Get Real: The Politics of Francis Fox Piven

            Francis Fox Piven was born in October of 1932 to Russian Jewish parents, and grew up in Queens, New York. At an early age she was instilled with a questioning and skeptical attitude towards the outside world, something she attributed at least in part to the influence of her father. Contrasting her intellectual inclinations to that of a “positivistic, protestant, American kind of predisposition,” she later commented that “I think I was raised with a much more skeptical view of social life and a view that said if there are severe misdistributions of power or whatever in a society, that there must be an explanation – and the explanation really must be systemic. I think that that view was transmitted to me by my father who believed that the effort to try to understand society had to go beyond the form of proclamations that spokesmen for that society made.”[1] This critical curiosity would lead her into the study of urban planning, and she acquired a Bachelor’s in City Planning at the University of Chicago, where she went on to earn her PhD. During the course of her career, however, she moved in more than merely city planning circles, becoming an active participant in the welfare rights movement and, along with her partner Richard Cloward, authoring several influential books on poverty and social movements. During her career, Piven interacted extensively with both liberals and the left, but developed her own leftist perspective and, even more importantly, practice. Her combination of incisive analysis informed by the pragmatic demands of political action produced a body of work that interacts with, but also stands independent of, the mainstream bodies of thought on both the postwar left and center.

When Piven was earning her Masters at the University of Chicago, frameworks dedicated to and informed by postwar liberalism dominated the social sciences. Although the name given to these various assumptions and prejudices varied from field to field, the term that I am going to use to refer to this cluster is pluralism. Pluralism celebrated the political institutions of America as open, tolerant, and ultimately available and responsive to any and all of America’s citizens. Pluralists also believed, as did most postwar liberals, that social science could be directly used in the diagnoses and solving of social problems. Piven herself was influenced by this core faith, describing her decision to focus on economic and social planning as “reflecting my interest in trying to use social science to change the world.”[2] However, her early experience with working on the re-zoning of New York City disillusioned her of those possibilities, and she instead shifted to completing a PhD.

Piven’s next major project would also cast doubt on the optimistic assumptions of mainstream social science. Alongside Richard Cloward, she joined the staff of an experimental antipoverty project in the Lower East Side, known as Mobilization for Youth. Mobilization for Youth was one of a host of projects that hoped to use social scientific knowledge to craft a supposedly new approach to addressing delinquency and inner-city poverty. These programs were funded both by private foundations – such as the liberal behemoth the Ford Foundation – and also the federal government. Originally under John F. Kennedy’s President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and then under Lyndon Baine’s Johnson expanded War on Poverty, liberal elites responded to the growing concern about black and brown poverty with programs intended to encourage, among other things, the participation and political education of the poor.

Piven’s role within Mobilization, however, was somewhat unique. While Cloward had crafted the sociological theory that, officially at least, guided the actions of Mobilization, Piven conducted her own research on the dynamics of coalition politics that a project like Mobilization necessarily participated in. “I would be able to do a historical study of Mobilization for Youth,” she later explained, “emphasizing, however, the collaboration between different kinds of professionals with different ‘takes’ on how to understand public problems, and how to ameliorate public problems.”[3] Although this study never materialized – due largely to the unexpected controversies and conflict that Mobilization found itself chronically embroiled in – Piven was present for dozens of meetings and collected hundreds of documents attesting to Mobilization’s efforts and the obstacles it encountered.

By the end of her participation in Mobilization, the net result of Piven’s experience on the program had pushed her to a more cutting, and radical, critique of American politics. First, learning directly from the poor about their challenges made it clear to many Mobilization staffers that the problem of poverty had little to do with political education or sophistication and much more to do with a chronic shortage of money and a political system designed to keep it that way. As she explained, “MFY had a number of walk-in store-front family service centers located around the Lower East Side, and a lot of women and children were coming into those centers asking for help with problems stemming from the lack of money. Over time, this led the social workers in the centers to stop talking so much about fancy sorts of case ‘intervention’ and to begin helping these mothers get on welfare.”[4] This shift in priorities led to some of Mobilization’s more controversial actions, such as helping to organize rent strikes and assisting local Puerto Rican and black mothers in their fights with the local school board. Such action, however, represented only a small amount of what Mobilization did and was atypical, in any case, for such programs. Moreover, Piven recognized the difference between the stated goals of such antipoverty programs and the political logic they actually stemmed from. Indeed, in the first few years following Mobilization’s retreat into a typical social welfare dispensary center, she frequently found herself having to push back against characterizations of Mobilization that claimed that it was a faithful servant to radical social science theories. On the contrary, she argued, most antipoverty programs were typical liberal concessions with limited potential for effecting substantial change.

First, Piven argued that any attempt to increase the influence of the poor through mainstream political participation was doomed. While pluralist scholars claimed the political system was responsive to anyone who knew how to hack it, Piven asserted the importance of basic political calculus – unless a constituency could provide or withhold the keys to power for political elites, they would be ignored. Unorganized, impoverished, and often absent or thwarted at the ballot box, the poor could pose no threat to politics-as-usual. “Today’s unorganized poor,” Piven explained, “have nothing to bargain with, and cannot hope to obtain a re-distribution of economic resources by negotiation.”[5] The antipoverty programs that liberals invested hope in, however, believed that the problem lay not with political systems that responded only to power and money but, rather, the ignorance of the poor in knowing the ins-and-outs of the political labyrinth. Piven highlighted the shallowness of this analysis. “This kind of advocacy follows a long tradition of neighborhood councils in the slums,” she wrote, “through which local residents were encouraged to ‘participate’ in the elaborate rituals of parliamentary procedure as if that were the path of political influence for the very poor.”[6] Against liberal claims of an open and inexplicably benevolent political system, Piven insisted on a less sentimental assessment of how politics worked.

But if politicians did not care about the poor, how could have Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Party have declared a War on Poverty? Often asked this question, Piven replied that the combination of the conflict generated by the civil rights movement and the growing electoral importance of the cities in state and national elections provided the incentive that resulted in the modest, watered down programs of the War on Poverty. “Why was the federal government so interested in poor neighborhoods – poor urban neighborhoods?,” asked Piven. “They were interested in poor urban neighborhoods because poor urban neighborhoods were becoming a political problem, they were, in effect – the federal government was, in effect – making concessions. They were inaugurating new programs. Those programs could be understood as concessions. I understand them as concessions.”[7] When one liberal took offense at this analysis – didn’t people like Lyndon Johnson clearly care about poverty and injustice, after all?, Piven responded: “Now, Lyndon Baines Johnson cared a lot, you know? Everybody cares. But did he care ten years earlier? Twenty years earlier? Had he just begun to care? Why was he caring now? Party politicians are supposed to try to win state office by worrying about electoral politics and electoral calculation.”[8] In contrast to liberal hagiographies detailing the beneficent accomplishments of leading politicians, Piven reminded everyone who put pressure on liberal elites to act in the first place – poor and black people.

Piven returned to this theme of examining reality before rhetoric repeatedly – she had to, as both liberals and an increasingly influential group of neoconservatives continued to insist that the War on Poverty was either, according to the former, entirely benevolent and disinterested, or, according to the latter, a utopian scheme driven by radical social scientists. This sometimes required Piven to be very critical of her colleagues in the fields of social science and social work. In response to a collection of essays by policy experts on the War on Poverty, Piven noted the self-serving nature of their analysis, which assumed that the programs represented the impact of concerned experts like themselves. “Not coincidentally,” she pointed out, “the prospects for social reform are tied neatly to the prospects of the social policy establishment. More important, it is a view that makes astonishing assumptions about the nature of government. It argues that a major category of government action can be understood primarily as efforts to solve social problems rather than as efforts by political leaders to maintain their hegemony. Thus, the Kennedy and Johnson programs are to be understood and evaluated primarily as efforts to help the disadvantaged, and to help them in the ways explicitly named by legislative titles.”[9] By pointing out the insufficiency of such a viewpoint, Piven might have felt like she was stating the obvious, but there was no shortage of scholars, politicians, and public intellectuals who regularly worked with the underlying assumption that the American political system stood above all previous political systems in history, responsive to all citizens and on the verge of solving all major social problems. She noted one example of the myth – incidentally still around to this day – that John F. Kennedy was inspired to address the issue of poverty after reading Michael Harrington’s popular book on the subject, The Other America. As she put it, “The myth is interesting, not because it revealed very much about politics, but because it revealed the still strong faith in the possibility of reform through good suggestions and good intentions.”[10] Indeed, the history of the Great Society was – and I would argue continues to be – open to this kind of naiveté, especially since, in the decades since, it looks particularly good when compared to the wholesale abandonment and criminalization of the poor that followed soon after.

Piven also pushed back against the political talking point that would play a key role in that abandonment and criminalization – the notion of the culture of poverty. Although this idea – that the poor are kept poor as much by bad habits, poor work ethic, or psychological damage – is associated today mostly with the Right, it has its origins in liberal and even leftist discourse. Deeply related to pluralist political thinking and the postwar tradition of qualitative liberalism, social scientists and political commentators depicted poverty as a psychological “tangle of pathology” as much as an economic condition. Piven, however, would have none of this. “Poverty is not mainly a culture of pessimism and self-defeating attitudes, and it is not best understood as a ‘web of disabilities,’” she wrote. “Poverty is first and foremost an economic condition, the lack of steady work at a decent wage.”[11] Guided by this understanding, Piven criticized antipoverty programs that insisted on treating poverty as a mental health condition or appeared to believe that the poor had been ignored by the political structure because they lacked proper political knowledge and skills. The problem for the poor, Piven insisted, was not that they did not know how to do politics – the problem was that politicians did not care to listen.

However, if Piven believed that politicians responded only to incentive and that the poor had nothing to bargain with, how could they hope to improve their situation? The answer, she argued, was disruption. This was at the core of a famous article by her and Cloward, called “The Weight of the Poor.” (Made notorious, incidentally, in recent years by a series of misleading exposes done by Glenn Beck that resulted in hundreds of death threats addressed to Piven.) Piven and Cloward argued that because poor were easy for elites to ignore, they would have to use the one thing they did have in abundance – their numbers – to cause enough disruption and, through signing up in large numbers for city and state welfare systems, a fiscal crisis that would force a concession from worried and perhaps terrified politicians. When asked what strategies the poor should employ, Piven replied: “Protest demonstration. Blocking traffic. Reduced work output is probably a good tactic for some workers in crucial services. Or wildcat strikes, or refusing to service downtown areas of the city.”[12] Actively encouraging conflict put Piven at odds not only with liberals, but also some fellow leftists, such as George Wiley of the National Welfare Rights Organization, who wanted to build the poor into an organization that would then come to the negotiating table like any other interest group. However, Piven rooted her recommendation for disruption and crises by referring back not only to her experience at Mobilization – where the poor only received attention when they caused trouble – but also to the larger dynamic that brought the Democratic Party to deal with racial injustice in the first place: the ability of black people to threaten the future electoral success of the Democratic Party. “Disruptive action,” Piven wrote, “has always been the main political recourse of the very poor.”[13]

And yet while Piven advocated radical and disruptive tactics, she did not adhere to a revolutionary ideology that considered only the entire restructuring of society as acceptable. On the contrary, she recognized that while disruption offered the most effective tactic open to the poor, what it could win would itself be limited by current political realities. Critical of, as she put it, “building revolutionary-socialist castles in the air,” she instead encouraged accepting the concessions that such conflict could generate as clearly better than nothing.[14] Moreover, Piven remained open to a variety of tactics. “I do not see electoral and movement work as opposed to each other, as some activists do,” she explained. “Rather, I see movements and electoral work as being complimentary. … If we were to enlist large numbers of poor and minority people, then political leaders would be forced by their own calculations of advantage to generate a different kind of electoral rhetoric, and that would give movements courage.”[15] While offering her own strategies, Piven never proposed a rigid ideological line.

This openness extended to the other expressions of the vibrant leftist scene that America witnessed in the 1960s. During the student occupation of Columbia University, Piven not only advocated for the students, but actively partook in the occupation. She later described the scene among faculty in a letter to Tom Hayden, who had assisted her climb through the window of a locked-down building during the occupation. “Even the leftist faculty,” she wrote, “kept explaining to me (in very exasperated tones) that they were the negotiators, and that you guys simply didn’t understand political negotiation and exchange. I said that the events weren’t being done justice by their evasiveness and negotiations and wouldn’t someone say the students were right? They were very excited, cried or flung themselves about – myself, I was pretty sure Columbia would survive.”[16] Elsewhere, when discussing how rent strikes may be an effective strategy for making housing affordable, she suggested reaching out to local student organizations to assist in preventing evictions.[17] Likewise, she showed the same openness towards black power. Unlike worried liberals, who focused myopically on the rhetoric of black power, Piven saw the potential in a movement aimed at building solidarity among the black poor. “Whatever else may be said of its rhetoric,” she wrote, “black power, by calling on people to be, feel, think and act black, is fostering a new sense of community in the ghetto, especially among the young. This is a hopeful trend, for solidarity is one prerequisite to the political power without which the mass of black poor cannot advance economically.”[18] Thus, although Piven offered her own clear and particular program for leftist action, she viewed leftist organizing and politics as always a matter of coalitions. Or, as she put it, “People on the left have to work together. It’s as simple as that.”[19]

Finally, Piven offered a perspective on political critique and commentary that, I believe, can be particularly useful to both political activists and intellectual historians. Simply put, never be so distracted by the official debate that you forget the power struggles that underlie it. For example, in an exchange in Social Policy on the role of social planners and advocates, one policy expert criticized the disruptive action of the National Welfare Rights Organization, because when they seized the stage at a health policy conference their demands were not, he felt, incisive or well chosen. In reply, Piven pushed back against the implied notion that “that information and analysis will turn the world around,” reminding her interlocutors that “it is not the correctness of the slogans which makes the Establishment tremble,” but rather the pressure applied by any political action.[20] She applied this to the work of the left as well, writing “ideals aside, the reality is that the poor get responses from government mainly through disruption, and the question to ask about any radical analysis we contribute is whether it stimulates action or mutes it.”[21]. And indeed, it was while she was working with Mobilization, viewing, as her partner Cloward later commented “through the eyes of the people themselves” that she developed the kernels of countless books and articles on the politics of poverty.[22] Later in life, Piven would reflect on how her approach differed from the preoccupations of many leftists in America. “Here there is a tradition where intellectuals on the left treat politics as discourse. And I must say, it seems a one-sided discourse.”[23] This is a useful reminder, for all us who spend our time criticizing and contributing to political ideas, to make sure we never lose sight of the fundamental, and most important question of what contributes to solidarity, and what undermines it.

 

[1] Interview with Francis Fox Piven, “A Skeptical Look at the U.S. Health Services – A Program from the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions In Santa Barbara,” 3, Box 1, Folder 1, Francis Fox Piven Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, (Northampton, Massachusetts).

[2] May 28, 1992, Oral History Interview with Francis Fox Piven. Conducted by Noel A. Cazenave, 10. Oral History Research Archives, Columbia (New York).

[3] May 28, 1992, Oral History Interview with Francis Fox Piven. Conducted by Noel A. Cazenave, 3. Oral History Research Archives, Columbia (New York).

[4] Interview with Francis Fox Piven, “Social Analysis and Organizing: An Interview with Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven,” for “R.A.” transcript for unidentified publication, not dated, 2, Box 1, Folder 15, Francis Fox Piven Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, (Northampton, Massachusetts).

[5] Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven, Draft of “Politics, Professionalism and Poverty,” 1965, 42, Francis Fox Piven Papers, Box 72, Folder 5, Sophia Smith Collection (Northampton, Massachusetts).

[6] Francis Fox Piven, “Whom Does the Advocate Planner Serve?” in Social Policy, article in May 1970, responses in June 1970, 35, Box 74, Folder 20, Francis Fox Piven Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, (Northampton, Massachusetts).

[7] May 28, 1992, Oral History Interview with Francis Fox Piven. Conducted by Noel A. Cazenave, 15-16. Oral History Research Archives, Columbia (New York).

[8] May 28, 1992, Oral History Interview with Francis Fox Piven. Conducted by Noel A. Cazenave, 18-19. Oral History Research Archives, Columbia (New York).

[9] Francis Fox Piven, Draft of review for The Great Society: Lessons for the Future, ed. By Eli Ginzberg and Robert M. Solow, 1974, 5-6, Box 75, Folder 24, Francis Fox Piven Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, (Northampton, Massachusetts).

[10] Francis Fox Piven, Draft of the review, The Other America, 1975, 2, Francis Fox Piven Papers, Box 75, Folder 23, Sophia Smith Collection (Northampton, Massachusetts).

[11] Francis Fox Piven, Draft of the review, The Other America, 1975, 3, Francis Fox Piven Papers, Box 75, Folder 23, Sophia Smith Collection (Northampton, Massachusetts).

[12] Interview with Francis Fox Piven, “On urban politics and crisis,” Liberation, not dated, Francis Fox Piven Papers, Box 1, Folder 13, Sophia Smith Collection (Northampton, Massachusetts).

[13] Francis Fox Piven, “Whom Does the Advocate Planner Serve?” in Social Policy, article in May 1970, responses in June 1970, 35, Box 74, Folder 20, Francis Fox Piven Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, (Northampton, Massachusetts).

[14] Francis Fox Piven, Letter to Herschel Kaminsky, of Social Policy, July 30, 1970. Francis Fox Piven Papers, Box 2, Folder 8, Sophia Smith Collection (Northampton, Massachusetts).

[15] Interview with Francis Fox Piven, “On voter registration, for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom,” transcript, 1973, Box 1, Folder 10, Francis Fox Piven Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, (Northampton, Massachusetts).

[16] Frances Fox Piven, Letter to Tom Hayden, May 6, 1968, Box 2, Folder 5, Francis Fox Piven Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, (Northampton, Massachusetts).

[17] Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven, “Disrupting City Services to Change National Priorities,” Viet Report: A Special 64 Page Report on Urban America in Revolt, Summer 1968, 27, Box 74, Folder 7, Francis Fox Piven Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, (Northampton, Massachusetts).

[18] Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven, “What Chance for Black Power,” reprinted from The New Republic, March 30, 1968, 3, Box 74, Folder 5, Francis Fox Piven Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, (Northampton, Massachusetts).

[19] Interview with Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven, “Social Analysis and Organizing: An Interview with Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven,” Ann Withorn, 7, Box 1, Folder 15, Francis Fox Piven Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, (Northampton, Massachusetts).

[20] Francis Fox Piven, “Whom Does the Advocate Planner Serve?” in Social Policy, article in May 1970, responses in June 1970, 37, Box 74, Folder 20, Francis Fox Piven Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, (Northampton, Massachusetts).

[21] Francis Fox Piven, “Whom Does the Advocate Planner Serve?” in Social Policy, article in May 1970, responses in June 1970, 37, Box 74, Folder 20, Francis Fox Piven Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, (Northampton, Massachusetts).

[22] May 28, 1992, Oral History Interview with Richard Cloward. Conducted by Noel A. Cazenave, 36-37, Oral History Research Archives, Columbia (New York).

[23] Interview with Francis Fox Piven, “Social Analysis and Organizing: An Interview with Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven,” for “R.A.” transcript for unidentified publication, not dated, 14, Box 1, Folder 15, Francis Fox Piven Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, (Northampton, Massachusetts).