Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were Ivy League political activists with an ironic concern for the poor. Both professors at Columbia University School of Social Strategy authored an article in 1966 titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty” featured that year in The Nation magazine.
Both life-long Democrat Socialists, like Vermont’s darling Senator Sanders, they conceived of a strategy based on the Hegelian dialectic of thesis-antithesis = synthesis.
To clarify, Hegel taught a philosophy of social alchemy whereby societies could be changed in the desired direction by pitting their natural contradictions (thesis-antithesis) in an effort to meld them (alchemically) into the desired outcome (synthesis).
In other words, the order out of chaos approach to social justice we have been witnessing since the 1960s here in the states most recently with the Black Lives Matter riots, and the same strategy used in the French Revolution of the late 1700s around the time Rosseau and Hegel opined their ideas.
Their reasoning stems from the typical savior complex, a luxury idea, fancied by the elite and quasi-elite alike. Rather than accept the reality of a certain level of impoverishment due to natural causes like unequal distribution of resources, disadvantaged political realities due to cultural idiosyncrasies, and the laziness and greed inherent to humanity, Cloward and Piven operate from the delusional view that societies can be forced into equitable realities and people are inherently good and hard-working opportunists.
Likewise, when this reality is achieved through a tortured path of repeated dialectical revolutions we will arrive at Utopia. Yes, they actually believe this socialist mythology.
We want to thank Aaron Warner for this Op-Ed. If you have an Op-Ed or LTE
you would like us to consider, please submit it to Editor@GraniteGrok.com.
The life blood of this type of thinking is optimism and a false hope propped up on an outcome that evades it’s proponents with the perpetual repulsion of Sisyphus’s stone. So far, the socialist/communist experiment has successfully achieve ZERO Utopias out of some forty-eight attempts. Why stop now, one wonders for the generation raised on the rolling stones?
A brief history of the Cloward-Piven strategy can be found online in an article on the FarLeftFacts.org site. Though no individual is given credit for its authorship, the article, from Discover the Networks, lays out a clear history up to the present.
The timeline of events is roughly this. Inspired by the Watts riots of 1965, Cloward and Piven see the opportunity to bully the system via an angry and mobilized poor black community. Their reasoning is to replace the welfare system they deem a rich man’s placatory model, with a basic universal income guaranteeing lower levels of poverty – though we’re not sure how this works even to this day.
Using Hegel’s dialectic, Marx’s critical theory, Marcuse’s regressive tolerance and Alinsky’s rules for radical tactics, they sought leaders for their movement, chief of which was militant organizer George Wiley, a black man whom they acquired at the “Poor People’s War Council on Poverty” meeting in Syracuse, NY in 1966. I say acquired since they knew they were using this man essentially as a philosophical slave-master to do the heavy lifting for their wildly optimistic agenda. Wiley, himself a militant strategist, agreed to the strange bedfellows and marshalled himself accordingly. Though I’ve not found a link between him and Martin Luther King Jr., it’s important to note MLK Jr. was also a Democratic Socialist. I digress.
Unlike MLK, however, Wiley was keen to apply the social pressures recommended by his Ivy League patrons. His followers began to overwhelm welfare offices and unabashedly utilized the tactic previously mentioned with the following aims.
- Politicians, intimidated by threats of black violence, 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.
Sound familiar? Of course it does. We are seeing Cloward-Piven 2.0 with today’s BLM agenda. Only this time it’s working.
This racial and welfare coup ultimately did transform the welfare system in New York only to find staunch opposition from conservatives who rose to deal with both the civil unrest and patently damaging effects to the social order. Rudy Guiliani was key among those who derailed Wiley’s schemes in the late 1970’s and early 80s.
Seeing the successes among the ultimate failure, and buoyed by the Hegelian idea that the dialectic marches on in perpetuity until Utopia is achieved, they sought to revisit the same social justice by destruction model targeting another institution – voting rights.
The same tactics applied, this time the unrest of the supposed poor, downtrodden, disenfranchised and unheard represented by their Ivy League saviors, rebooted their efforts and attacked the vote. Forever reasoning their causes are just, despite the destructive, forged and coercive measures required to attain them, they moved the stone up the hill again this time hoping it would crest and smash down on the other side inhabited by, for the sake of argument, we’ll say the white patriarchy. Who knows really, this entire thing is an ever shifting jigsaw puzzle designed by intellectual pretenders who use their sophistry to manipulate the masses with the ultimate Marxian goal of redistribution of power in the hands of the self-proclaimed Illuminated Ones.
What they fail to see is the light they lay claim to is from the fires they start and forever are unable to put out.
For a video explanation of the role Cloward and Piven play in the ultimate globalist agenda watch Mark Dice’s Video here.
Discover the Networks Cloward and Piven article here.
Cloward and Piven Wikipedia entry here.
