This is a new series of articles where I explain various terms, catchphrases, and other confusing topics, as well as many secret government projects and agencies. If there are any subjects you’re interested in learning about, please include them in the comment section.

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.

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 Cloward and Piven

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. 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.”

Guaranteed minimum income

Guaranteed minimum income (GMI), also called minimum income (or mincome for short), is a social-welfare system that guarantees all citizens or families an income sufficient to live on, provided that certain eligibility conditions are met, typically: citizenship and that the person in question does not already receive a minimum level of income to live on.

The primary goal of a guaranteed minimum income is reduction of poverty. Under more unconditional requirements, when citizenship is the sole qualification, the program becomes a universal basic income (UBI) system. Unlike a guaranteed minimum income, UBI does not typically take into account what a recipient already earns before receiving a UBI. A form of guaranteed minimum income that considers income as a criterion is the negative income tax. In this system, only individuals earning below a certain threshold receive subsidies.

Elements

A system of guaranteed minimum income can consist of several elements, most notably:

• Social safety net that helps those without sufficient financial means survive through payments
• State child support
• Student loan and grants
• State pensions or social pensions for the elderly
• Disability pensions for those who physically can not work

History

Pre-modern antecedents

Persian monarch Cyrus the Great (c. 590 to c. 529 B.C.), whose government used a regulated minimum wage, also provided special rations to families when a child was born.

Cash assistance GMI was first documented by the third century BCE Greek philosopher, Aristotle, in his review of the Athenian Constitution. The modern equivalent would be a safety net program for people with less than $1,000 USD in savings to receive $20 USD per day.

The Roman Republic and Empire offered the Cura Annonae, a regular distribution of free or subsidized grain or bread to poorer residents. The grain subsidy was first introduced by Gaius Gracchus in 123 B.C., then further institutionalized by Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar.

The first Sunni Muslim Caliph Abu Bakr, who came to power in 632 C.E., introduced a guaranteed minimum standard of income, granting each man, woman and child ten dirhams annually. This was later increased to twenty dirhams.

17th century

In 1662, English demographer John Graunt included in his book, Natural and Political Observations Made Upon the Bills of Mortality, an argument for GMI based on statistics collected from Bills of mortality. According to the historian of statistics Ian Hacking, this was a new method of argument for an already widespread proposal, and that advocacy for a GMI began at least thirty years before that.

18th century

In 1795, American revolutionary Thomas Paine advocated a citizen’s dividend to all United States citizens as compensation for “loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property”.

19th century

French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte echoed Paine’s sentiments and commented that ‘man is entitled by birthright to a share of the Earth’s produce sufficient to fill the needs of his existence’ (Herold, 1955).

The American economist Henry George advocated for a dividend paid to all citizens from the revenue generated by a land value tax.

20th century

American economist Milton Friedman began advocating a basic income in the form of a negative income tax in the early 1940s. He discusses the proposal his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom and his 1980 book Free to Choose.

In 1963, Robert Theobald published the book Free Men and Free Markets, in which he advocated a guaranteed minimum income (the origin of the modern version of the phrase).

In 1966, the Cloward–Piven strategy advocated “overloading” the US welfare system to force its collapse in the hopes that it would be replaced by “a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty”.

In his final book Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967), Martin Luther King Jr. wrote

I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.

— from the chapter titled “Where We Are Going”

In 1968, James Tobin, Paul Samuelson, John Kenneth Galbraith and another 1,200 economists signed a document calling for the US Congress to introduce in that year a system of income guarantees and supplements.

In 1969, President Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan would have paid a minimum income to poor families. The proposal by Nixon passed in the House but never made it out of committee in the Senate.

In 1973, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote The Politics of a Guaranteed Income, in which he advocated the guaranteed minimum income and discussed Richard Nixon‘s Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI) proposal.

In 1987, New Zealand‘s Labor Finance Minister Roger Douglas announced a Guaranteed Minimum Family Income Scheme to accompany a new flat tax. Both were quashed by then Prime Minister David Lange, who sacked Douglas.

In his 1994 “autobiographical dialog”, classical liberal Friedrich Hayek stated: “I have always said that I am in favor of a minimum income for every person in the country”.

21st century

In 2013, the Equal Life Foundation published the Living Income Guaranteed Proposal, illustrating a practical way to implement and fund a minimum guaranteed income.

In 2017, Harry A. Shamir (US) published the book Consumerism, or Capitalism Without Crises, in which the concept was promoted by another label, as a way to enable our civilization to survive in an era of automation and computerization and large scale unemployment. The book also innovates a method to fund the process, tapping into the underground economy and volunteerism.

Other modern advocates include Ayşe Buğra (Turkey), The Green Economics Institute (GEI), and Andrew Coyne (Canada).

Funding

Tax revenues would fund the majority of GMI proposals. As most GMI proposals seek to create an earnings floor close to or above poverty lines among all citizens, the fiscal burden would require equally broad tax sources, such as income taxes or VATs. To varying degrees, a GMI might be funded through the reduction or elimination of other social security programs, such as unemployment insurance.

Another approach for funding is to acknowledge that all modern economies use fiat money and thus taxation is not necessary for funding. However, the fact that there are no financial constraints does not mean other constraints, such as on real resources, do not exist. A likely outcome based on the economic theory known as Modern Monetary Theory would be a moderate increase in taxation to ensure the extra income would not cause demand-pull inflation. This hypothetical Chartalist approach can be seen in the implementation of quantitative easing programs where, in the United States, over three trillion dollars were created without requiring taxes.

Examples around the world

Austria

Social assistance is the last social safety net provided by the state (principle of subsidiarity). Social assistance is only granted if people cannot secure their livelihood either through their own efforts or through family assistance (maintenance obligation) or on the basis of a social insurance or other benefit entitlement. Due to other existing benefits in Austria, many people are not dependent on social assistance.

Belgium

Brazil

Minimum income has been increasingly accepted by the Brazilian government. In 2004, President Lula da Silva signed into law a bill to establish a universal basic income. This law is primarily implemented through the Bolsa Família program. Under this program, poorer families receive a direct cash payment via a government issued debit card. Bolsa Família is a conditional cash transfer program, meaning that beneficiaries receive their aid if they accomplish certain actions. Families who receive the aid must put their children in school and participate in vaccination programs. If they do not meet these requirements, they are cut off from aid. The program has been criticized as vote-buying, trading productive individuals’ earning for the votes of welfare recipients As of 2011, approximately 50 million people, or a quarter of Brazil’s population, were participating in Bolsa Família.

Canada

Canada has experimented with minimum income trials. During the Mincome experiment in Manitoba in the 1970s, Mincome provided lower-income families with cash transfers to keep them out of poverty. The trial was eventually ended but this was due to budget shortfalls and a change in government.

The province of Ontario began a minimum income experiment in 2017. Approximately 4000 citizens began to receive a stipend based on their family situation and income. Recipients of this program could receive upwards of $10,000 per year. Government researchers used this pilot as a way of testing to see if a minimum income can help people meet their basic needs. On 31 August 2018, following a change in government, incoming Premier Doug Ford announced that the pilot would be canceled at the end of the current fiscal year.

China

China’s Minimum Livelihood Guarantee also called dibao, is a means-tested social assistance scheme introduced in 1993 and expanded to all Chinese cities in 1999.

Cyprus

In July 2013, the Cypriot government unveiled a plan to reform the welfare system in Cyprus and create a ‘Guaranteed Minimum Income‘ for all citizens.

Denmark

Kontanthjælp (formerly known as bistandshjælp) is a public benefit in Denmark granted to citizens who would otherwise not be able to support themselves or their families. In principle, cash benefits are a universal right for all citizens who meet certain statutory criteria.

Estonia

A subsistence allowance is financial help for a person or family in need, which provides minimal resources for everyday life (food, medicine, housing costs, etc.).

Finland

Basic subsistence allowance paid by Kela may be granted to a person or family whose income and assets are insufficient to cover the necessary daily expenses.

France

In 1988, France was one of the first countries to implement a minimum income, called the Revenu minimum d’insertion. In 2009, it was turned into Revenu de solidarité active (RSA), a new system that aimed to solve the poverty trap by providing low-wage workers a complementary income to encourage activity.

Germany

Greece

The minimum guaranteed income is a selective financial benefit to ensure that all citizens enjoy a minimum standard of living and cover their basic needs. It has been tested and implemented in European Union countries and others. In 2019 it was incorporated as a requirement in the Greek Constitution.

Hungary

India

Modern independent India developed many means and livelihood tested cash transfer programs through Direct Benefit Transfer at both the federal and the state level. At the federal level, these include minimum income social pension programs such as National Social Assistance Scheme, guaranteed employment program like National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 or a disability aid like Deendayal Disabled Rehabilitation Scheme. At the state level, there can be additional minimum income programs, one such being “Laksmir Bhandar” run by the state of West Bengal that transfers a minimum aid to families without work in the state.

Ireland

In Ireland, €20 of earnings per day of permitted work (beneficiaries are allowed up to three days per week) is disregarded from employment income when calculating Jobseekers’ Allowance entitlement and deductions are calculated as 60 percent of earnings less this income disregard. In addition, the Part-time Job Incentive Scheme and Back to Work Family Dividend are fixed-duration payments offered to the long-term unemployed incentive moving into work. In return for relinquishing claims to primary assistance benefits, both schemes provide benefits for a fixed duration that are slightly lower than household GMI entitlements, but which are not tapered with employment income, subject to certain eligibility requirements. Ireland’s relatively generous tapering system serves to smooth disincentives to increase income and work and contributes to their lower measured participation tax rates (PTRs) and marginal effective tax rates (METRs).

Italy

The citizens’ income was a social welfare system created in Italy in January 2019. Although its name recalls one of a universal basic income, this provision was actually a form of conditional and non-individual guaranteed minimum income.

Netherlands

Norway

Income support can be granted if the applicant has insufficient income and resources to live on and is not entitled to other social security benefits. Income support is paid by the Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration.

Poland

Portugal

The Social Insertion Income is a benefit for combating poverty, enabling individuals and their families to obtain support adapted to their situation, facilitating the satisfaction of their basic needs and aiming to integrate them into work, society and the community.

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia has a Citizen’s Account Program which provides a basic income to registered citizens. In December 2017, immediately before the program began, more than 3.7 million households had registered, representing 13 million people, or more than half the population. As of 2013, between one fifth and one third of Saudi residents are estimated to be non-citizens.

Slovakia

Material need assistance (pomoc v hmotnej núdzi) includes one hot meal a day, essential clothing and shelter.

South Africa

The Social Relief of Distress grant (SRD) in South Africa is given to those whose monthly income falls short of the individual food poverty line, which is the minimal amount required to buy food that provides adequate calories for survival.

Spain

In Spain, the ingreso mínimo vital is an economic benefit guaranteed as part of the Social security in Spain. The IMV is defined as a “subjective right” and is intended to prevent poverty and social exclusion of people who live alone or integrated into a coexistence unit when they are in a situation of vulnerability due to lack of sufficient financial resources to cover their basic needs. The benefit, which is not fixed and varies depending on various factors, ranges between 462 and 1015 euros per month, is expected to cover 850,000 households (approximately 2.5 million people) and will cost the government 3 billion euros per year.

Sweden

Social assistance consists partly of a “national standard” (riksnorm) and partly of “reasonable costs outside the national standard”. The national standard includes costs such as food, clothing and footwear. Reasonable non-standard costs include rent and household electricity.

United Kingdom

Universal Credit is a social welfare program in the United Kingdom that consolidates several means-tested benefits into a single payment, aiming to simplify the welfare system and incentivize work.

United States

The United States has multiple social programs that provide guaranteed minimum incomes for individuals meeting certain criteria such as assets or disability. For instance, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) is a United States government program that provides stipends to low-income people who are either aged (65 or older), blind, or disabled. SSI was created in 1974 to replace federal-state adult assistance programs that served the same purpose. Today the program provides benefits to approximately eight million Americans. Another such program is Social Security Disability Insurance (SSD or SSDI), a payroll tax-funded, federal insurance program. It is managed by the Social Security Administration and is designed to provide income supplements to people who are restricted in their ability to work because of a disability, usually a physical disability. SSD can be supplied on either a temporary or permanent basis, usually directly correlated to whether the person’s disability is temporary or permanent.

An early guaranteed minimum income program in the U.S. was the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), established by the Social Security Act. Where previously the responsibility to assist needy children lay in the hands of the states, AFDC transferred that authority to the federal government. Over time, the AFDC was often criticized for creating disincentives to work, leading to many arguing for its replacement. In the 1970s, President Richard M. Nixon proposed the Family Assistance Program (FAP), which would replace the AFDC. FAP was intended to fix many of the problems of the AFDC, particularly the anti-work structure. Presidential nominee George McGovern also proposed a minimum income—in the form of a Universal Tax Credit. Ultimately, neither of these programs was implemented. Throughout the decade, many other experimental minimum income programs were carried out in cities throughout the country, such as the Seattle-Denver Income Maintenance Experiments. In 1996, under President Bill Clinton, the AFDC was replaced with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. This would block grant funds to the states to allow them to decide how aid would be distributed.

Another guaranteed minimum income program in the U.S. is the Earned Income Tax Credit. This is a refundable tax credit that gives poorer families cash assistance every year. The EITC avoids the welfare trap by subsidizing income, rather than replacing it.

Other countries

• Bulgaria: Социални помощи
• Croatia: Zajamčena Minimalna Naknada
• Czech Republic: Příspěvek na živobytí
• Iceland: Fjárhagsaðstoð
• Latvia: Sociālā palīdzība
• Lithuania: Piniginė socialinė parama
• Romania: Venit minim garantat
• Slovenia: Denarna socialna pomoč

Social dividend

The social dividend is the return on the natural resources and capital assets owned by society in a socialist economy. The concept notably appears as a key characteristic of market socialism, where it takes the form of a dividend payment to each citizen derived from the property income generated by publicly owned enterprises, representing the individual’s share of the capital and natural resources owned by society.

Although the social dividend concept has not yet been applied on a large scale, similar policies have been adopted on a limited basis. In both the former Soviet-type economies and non-socialist countries, the net earnings of revenue-generating state enterprises were considered a source of public revenue to be spent directly by the government to finance various public goods and services.

The concept of a social dividend overlaps with the concept of a universal basic income guarantee, but is distinguished from basic income in that a social dividend implies social ownership of productive assets whereas a basic income does not necessarily imply social ownership and can be financed through a much broader range of sources. Unlike a basic income, the social dividend yield varies based on the performance of the socially owned economy. The social dividend can be regarded as the socialist analogue to basic income. More recently the term universal basic dividend (UBD) has been used to contrast the social dividend concept with basic income.

Overview

Social dividends are a key feature in many models of market socialism which are characterized by publicly owned enterprises operating to maximize profit within a market economy. In such a system, the social dividend would grant every citizen a share of the property income generated by publicly owned assets and natural resources, which would be received alongside any labor income (wages and salaries) earned through employment. In contrast to cooperative variants of market socialism, where the profits of each firm are distributed among the members/employees of each individual firm, a social dividend benefits the public at large. A social dividend would also eliminate the need for the social welfare and income redistribution programs, along with the administrative costs they incur, that exist in capitalist economies.

The benefits of a social dividend include broadly sharing the benefits of economic growth and technological progress, greater autonomy for individual citizens, greater social and income equality, and eliminating class differences in society arising from labor income and property income. The social dividend also has advantages over a basic income by addressing the criticism that a conventional basic income can be used as justification to weaken labor protection laws and unemployment compensation, creating a population dependent upon the subsistence levels of income afforded by the basic income, and might serve to further impede the transition to a post-capitalist society.

There are many institutional forms a social dividend can take. Generally, they are regarded as being universally distributed without constraint, even to unemployed individuals. However, the exact institutional arrangement varies among different proposals, for example, there might be certain constraints on the receipt of the dividend payment imposed on the unemployed.

Notable economists and political scientists who have articulated social dividend models in their models of socialism include Oskar Lange, Abba Lerner, James Meade, James Yunker, John Roemer, Pranab Bardhan, David Schweickart and Yanis Varoufakis.

Theoretical history

Origins

As a precursor to the social dividend concept, Léon Walras, one of the founders of neoclassical economics who helped formulate the general equilibrium theory, argued that free competition could only be realized under conditions of state ownership of natural resources and land. Walras argued that nationalized land and natural resources would provide a source of income to the state that would eliminate the need for income taxes.

In Karl Marx‘s critique of political economy, property income is a component of surplus value, which refers to the net value above the total wage bill. The surplus value is distributed among a small minority of passive owners – capitalists and private shareholders. The capitalists appropriate the product of social labor by holding ownership titles to the means of production. While Marx was opposed to the distribution of property income under capitalism, the way property income is distributed was not the instrumentality of capitalist collapse nor was it the primary reason for the desirability of the abrogation of capitalism in Marx’s view. In Marx’s view capitalism was not to be opposed due to any supposedly moral defect in its distribution, but because its underlying dynamic of capital accumulation and surplus value appropriation was unstable and ultimately internally unsustainable. For Marx, socialism implied an end to this class dynamic, where the surplus product generated by the social means of production would be appropriated by all members of society.

The term “social dividend” was put forth by British economist George Douglas Howard Cole in his 1935 book In Principles of Economic Planning to refer to the distribution of the net social product in the form of a cash disbursement for a socialist economy. Prior to this, most socialist economists assumed the net social product would be remitted to the population in-kind. In Cole’s model, income would be distributed on the basis of work performed and on the basis of citizenship, the latter representing the social dividend that recognized “…each citizen’s claim as a consumer to share in the common heritage of productive power.” The aim would be to make the dividend large enough, through greater economic growth and efficiency, to cover the basic needs of every citizen.

Proposed models

Oskar Lange is credited with the first use of the term “social dividend” in his seminal paper On the Economic Theory of Socialism, where he defined it as the accumulation of profit and rent minus investment by publicly owned enterprises. In Lange’s model of socialism, the social dividend would be one component of the income to consumers alongside receipts for labor services. Abba P. Lerner contributed to the idea of a social dividend by incorporating it into Lange’s original model of socialism as a lump-sum payment to each citizen as not to effect the efficient operation of labor markets. Lange’s original proposal was to have the social dividend proportionate to a person’s earnings from work. Abba Lerner’s social dividend proposal was a modification of Lange’s, where the social dividend would be distributed as a lump-sum payment and not be distributed proportionally to wages as to not disturb the efficient allocation of labor in the labor market. In Lerner’s The Economics of Control: The Economics of Welfare the social dividend also serves as an economic lever for preventing inflation and deflation. The social dividend represented the citizen’s share of the earnings of the factors of production other than labor, but in Lerner’s model, it is distributed in a way that induces consumers to spend the right amount which along with investment demand for factors would provide full employment. Lerner’s model proposed that inflation and depression could be prevented in a socialist economy by adjusting the level of the social dividend: if spending is too high, the social dividend could be set to zero or a negative (as a tax) to reduce demand.

British economist James Meade outlined a social dividend system within his model of what he called “liberal socialism”. Meade advocated for a reversal of the British nationalization process in the immediate post-Second World War period, where nationalized and state-owned British industries conferred control rights without conferring income rights to the state, with the state being denied free use of its profits. In an arrangement that Meade called “topsy-turvy nationalization” the state would act as a shareholder receiving residual income from its enterprises without being granted control rights over enterprises. The proceeds from the state-owned enterprises would finance the social dividend. The principle benefits of Meade’s system was the separation of government micromanagement from enterprise management, flexible labor markets, and widely shared benefits of economic growth among the population.

For the American economist James Yunker, as a function of public ownership of the means of production the social dividend represents the most important and fundamental benefit of a socialist system. In Yunker’s model of “pragmatic market socialism” enterprises would be organized as corporations and function almost identically to present-day capitalist firms, the major difference being that their shares would be owned by a public entity which he dubbed the “Bureau of Public Ownership”. The major difference between capitalism and this form of market socialism involves the distribution of property income: the property return generated by publicly owned corporations would belong to the population as a whole as opposed to accruing to a minority of private owners and shareholders, thereby eliminating the class distinction between owners and workers and inequality arising from the distinction between property income and labor income, while otherwise functioning almost identically to capitalism.

In John Roemer’s and Pranab Bardhan’s model of market socialism, public ownership takes the form of public ownership of shares in publicly listed firms. As firms are publicly owned, the dividend payments are divided equally among all adult citizens instead of accruing to a small class of private owners. The social dividend supplements individual income from wages and personal savings.

In Beyond the Profits System: Possibilities for the Post-Capitalist Era, economist Harry Shutt advocates a basic income system to replace all existing state social security and welfare functions with the exception of childcare. This measure would be financed by the public and cooperative ownership of enterprises, and is a measure to be adopted alongside the ending of capital accumulation as the driving force in the economy. Taken together, these measures would constitute a post-capitalist economy.

In February 2017, the Chinese think tank Shenzhen Innovation and Development Institute issued an Outline of Shared Development in Shenzhen which included a proposed a state-owned capital dividend fund. The goal of the proposed social dividend fund is to share the results of reform and development of Shenzhen’s state-owned enterprises.

On 16 June 2017, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published a study on the feasibility of a universal basic income in four OECD countries using the EUROMOD micro-simulation model. The study concluded that basic income would have mixed results and not be an efficient tool for reducing poverty, creating gainers and losers, with those currently receiving earnings-related or means-tested benefits suffering a decline in their living standards. The OECD report ends up recommending a social dividend as a partial alternative to basic income as a separate system from existing social protection, whose function would be to share the benefits of technological progress and globalization more equally.

In practice

Social dividend systems have been implemented in limited form on the basis of public ownership of natural resources in the state of Alaska through the Alaska Permanent Fund and in Norway by the Government Pension Fund of Norway. The Alaska Permanent Fund distributes a share in the state’s wealth derived from royalty income from oil produced on state-owned land and oil reserves to each individual in the form of a dividend payment on the basis of citizenship.

In the People’s Republic of China regional social dividend-type systems are in place. The Macao Special Administrative Region has distributed cash disbursements to its residents since 2008 through the Wealth Partaking Scheme, with the goal of sharing the results of the region’s development and enterprises with its population. Macao residents receive an annual state bonus financed mainly by lottery revenues. In the urban village of Huaidi in Shijiazhuang, Hebei, all citizens have been received an annual social dividend funded by collectively owned land development rights since 1995. Huaidi’s property assets are also used to finance a range of in-kind benefits and public services.

The government of Singapore distributed a “growth dividend” to most of its citizens in 2011 financed out of ballooning government revenues from high rates of economic growth. However, unlike a social dividend, the “growth dividend” was a one-time disbursement and is not a regular disbursement.

Criticism

In response to the socialist contention that passive shareholders and owners can be substituted for publicly owned institutional investors, Ludwig von Mises claimed that the private dividends of capitalists and speculators are necessary for calculating the opportunity costs of capital goods. According to Mises, attempts to replace private dividends with social dividends lead to either dis-coordinated bureaucratic planning or bureaucratic rigidity. Mises rejected Lange’s proposal because financial markets provide signals that Langian market socialism lacks:

“Those suggesting a quasi market for the socialist system have never wanted to preserve the stock and commodity exchanges, the trading in futures, and the bankers and moneylenders as quasi-institutions. One cannot play speculation and investment. The speculators and investors expose their own wealth, their own destiny…”

MacKenzie asserts that John Roemer’s proposed socialist “stock market” fails to provide a sufficient basis for efficient capital investment, and that equalization of stock ownership precludes an efficient division of labor between those who do and do not have a comparative advantage in planning capital projects.

Related concepts

Social dividends have an alternate definition as the citizen’s egalitarian share of surplus tax revenue. This form of social dividend exists within the framework of capitalism since productive assets would be privately owned, operated for private profits and would not directly finance the social dividend.

“the creation of a guaranteed annual income by triggering a crisis in the existing welfare system.”

If we can’t abide poverty and won’t abolish it, at least we can destroy the poor

It is a characteristic paradox of our time that the word welfare has come to mean almost precisely its opposite. No Big Brother, no Ministry of Truth, presided over this linguistic transmutation of gold into lead. Yet this benign term, defined by my dictionary as a “condition of health, happiness, and prosperity,” immediately summons images of misery. humiliation and waste. The three books considered here go far in explaining why.

In 1965, Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward circulated a paper arguing that the best way to obtain welfare reform would be to flood the rolls with every family eligible under the law. Although Piven and Cloward are by no means taking credit for it, that is exactly what happened. The rolls were flooded. In New York City, if anyone needs reminding, the number of families quadrupled in the sixties, three‐quarters of that increase taking place in the last five years. And we are now indeed on the verge of welfare reform. I doubt, however, that the authors have been much commended in official circles for their foresight.

Their book is as uncompromising and provocative as their earlier paper. Historically, they argue, public relief has served to regulate the poor, not assist them; to defuse political turmoil and discipline the labor force. From the Middle Ages, governments have extended relief whenever mass unemployment caused by economic

Peter Steinfels is associate editor of Commonweal. dislocation begins to threaten political order. Once such flashpoints are passed, the relief rolls are constricted; whatever residual assistance remains is administered in such a harsh and degrading fashion as to stand warning for the laboring poor.

Piven and Cloward discern the same pattern in the first American welfare “explosion” — the massive Federal relief efforts of the New Deal. It was not the existence of misery alone but the threat of action, in the streets and in voting booths, that finally forced the Government’s hand. Nonetheless, after the 1936 election sweep submerged the danger posed to Roosevelt by the Townsend Plan for aiding the aged and Huey Long’s “Share Our Wealth” movement, welfare cutbacks became the order of the day.

The starting point for Piven’s and Cloward’s analysis of our second and current welfare explosion is the Agricultural Revolution, which, between 1940 and 1970 removed 20‐million Americans from the land. It was, they remind us, “one of the greatest mass dislocations in United States history comparable to the movement of 22‐million immigrants to American shores between 1890 and 1930.”

The nineteen‐fifties, then, did not lack a vast pool of persons in need of public assistance. What was lacking was the social and political pressure to get them on the rolls. Piven and Cloward exhibit the whole bag of tricks, tortuous and torturous, in law and in practice, that administrators employed (and, too often, still employ) to keep welfare eligible from their benefits and to tailor the relief system to the cheap labor need of various regions and seasons.

Some of the refugees of the Agricultural Revolution no doubt scraped by in the fifties. The fate of others was summed up by an incident at hearings of the Mississippi Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Piven and Cloward relate how case after case was heard of welfare abuses that left rural families on the edge of starvation. One Committee member finally asked, “How is it they don’t die?” The reply came back, “They do die, slowly.”

Two factors changed the situation in the sixties, and the bill for the Agricultural Revolution fell due. First, civil rights agitation encouraged blacks to resist public assistance abuses while urban disorder and ghetto riots put pressusre on the cities. Second, a Kennedy‐Johnson political strategy attempted to cement blacks into the New Deal coalition by providing services to the ghetto, over the heads, if necessary, of local ethnic laborpressure based Democratic administrations.

This latter ambition led to direct Federal intervention in the form of anti‐poverty programs and Great Society agencies. Storefront community action centers and neighborhood legal services were naturally drawn into challenging the legal and not‐so‐legal barriers that welfare systems put in the way of the needy. And harassed city fathers found that, especially for the black poor, welfare, unlike housing, education and jobs, was an area that involved relatively little confrontation with the established, competing interest groups.

By mixing history, political interpretation and sociological analysis, by placing the relief crisis in the context of “economic disruption, large‐scale migration, mass volatility and electoral responses,” Piven and Cloward provide the best explanation to date of our present situation. They also argue that the pattern most typical of relief programs is not a linear one of ever‐ascending humane sentiment, but the cyclical one of expansion and contraction; and that the crucial variable in relief explosions is not the number of eligible needy, but their turbulence. Raised to the status of “laws,” their theses may he questionable, but no future discussion of the subject can afford to ignore them.

The tone of “Regulating the Poor” is aggressive, sometimes accusatory. Yet much of its argument, at least in regard to the cruel operation of the present system and the need for major change, is confirmed in two other books, each very different in tone and focus. “The State of Welfare,” by Gilbert Y. Steiner, the Director of Governmental Studies at the Brookings Institution, surveys a whole range of welfare programs: relief in kind (public housing, surplus commodities and food stamps) as well as relief in cash (Aid to Families with Dependent Children and veterans’ pensions).

Indeed, one of his purposes is to consider the effects of such fragmentation. The poor get their “handouts” from a sort of Government octopus, and there is plenty of opportunity for sleight‐of‐tentacle. Do administrators of cash benefits and of relief in kind both console themselves that their own inadequate assistance is being supplemented by the other one’s program? Quite possibly, writes Steiner, and he adds: “If each group feels that it is running an unsatisfactory program, they are both right.” Steiner concentrates on the development and discussion of welfare programs within the Government bureaucracies and legislative corridors.

In a chapter on “Tireless Tinkering with Dependent Families,” he tracks down the unexamined assumptions underlying the 1962 drive to link benefits with extensive psychosocial services and, when that effort failed, the equally unsuccessful 1967 manpower training amendments to get welfare recipients “off the welfare rolls and onto the tax rolls.” The Government counted on social service skills and personnel that weren’t available, capabilities among the poor that were too much to demand, and day care facilities that didn’t exist.

One of the most fascinating chapters concerns the special program of assistance available for aged or disabled wartime veterans or their survivors. This program pays $2.3‐billion annually to recipients whose need is in no way connected to disabilities incurred in military service.

The veterans’ program usually pays better and comes easier. Unlike most public assistance beneficiaries, recipients of veterans’ pensions are not conditioned to believe that they are a drag on society, are not subject to investigation to insure that their claim continues to be valid, are presumed to be telling the truth, are assisted in making a claim by a large network of volunteers, are not obliged to account for their spending behavior, may have significant amounts of income from other sources, are able to move freely without jeopardizing their benefits and are not badgered to get off the rolls.

If only A.F.D.C. mothers had the American Legion looking after their interests! “Ironically,” concludes Steiner, “veterans’ pension is the relief program with the least rational justification but with the smoothest political path and with the most admirable administrative features. In the best of all arrangements, veterans’ pensions would not be folded into public assistance; public assistance would be folded into veterans’ pensions.” The welfare situation could be solved by Congressional fiat declaring all relief beneficiaries to be wartime veterans. That, after all, would be among the least of the fictions our Government.

Steiner’s is the micro politics to complement Piven’s and Cloward’s macro politics. It is written with a discriminating intelligence, however, which makes the most detailed accounts of bureaucratic maneuvers illuminate the larger issues at stake.

Still a third kind of book has been written by Bruno Stein. “On Relief” is an economist’s outline of the advantages, drawbacks and possible costs of the alternatives to our ramshackle heritaee from the Elizabethan Poor Laws: the negative income tax, child allowances, federalization and other reforms of the present system, and the Family Assistance Plan. Stein’s book has two special merits. It is perfectly clear and it extends the discussion of poverty to the issues of inequality, that “relative poverty” that no amount of economic growth can cure without a proportionate redistribution of wealth among the poor.

The Family Assistance Act was hailed as “the way out” of the welfare crisis by President Nixon when he congratulated the House of Representatives for passing the measure. But none of the authors of these books see it that way.

Piven and Cloward are understandably hostile. They suspect that the measure’s “workfare not welfare” provisions introduce a period of the historical cycle when the needy are purged from the rolls. By removing the disruptive threat, which is the only reliable protection of the poor against perennial public opposition to relief, the new benefits set the stage for eventual cutbacks rather than future gains. Better, they advise, to continue the explosion of the rolls—a strategy that may be more costly to the poor and less feasible than they estimate. Their position is not entirely free of contradictions; the Nixon plan seems simultaneously to enjoy the properties of both the expanding and contracting stages of the traditional pattern, which may indicate the limitations of their

But Steiner and Stein, it should be noted, are also skeptical. The primary problem is money, and Family Assistance simply does not provide enough of it for the welfare poor, however much of a breakthrough it is for the working poor. Steiner further casts doubt on the assumptions that aid to the working poor will affect family stability and Southern migration. Both authors wonder if the President has not promised too much for too little—inviting disillusionment and a future crisis.

“In our highly favored country… poverty need not and ought not to exist.” That opinion was emitted almost 150 years ago by a New York committee on poverty and relief. In the name of this very optimism it concluded that the poor laws were too generous! Another New York commission, in 1963, analyzed the problem: “full acceptance of public welfare becomes a kind of criticism of our economic system.” Thus, unable to abide poverty, unwilling to abolish it, we are always tempted to do the second best: abolish the poor.

Cloward-Piven Strategy: 7 Stages of an Empire

Cloward-Piven StrategyWhat is it? Why should we be afraid?

The Cloward-Piven Strategy is a political theory developed in the 1960s by two sociologists, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. They wrote an article in 1966 for The Nation magazine titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.” Their idea was to create a crisis in the welfare system by overloading it with demands, which would force the government to make big changes, ideally leading to a guaranteed income for everyone. Basically, they thought that if enough people signed up for welfare and pushed the system to its breaking point, politicians would have no choice but to rethink how the country handles poverty.

Over time, some folks—especially critics on the political right—have interpreted this strategy as a deliberate plan to destabilize the government or even push for socialism. Cloward and Piven themselves said their goal was reform, not destruction, but the theory has taken on a life of its own in debates. Many discussions online and in conservative circles outline seven stages of this strategy, though these stages aren’t directly from Cloward and Piven’s original work. They’ve been framed by later analysts to describe how the strategy might play out. I’ll use those seven stages here to structure this report, tying them to real events in U.S. history to show where people think the stages have been completed or are in progress.

The Seven Stages and Their Application to U.S. History

Stage 1: Overload the System

This stage is about signing up as many people as possible for government programs like welfare, food stamps, and housing assistance. The idea is to stretch these systems so thin that they can’t keep up with the demand.

In the United States, this ties back to the 1960s and 1970s when the War on Poverty programs under President Lyndon B. Johnson expanded welfare access. The number of people on public assistance grew a lot during this time. For example, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program saw enrollment jump from about 3 million in 1960 to over 10 million by the mid-1970s. Community organizers, including groups inspired by Cloward and Piven, encouraged people to apply for benefits they were entitled to, which put pressure on local and state budgets. Critics argue this was the first step in overloading the system, and it’s widely seen as completed since welfare rolls did indeed swell during that era.

Stage 2: Create a Crisis

Once the system is overloaded, the next step is a visible crisis—think long wait times, denied benefits, or bankrupt local governments unable to pay for programs. This makes people frustrated and angry with the system.

By the late 1970s and into the 1980s, there were clear signs of strain. Cities like New York faced near bankruptcy in 1975, partly due to rising welfare costs alongside other economic issues. Welfare offices were overwhelmed, and there were constant complaints about inefficiency and fraud. Public opinion started turning against welfare programs, with many feeling they were unsustainable. This stage is also considered complete because the crisis became a national talking point, setting the stage for political action.

Stage 3: Mobilize the Poor and Disenfranchised

Here, the strategy calls for organizing the people affected by the crisis—those on welfare or struggling economically—to demand change through protests, activism, and voting. The goal is to make their voices loud enough that politicians can’t ignore them.

This happened through movements like the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), active in the late 1960s and 1970s, which pushed for better benefits and even a guaranteed income. There were marches and sit-ins at welfare offices. While the NWRO eventually faded, the broader push for civil rights and economic justice during this period amplified the voices of the poor. Many see this stage as completed because these efforts did influence policy debates, even if they didn’t achieve all their goals.

Stage 4: Expand Government Programs

As a response to the crisis and mobilization, the government is supposed to expand programs or create new ones to address the demands, even if it means spending more money and increasing bureaucracy.

This ties to the growth of social programs in the 1960s through the 1980s. Think of things like Medicaid, food stamps (now SNAP), and housing subsidies that expanded during and after Johnson’s Great Society initiatives. Even in the 1990s and 2000s, programs grew in scope—look at the Affordable Care Act in 2010, which aimed to cover more uninsured people. Critics of the Cloward-Piven theory argue this shows the government bending to pressure by expanding its role, so this stage is often marked as done, though the debate continues on whether these expansions were enough or too much.

Stage 5: Increase Dependency

With more programs in place, more people rely on government help, creating a cycle where dependency grows. This makes it harder for individuals to get off assistance and for the government to cut back without causing a backlash.

By the 2000s, millions of Americans were on some form of public assistance. For instance, SNAP enrollment hit over 40 million by 2010 after the Great Recession, and it’s stayed high since. Critics point to stats like these to say dependency has increased, with generations sometimes staying on benefits. Others argue this is less about a sinister plan and more about economic realities like stagnant wages and job loss. Still, in the context of this strategy, many agree this stage is complete because reliance on government programs has undeniably grown over decades.

Stage 6: Bankrupt the System

The idea here is that the cost of all these programs becomes so high that the government can’t sustain them, leading to a financial crisis. This could mean massive debt, higher taxes, or cuts to other areas like defense or infrastructure.

Looking at the U.S. today (as of November 2024), the national debt is over $35 trillion, and entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid make up a huge chunk of federal spending—over 60% of the budget in recent years. Some argue this shows the system is on the brink, with warnings about Social Security running out of funds by the 2030s if nothing changes. Others say the debt is manageable with economic growth or tax reform. In the Cloward-Piven framework, this stage is often seen as complete or nearly there because the financial strain is a hot topic, even if total collapse hasn’t happened yet.

Stage 7: Implement Radical Change

The final stage is where the overloaded, bankrupt system forces a complete overhaul. Cloward and Piven originally hoped this would mean a guaranteed basic income for everyone, but critics fear it could lead to socialism or loss of individual freedoms as the government takes more control to fix the mess.

As of November 2024, this stage is not complete. There’s no universal basic income or full socialist system in the U.S. However, there have been experiments and discussions—like Andrew Yang’s 2020 presidential campaign pushing for a $1,000 monthly payment to every adult, or pilot programs in cities testing basic income. On the flip side, some policies during the COVID-19 pandemic, like stimulus checks and expanded unemployment benefits, were seen by critics as steps toward government overreach. Progress on this stage is debated: supporters of the theory say we’re inching closer with every new entitlement or debt crisis, while skeptics argue the U.S. economy and political system are too resilient for such radical change anytime soon. Since my knowledge doesn’t extend past November 2024, I can’t predict what’s next, but the conversation around income guarantees and wealth redistribution remains active.

Wrapping It Up

So, to sum it all up, the Cloward-Piven Strategy, as interpreted through these seven stages, has been tied to real shifts in U.S. policy and society over the last 60 years. Stages 1 through 5—overloading the system, creating a crisis, mobilizing people, expanding programs, and increasing dependency—are widely seen as completed by those who believe this strategy is playing out, based on historical data like welfare growth and program expansions. Stage 6, bankrupting the system, is arguably complete or close to it, given the national debt and entitlement costs, though opinions differ on how dire the situation is. Stage 7, radical change, is still in progress or not yet achieved, depending on who you ask, with no clear consensus on whether something like a guaranteed income will ever happen.

By framing the Cloward-Piven Strategy within a stages-of-empire model, we see its relevance primarily in the Stagnation and Decline phases, where welfare systems are both expansive and vulnerable. Historically, in the United States, their ideas emerged during the mid-20th century’s social upheavals and continue to resonate in debates over welfare and economic policy through 2024. While their strategy was never implemented as a deliberate policy, the natural growth of dependency during crises like the Great Recession and the pandemic mirrors the kind of systemic stress they described. This analysis provides a lens to view U.S. history through the interplay of social policy and societal lifecycle, though the actual impact of their theory remains a matter of interpretation rather than direct causation.

Cloward-Piven at work

Andy Windham

Now what are the chances of tens of thousand of children from several Latin American nations showing up at our border at the same time? Obviously, this is a well-coordinated, planned event.

What we are witnessing is the Cloward-Piven strategy at work. For the benefit of those who do not know, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were two professors who taught at Columbia University. They outlined a plan to socialize America by overwhelming the system with government spending and entitlement programs.

All these illegal immigrant children will be added to the welfare rolls, and can be counted on to vote for larger government in the future.

Our home-grown socialist president is purposely overwhelming the U.S. economy to create systemic failure, destroying capitalism and our country from within.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev said that it would be the American youth who would raise the “red flag” over America.

Cloward-Piven Strategy (CPS)

First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and his wife Frances Fox Piven — both longtime members of the Democratic Socialists of America, where Piven today is an honorary chair — 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 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 authors also asserted that: (a) the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the country; (b) poor people would rise in revolt; and (c) only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands.

The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inherent inadequacy of the welfare state. In this regard, 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 1971 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.

Cloward and Piven noted that the number of Americans subsisting on welfare — about 8 million at that time — probably represented less than half the number who were technically eligible for full benefits. Thus the authors proposed a “massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls,” calculating that the system would be bankrupted if even a fraction of potential welfare recipients were to demand their entitlements. The result, predicted Cloward and Piven, would be “a profound financial and political crisis” that would unleash “powerful forces … for major economic reform at the national level.”

The Cloward-Piven article called for “cadres of aggressive organizers” to use “demonstrations to create a climate of militancy.” Then, the authors predicted, the following would happen:

The Cloward-Piven Strategy was an example of what are commonly called Trojan Horse initiatives — 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 in an effort to overwhelm government agencies with a flood of demands beyond the capacity of those agencies to meet. Cloward and Piven calculated that the flood of demands which they were recommending would 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. The three met in January 1966, at the so-called “Poor People’s War Council on Poverty,” a radical organizers’ meeting in Syracuse, New York. Wiley listened to the Cloward-Piven plan with interest. That same month, he launched his own activist group, the Washington, D.C.-based Poverty Rights Action Center. In a calculated show of militancy, Wiley sported dashikis, jeans, battered shoes, and a newly grown Afro. Regarding the Cloward-Piven strategy, Wiley told one audience:

“A lot of us have been hampered in our thinking about the potential here by our middle-class backgrounds – and I think most activists come out of middle-class backgrounds – and were oriented toward people having to work, and that we have to get as many people as possible off the welfare rolls…. However, I think that this [Cloward-Piven] strategy is going to catch on and be very important in the time ahead.”

After a series of mass marches and rallies by welfare recipients in June 1966, Wiley proudly declared “the birth” of the Welfare Rights Movement.

Cloward and Piven publicly outlined their strategy at the Second Annual Socialist Scholars Conference, held in September 1966 at New York City’s Hotel Commodore. To read an eyewitness account of their presentation, click here.

In the summer of 1967, George Wiley founded the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). His tactics closely followed the recommendations set out in Cloward and Piven’s article. Wiley’s 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,” wrote Sol Stern in the City Journal. “From 1965 to 1974, the number of 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.”

The National Welfare Rights Organization pushed for a “guaranteed living income,” as prescribed by Cloward and Piven, which it defined, in 1968, as $5,500 per year for every American family with four children. The following year, the NWRO raised its demand to $6,500. Though Wiley never made headway with his demand for a living income, the tens of billions of dollars in welfare entitlements that he and his followers managed to squeeze from state and local governments came very close to sinking the American economy, just as Cloward and Piven had predicted.

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven had given special attention to New York City, whose masses of urban poor, leftist intelligentsia, and free-spending politicians rendered it uniquely vulnerable to the strategy that the authors proposed. At the time, NYC welfare agencies were paying about $20 million per year in “special grants.” Cloward and Piven estimated that they could “multiply these expenditures tenfold or more,” thereby draining an additional $180 million annually from the city coffers.

New York City’s arch-liberal mayor John Lindsay, newly elected in November 1966, capitulated to Wiley’s every demand. An appeaser by nature, Lindsay sought to calm racial tensions by taking “walking tours” through Harlem, Bedford Stuyvesant, and other troubled areas of the city. This made for good photo-ops but failed to mollify Wiley’s cadres and the masses that they mobilized, who wanted cash. On one occasion, black militants laid siege to City Hall, bearing signs saying “No Money, No Peace.” “The violence of the [welfare rights] movement was frightening,” Lindsay budget aid Charles Morris would later recall.

Lindsay answered these provocations with ever-more-generous programs of appeasement in the form of welfare dollars. New York’s welfare rolls had been growing by 12% per year already, before Lindsay took office. The rate jumped to 50% annually in 1966. During Lindsay’s first term of office, welfare spending in New York City more than doubled, from $400 million to $1 billion annually. Outlays for the poor consumed 28% of the city’s budget by 1970. “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,” Sol Stern wrote in the City Journal.

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.

Crucial to George Wiley’s success was the cooperation of radical sympathizers inside the federal government, who supplied Wiley’s movement with grants, training, and logistical assistance, channeled through federal War on Poverty programs such as VISTA’s.

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.

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 July 20, 1998 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.”

In a January 2011 article in the Nation magazine, Frances Fox Piven would reflect upon the elements that had helped make the welfare-rights movement successful in the 1960s:

“Before people can mobilize for collective action, they have to develop a proud and angry identity and a set of claims that go with that identity. They have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry and indignant. Welfare moms in the 1960s did this by naming themselves ‘mothers’ instead of ‘recipients.’”

In the same 2011 article, Piven noted that “protesters need targets, preferably local and accessible ones capable of making some kind of response to angry demands.”

Cloward and Piven Shift Their Focus from Welfare Rights to Voting Rights

After the welfare-rights movement had run its course by the mid-1970s, 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. Cloward and Piven despised America’s electoral system every bit as much as they despised its welfare system, and for much the same reason. They believed that welfare checks and voting rights were mere bones tossed to the poor to keep them docile. The poor did not need welfare checks and ballots, they argued. The poor needed revolution.

In their 1977 book, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, Cloward and Piven asserted that the “electoral process” actually served the interests of the ruling classes, providing a safety valve to drain away the anger of the poor. The authors wrote that “as long as lower-class groups abide by the norms governing the electoral–representative system, they would have little influence.… [I]t is usually when unrest among the lower classes breaks out of the confines of electoral procedures that the poor may have some influence,” as when poor people engage in “strikes,” “riots,” “crime,” “incendiarism,” “massive school truancy,” “worker absenteeism,” “rent defaults,” and other forms of “mass defiance” and “institutional disruption.”

In 1981, Cloward and Piven wrote that poor people lose power “when leaders try to turn movements into electoral organizations.” That is because the “capability of the poor” to effect change lies “in the vulnerability of societal institutions to disruption, and not in the susceptibility of these institutions to transformation through the votes of the poor.”

To advance their radical agenda, Cloward and Piven focused more intently on transforming the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party. Because Democrats professed to represent the lower classes, many poor people believed they could get what they wanted by voting Democrat. Thus their energies would be channeled into useless “voter activity,” rather than strikes, riots, “incendiarism” and the like.

Ten years earlier, when Cloward and Piven determined that the welfare state was acting as a safety valve for the establishment, they resolved to destroy the welfare state. The method of destruction they chose was drawn from the teachings of Saul Alinsky: “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.” And so they did, challenging the welfare state to pay out every penny to every person theoretically entitled to it. Alinsky called this sort of tactic “mass jujitsu” – using “the strength of the enemy against itself. Now Cloward and Piven concluded that the Democratic Party was also acting as a safety valve for the establishment. Thus they would try to force Democrats to “live up to their own book of rules” — i.e., if the Democrats say they represent the poor, let them prove it.

Cloward and Piven presented their plan in a December 1982 article titled, “A Movement Strategy to Transform the Democratic Party,” published in the left-wing journal Social Policy. They sought to do to the voting system what they had previously done to the welfare system. They would flood the polls with millions of new voters, drawn from the angry ranks of the underclass, all belligerent and the demanding their voting rights. The result would be a catastrophic disruption of America’s electoral system, the authors predicted.

Cloward and Piven hoped that the flood of new voters would provoke a backlash from Democrats and Republicans alike, who would join forces to disenfranchise the unruly hordes, using such expedients as purging invalid voters from the rolls, imposing cumbersome registration procedures, stiffening residency requirements, and so forth. This voter-suppression campaign would spark “a political firestorm over democratic rights,” they wrote. Voting-rights activists would descend on America’s election boards and polling stations much as George Wiley’s welfare warriors had flooded social-services offices. Wrote Cloward and Piven:

“By staging rallies, demonstrations, and sit-ins … over every new restriction on registration procedures, a protest movement can dramatize the conflict…. Through conflict, the registration movement will convert registering and voting into meaningful acts of collective protest.”

The expected conflict would also expose the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party, which would be “disrupted and transformed,” the authors predicted. A new party would rise from the ashes of the old. Outwardly, it would preserve the forms and symbols of the old Democratic Party, but the new Democrats would be genuine partisans of the poor, dedicated to class struggle. This was the radical vision driving the Voting Rights Movement.

The community organization ACORN spearheaded this “voting rights” movement, which was led by veterans of George Wiley’s welfare rights crusade. Also key to the movement 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 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 President Bill Clinton ultimately signed in 1993. (It’s official name was the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.) At the White House signing ceremony for this bill, both Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were in attendance. The new law eliminated many controls on voter fraud, making it easy for voters to register but difficult to determine the validity of new registrations. Under the new law, states were required to provide opportunities for voter registration to any person who showed up at a government office to renew a driver’s license or to apply for welfare or unemployment benefits. “Examiners were under orders not to ask anyone for identification or proof of citizenship,” notes Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund in his book, Stealing Elections. Moreover, states were required to permit the mailing of voter registrations, which enabled anyone to register without ever having any personal contact with a registrar or an election official. Further, restrictions were placed on states’ ability to prune “deadwood” – people who had died, relocated, or been convicted of crimes that made them ineligible to vote – from their rolls.

The Motor-Voter bill did indeed cause the voter rolls to be swamped with 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 during the 1990s, and culminating in the Florida recount crisis in the 2000 presidential election.  On the eve of the 2000 election, in Indiana alone, state officials discovered that one in five registered voters were duplicates, deceased, or otherwise invalid.

The cloud of confusion hanging over elections served leftist agitators well. “President Bush came to office without a clear mandate,” the leftwing billionaire George Soros declared. “He was elected president by a single vote on the Supreme Court.” Once again, the “flood-the-rolls” strategy had done its work. Cloward, Piven, and their disciples had introduced a level of fear, tension, uncertainty, and foreboding to U.S. elections previously encountered mainly in Third World countries.

In January 2010, journalist John Fund reported that Congressman Barney Frank and U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer were preparing to unveil legislation calling for “universal voter registration,” whereby any person whose name was on any federal roll at all — be it a list of welfare recipients, food stamp recipients, unemployment compensation recipients, licensed drivers, convicted felons, property owners, etc. — would automatically be registered to vote in political elections. Without corresponding identity-verification measures at polling places, such a law would vastly expand the pool of eligible voters, thereby multiplying the opportunities for fraudulent voters to cast ballots under other people’s names.

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 to overload, and cause the collapse of, various American institutions. Leftists such as Barack Obama euphemistically refer to this collapse as a “fundamental transformation,” on the theory that society can only be improved by destroying the deeply flawed existing order and replacing it with what they view as a better alternative.

President Biden Articulates How Crisis Can Be an “Opportunity”

On April 22, 2022, President Joe Biden said the following about what he characterized as the environmental crisis: “In my view, this crisis is a genuine opportunity. An opportunity to do things we wanted to do. And only now it becomes so apparent.”

Resources

en.wikipedia.org, “Cloward–Piven strategy.” By Wikipedia Editors; en.wikipedia, ” Guaranteed Minimum Income.” By Wikipedia Editors; en.wikipedia.org, “Social Dividend.” By Wikipedia Editors; Maryland General Assembly (.gov)https://mgaleg.maryland.gov, “The Cloward–Piven Strategy.”; nytimes.com, “If we can’t abide poverty and won’t abolish it, at least we can destroy the poor.” By Peter Steinfels; milesgray,com, “Cloward-Piven Strategy: 7 Stages of an Empire.” By Miles Grayson; The Augusta Chronicle, “Cloward-Piven at work.” By Andy Windham; https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/organizations/clowardpiven-strategy-cps/, “Cloward-Piven Strategy (CPS).”;

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