Cloward and Piven Strategy

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Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward standing behind President Bill Clinton during the signing ceremony for the National Voter Registration Act

The Cloward - Piven Strategy is a plan of action developed by Richard Cloward and his wife Frances Fox Piven, the namesakes for the strategy. The plan entails collapsing the U.S. economy by overburdening the welfare roles in a way which would leverage unheard of levels of spending and debt to the point of total systemic collapse. Cloward and Piven wrote about their plan in an article they co-authored in the 1960s called "Mobilizing the Poor: How it Could Be Done." Later, it was published in The Nation, under the title "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty."

Overview

Cloward and Piven were radical leftist Columbia University professors who believed in "change" and "social justice." Inspired by the Watts riots of Los Angeles in 1965, they wrote and published their article which outlined the best way to bring the kind of Saul Alinsky-type social change to America. They summarized it this way: "the strategy we propose, is a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls."

They viewed the effort as self-sustaining and self-building, writing that:

If organizers can deliver millions of dollars in cash benefits to the ghetto masses, it seems reasonable to expect that the masses will deliver their loyalties to their benefactors.

Put another way, money can be used to purchase the votes of people and continually retain their loyalty on election day for every ongoing election in the future.

Implementation

The goal for Cloward and Piven was to overwhelm the system and bring about the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with impossible demands and bring on economic collapse. They wrote:

By the internal disruption of local bureaucratic practices, by the furor over public welfare poverty, and by the collapse of current financing arrangements, powerful forces can be generated for major economic reforms at the national level.[1]

Following its publication, liberal activists like Barack Obama were attracted to the so-called "crisis strategy" or "Cloward-Piven Strategy," as it came to be called, and were eager to put it into effect.[2]

Post collapse

The primary objective of the Cloward Piven strategy is systemic collapse, however the longer-term goals were not lost on the authors. They wrote:

If this strategy were implemented, a political crisis would result that could lead to legislation for a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty.

See also

References

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