feminists and many other progressives lining up behind her candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. Why?

FRANCES FOX PIVEN

Hillary Clinton has a very mixed record on the issue of poverty, including the poverty of women and children. She began as a lawyer with Marian Wright Edelman’s advocacy group, the Children’s Defense Fund, and she later popularized the slogan “It takes a village to raise a child.”

But in the 1990s, as the right-wing campaign against blacks and the poor escalated, she joined with her husband in trying to minimize the damage the Republican assault was causing Democrats by endorsing some of its principles. Bill Clinton campaigned in 1992 with the promise to “end welfare as we know it,” and when a Republican House put a bill that did just that on his desk before the 1996 election, he signed it, with Hillary’s support.

The problem is not just Hillary. The main argument for PRWORA was that welfare caused the poor to become dependent. Better to show tough love and cut out the checks, because then poor women would shape up, get a job, and begin the climb out of poverty.

This conviction that wage work is always better than welfare is deeply ingrained, and it is shared by much of the Left as well as all of the Right. It’s time we reevaluated it, not only because it has confused our support for income assistance to the poor but also because contemporary labor market conditions make full employment at decent wages less and less likely.

Maybe there will come a glorious day when investment will mean investment in a green economy, caregiving jobs, and so on. But in the meantime, we should not endorse policies that punish the poor.

How should we understand the energy and enthusiasm coalescing around Bernie Sanders’s candidacy? Is this the beginning of a movement?

FRANCES FOX PIVEN

The Sanders campaign is the continuation of a movement, not the beginning. It’s hard to be sure of the exact beginning. Was it the occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol? Or Occupy? Or Ferguson? Or now Black Lives Matter?

All these events are evidence of the scale and intensity of popular anger at escalating inequality and the abusive government policies that inequality makes necessary. And just as neoliberalism is bigger than the United States, so is the movement. Occupy drew inspiration from the Arab Spring, UK Uncut from Occupy.

And the movements are spilling over into electoral politics, not only with the remarkable Sanders campaign here, but also with the defeat of the arch-conservative Stephen Harper in Canada and the ascendance of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party in Britain.

It’s a good time to be a political activist!

Conclusion

A lot of reform programs were created by well intentioned individuals. However, when a reform program is based on destroying a portion of a society, I don’t care what the intentions were or are, they are wrong. No social group is inherently evil (clarification, Nazism, Facism and Communism, thought these are poitical movements and not sub-groups of a population) and so therefore do not deserve this type of treatment. The belief that one group is more deserving than another one is ludicrous. We are going through a time in our history where this strategy is being forced on us. I frankly have worked very hard for what I have, and I do not appreciate some politician trying to take away everything that I have spent my whole life auiring just to give to another group of people, well deserving or not. I already pay way too much of my income in taxes. If I want to donate my money to help the less fortunate, it should be my choice to do so, not the governments.

Resources

en.wikipedia.org, “The Cloward-Piven Strategy>” By Wikipedia Editors; http://burawoy.berkeley.edu, “Piven Attack rom the Right.” By Peter Dreier; jacobin.com, “A Moment for Movements.” AN INTERVIEW WITHFRANCES FOX PIVEN; medium.com, “Cloward-Piven Strategy.” By Fabian Owuor;

What Is Wrong With Our Country?

Common Sense and Ramblings In America

What Is Wrong With Our World–The Cloward-Piven Strategy

History

Strategy

Focus on Democrats

Reception and criticism

Impact of the strategy

A Moment for Movements

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History

Strategy

Focus on Democrats

Reception and criticism

Impact of the strategy

A Moment for Movements

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