Cloward Piven
Strategy
Mo Dim Sun
Published on Mar 7, 2009
Cloward–Piven
strategy
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".[1][2]
The two stated that many Americans who were eligible for
welfare were not receiving benefits, and that a welfare enrollment drive would
strain local budgets, precipitating a crisis at the state and local levels that
would be a wake-up call for the federal government, particularly the Democratic Party. There would
also be side consequences of this strategy, according to Cloward and Piven.
These would include: easing the plight of the poor in the short-term (through
their participation in the welfare system); shoring up support for the national
Democratic Party-then splintered by pluralistic interests (through its cultivation
of poor and minority constituencies by implementing a national
"solution" to poverty); and relieving local governments of the
financially and politically onerous burdens of public welfare (through a
national "solution" to poverty).[2]
Strategy
Cloward and Piven's article is focused on forcing the Democratic Party, which in 1966 controlled the
presidency and both houses of the United States Congress, to take federal action 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."[3]
They further wrote:
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“
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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.[3]
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”
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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."[4]
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.”[5]
Reception and criticism
Howard Phillips, chairman of The Conservative Caucus, was quoted in 1982 as saying that the
strategy could be effective because "Great Society
programs had created a vast army of full-time liberal activists whose salaries
are paid from the taxes of conservative working people."[6]
Liberal commentator 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."[7]
Impact of the strategy
In papers published in 1971 and 1977, Cloward and Piven
argued that mass unrest in the United States, especially between 1964 and 1969,
did lead to a massive expansion of welfare rolls, though not to the
guaranteed-income program that they had hoped for.[8] 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".[9]
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."[10]
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