60 Years of Artificial Chaos in Service for Revolution

The Cloward-Piven strategy was a calculated blueprint for social disruption. How is it working out?

In the spring of 1966, the United States was in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement and Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. It was at a time when the New Left concluded that American capitalism had neutralized the working class; therefore, it was no longer suitable to be cannon fodder for revolution. To answer the collectivist call, two Columbia University School of Social Work professors—Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven—published a provocative essay in The Nation magazine. Titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty,” the May 2 article outlined what later became known as the Cloward-Piven strategy.

Far from a conventional policy proposal, it was a calculated blueprint for social disruption. Cloward and Piven, who were members of the ultra-left Democratic Socialists of America—where Piven was an honorary chair—argued that the existing welfare system, riddled with gaps between statutory eligibility and actual benefits, could be politically weaponized. By organizing a mass enrollment drive to claim every available benefit, activists could intentionally overload local and state welfare bureaucracies, trigger fiscal crises, and force the federal government—then controlled by Democrats—to replace fragmented public assistance with a guaranteed annual income.

The professors were blunt about mechanics. They noted that roughly eight million Americans received welfare, but at least as many more were eligible yet unserved because of restrictive local practices and bureaucratic hurdles. “The discrepancy is not an accident stemming from bureaucratic inefficiency,” they wrote; “rather, it is an integral feature of the welfare system.” A “massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls” would produce “bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments.” This chaos would deepen rifts in the big-city Democratic coalition

WOW.

One time I was sitting in the second floor bar in the Omni Parker House in Boston. Very cool, paneled, club chairs, overlooking the street below.

On the little bar menu: Ho Chi Minh Spring Rolls. No kidding.

Couple of weeks later I went back: The Spring Rolls were gone.

Ho Chi Minh worked on passenger freighters and he was a pastry chef at this very hotel in the 1920s. So that is why they had these thingys on the bar menu.

Where am I going with this?

Ho Chi Minh approached the OSS multiple times during WW2 (Viet Nam was occupied, I believe, by the Japanese and the latter were of course complete AHs to the VN people.

But the French were also complete AHs to the VN people, and treated them as essentially slave labor and were nasty to them.

So Bac Ho (Uncle Ho as he came to be known later) approached the FDR admin, wanting to get VN recognized as a free country, as was stated multiple times by FDR and Churchill in their phony documents related to the right of self-determinations of people and nations after WW2 was all said and done.

Nice sentiments, cranked out by FDR's Harvard staffers, but pure BS, it turned out.

And Ho used the phraseology and ideology of Jefferson as in the Declaration to justify his repeated requests to talk to the FDR -- and later the Truman -- admins in an attempt to establish a free Viet Nam after the War.

At every juncture, the OSS operatives were dismissive and blew off Ho Chi and the Vietnamese people.

What a HUGE stupid move!

Imagine if they had taken Ho Chi seriously. If they had taken an interest in Viet Nam as potentially, a Constitutional Republic!

Instead, they returned Vietnam to the detested French, who continued their abuse to the VN people.

UNTIL, Ho Chi went to the CCP.

I am convinced that Ho Chi could have been accomodated and could have been helped by the US in that very early, WW2 stage.

Had the OSS people at least passed on his interest and his willingness to talk to the FDR and Truman administrations, instead of squelching and dismissing it (if indeed this is what happened)...

Imagine an American ally like, even better than, Japan in SE Asia during the Cold War era. Imagine what might have been.

The Vietnamese Americans I know are very solid, squared away, conservatives.

Is it crazy to think like this? We will never know; there is no way to control the experiment by going back in time and make FDR have a sympathetic meeting with the young Ho Chi Minh.

But, cynical me says, NO, Ho Chi would always have been a commie, he was destined to hook up with Mao.

I don't know: I think Ho Chi wanted an independent nation at any, any cost.

I say we missed a great opportunity during WW2, letting our Ivy League geniuses do our thinking for us.

Nice sentiments, cranked out by FDR’s Harvard staffers, but pure BS, it turned out.

I recommend reading: The Last Imperialist: Sir Alan Burns’ Epic Defense of the British Empire.

It was the USA which forced anti-colonialism upon the word after WWII, with disastrous results. Of course, the USSR was also pushing it to weaken the West.

I am not a Ho Chi Minh expert, but it is possible he was rebuffed by the FDR administration because of USA committments to the French in WWII. The FDR administration was pretty chummy with the Communists, and the communists in France were pretty powerful in the Resistance.

From what I have read, Ho Chi Minh became a dedicated communist in France as a student, long before WWII.

The Britannica shows him as founder of the Indochina Communist Party in 1930.

He went to Moscow in 1923. His biography describes a lifelong, dedicated communist.

It is highly doubtful he would have tolerated the creation of an independent, capitalist Vietnam.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ho-Chi-Minh

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