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 had used batons to subdue a
black man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an
article titled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty" in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold
an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the
so-called "crisis strategy" or "Cloward-Piven Strategy," as it came to
be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.
In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes
used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net,
the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only
when "the rest of society is afraid of them," Cloward told The New York Times on
September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government
hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage
and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would
ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor
people would rise in revolt; only then would "the rest of society"
accept their demands.
The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of
the welfare state. Cloward-Piven's early promoters cited radical
organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. "Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules," Alinsky wrote in his 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.
The authors noted that the number of Americans subsisting on welfare --
about 8 million, at the time -- probably represented less than half the
number who were technically eligible for full benefits. They proposed a
"massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls."
Cloward and Piven calculated that persuading even a fraction of
potential welfare recipients to demand their entitlements would bankrupt
the system. The result, they predicted, would be "a profound financial
and political crisis" that would unleash "powerful forces … for major
economic reform at the national level."
Their article called for "cadres of aggressive organizers" to use
"demonstrations to create a climate of militancy." Intimidated by
threats of black violence, politicians would appeal to the federal
government for help. Carefully orchestrated media campaigns, carried out
by friendly, leftwing journalists, would float the idea of "a federal
program of income redistribution," in the form of a guaranteed living
income for all -- working and non-working people alike. Local officials
would clutch at this idea like drowning men to a lifeline. They would
apply pressure on Washington to implement it. With every major city
erupting into chaos, Washington would have to act.
This was an example of what are commonly called Trojan Horse movements
-- mass movements whose outward purpose seems to be providing material
help to the downtrodden, but whose real objective is to draft poor
people into service as revolutionary foot soldiers; to mobilize poor
people en masse to overwhelm government agencies with a flood
of demands beyond the capacity of those agencies to meet. The flood of
demands was calculated to break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears
into gridlock, and bring the system crashing down. Fear, turmoil,
violence and economic collapse would accompany such a breakdown --
providing perfect conditions for fostering radical change. That was the
theory.
Cloward and Piven recruited a militant black organizer named George Wiley to
lead their new movement. The three met in January 1966, at a radical
organizers' meeting in Syracuse, New York called the “Poor People's War
Council on Poverty.” Wiley listened to the Cloward-Piven plan with
interest. That same month, he launched his own activist group, the
Poverty Rights Action Center, headquartered in Washington DC. In a
calculated show of militancy, he sported dashikis, jeans, battered
shoes, and a newly grown Afro. Regarding the Cloward-Piven strategy,
Wiley told one audience:
“[A] a lot of us have been hampered in our thinking about the potential
here by our own middle-class backgrounds – and I think most activists
basically 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 declared “the birth of a movement” – 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, Ralph Wiley founded the National Welfare Rights Organization
(NWRO). His tactics closely followed the recommendations set out in
Cloward and Piven's article. His followers invaded welfare offices
across the United States -- often violently -- bullying social workers
and loudly demanding every penny to which the law "entitled" them. By
1969, NWRO claimed a dues-paying membership of 22,500 families, with 523
chapters across the nation.
Regarding Wiley's tactics, The New York Times commented on
September 27, 1970, "There have been sit-ins in legislative chambers,
including a United States Senate committee hearing, mass demonstrations
of several thousand welfare recipients, school boycotts, picket lines,
mounted police, tear gas, arrests - and, on occasion, rock-throwing,
smashed glass doors, overturned desks, scattered papers and ripped-out
phones."
These methods proved effective. "The flooding succeeded beyond Wiley's wildest dreams," 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
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 they 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,”
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 they mobilized, who wanted cash. “The violence of the
[welfare rights] movement was frightening,” recalls Lindsay budget aid
Charles Morris. Black militants laid siege to City Hall, bearing signs
saying “No Money, No Peace.”
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 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:
"[B]efore 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."
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 abided 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.
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. 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.
“States had to permit mailing voter registrations, which allowed anyone
to register without any personal contact with a registrar or election
officials. Finally, states were limited in pruning 'deadwood' –people
who had died, moved, or been convicted of crimes – 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 serves 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, 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.
Click here to read about more recent efforts by the Left to overload the American system.
Major Resource: The Shadow Party, by David Horowitz and Richard Poe (Nashville, TN: Nelson Current, 2006), pp, 106-128.
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