Poor People's Movements

• Comment: Needs more secondary sources to demonstrate why the book is important Yeeno (talk) 🍁 07:33, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

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Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail

Author	Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward
Language	English
Subject	Social Movements
Publisher	Pantheon Books, Random House (second edition)
Publication date	1977 (2nd Edition: 1979)
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages	382
ISBN	0-394-72697-9

Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (1977; second edition 1979) is a book about social movements by the American academics and political activists Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward. The book advanced Piven and Cloward's theories about the possibilities and limits of social change through protest. The book uses four case studies: the Unemployed Workers' Movement of the Great Depression, the Industrial Workers' Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Welfare Rights Movement, particularly the activity of the National Welfare Rights Organization.

Synopsis

Introduction

That organizing to form long-term, political pressure groups is not only futile, but distracts from winning possible larger gains from moments of opportunity opened by mass protest: "...that by endeavoring to do what they cannot do, organizers fail to do what they can do...all too often, when workers erupted in strikes, organizers collected dues cards; when tenants refused to pay rent and stood off marshals, organizers formed building committees; when people were burning and looting, organizers used that 'moment of madness' to draft constitutions."<xxi-xxii>

The Structuring of Protest

This chapter is about how, like political participation generally, protest is constrained by material conditions. People generally acquiesce to the conditions that they live in, even when their is substantial inequality or patent injustice on the surface. Only when large-scale change takes place do people actively question the arrangement of society. Massive, rapid economic change creates the disturbance and interruption to the ritual and rhythm of daily life that allow the conditions that allow for mass, lower-class protest to emerge. Piven and Cloward identify three changes among communities that signal the possibility of mass protest: (1) that the harm and indignity falling upon people is a fault of the system and not due to individual failing, that ordinarily fatalistic people begin to demand rights or other forms of change, (3) that people who ordinarily consider themselves helpless begin to see themselves as capable of changing their conditions.<4>

A main argument of the book is also that protest itself is constrained by larger structures. For instance, the form protest takes, whether riots, strikes, or boycotts depend on the context of the population: unemployed workers cannot strike. The location of protest is also context-dependent: welfare recipients cannot easily go to Congress or state legislatures en masse, and when they do, they are easily ignored, whereas at the welfare offices they are difficult to ignore and can meaningfully disrupt the office. <22> Context also constrains the possible antagonists or targets of protests, "[t]enants experience the leaking ceilings and cold radiators, and they recognize the landlord. They do not recognize the banking, real estate, and construction systems....when the poor rebel they so often rebel against the overseer of the poor, or the slumlord, or the middling merchant, and not against the banks or the governing elites to whom the overseer, the slumlord, and the merchant also defer."<20> "people cannot defy institutions to which they no access, and to which they make no contribution." <23> Similarly, many superficially sympathetic voices to the anti-War movement criticized the anti-Vietnam war student movement for protesting universities and going after university administrators and professors, which were not the root of the war. Yet because of larger constraints, universities were where students could easily gather, and where "they played a role on which an institution depended," so their resistance mattered...<page 22>

Formal Organizations

In each of movements examined, activists and organizers concentrated on building formally structured mass-membership organizations of poor and working-class people, with the hope that these organizations would win concessions from elites that would allow the organizations to grow or at least maintain membership. In the US, mass-membership opposition organizations cannot be sustained over time. Moreover, attempts to grow mass-membership opposition groups inevitably lead to conciliation with elites to support such groups and attempts by organizers to rein in the disruptive potential of mass movements.

The Welfare Rights Movement

Increasing Eligibility

Welfare rights lawyers, most prominently Edward Sparer worked to challenge other policies that kept families from eligibility for welfare. "Man-in-the-house rules, residence laws, employable mother rules, and a host of other statutes, policies, and regulations which kept people off the roles were eventually struck down."

Reception

In a review for The Nation magazine, Jack Beatty said the book was "bound to have a wide and various influence" and called it "disturbing." While praising the analysis of the industrial workers' movement, Beatty criticized the Piven-Cloward plan for backfiring, noting that in the urban politics of the late 1960s, one "could not talk to a cabdriver or a counterman, a waitress or a barber without hearing a bitter diatribe against the welfare poor." Beatty argued that the backlash to increased use of the welfare system led to working class support for Republican candidates like Richard Nixon.

Influence

Poor People's Movements and the associated Cloward-Piven Strategy were criticized following publication and remain a contentious position among activists and organizers. The arguments made in the book have continued to interest scholars, activists, and organizers, with one scholar commenting that "after 25 years, PPM continues to be read, discussed, and taught, warts and all."

See Also

Cloward-Piven Strategy
George Wiley