Poor People’s Movements and The Movements of 2020

I organized multiple reading groups of the classic book Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed and How They Fail, by Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, over the past year. The book has perhaps never been more relevant given the the historic protests over police brutality, the coronavirus pandemic, and economic inequality of late. I was recently on Left Anchor and we talked about what lessons might be drawn from the successes and failures of these protests, and how we should think about movement strategy going forward. Check it out.

https://leftanchor.podbean.com/e/episode-182-the-movements-of-2020-with-david-kaib/

Poor People’s Movements – Additional Readings

I am currently in the middle of multiple reading groups of Piven and Cloward’s Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. Here are some suggested readings to follow up on that.This is not meant to be comprehensive. Suggestions welcome in the comments.

More Piven and Cloward

Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward

Why Americans Still Don’t Vote: And Why Politicians Want It That Way by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward

“Disruptive Dissensus – People and Power in the Industrial Age” by Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven

Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America by Frances Fox Piven

Great Depression

Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs

Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression by Robin D.G. Kelley

Labor

No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane F. McAlevey

“The Barren Marriage of American Labour and the Democratic Party” by Mike Davis

Civil Rights Movement

I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle by Charles M. Payne

Welfare Rights Movement

Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States by Premilla Nadasen

Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty by Annelise Orleck

Backlash is inevitable

Another criticism leveled at the movements we analyzed is that they produced a broad-based “backlash” in the American electorate. Harrington says that disruptive protest in the 1960s produced “the mean spirit exploited by people like Richard Nixon,” and Bernstein warns that disruptive protest is “dangerous.” There is a large measure of unreality about this criticism. It is as if a group or class struggle can, when carefully managed, proceed without engendering conflict. Obviously, the labor struggles of the mid-thirties helped to produce the corporate-led backlash that began in 1938 and culminated in the “witch-hunts” of the late forties and early fifties; and just as obviously, the black struggles of the fifties and sixties helped produce the backlash of the seventies (to which the student and anti-war movements also contributed.) But how could it be otherwise? Important interests were at stake, and had those interests not been a profound source of contention, there would have been no need for labor insurgency  in the one period or black insurgency in the other. Put another way, the relevant question to ask is whether, on balance, the movement made gains or lost ground; whether it advanced the interests of working people or set  back those interests….What was won must be judged by what was possible.

–Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements

What is Oligarchic Inevitability?

I’ve written here before about an idea I call ‘democratic efficiency‘: the belief that one can infer popular beliefs from institutional outcomes because aggregated individual choices are manifested in an unmediated fashion in politics and policy. That means that whatever the public believes will (absent some interference in the normal functioning of our political system) automatically be translated into policy, because of competitive electoral incentives between he two major parties.  Recent research has provided even more evidence that this is not a useful way to talk about the world.  The piece that has generated the most discussion has been Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page (pdf) that tested different explanations for American politics.  While the authors don’t actually come to this conclusion, the general take away has been that this piece demonstrates that the United States is an oligarchy.

Targeting the Right To Vote

I’ve written about voting rights before, a topic that has become all the more urgent in the wake of recent efforts to restrict voting rights and the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act. Keith Bentele and Erin O’Brien have a piece examining recent GOP efforts at adopting various voting barriers: Jim Crow 2.0? Why States Consider and Adopt Restrictive Voter Access Policies. (Full disclosure, Erin is a good friend from my doctoral program, and I provided feedback on the paper.) Their empirical findings are going to get the most attention, and they are certainly important. I’ll review them below. But the larger implications are important too, and since I fear these may get lost I want to discuss them more fully.

…How some people are made to do the harshest work for the least reward

One disclaimer ought to be entered at the outset.  We have already suggest that relief giving is partly designed to enforce work.  Our argument, however, is not against work.  We take it for granted that all societies require productive contributions from most of their members, and that all societies develop mechanisms to ensure that those contributions will be made.  In the market economy, the giving of relief is one such mechanism.  But much more should be understood of this mechanism than merely that it reinforces work norms.  It also goes far toward defining and enforcing the terms on which different classes of people are made to do different kinds of work; relief arrangements, in other words, have a great deal to do with maintaining social and economic inequities.  The indignities and cruelties of the dole are no deterrent to indolence among the rich; but for the poor person, the specter of ending up on “the welfare” or in “the poorhouse” makes any job at any wage a preferable alternative.  And so the issue is not the relative merit of work itself; it is rather how some people are made to do the harshest work for the least reward.

Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor.