What is a Cloward and Piven and how does it affect us? Actually, it is not a what, but a who. Who are the two individuals involved in this radical, destructive pursuit for social justice? Richard Andrew Cloward and his wife Frances Fox Piven, Columbia Sociology Professors, who were both members of the Democratic Socialists of America, and where Frances Piven today is still an honorary chair.
The “Cloward-Piven Strategy” was an article with the idea that would create the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
When the article was posted, it focused on forcing the Democratic Party, which in 1966 controlled the presidency and both houses of the United States Congress, to take federal action to help the poor. They argued that full enrollment of those eligible for welfare “would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments that would “deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor. To avoid a further weakening of that historic coalition, a national Democratic administration would be constrained to advance a federal solution to poverty that would override local welfare failures, local class and racial conflicts and local revenue dilemmas.
Cloward and Piven hopes were for group conflict, spelling political crisis for the local party apparatus, which would thus become acute as welfare rolls mounted and the strains on local budgets became more severe.
Piven is still pushing her agenda…