6 years ago, I was mocked by the Left and ignored by the Right when I rang the Cloward-Piven Bell... 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 an African American 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-Pivens 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 1971 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The systems 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.
Posted on: Mon, 07 Jul 2014 00:59:29 +0000
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