House of Eratosthenes

First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue a black man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an article titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty” in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called “crisis strategy” or “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when “the rest of society is afraid of them,” Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands.

The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven’s early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1972 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one.
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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.
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The Cloward-Piven strategy depended on surprise. Once society recovered from the initial shock, the backlash began. New York’s welfare crisis horrified America, giving rise to a reform movement which culminated in “the end of welfare as we know it” — the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which imposed time limits on federal welfare, along with strict eligibility and work requirements. Both Cloward and Piven attended the White House signing of the bill as guests of President Clinton.
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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.

Let’s not negotiate with these people. No matter what. Let’s just renounce this supposedly-noble objective of trying to find a midpoint or “common ground.”

I’ve spent a lifetime having it beaten into my head that only crazy old men in plaid shirts crusted with their own drool babble on about anything that comes close to “communists trying to ruin our way of life and tear down our country.”

But as I learn more about the turmoil that was taking place around the time of my birth, I find the facts point more and more toward this as the proper way to look at things. You don’t need to drink vodka and wear a big fur hat with a red star on the front to be a commie.

And negotiating with one is like negotiating with a rattlesnake. It is the straddling of a divide that stretches from one universe to a wholly incompatible other universe. It is a compromise between order and anarchy, creation and destruction, good and evil. It doesn’t take much at all to deserve a spot at a conference table, but one unalterable standard must be that you have to want a spot at the conference table. And commies don’t want one. They just want to tear things down.

Hat tip to Boortz.

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- House of Eratosthenes | 08/20/2009 @ 22:17
“It doesn’t take much at all to deserve a spot at a conference table, but one unalterable standard must be that you have to want a spot at the conference table. And commies don’t want one. They just want to tear things down.”

Spot on Morgan. The differences between the Left and Right are now so large and the aims of the Libs are so dangerous that their can be no compromises. What, should we negotiate which liberties we can still enjoy, which constitution we should live under, what rights we should have? I think not.
- tim | 08/21/2009 @ 06:34
Spot on Morgan.

+1.
- rob | 08/21/2009 @ 11:11
What, should we negotiate which liberties we can still enjoy, which constitution we should live under, what rights we should have? I think not.

Exactly. Our leaders’ mushiness and lack of integrity are what got us to this point in the first place. The people deserve some of the blame, too, for not throwing the bums out.
- cylarz | 08/23/2009 @ 22:07
You’ve seen this, right? and this? Gramsci rests peacefully in his grave, while Jefferson is spinning.
- Hector Owen | 08/25/2009 @ 22:14

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Cloward-PivenThursday, August 20th, 2009

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Thursday, August 20th, 2009