The Cloward-Piven Strategy
The Biden Administration
In the first few months of the Biden Administration, things seemed to be in disarray. There was conflicting messaging and they seemed unable to do anything right. I read at the time that the Administration was being run by young idealists with little practical experience. So maybe things would improve as they gained more experience. Whether or not that was the reason, at the time it looked like horrible incompetence.
But as the months wore on and nothing changed it began to look less like incompetence and more like intentional destruction. How could this be? Why would anyone of any party want to intentionally screw everything up?
The Cloward-Piven Strategy
The husband/wife team of Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, two liberal political activists and college professors who at the time taught at Columbia University and Boston University, respectively, wrote a paper published in the Nation Magazine on May 2, 1966. The paper was titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty” and it outlined their philosophy towards welfare programs, later dubbed the “Cloward-Piven Strategy.”
Their strategy for change was to overwhelm the bureaucracy (in this case the welfare system) to create chaos, take control of the system in the midst of the chaos and implement greater government control as the solution to the chaos. Cloward and Piven had determined that only half of those eligible were signed up for welfare and argued for better advertisement to recruit more of the eligible people to sign up, hoping that the influx of new applicants would overwhelm the system and produce the chaos necessary to enable greater control by the Federal government.
Cloward and Piven bemoaned the fact that in 1966 public assistance was primarily a state and local responsibility, with the federal government involvement being only in some supervisory and reimbursement capacity. They saw local governments as being more frugal and antagonistic towards the poor so that federal control would lead both to more recipients and to recipients receiving all possible benefits
Cloward’s and Piven’s clearly articulated their ultimate goal to eliminate poverty by the implementation of a guaranteed annual income. They also argued that because of the deep-rooted “ideal of individual and social economic mobility” that even activists were reluctant to call for programs “to eliminate poverty by the outright redistribution of income.” But they were willing to identify the necessary features of any program that would redistribute income while avoiding the evils of the present system.
They argued that welfare payments must be increased to provide adequate levels of income and that the right to that income must be guaranteed. They argued that any eligibility requirements that enabled bureaucrats to choose when to give and when to withhold financial relief to the poor represented “an arrangement in which their rights are diminished in the name of overcoming their vices.” Requiring any sort of personal responsibility was anathema to them. In fact they opposed any form if income or asset verification but rather proposed that the poor should only be required to “certify to their condition.”
In the new introduction to their paper written by Piven in 2015 for a reprint in Nation (Cloward had died in 2001), she states : “Our objective was not, as later critics of the Glenn Beck variety later charged, to propose a strategy to bring down American capitalism. We were not so ambitious.” It’s not that they weren’t socialists, just that they had set a more reasonable goal: the total overhaul of the welfare system.
To summarize, the plan that Cloward and Piven proposed entailed (1) overloading the welfare system (2) to produce chaos, (3) take control in the chaos and (4) bring in federal government control of the welfare system.
Here is the link to the 2015 anniversary edition of The Nation which includes Piven’s new introduction and the complete 1966 article: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/weight-poor-strategy-end-poverty/
What About “Personal Responsibility?”
We explained in our post The True Meaning of Government, that the most foundational form of government is self-government. Family government is built on self-government and church and civil governments are built on that foundation of self and family governments. Socialists, like Cloward and Piven, reverse that, with the State (civil government) being foundational and granting power as it sees fit to individuals, families, churches and other institutions. So in their welfare model, the State is in charge and welfare is distributed from the “haves” to the “have nots” according to how the State defines them. This is “eliminat(ing) poverty by the outright redistribution of income.” There is no room for personal responsibility (self-government) in Socialism.
Planned Chaos
Cloward and Piven were specifically addressing what they saw as inequities in the welfare system. Since their paper was published in 1966, however, many saw that they had developed a model that could be applied in any number of other situations.
Rahm Emanuel, former Mayor of Chicago and Chief of Staff to President Barack Obama is famous for saying “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” He later explained that crises can provide the “opportunity to do things that you had never considered, or that you didn't think were possible.” (source Wikipedia)
So when we see Progressives implement policies that exacerbate the problems that the policies are supposed to address, could we be seeing the Cloward-Piven Strategy at work? Let’s examine the chaos at the southern border as an example.
Open Border Policy
President Biden’s open borders have overwhelmed the Border Patrol and created chaos not only at the border but also in dozens of cities to which Biden has shipped the illegals (see our post Standoff at the Texas Border). The bureaucracy is overwhelmed (at the border and in cities) and chaos has ensued so we need more federal control. President Biden has said he will control the border if we just give him more power. (“bipartisan” bill, anyone?).
Other Historical Examples
Where else have the principles of the Cloward-Piven Strategy been applied? It has become common to read or hear political commentators discuss the Cloward-Piven Strategy at work in current events.
Here are some events that commentators have seen to bear the fingerprints of the Cloward-Piven Strategy. I encourage my readers to do their own research into these events (and others) and decide for themselves if they see this Strategy at work, or if they just see incompetence or coincidence.
Covid Pandemic - A “novel” virus appears, civil government directives create fear, uncertainty and isolation, resulting in chaos in so many ways, and requiring new civil government programs to manage PPE, do testing and eventually produce a “vaccine.” Significant control of the population by the government and by its big business partners was needed to “make us all safe” again. In the initial response to Covid in 2020, it was administrative state actors like Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx and the CDC that brought the policies that created the chaos.
2014 Border Crisis – Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) - Obama executive orders “gutted” our immigration enforcement system, resulting in a 2013-14 surge in unaccompanied children seeking entrance into the US. Essentially, if a minor got to the southern border, the border patrol took him/her in. The number of UACs in 2014 was eight times the number of only a few years earlier. https://www.cairco.org/highlights/illegal-alien-kiddie-colonists-invited-invasion
2008 Financial Crisis – A Washington Times editorial blamed the financial crisis on pressure from “community organizers” to make high risk loans, which created a sink-hole of bad loans requiring federal intervention. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/oct/15/the-cloward-piven-strategy/
So, Now What?
There have always been academics and activists coming up with political theories and plans to remake society. Cloward’s and Piven’s proposal for using the welfare system to bring societal change is one of many ideas hatched over the centuries. This strategy seems to have had some traction over the years since their 1966 article, with activists on the Left having applied the “overload the bureaucracy, create chaos, manage the chaos and expand the power of civil government” process to further their agenda. This strategy is, in essence, a practical application of Hegelian dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis.
Knowing how to recognize the Hegelian dialectic and the Coward-Piven Strategy in operation empowers us to look critically at both historical and current events, asking if the crises we have observed have been naturally occurring societal changes or an engineered crisis to further societal movement towards socialism. Being able to apply this lens to critically examine human events helps us to better craft our response to those events.