Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

The Cloward-Piven Strategy to implement socialist revolution
Cloward-Piven.com ^ | Tue Sep 27, 2005 | discoverthenetwork.com

Posted on 02/12/2009 5:49:38 AM PST by ebiskit



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.

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. In the summer of 1967, 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," writes Sol Stern in the City Journal.  "From 1965 to 1974, the number of single-parent 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."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.

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.

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 1997 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."

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. Like ACORN, the organization that spear-headed this campaign, the new "voting rights" movement was led by veterans of George Wiley's welfare rights crusade. Its flagship organizations 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 A. 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 Bill Clinton ultimately signed in 1993. The Motor-Voter bill is largely responsible for swamping the voter rolls with "dead  wood" -- 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.

The new "voting rights" coalition combines mass voter registration drives -- typically featuring high levels of fraud -- with systematic intimidation of election officials in the form of frivolous lawsuits, unfounded charges of "racism" and "disenfranchisement," and "direct action" (street protests, violent or otherwise). Just as they swamped America's welfare offices in the 1960s, Cloward-Piven devotees now seek to overwhelm the nation's understaffed and poorly policed electoral system. Their tactics set the stage for the Florida recount crisis of 2000, and have introduced a level of fear, tension and foreboding to U.S. elections heretofore encountered mainly in Third World countries. 

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.


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Editorial; Front Page News; Government
KEYWORDS: acorn; alinsky; billclinton; cloward; clowardpiven; georgesoros; marxism; nwro; obama; opensocietyinstitute; piven; projectvote; revolution; shadowparty; socialism; soros; welfare
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first 1-2021-4041-45 next last
Excellent synopsis of the socialists' traitorous malfeasance & political 'trickeration.' We are being engaged in an unfair fight for the very soul of the Republic.

Liberty can be such an ugly pursuit.

thaDeetz

1 posted on 02/12/2009 5:49:38 AM PST by ebiskit
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | View Replies]

read


2 posted on 02/12/2009 5:59:39 AM PST by nuconvert ( Khomeini promised change too // Hail, Chairman O)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: ebiskit

Note that either Cloward or Piven (or both?) were guests at Bill Clinton’s inauguration


3 posted on 02/12/2009 5:59:54 AM PST by silverleaf ("Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury" - Screwtape)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: ebiskit

Excellent post. It’s a “save” AND a “print”.


4 posted on 02/12/2009 6:03:26 AM PST by Humble Servant (See y'all in the Gulag.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: grady

ping for later


5 posted on 02/12/2009 6:06:33 AM PST by grady ("Peace is that brief glorious moment in history when everybody stands around reloading." - Unknown)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: ebiskit

Excellent post. It’s a “save” AND a “print”.


6 posted on 02/12/2009 6:06:35 AM PST by Humble Servant (See y'all in the Gulag.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: ebiskit

Well that Clove Pliven strategy can work both ways....we can start making the socialists live up to their so called promises and make them live up to their so called utopian principles.
I think you saw that from the Fort Myers visit....folks there calling upon Obama to “save” them from their economic
circumstances. Let’s start overloading the socialists with demands to fix every possible social ill and sarcastically denouncing them when they fail.

That’s why Rush is so hated by the socialists. He goes Clovian on them, using the same tactics the socialists apply to conservatives.


7 posted on 02/12/2009 6:08:01 AM PST by mdmathis6
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: ebiskit
Great find. Thanks for posting that.

“We are being engaged in an unfair fight for the very soul of the Republic.” Amen.

Like the man says, “If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics $uck.”

These worms do not need to win; they only need for us to not win and they know it. They are the same punks who put sugar in your gas tank. No need to stop the car itself or even the whole engine, just stop enough of it to stop the rest of it.

It most certainly is “an unfair fight for the very soul of the Republic,” and we either start fighting to win or we fight to lose.

8 posted on 02/12/2009 6:08:10 AM PST by shoutingandpointing
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: silverleaf
[ Note that either Cloward or Piven (or both?) were guests at Bill Clinton’s inauguration ]

And probably at Bush and O'bamas too.. since Bush paved the ground work for O'bamas Coup D'etat..

9 posted on 02/12/2009 6:10:52 AM PST by hosepipe (This propaganda has been edited to include some fully orbed hyperbole....)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: ebiskit
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) is on board:


10 posted on 02/12/2009 6:11:17 AM PST by paulycy (BEWARE the LIBERAL/MEDIA Complex)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: silverleaf

We need the right’s version of acorn!


11 posted on 02/12/2009 6:12:30 AM PST by bicyclerepair (Thank you Mr. Robinson for FR. from: Ft. Lauderdale Florida)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: ebiskit
Poor people can advance only when "the rest of society is afraid of them,"

I'm not afraid of them. I'm more heavily armed than any poor person I ever met. I grew up around poor people - most everyone I knew was poor when I was a child. I've said it before on this forum and I'll say it again. Poor people are poor because they make stupid decisions over and over and over again. No one who repeatedly makes stupid decisions frightens me, unless they're at the wheel of a car that I'm riding in.

12 posted on 02/12/2009 6:17:49 AM PST by Hardastarboard (The Fairness Doctrine isn't about "Fairness" - it's about Doctrine.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: ebiskit; All

“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. “

Did you ever read the Arthurian legends...particularly the rise of Mordred who used such tactics against his father King Arthur? This fomented civil war and the destruction of Camelot as well as the Death of Arthur as well as Mordred.

I think I’ll start referring to the Dem’s as the Mordred party...or the “Mordreds”. Rebellion, hate, and death lay in the Heart of Mordred in his contempt towards his father just as the modern Mordreds hate the US and all of her Judeo-Christian adherents.


13 posted on 02/12/2009 6:18:08 AM PST by mdmathis6
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: ebiskit

Horowitz does a good job of keeping the history of the current usurpation of the Constitution understood.


14 posted on 02/12/2009 6:18:53 AM PST by KC Burke (Men of intemperate minds can never be free...their passions forge their fetters.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: mdmathis6

oops meant Cloward...!


15 posted on 02/12/2009 6:19:45 AM PST by mdmathis6
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 7 | View Replies]

To: bicyclerepair

We need a coherent strategy that defeats Saul Alinsky


16 posted on 02/12/2009 6:20:36 AM PST by silverleaf ("Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury" - Screwtape)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 11 | View Replies]

To: ebiskit

I can’t stand Jeremy Piven.


17 posted on 02/12/2009 6:25:40 AM PST by isom35
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: ebiskit
I think part of the problem is that as a society we have largely forgotten that liberty is the product of constant struggle and vigilance, not something you win once and then don't have to defend. It's time to fight, and fight hard.

The fight has to start with shining a light on the enemies of liberty. For too long they have been able to operate in the shadows, and hide their intentions by wrapping them in more acceptable terms. An important aspect of shining that light is to educate the public about the tactics used by those who want to push socialism on us and collapse our current system. The tactics proposed by Alinsky, for example, should be so well known that they cannot be carried out without recognition.

Further, we can no longer let false characterizations and generalizations stand. For example, the characterization of ‘the poor’ as a monolithic group of people who have been unfairly treated and hurt by society is just not accurate. Yes, there are certainly people who have been unfairly treated and suffered because of societal wrongs. But not everyone is Bob Cratchit or Tiny Tim, and people wind up in different places in the world for a variety of reasons, including personal choices. It is very, very important that we do not let the argument be framed as ‘rich vs. poor’. We should hold up those in our society who have worked hard and achieved on that basis as role models, not victimizers.

Also, taking a page from the leftist playbook, we need to be louder and more persistent in our ‘righteous indignation’. When people like Cloward and Piven use tax-exempt universities as their soap-box to push for the dissolution of our society we cannot let them go unchallenged. What exactly is sedition? Seems to me that calling for a collapse of the economic system of your home country is sedition.

18 posted on 02/12/2009 6:26:57 AM PST by pieceofthepuzzle
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: ebiskit

Fascinating reading. Thanks for posting.


19 posted on 02/12/2009 6:30:57 AM PST by Bearshouse
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: ebiskit

I believe that if zerO released his college records, you would see that professors Cloward and Piven taught a certain foreign student...


20 posted on 02/12/2009 6:32:07 AM PST by genetic homophobe ("I readily concede I chucked aside my free-market principles..." defend that)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first 1-2021-4041-45 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson