I want to provide an overview of some major conceptual issues and questions of practice raised by Poor People's Movements—no easy task in a brief paper, given the richness of the text under discussion. I'll begin, however, by placing Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward's ideas into a larger historical and theoretical framework. PPM's intellectual antecedents are not often emphasized, both because of the controversies the book provoked at the time of its publication, in 1977, amid a swirl of activist politics, and because of its continuing relevance today—in a most reactionary political climate—for social practice, community mobilization, and organizing strategy generally. But the key to the book's theoretical ancestry lies in its very title, Poor People's Movements. This is not a book about institutional responses to political domination and economic exploitation. It is not about the labor movement and other forms of mass-based organization. It is not about the process of organizing people into interest groups and voluntary associations as a way of challenging and changing public policy. While all of these matters fall within PPM's circle of concern, the book is about, simply stated, the politics of disruption. Its focus, therefore, puts it directly in line with such historians of “the crowd” as Eric Hobsbawm, George Rudé, E. P. Thompson, and, in this country, Herbert Gutman.
Piven and Cloward were not professional historians. Cloward was a sociologist and professor of social work who had been active in the war on poverty in New York City, and who, in 1965, had co-authored with Lloyd Ohlin an influential book on gang delinquency. Piven was a political scientist and social activist who taught at Boston University. What linked these scholars conceptually with historians of “archaic” social movements, eighteenthcentury class formation in England, and culturalist approaches to the American labor movement1
was
PPM's conscious challenge to leftist orthodoxy's inherited theory and preconceived notions about how poor people are supposed to become political actors. Piven and Cloward applied to contemporary American social movements the insights of what in the 1970s was called “the new labor history.” This approach concerned itself with the ways ordinary men and women, out of their immediate experience and understanding, moved to shape and create the movements of which they became part. It rejected structuralist explanations of protest movements. Piven and Coward saw no sense at all in the premise that under the right conditions, and with the correct strategy and tactics, people somehow became “organized into” social movements by professional leadership elites who could see deeper into the people's situation than could the people themselves.
There is not room, in this brief commentary, to explore the conceptual connections between Piven and Cloward and the historians who first developed what might be called movement formation theory. This would be difficult anyway, since the latter were particularly careful not to offer the sort of broad-based historical generalizations about the relationships among economic structures, mass organizations, and political action that their approach was meant to challenge. They always embedded their theoretical observations in the particulars of the cases they studied. “The history of social movements is generally treated in two separate divisions,” Hobsbawm wrote in his introduction to Primitive Rebels. He was referring to the distinction Marxist theory made between the “pre-modern” revolts of slaves, social sects, peasants, “and the like,” and “modern” labor and socialist movements, along with “such other movements as have been fitted into the socialist framework.”2
Hobsbawm treated seriously a variety of forms of protest movements—including those by social bandits and the Mafia, and what he called “the city mob” and “labor sects,” all of which existed alongside industrial capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He was directly confronting received Marxist notions that, in response to the growth of capitalism, there was some sort of a linear evolution of class consciousness, and the only movements that “counted” were tied to trade unions and the development of political parties on the left. In Hobsbawm's view, such notions were narrow and historically flawed. The canvas of movements for change extended well beyond the particular forms of class conflict and class organization that had emerged in the industrializing urban centers of Europe in the nineteenth century.
To Hobsbawm and his coterie, it was myopic and arrogant to see movements of resistance that did not fit the Marxist mold as either irrelevant or wrongheaded. “It is high time that movements of the kind discussed in this book,” Hobsbawm continued in his introduction, be considered “not simply as an unconnected series of individual curiosities, as footnotes to history, but as a phenomenon of general importance and considerable weight in modern history.”3
It is not much of a leap from this observation—made well before the turmoil of the 1960s had erupted and “new social movements” had come upon the scene—to a recognition that social movements were shaped in all sorts of ways. Collective resistance comes out of the immediacy of people's experience, the new social history argued, so there is no correct or incorrect historical form for social protest. Each social movement is a product of its own time and experience. Or, as Piven and Cloward themselves wrote in the introduction to the paperback edition of their text, “popular insurgency does not proceed by someone else's rules or hopes; it has its own logic and direction. It flows from historically specific circumstances: it is a reaction against those circumstances, and it is also limited by those circumstances.”
4 Piven and Cloward 1979, xi.
It is this insight that lies at the heart of Piven and Cloward's work, and it is why, after 25 years,
PPM continues to be read, discussed, and taught, warts and all.
The connection between PPM and the British New Left is not particularly obscure or hidden. Piven and Cloward drew freely from the work of Hobsbawm, Rudé, and Thompson in their own chapter on the structuring of protest. In a key passage, they focused on the theoretical and practical importance of seeing the world as those caught up in the dynamics of resistance see it:
[P]eople experience deprivation and oppression within a concrete setting, not as the end product of large and abstract processes, and it is the concrete experience that molds their discontent into specific grievances against specific targets. Workers experience the factory, the speeding rhythm of the assembly line, the foreman, the spies and the guards, the owner and the paycheck. They do not experience monopoly capitalism. People on relief experience the shabby waiting rooms, the overseer or the caseworker, and the dole. They do not experience American social welfare policy…. No small wonder, therefore, that when the poor rebel they so often rebel against the overseer of the poor, or the slumlord, or the middling merchant, and not against the banks or the governing elites to whom the overseer, the slumlord, and the merchant also defer. In other words, it is the daily experience of people that shapes their grievances, establishes the measure of their demands, and points out the targets of their anger [italics added].5
Here is a perspective to challenge the self-defined objective position of the social organizer who believes he or she has an enlightened understanding to
bring to the aggrieved participants in collective action. The assumption of such an organizer is that once those caught up in mobilization understand the abstract concepts of capitalist exploitation that explain their grievance, the scales will fall from their eyes. They will eventually become classconscious actors, well on their way to joining unions, supporting the appropriate leftist political party, and fighting for socialism. The best organizers, of course, even in the heyday of the Popular Front, understood that one had to work with people where they were and appeal to them in terms of what they understood their immediate interests to be. Indeed, it is not clear where, exactly, the processes of social movement formation ever worked in even close approximation to the way Marxist theories of political action expected they would.
It is important to recognize that when PPM was first published, much of the surrounding controversy appeared to focus on the book's rejection of mass-based organization (whether by labor unions or by political parties) as bureaucratic and routinized, and on its support for continual disruptive action as a first principle for change. But let me suggest that many of the negative reactions to the text followed not so much from its critique of the role of organization and the search for stability in movement life as from the theoretical privilege PPM granted the immediacy of the experience of domination.
In essence, PPM was about the extent to which organizers, in order to be effective, had to operate in terms of the consciousness and political understanding of the people they attempted to organize. Piven and Cloward were exactly right in their characterization of Marxism and its many Leninist variations. Practitioners in these traditions, for all of their identification with and understanding of the lives of working people, always saw those lives through the lens of predetermined theory—in particular, through whichever lens their camp happened to be championing at the time. It is very hard, at the level of everyday community and workplace, to connect to the lived experience and immediate consciousness of the economically exploited and politically vulnerable. It is much easier to assume that people do not really understand the sources of their grievances and to offer ready answers that, if the people would only listen, would surely make their lives better.
Piven and Cloward rejected this model, thus undermining the idea of false consciousness and depriving organizers of a notion that gave them power over the organized. No wonder the book met with resistance. What stands out as one rereads the work is its powerful assertion that activists must literally see and react to the world from the position of those who are most aggrieved by it. It's a lesson that has had impact on the most important social movements and social movement theorists of the past 25 years. But it still is not fully understood or integrated into leftist social practice. When people don't act as theory predicts they will, some scholars still refuse to question the theory rather than criticize the people. Here it is worth recalling a line from the British film My Beautiful Laundrette: “The working class has been a great disappointment to me,” an aging Pakistani Marxist, long active in the Communist labor movement of his adopted country, sadly tells a younger cohort. The ultimate optimism of PPM may lie in its stance that where such disappointment exists, it's the radical's problem—not that of the people who are struggling to better their lives.
Despite its insight and power, however, much about the book remains problematic. In what follows, I look at a number of those concerns—in particular, ones touched upon by some of the articles in this symposium.
The Specter of Identity Politics
The realities of class, and class conflict, were never far from Piven and Cloward's approach to social movements. Indeed, in their introduction, the authors explicitly stated that while their usage of the term poor people “deviates from sociological custom … [it] is consistent with classical Marxist definitions of the working class.”6
Still, connected to their rejection of a routinized Marxism was the principle that an undifferentiated industrial working class, as it allegedly developed in western Europe in the nineteenth century, can no longer be viewed as the only significant historical formation at the center of modern social change.
PPM, as Sidney Tarrow writes in his contribution to this symposium, was “full of unlikely heroes: welfare clients, the unemployed, racial minorities.” The organized labor movement was the focus of only one chapter, while the last two chapters examined movements most closely associated with the emerging identity politics of the 1960s and 1970s, the civil rights and welfare rights movements. Even as it cast its own analyses in the terms of working-class life and working-class struggle,
7 PPM helped introduce the specter of identity politics into the centralizing narrative of the old, universalist left, and into the way that narrative was playing itself out in the American context.
The loss of the industrial working class as the primary actor in the processes that foment change, along with the emergence of a politics of cultural contestation, has created a profound theoretical and practical dilemma for the historical left. It has robbed the left of a universalist worldview and an overarching set of political interests and goals that brought solidarity, it was once supposed, to the infinite number of cultural and economic groupings subordinated within and across variously configured capitalist societies. Given its destabilizing and unruly character both as an abstract concept and as a way of structuring collective resistance, there has been much criticism of identity politics. Identity politics, however, is here to stay, an unavoidable outcome of the new social formations of postindustrial society. The point for a classoriented left, therefore, is not to dismiss those who would build resistance movements on the basis of race, or gender, or ethnic affinity. It is, rather, to understand the sources of the discontent and consciousness that give rise to such movements, work with them, and seek modes for unity and connection, as Piven and Cloward did in the welfare rights movement.
It is especially important, in the current political climate, to keep in mind that class has no more withered away than has the state. But as an economic and cultural formation, and as an element of social and political identity, class can no longer claim to be the only significant nexus of political organization and action. Part of the lasting importance of Piven and Cloward's work is that they directly engaged this issue just as it began to reshape contemporary understanding of American social movements. Few who followed in the field have escaped their influence.
Labor and Civil Rights
The most serious controversies provoked by PPM stemmed from its critique of mass-based organization. The problem, according to Piven and Coward's analysis, is that the very need to maintain and reproduce the institutionalized structures of mass organization siphons off the energies and resources necessary to compel the state to meet the demands of the poor. Organizational leadership, it follows, impedes rather than promotes the empowerment of the poor. In the 1930s and 1960s, eras in modern American history characterized by mass protest, organizers
not only failed to seize the opportunity presented by the rise of unrest, they typically acted in ways that blunted or curbed the disruptive force which lower-class people were sometimes able to mobilize…. [I]n the largest part organizers tended to work against disruption because, in their search for resources to maintain their organizations, they were driven inexorably to elites, and to the tangible and symbolic supports that elites could provide….
…Each generation of leaders and organizers acts as if there were no political moral to be derived from the history of failed organizing efforts, nor from the obvious fact that whatever the people won was a response to their turbulence and not to their organizational numbers.8
The best one can say for this thesis is that, in the enthusiasm of the moment, Piven and Cloward may have overstated their case for the primacy of disruption and the impotence of organizational leadership. Even when they later sought to clarify their position, in the introduction to the paperback edition,
9 In response to their critics, they wrote that the point is to acknowledge “the weaknesses in received doctrines revealed by historical experience…. We may then begin to consider alternative forms of organizations through which working-class people can act together in defiance of their rulers in ways that are more congruent with the structure of working-class life and with the process of working-class struggle, and less susceptible to penetration by dominant elites” (italics added). Piven and Cloward 1979, xvi.
their approach to the role of organization in political struggle was never less than ambiguous. I can do no more in this essay than briefly touch upon that ambiguity as it appears in Piven and Cloward's analyses of two critical American social movements, the labor movement of the 1930s and the civil rights movement as it emerged in the 1950s. In the end, they seem to have wanted it both ways.
At the conclusion of their chapter detailing the history of the industrial union movement, from the onset of the Depression through the postwar era and the beginnings of the Cold War, Piven and Cloward restated their thesis that only disruption leads to gains for the disenfranchised.
That industrial workers did in fact win in the 1930s, and that they won only through mass struggle, is underplayed in some radical interpretations. Such interpretations emphasize the advantages that unionization ultimately yielded management…. Industrial unionization was not a management strategy, but a workers’ victory [italics added].10
And unionization was a victory worth winning, they insisted, affirming the obvious, because workers “are better off in the 1970s than they were in the 1920s.”
11 Piven and Cloward then listed a number of the ways in which unions continue to secure and protect workers’ rights and economic position.
Well, yes. But then, if unionization was worth it after all, why this insistence that bureaucratic organization ultimately stifles genuine working-class activism? Does the critique of organization reduce ultimately to sound and fury over whether the glasses of organizational structure and bureaucratic stability are half full or half empty?
In responding to Piven and Cloward's thesis, it is important to grant at the outset that such elements of movement life as autonomous decision making at the local level and the willingness to rely on confrontational tactics are essential if challenging groups are to alter the status quo. Thus, in a recent article in this journal,12
Margaret Levi states that union democratization and decentralization—along with local militance, creativity, and independent coalitions with civil and community groups—are among the strengths of the admittedly weakened but potentially resurgent labor movement. Her emphasis on these features of current national union structures reflects a partial recognition of the important insights captured in
PPM by Piven and Cloward, who gave “strong support for the claim that workers achieve their greatest gains in those extraordinary moments when mass protest occurs.” Still, Levi remains critical:
The problem with this framing is that it underestimates what unions accomplish in ordinary political periods. It also underestimates—as do most of the unions themselves—the role that more modest disruptions can play in enlarging political power.13
Ibid., 59. In an endnote of her own, Levi points out that in a recent publication Piven and Cloward recognize the salience of this matter and develop their argument further. See Piven and Cloward 2000.
In reference to the labor movement, it is simply not the case that only mass strikes and uncontrollable disruptions can attain significant gains for working people. Unions are not set up to bring about fundamental change, but that does not mean they cannot bring about any change at all or provide any meaningful support or services to their constituencies.
Labor bureaucracies, like other forms of social organization, vary from industry to industry. While some slide into complacency, others hold on to their integrity and remain committed to the improvement of their members’ lives. While militance and the threat of direct action may be necessary to maintain hardfought gains for workers, both the disjunctures fed by mass protest and the stability and continuity provided by organizational structure contribute to the expansion and defense of the rights of subaltern groups.
Of all the studies in Piven and Cloward's book, their discussion of the civil rights movement may have been the most myopic in terms of its reading of the role played by organizational structures. The authors began by tying the origins of the civil rights movement directly to institutional changes in the economy and social organization of the South. They pointed to the growing concentration of African Americans in Southern urban centers as agriculture became mechanized, returning black veterans entered the black colleges, and the black entrepreneurial and professional classes began to expand:
Churches acquired mass memberships, fraternal and other communal associations proliferated, small businesses could be sustained, segregated union locals were formed, and a black press could be nourished. These institutions provided the vehicles to forge solidarity, to define common goals, and to mobilize collective action [italics added].14
Piven and Cloward 1979, 204.
Precisely. A rich organizational infrastructure, which gave access to both material resources and the less tangible ones provided through informal communication networks and communal solidarity, predated the boycotts and protests.
Piven and Cloward were thus well aware of the ways in which local organizational infrastructures and networks, including local branches of the NAACP, were fundamental to the protest and direct-action boycotts that erupted in cities like Baton Rouge, Montgomery, and Tallahassee. Still, even as they recognized the presence of these organizational bases—what Aldon Morris later called “movement centers”—they neglected the theoretical import of the critical role such centers played.15
“The concept ‘movement center’ suggests that an alternative view best fits the data regarding the civil rights movement: Movement centers provided the organizational framework out of which the modern civil rights movement emerged and it was organization-building that produced these centers.” Morris 1984, 74.
Indeed, their description of Rosa Parks and her historic decision to stay just where she was, seated at the front of the bus, is paradigmatic of their overall approach.
Here, they told us, was Rosa Parks, on December 1, 1955, a seamstress in a local department store coming home from work (read: the common man—or woman—of American populist myth, an ordinary citizen with no obvious organizational or political ties). She simply refused to move to the back of the bus and was arrested for her trouble. As word of the arrest spread, “a remarkably instantaneous mobilization of the black leadership” took place, “spurred by the heads of the Women's Political Council and by E. D. Nixon, a well-known activist who was both an influential member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a resident of Montgomery.” By mid-afternoon on Friday, Piven and Cloward wrote, “40,000 leaflets calling for a boycott the following Monday morning were being distributed throughout the black community of 50,000 persons.”16
Piven and Cloward 1979, 208–9.
It was
that spontaneous.
Well, not quite.
First of all, Nixon was not just a well-known activist and influential member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. He was vice president of the Brotherhood and president of the Alabama chapter of the NAACP.17
And the boycott, while not premeditated and arranged for that particular afternoon, had been a long time in the making. Here is Nixon explaining how the bus boycott got started:
First of all, we'd talked about a bus boycott all year. We had three other people prior to Mrs. Parks arrested who reported their incidents to us, but you couldn'ta found nobody in Montgomery would agree to have a bus boycott … unless it was approved by E. D. Nixon. The first one was a minister's daughter…. After I talked to her I discovered she would not make a good litigant. Now you are on the outside here. You think that anybody that got arrested would be good. Now, you would think that the average person would think that, but my training with the NAACP and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters taught me different [italics added].18
There were a number of other cases, all rejected by Nixon. One woman had personal problems that Nixon believed any good lawyer could exploit in court. There was another arrest, in October, but Nixon rejected that woman as well, for when he went to her home, he found her father “sitting there drunk and half dressed” on the front porch. Nixon believed that “any black who challenged segregation had to be above reproach.” On December 1, however, the situation changed. Nixon, at work in his office downtown, got a call from his wife that the police had just arrested Parks. When he called police headquarters to find out the charge, they told him it was none of his business.
19 In short, Parks was not just your average seamstress working in the men's alteration shop at the Montgomery Fair department store. She'd also been executive secretary of the NAACP in Montgomery for a number of years, served as a stewardess in the local African Methodist Episcopal Church, and was a well-known and well-respected leader in the community. As Morris points out, “Mrs. Parks’ arrest triggered the mass movement not only because she was a quiet, dignified woman of high morals, but also because she was an integral member of those organizational forces capable of mobilizing a social movement ” (italics added).20
There is more, however. Parks had spent part of the previous summer at a workshop at the Highlander Folk School, an educational center and camp retreat in the mountains of Tennessee, just west of Chattanooga. Myles Horton had organized and set up Highlander in the early 1930s, with the support of organizations ranging from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to the Union Theological Seminary, as a site to train union organizers. It was one of the few places in the South where blacks and whites could live and work together. In the early 1950s, Horton had shifted the focus of his workshops from labor to civil rights organizing. And in the summer of 1955, Nixon and Virginia Durr, a Southern white woman long active in the movement to end segregation in Montgomery (her political roots, along with her husband's, went back to the New Deal), had sponsored Parks's participation at Highlander. “At the end of our workshops,” Horton writes in his autobiography, “we reviewed and critiqued the sessions and then asked the participants what they were going to do when they got home. Rosa Parks said she didn't know what she could do.” But when she returned to Montgomery and refused to move to the back of the bus,
even though her action was not pre-arranged and she acted individually, Rosa Parks operated with the full knowledge that for at least two years black people in Montgomery had been trying to set up a test case on the segregated buses…. Rosa wasn't only acting as an individual, she was acting in a way that was consistent with the beliefs of the black organizations in Montgomery, just as she was sent to Highlander by some of these same organizations [italics added].21
Piven and Cloward totally ignored the organizational context of Parks's decision to stay put when that bus driver told her, as passengers began to board and fill the aisle, to give her seat to a white man. Parks's decision not to move may have been spontaneous, but not much else about the Montgomery boycott was.
Parks knew that Nixon was on daily hold, waiting for the call that would do the trick. She has never said as much, of course. Much better to maintain the myth that there was no premeditation of any sort here and that she had no knowledge of any prior plans to foster mass demonstrations against segregation in Montgomery. And certainly much better not to call attention to the fact that she'd been at the Highlander School in Tennessee, hotbed of Negro lovers and Communists, just the summer before.
If the Montgomery bus boycott was a mass spontaneous protest, then it was a mass spontaneous protest long conceived and shaped by an extensive movement infrastructure, one just waiting for the right trip wire to go off and bring everything together. It was informed by the social and material resources provided by an entire network of organizations. Among these were the local branch of the NAACP, the city's black churches, and the Montgomery Women's Political Council, as well as Myles Horton's Highlander School—which was itself connected to and supported by a whole host of national organizations, including the newly created AFL-CIO.
In sum, while mass demonstrations and direct confrontation may be essential to a social movement's attaining its goals, it is not the case that such organizations as those listed above inherently impede the progress of large-scale protest. They may, in fact, be the necessary vehicles for its appearance.
Strategies of Practice and the Critique of Mass Organization
This essay has moved a certain distance from its original argument that PPM can best be appreciated as an extension of the insights of the new social historians of the 1950s and 1960s. For in light of today's social movement politics, the book grapples with a familiar but thorny series of questions. These have to do with the relationship between identity- and class-based politics, the value of mass organization as a bulwark against a state committed to stigmatizing and punishing the poor, and the uncertainties of a politics of destabilization in the face of the seeming drift of protest movements toward organizational stasis. In this last section, then, I want to return to the question of what PPM offers to today's social movement practice.
In this symposium, Sanford Schram maintains that Piven and Cloward did not offer an anti-organizational theory of social movement politics. They did not make a principled or theoretical argument in support of unruliness and disruption over structure and continuity for achieving the political goals of poor people, because, according to Schram, the book was not about theory. It was an exploration of social movement strategy. What mattered to Piven and Cloward was whether a given society faced structural coherence or disjunction, structural stability or instability, and, given the particular prevailing socioeconomic and political conditions, whether protest or organization made more sense as a strategy. The proof of the pudding, Schram suggests, came in 1984. That is when Piven and Cloward worked with others to form Human SERVE, which eventually was instrumental in winning passage of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.
Maybe so. But as I have tried to show in this discussion, the problem is not one of a strategic choice between protest and organization, depending upon the tenor of the times. It is a lack of recognition that both structure and protest are essential to a politics of change. Despite the meticulous and detailed narratives presented in PPM, the history of poor people's movements demonstrates time and again that movement centers and organizational infrastructures, in one form or another, consistently inform and feed the emergence of direct action and disruption. Organization is a necessary condition of effective protest.
But then, so are flexibility, eclecticism, and the ability to react to the particular moment. Schram argues for just such a politics of contingency, which recognizes that few events can be anticipated and even fewer responses predetermined. Those involved in the politics of change must be prepared to shift ground on the instant. A politics of radical incrementalism, Schram calls it. You get what you can when you can. Nevertheless, practitioners of such a politics must understand themselves as embedded in a movement infrastructure, or set of movement infrastructures, and, at the same time, have the capacity to react to unforeseen events with intuition, sensitivity to the moment, and art. Like Rosa Parks.
The workings of social movements can be understood best in the context of a theory that sees them in all their particularity, and as consequences of the narratives through which people construct, interpret, and appropriate daily experience. Thus, while I have insisted throughout this essay that organizational life and movement centers are critical to social movements’ functioning, they must also reflect specific conditions and circumstances. Piven and Cloward offered a work that, in the American context, served as a theoretical and practical transfer point to that vision. Whatever one's assessment of their perspectives on organization, they helped further a constellation of theories that recognized social movements as both historically contextualized and contingent upon human agency.
