Thursday, June 20, 2024

The Cloward-Piven Strategy



Wikipedia orients us,
The Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. The strategy aims to utilize "militant anti poverty groups" to facilitate a "political crisis" by overloading the welfare system via an increase in welfare claims, forcing the creation of a system of guaranteed minimum income and "redistributing income through the federal government". 

The Cloward Piven strategy was developed by Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven in 1966.  It outlines a strategy for radical social change by way of abusing the system to the point of Destruction.  

Piven pathetically explains,

We were associated with the Social Work tradition which said that the programs worked as they were supposed to work but they hadn't worked as they were supposed to work and it was out of that realization that Insight that we developed the strategy to end poverty which called for a massive mobilization of social workers and lawyers and organizers to get people to get benefits to which they were entitled we were proposing a kind of movement that demanded what people were already entitled to by law, by regulation, by propaganda. 

The primary goal of the Cloward Piven strategy is to create a political and economic crisis that would destroy capitalism and lead to the implementation of a socialist system with a guaranteed income.  The strategy involves enrolling large numbers of people into the welfare system, as many people as it takes, to overwhelm and strain the system until it collapses.  Everyone enrolled into the welfare system is also used as an army to carry out the destruction of the current system.  They are registered to vote and instructed on how to vote, organized and mobilized, and made to appear as grassroots organizations, demanding more from the system.  

The ideal outcome of the Cloward-Piven Strategy is to collapse the current system.  According to their theory, this will compel the government to implement a universal basic income, which would then shift the U.S. towards a more socialist system with increased government control over the economy everyone is being encouraged to do it.  "Burn it down!" is the new sexy ring.  

02:16. In high school they compare it to the American Revolution the Clower Piven strategy is a political gambit designed to overwhelm the American government by placing so many demands on the bureaucratic structure that it collapses.  It's sort of a "shock and awe" campaign, a surprise attack on entrenched systems meant to force major changes to the ways that things are handled by the government.  It may be messy, but it does harken back to a fundamental ideology of the American Republic, "If it ain't fixed break it." 

02:48. All of this explains the likes of AOC.

Wild-eyed, batshit crazy, Piven,

What people like AOC are doing, what the Squad is doing, is really very important, very important.  But at the same time there is this movement which is so big, some people say the biggest movement in American history; it's hard to know because it's hard to measure a movement.  But it is big. It is interracial and it penetrates into every small town.  I now am in Upstate New York. The town I'm closest to has maybe 2,000 people. You know, we have little demonstrations in front of the post office for Black Lives Matter, and this is Trump country; nevertheless, there is a Black Lives Matter demonstration.  So it's a very potent and important moment in American political development, and we have to make the most of it because if we don't we don't know what's going to happen, but it's not going to be good. 

Quite the ominous message for a crazy radical Bolshevik in American government.  

 

 


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