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Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare
Piven and Cloward have updated their classic work on the history and function of welfare to cover the American welfare state's massive erosion during the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years. The authors present a boldly comprehensive, brilliant new theory to explain the comparative underdevelopment of the U.S. welfare state among advanced industrial nations. Their conceptual framework promises to shape the debate within current and future administrations as they attempt to rethink the welfare system and its role in American society.
"Uncompromising and provocative. . . . By mixing history, political interpretation and sociological analysis, Piven and Cloward provide the best explanation to date of our present situation . . . no future discussion of welfare can afford to ignore them."
—Peter Steinfels, The New York Times Book Review
"Uncompromising and provocative. . . . By mixing history, political interpretation and sociological analysis, Piven and Cloward provide the best explanation to date of our present situation . . . no future discussion of welfare can afford to ignore them."
—Peter Steinfels, The New York Times Book Review
544 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1971
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1633 people want to read
About the author
Frances Fox Piven
37 books37 followersFrances Fox Piven is an American professor of political science and sociology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, where she has taught since 1982. Piven is known equally for her contributions to social theory and for her social activism.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews
September 15, 2009
This book by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward came out over three decades ago. And it is still powerful reading and powerful analysis. I would not expect everyone to agree with the authors' contentions, but once having read this book, you will be challenged in your understanding of welfare policy. Indeed, both many liberals and many conservatives alike are apt to be irritated by this book.
In short, the key point the authors make is that welfare policies are designed to pacify rebellious out of work people. Once they are pacified, welfare is reduced. And while welfare programs are operating, there will be a tendency to make benefits low so that recipients are impelled back into the work force, even for low wages. The authors put it this way (page xiii): "Historical evidence suggests that relief arrangements are initiated or expanded during the occasional outbreaks of civil disorder produced by mass unemployment, and are then abolished or contracted when political stability is restored. We shall argue that expansive relief policies are designed to mute civil disorder, and restrictive ones to reinforce work norms."
The book itself spends a great deal of time on two American case studies: the New Deal and the Great Society. Again, they argue that in neither case was government very generous, that in both instances programs were designed to push people into the job market and reinforce work norms.
The authors use an early historical example to set the stage for their analysis, by going back to England of the 16th century and thereafter. They contend that the early examples of welfare as a force to quiet rebellious masses and discipline them toward norms supportive of work. And this sometimes meant government money. Piven and Cloward note that between 1760 and 1784, taxes for relief of the poor rose by 60%. The rationale? People were getting uprooted from life on the land, as farmers, and pressed to enter the industrial labor force. And relief provided the tool to move people from one economic realm to another--and to keep them from open rebellion. John Stuart Mill himself is quoted as to the design of such acts to keep the poor from rebellion.
But the bulk of the work is on "regulating the poor" in the United States. Here, the authors go into considerable detail on programs such as Social Security, which, they argue, was quite modest, would take time to implement, but which yet served to quiet the possibly disenchanted multitudes during the dark days of the Great Depression.
This work is still well reputed today. I have seen little in the way of attempts to actually test the authors' argument statistically (although maybe I've missed something). I'd surely like to see what the evidence says. A couple case studies are interesting and suggestive, but I need more evidence to be fully convinced. Nonetheless, this is a thought provoking work and one that helps one think about welfare programs in a different way, whether or not the reader is in accord with the authors.
In short, the key point the authors make is that welfare policies are designed to pacify rebellious out of work people. Once they are pacified, welfare is reduced. And while welfare programs are operating, there will be a tendency to make benefits low so that recipients are impelled back into the work force, even for low wages. The authors put it this way (page xiii): "Historical evidence suggests that relief arrangements are initiated or expanded during the occasional outbreaks of civil disorder produced by mass unemployment, and are then abolished or contracted when political stability is restored. We shall argue that expansive relief policies are designed to mute civil disorder, and restrictive ones to reinforce work norms."
The book itself spends a great deal of time on two American case studies: the New Deal and the Great Society. Again, they argue that in neither case was government very generous, that in both instances programs were designed to push people into the job market and reinforce work norms.
The authors use an early historical example to set the stage for their analysis, by going back to England of the 16th century and thereafter. They contend that the early examples of welfare as a force to quiet rebellious masses and discipline them toward norms supportive of work. And this sometimes meant government money. Piven and Cloward note that between 1760 and 1784, taxes for relief of the poor rose by 60%. The rationale? People were getting uprooted from life on the land, as farmers, and pressed to enter the industrial labor force. And relief provided the tool to move people from one economic realm to another--and to keep them from open rebellion. John Stuart Mill himself is quoted as to the design of such acts to keep the poor from rebellion.
But the bulk of the work is on "regulating the poor" in the United States. Here, the authors go into considerable detail on programs such as Social Security, which, they argue, was quite modest, would take time to implement, but which yet served to quiet the possibly disenchanted multitudes during the dark days of the Great Depression.
This work is still well reputed today. I have seen little in the way of attempts to actually test the authors' argument statistically (although maybe I've missed something). I'd surely like to see what the evidence says. A couple case studies are interesting and suggestive, but I need more evidence to be fully convinced. Nonetheless, this is a thought provoking work and one that helps one think about welfare programs in a different way, whether or not the reader is in accord with the authors.
November 7, 2014
As an intellectual homeless shelter resident with a master's degree and physical challenges restricting me to a desk job that I have yet to be offered in spite of 2,891 applications in the past 30 months, I was recommended this book by John Sheehan, the social worker at the soup kitchen at the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York. He told me that Piven, who is still living and speaks at sociology conferences was his inspiration to become a social worker. At the time, I was reading Barbara Ehrenreich's
Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
. Piven is in the acknowledgements of that book as one of the manuscript's early readers (and Ehrenreich was the editor of some publications with Piven and Cloward cited in this book). Frances Goldin is in the acknowledgements of this book for being Piven and Cloward's agent, and she was just presented an award last week by Picture the Homeless, an organization to which I belong. A useful idiot to conservatives among my cyberbullies said that citing "Cloward/Piven" in my blog undermines my credibility, which seems to peg her as an admirer of Glenn Beck, who has so little credibility that an entire book,
Who's Afraid of Frances Fox Piven
has been published to reveal Beck's claims about Piven for the lies that they are.
The main thesis of the book is that poor relief, which is known in the United States as welfare, is designed to stave off revolt until its recipients can be forced into the harshest, most demeaning work available. It is thus a strategic method of keeping the wealthy in power to abuse the poor. It chronicles efforts in the 1960s to expand welfare rolls by Mobilization for Youth (MFY) Legal Services, another organization that has served me, to get people legally entitled to welfare rolls on them in ways that were never done before. The argument is there has been no significant increase in eligibility for welfare, except in the South, where laws significantly restricted it, but the expanding rolls is primarily due to grassroots efforts through the influence of Johnson's Great Society to make sure that those entitled got the tiny share of the wealth to which they were entitled (276), a position that they are generally kept in by capitalist need for free or nearly free labor (345). According to the White House's website, the average taxpayer pays $36 a year toward food stamps and $6 per year towards welfare. The welfare I receive is $41 per month, plus $189 per month for food stamps, and I live in a homeless shelter. Even though when you divide that $41 figure that the average citizen contributes to welfare and food stamps on a yearly basis among all the taxpayers, the grand total is about $0.0000001, I have encountered admitted right-wingers online who are so greedy that they want me to do minimum wage physical labor (and I include fast food under physical labor because difficulty standing for long periods is one of my ailments) against my doctors' orders rather than to receive it Some have even said that they want me to die for refusing. This anecdote is reflective of Piven and Cloward's basic points. On page 16, they detail why welfare is needed by the so-called "free market" and touch briefly on the foolishness of not providing welfare, and why such extreme right-wing resolutions cannot possibly make it past intelligent lawmakers. That terrorism was used to enforce work in 1767 is documented on page 34--only seven out of 100 infants in the English workhouses we mostly know today through Oliver Twist lived to reach the age of 2. This is to which right-wingers want to return us. They cite Karl Polyani's The Great Transformation stating that philanthropists of 1834 advocated and practiced "psychological torture," something right-wingers poo-poo when I write entire blog entries about the psychological torture I've experienced via the welfare system. Conservatives seem to not know how to do anything but whitewash the truth, as they did, under the aegis of the Republican Party, during the era of the New Deal in 1936) (99).
On page 8, she describes a WEP (work experience program)-like system in the sixteenth century, and WEP is first mentioned by name on page 129. This is a failed system in which people on welfare are forced to do slave labor that is not calculated based on the federal minimum wage, and thus violates federal law. It is being phased out at the city level in New York, as announced by Human Resources Administration chair Steven Banks, although he admitted to a group of us from Picture the Homeless two Fridays ago that it would take two years to phase out fully), and I have heard rumors that the state is finally going to do the same. In a note on page 14, they invokes the rebellions of Wat Tyler and Jack Cade, so I'm in familiar territory, having reviewed Jack Cade's Rebellion of 1450 two years ago. (For some reason it says that the Cade rebellion was in 1460.) While William Shakespeare made fun of Jack Cade and portrayed him as illiterate in King Henry VI Part II , Cade was a literate man with legitimate requests, just as I am.
"[T]he Southern case also reveals how relief policies can be used to support a labor caste system, one in which the subjugation of particular ethnic or racial groups (in this case blacks) serves to lower the price of labor generally," Piven and Cloward tell us on page 131. If relief policies lower the price of labor, why would conservatives, who care most about the bottom line, want to eliminate them? They were used to push agricultural hourly wages down to 77¢ an hour in South Carolina as late as 1969. A recurring motif is the way blacks on welfare were forced to do farm labor, while whites never were. I think most people know that this has since switched to the Latino community, but it addresses the racist manor with which welfare was provided, particularly in the Jim Crow South. They also know that administrators of food programs would collude with employers to make sure that blacks were forced to work to get a meager ration of food, with examples from Polk County, Florida, and "a Mississippi rural county" (139).
Poverty is created by the wealthy. "The exigencies of their political environment force relief officials to design the procedures that serve the economic ends of groups outside the relief system" (147). This is why only bottom-feeder employers ever come to the shelters or Workforce 1, offering low wage jobs that do not pay enough for anyone to exit the shelter system. If working in retail or food service got people out of homeless shelters, able-bodied people (of which I am not one) would be far more inclined to do it. Of course, those in power choose to blame the poor rather than the capitalists and relief officials who create the problem, and they created myths that pit the poor against the poor, identifying an illusory caste of lazy people that even other welfare recipients don't like, in spite of them being a straw man (172). They analyze the deep roots of hating the poor in market ideology (147-149)--most Americans believe that meritocracy is real. Thus, people come up with excuses of how I supposedly fell short, even if it involves outright lies about my history (insisting that my job applications are fake, insisting that I have substance abuse issues when there is no evidence, alleging that I could have prevented the problem by having been a STEM major, which is also false (see also http://issues.org/29-4/what-shortages...). The conclusion reached by Piven and Cloward is "That the working poor are ready to forfeit such substantial sums is powerful testimony to the force with which the ideology of work and success, together with abhorrence of the dole, has been driven home by those who gain the least from their labor. It is especially powerful testimony considering that, while the poor shun 'the dole,' affluent groups profit greatly and regularly from public subsidies of many kinds" (175). When I have tried to point this out by showing my attackers this video, I usually get a lot of blubbering about worthiness that never addresses the substance of the arguments presented.
The book doesn't directly address situations like mine. The case study focuses on Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), for which I do not qualify, although food stamps and other sorts of welfare (including men on welfare) are certainly touched upon, as are social security and unemployment insurance. Even so, terminology I have dealt with just keeps coming up, such as "failure to comply" on page 157. Anyone who has ever been on food stamps has probably been found in failure to comply at some point, usually because of a failure on the agency's part to provide the recipient with specific instructions, such as letters announcing mandatory appointments getting conveniently lost in the mail. It also goes into late-night raids of the sort William Bratton was using in early 2012 on shelters to violate the homes of welfare recipients in direct violation of the fourth amendment to insure that no man was present, thus forcing family instability onto the recipients (166), a scandal that eventually led to AFDC-UP (unemployed parent).
Scandals are pervasive when dealing with those who work with the poor. Page 203 notes the story of Roy Flowers, who violated laws surrounding minimum wage, child labor, overtime pay, and record keeping, and who was renting shacks to black workers for $70 per month that should have been $5 per month. He was made an example, and forced to pay 200 employees $50,000. On the other hand, in another example of collusion, he was also paid by the U.S. Department of Agriculture $10,832 for not cultivating 4,000 of his 16,000 acres. This example shows that since the wealthy can restrict the amount of work that can be done by labor, we need to separate having necessities from availability of work.
Right-wing lies that are commonly heard in the press are debunked here. For example, in 1988, 64% of minimum wage workers were over the age of 20 (354), yet right-wingers still try to talk about the issue as though we want to give living wages to teenagers working for spending money. The situation today is worse than ever. A few years ago, Florida tried to institute begging licenses that cost $90 per person and were unavailable to those who needed them. This was tried and failed as early as 1531 in England (15), and again in New Jersey in 1936 (109), and was eventually ruled a first amendment violation in Florida.
At Occupy Wall Street Alternative Banking, we decry economists who present their mathematical models in a vacuum and pretend that they apply to real life. On page 355, Piven and Cloward demonstrate that the "Phillips Curve" is not reflected by real-life data. The curve shows that unemployment and wage levels vary inversely, but in the late 1960s and early 1970s, unemployment rose without falling wages, and in fact, wage increases accelerated (355-6). They also demonstrate the lie of the "free market"--"When people had an alternative means of subsistence, they were not as likely to sell their labor except under terms that improved their situation, and they were less likely to accept the most backbreaking or degrading forms of work." This is what the right truly despises. They desire a market that is anything but free, in which people have no alternative but to accept torture for the barest means of subsistence (358-9), even going as far as to whine that food stamps are "unfair" (361) as though barely surviving on backbreaking labor is, and bemoaned how food stamps facilitate strikes. Solomon Fabricant even recommended letting unemployment rise in order to bring wages down (358). That's about as unfair as it gets. The immorality of those on the top is nearly unfathomable, yet even a leftist like Daniel P. Moynihan erroneously externalizes immorality onto the poor. The authors he is trying to make reinterpret correlation as causation (368).
Today's buzzword, "income inequality" is invoked on page 361, with its enormous expansion under that most overrated president, Ronald Reagan, as is his policy of "ritualized degradation" (367), so-called "workfare."
The book demonstrates many systemic problems that resulting increased poverty: "The more professionally oriented the welfare staff, the lower the proportion of the poor who got relief: 'High scores on the professional orientation scale were given to caseworkers who belonged to professional associations, read professional journals, and held or were working toward the master's degree in social work. There was a strong inverse relation between the measure of professionalism and the AFDC poor rate. The lower the number of caseworkers with a professional orientation to the field of social work, the larger The number of poor persons using AFDC [Emphasis added.] (New York State Department of Social Services Nov. 1968-Feb 1969 report, 52)" (176) "[T]he institutional changes which weakened the occupational and life supports of the poor, and the role of the dominant classes in promoting those changes, were typically ignored. The result, as we said in the original introduction of this book, is that 'much of the literature on relief--whether the arid moralisms and pieties of nineteenth century writers or the ostensible 'value neutral' analyses of twentieth-century professionals and technicians--merely serves to obscure the role of relief agencies in the regulation of marginal labor and in the maintenance of civil order" (370-71).
I found an instance on the first line of page 191 of a missing word "who." A professor in whose book I found a similar missing word in time for a new printing suggested I look for work as a proofreader. that was before I became homeless. I have applied for 42 proofreader jobs in the time I have become homeless alone. One welfare agent told me that I need to apply for 42 proofreader positions a day, and I laughed at her openly for assuming that one could find 42 individual proofreader positions in one day, which would be tough even if one had the resources to relocate anywhere.
[unfinished draft]
The main thesis of the book is that poor relief, which is known in the United States as welfare, is designed to stave off revolt until its recipients can be forced into the harshest, most demeaning work available. It is thus a strategic method of keeping the wealthy in power to abuse the poor. It chronicles efforts in the 1960s to expand welfare rolls by Mobilization for Youth (MFY) Legal Services, another organization that has served me, to get people legally entitled to welfare rolls on them in ways that were never done before. The argument is there has been no significant increase in eligibility for welfare, except in the South, where laws significantly restricted it, but the expanding rolls is primarily due to grassroots efforts through the influence of Johnson's Great Society to make sure that those entitled got the tiny share of the wealth to which they were entitled (276), a position that they are generally kept in by capitalist need for free or nearly free labor (345). According to the White House's website, the average taxpayer pays $36 a year toward food stamps and $6 per year towards welfare. The welfare I receive is $41 per month, plus $189 per month for food stamps, and I live in a homeless shelter. Even though when you divide that $41 figure that the average citizen contributes to welfare and food stamps on a yearly basis among all the taxpayers, the grand total is about $0.0000001, I have encountered admitted right-wingers online who are so greedy that they want me to do minimum wage physical labor (and I include fast food under physical labor because difficulty standing for long periods is one of my ailments) against my doctors' orders rather than to receive it Some have even said that they want me to die for refusing. This anecdote is reflective of Piven and Cloward's basic points. On page 16, they detail why welfare is needed by the so-called "free market" and touch briefly on the foolishness of not providing welfare, and why such extreme right-wing resolutions cannot possibly make it past intelligent lawmakers. That terrorism was used to enforce work in 1767 is documented on page 34--only seven out of 100 infants in the English workhouses we mostly know today through Oliver Twist lived to reach the age of 2. This is to which right-wingers want to return us. They cite Karl Polyani's The Great Transformation stating that philanthropists of 1834 advocated and practiced "psychological torture," something right-wingers poo-poo when I write entire blog entries about the psychological torture I've experienced via the welfare system. Conservatives seem to not know how to do anything but whitewash the truth, as they did, under the aegis of the Republican Party, during the era of the New Deal in 1936) (99).
On page 8, she describes a WEP (work experience program)-like system in the sixteenth century, and WEP is first mentioned by name on page 129. This is a failed system in which people on welfare are forced to do slave labor that is not calculated based on the federal minimum wage, and thus violates federal law. It is being phased out at the city level in New York, as announced by Human Resources Administration chair Steven Banks, although he admitted to a group of us from Picture the Homeless two Fridays ago that it would take two years to phase out fully), and I have heard rumors that the state is finally going to do the same. In a note on page 14, they invokes the rebellions of Wat Tyler and Jack Cade, so I'm in familiar territory, having reviewed Jack Cade's Rebellion of 1450 two years ago. (For some reason it says that the Cade rebellion was in 1460.) While William Shakespeare made fun of Jack Cade and portrayed him as illiterate in King Henry VI Part II , Cade was a literate man with legitimate requests, just as I am.
"[T]he Southern case also reveals how relief policies can be used to support a labor caste system, one in which the subjugation of particular ethnic or racial groups (in this case blacks) serves to lower the price of labor generally," Piven and Cloward tell us on page 131. If relief policies lower the price of labor, why would conservatives, who care most about the bottom line, want to eliminate them? They were used to push agricultural hourly wages down to 77¢ an hour in South Carolina as late as 1969. A recurring motif is the way blacks on welfare were forced to do farm labor, while whites never were. I think most people know that this has since switched to the Latino community, but it addresses the racist manor with which welfare was provided, particularly in the Jim Crow South. They also know that administrators of food programs would collude with employers to make sure that blacks were forced to work to get a meager ration of food, with examples from Polk County, Florida, and "a Mississippi rural county" (139).
Poverty is created by the wealthy. "The exigencies of their political environment force relief officials to design the procedures that serve the economic ends of groups outside the relief system" (147). This is why only bottom-feeder employers ever come to the shelters or Workforce 1, offering low wage jobs that do not pay enough for anyone to exit the shelter system. If working in retail or food service got people out of homeless shelters, able-bodied people (of which I am not one) would be far more inclined to do it. Of course, those in power choose to blame the poor rather than the capitalists and relief officials who create the problem, and they created myths that pit the poor against the poor, identifying an illusory caste of lazy people that even other welfare recipients don't like, in spite of them being a straw man (172). They analyze the deep roots of hating the poor in market ideology (147-149)--most Americans believe that meritocracy is real. Thus, people come up with excuses of how I supposedly fell short, even if it involves outright lies about my history (insisting that my job applications are fake, insisting that I have substance abuse issues when there is no evidence, alleging that I could have prevented the problem by having been a STEM major, which is also false (see also http://issues.org/29-4/what-shortages...). The conclusion reached by Piven and Cloward is "That the working poor are ready to forfeit such substantial sums is powerful testimony to the force with which the ideology of work and success, together with abhorrence of the dole, has been driven home by those who gain the least from their labor. It is especially powerful testimony considering that, while the poor shun 'the dole,' affluent groups profit greatly and regularly from public subsidies of many kinds" (175). When I have tried to point this out by showing my attackers this video, I usually get a lot of blubbering about worthiness that never addresses the substance of the arguments presented.
The book doesn't directly address situations like mine. The case study focuses on Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), for which I do not qualify, although food stamps and other sorts of welfare (including men on welfare) are certainly touched upon, as are social security and unemployment insurance. Even so, terminology I have dealt with just keeps coming up, such as "failure to comply" on page 157. Anyone who has ever been on food stamps has probably been found in failure to comply at some point, usually because of a failure on the agency's part to provide the recipient with specific instructions, such as letters announcing mandatory appointments getting conveniently lost in the mail. It also goes into late-night raids of the sort William Bratton was using in early 2012 on shelters to violate the homes of welfare recipients in direct violation of the fourth amendment to insure that no man was present, thus forcing family instability onto the recipients (166), a scandal that eventually led to AFDC-UP (unemployed parent).
Scandals are pervasive when dealing with those who work with the poor. Page 203 notes the story of Roy Flowers, who violated laws surrounding minimum wage, child labor, overtime pay, and record keeping, and who was renting shacks to black workers for $70 per month that should have been $5 per month. He was made an example, and forced to pay 200 employees $50,000. On the other hand, in another example of collusion, he was also paid by the U.S. Department of Agriculture $10,832 for not cultivating 4,000 of his 16,000 acres. This example shows that since the wealthy can restrict the amount of work that can be done by labor, we need to separate having necessities from availability of work.
Right-wing lies that are commonly heard in the press are debunked here. For example, in 1988, 64% of minimum wage workers were over the age of 20 (354), yet right-wingers still try to talk about the issue as though we want to give living wages to teenagers working for spending money. The situation today is worse than ever. A few years ago, Florida tried to institute begging licenses that cost $90 per person and were unavailable to those who needed them. This was tried and failed as early as 1531 in England (15), and again in New Jersey in 1936 (109), and was eventually ruled a first amendment violation in Florida.
At Occupy Wall Street Alternative Banking, we decry economists who present their mathematical models in a vacuum and pretend that they apply to real life. On page 355, Piven and Cloward demonstrate that the "Phillips Curve" is not reflected by real-life data. The curve shows that unemployment and wage levels vary inversely, but in the late 1960s and early 1970s, unemployment rose without falling wages, and in fact, wage increases accelerated (355-6). They also demonstrate the lie of the "free market"--"When people had an alternative means of subsistence, they were not as likely to sell their labor except under terms that improved their situation, and they were less likely to accept the most backbreaking or degrading forms of work." This is what the right truly despises. They desire a market that is anything but free, in which people have no alternative but to accept torture for the barest means of subsistence (358-9), even going as far as to whine that food stamps are "unfair" (361) as though barely surviving on backbreaking labor is, and bemoaned how food stamps facilitate strikes. Solomon Fabricant even recommended letting unemployment rise in order to bring wages down (358). That's about as unfair as it gets. The immorality of those on the top is nearly unfathomable, yet even a leftist like Daniel P. Moynihan erroneously externalizes immorality onto the poor. The authors he is trying to make reinterpret correlation as causation (368).
Today's buzzword, "income inequality" is invoked on page 361, with its enormous expansion under that most overrated president, Ronald Reagan, as is his policy of "ritualized degradation" (367), so-called "workfare."
The book demonstrates many systemic problems that resulting increased poverty: "The more professionally oriented the welfare staff, the lower the proportion of the poor who got relief: 'High scores on the professional orientation scale were given to caseworkers who belonged to professional associations, read professional journals, and held or were working toward the master's degree in social work. There was a strong inverse relation between the measure of professionalism and the AFDC poor rate. The lower the number of caseworkers with a professional orientation to the field of social work, the larger The number of poor persons using AFDC [Emphasis added.] (New York State Department of Social Services Nov. 1968-Feb 1969 report, 52)" (176) "[T]he institutional changes which weakened the occupational and life supports of the poor, and the role of the dominant classes in promoting those changes, were typically ignored. The result, as we said in the original introduction of this book, is that 'much of the literature on relief--whether the arid moralisms and pieties of nineteenth century writers or the ostensible 'value neutral' analyses of twentieth-century professionals and technicians--merely serves to obscure the role of relief agencies in the regulation of marginal labor and in the maintenance of civil order" (370-71).
I found an instance on the first line of page 191 of a missing word "who." A professor in whose book I found a similar missing word in time for a new printing suggested I look for work as a proofreader. that was before I became homeless. I have applied for 42 proofreader jobs in the time I have become homeless alone. One welfare agent told me that I need to apply for 42 proofreader positions a day, and I laughed at her openly for assuming that one could find 42 individual proofreader positions in one day, which would be tough even if one had the resources to relocate anywhere.
[unfinished draft]
December 14, 2022
The writing is a pleasure to read: clear, measured, informative. Despite it being written 50 years ago, I cant imagine a better primer on welfare. The authors earned my trust early on and never let go... quite a feat considering I started reading this 3+ years ago. Picked it back up in part because I'm now on the dole myself, but moreso to gain context on the gross inequalities that covid is freshly resurfacing when it comes to class, race, and work. The thought was that finishing this might help me find a way, or a lens, to transform my frustrations into something more useful.
My main takeaways:
1) it is easier to provide welfare than to try solving underlying problems - primarily because disrupting the status quo threatens the interests of the better off (e.g. affordable housing, integrated schooling)
2) work is an extremely important mechanism for maintaining social order. welfare is primarily a substitute for maintaining social order.
3) relief pacifies. pacified people (or the "placid poor") do not clamor for reform / justice / equity. once something is had, there is fear of loss. risk aversion does not a protest make.
4) relief is a cycle
5) most big welfare swings are due to dislocations in skills, migration, and technological advancement. even in the 70s the authors surmised that there would likely come a time when technology would nullify more jobs than could be created, at which point they suggest a BMI
6) law changes lives. but lawyers only know what they are paid to know.
7) rat allowance is a perfect, and vivid, example of how cash bandaids (my term not theirs) perpetuate inhumane standards.
I wish all books these days still came with such copious (and compelling) foot-notes, references, and charts. Admirable work. I immediately studied up on all their other books and bought one to read next. I look forward to spending more time being guided by their research and policy suggestions.
My main takeaways:
1) it is easier to provide welfare than to try solving underlying problems - primarily because disrupting the status quo threatens the interests of the better off (e.g. affordable housing, integrated schooling)
2) work is an extremely important mechanism for maintaining social order. welfare is primarily a substitute for maintaining social order.
3) relief pacifies. pacified people (or the "placid poor") do not clamor for reform / justice / equity. once something is had, there is fear of loss. risk aversion does not a protest make.
4) relief is a cycle
5) most big welfare swings are due to dislocations in skills, migration, and technological advancement. even in the 70s the authors surmised that there would likely come a time when technology would nullify more jobs than could be created, at which point they suggest a BMI
6) law changes lives. but lawyers only know what they are paid to know.
7) rat allowance is a perfect, and vivid, example of how cash bandaids (my term not theirs) perpetuate inhumane standards.
I wish all books these days still came with such copious (and compelling) foot-notes, references, and charts. Admirable work. I immediately studied up on all their other books and bought one to read next. I look forward to spending more time being guided by their research and policy suggestions.
December 27, 2015
Piven and Cloward interpret US welfare policy through the lens of labor, arguing that the US government increases the amount and availability of government-provided aid in times of political unrest to keep any real change from happening and decreases it in times of relative peace in order to keep large groups of people desperate enough to accept low-wage, low-appeal jobs. For people of color and women, welfare functions as one of many interconnected systems to exclude them from participating in the wealth of this nation.
September 22, 2007
While a lot of this seems obvious to me now, I remember it being quite a revelatory book for me when I first read it.
November 6, 2023
“Relief arrangements deal with disorder, not simply by giving aid to the displaced poor, but by granting it on condition that they behave in certain ways and, most impor-tant, on condition that they work. Any institution that distributes the resources men and women depend upon for survival can exert control over them: the occasion of giving vitally needed assistance can easily become the occasion of inculcating the work ethic”
Three main topics are covered in this book. First the history of welfare and people in need. Second, the fact that welfare is created to subdue rebellious people. Third, the use of welfare to control people and get them to conform to a culture desired by the bourgeoisie. Each of these parts is fascinating. This definitely is an academic study and any reader needs to be prepared for a slow thick read. Although the numbers are dated, the overall findings still paint a cohesive and relevant picture of the worlds structure.
Three main topics are covered in this book. First the history of welfare and people in need. Second, the fact that welfare is created to subdue rebellious people. Third, the use of welfare to control people and get them to conform to a culture desired by the bourgeoisie. Each of these parts is fascinating. This definitely is an academic study and any reader needs to be prepared for a slow thick read. Although the numbers are dated, the overall findings still paint a cohesive and relevant picture of the worlds structure.
November 27, 2021
This was a "textbook" from one of my college classes decades ago. I finally finished it. I had the feeling all those years ago that there was no way I would truly understand what they were saying. I was right. I could not have understood, because I didn't understand American politics. But I knew from the brief reading I did at the time that I had to hang onto this book, because someday I would need it. I was right about that, too. Not until I lived American politics for several decades. We aren't supposed to understand it.
This is a big, dense book. But if you can slog through the "academese" to hear the pure political arguments the authors make ... well, it's as radical as I thought it would be. We need this book, now. We need it to understand that protest is a very important tool for Americans. But it is NOT the only tool we need to effect change to secure human rights for all Americans, as well as the world's citizens. We need functional governmental systems responsive to the needs of all of us. And we are losing our grip on that, all over the world.
Let's keep working at that. Together.
This is a big, dense book. But if you can slog through the "academese" to hear the pure political arguments the authors make ... well, it's as radical as I thought it would be. We need this book, now. We need it to understand that protest is a very important tool for Americans. But it is NOT the only tool we need to effect change to secure human rights for all Americans, as well as the world's citizens. We need functional governmental systems responsive to the needs of all of us. And we are losing our grip on that, all over the world.
Let's keep working at that. Together.
June 7, 2015
I first read this book back in 1976. It's pretty telling that I remember the book but not the class that required the book. I've recommended this book to all my liberal friends who have such a hard time understanding the conservative construct through the lens of a conservative. Making that mental leap that the systems exist not for moral reasons but for the sole purpose of controlling the poor is hard for most people. In addition, this book explains the historical basis for this thought process and how it's been implemented yesterday and today!
The three most telling lines from the book are memorable:
“This book is about relief-giving and its uses in regulating the political and economic behavior of the poor.”
“two main functions: maintaining civil order and enforcing work.”
“Most writers (on welfare) view the system as shaped by morality— by their good intentions, or by the mistaken intentions of others.”
The three most telling lines from the book are memorable:
“This book is about relief-giving and its uses in regulating the political and economic behavior of the poor.”
“two main functions: maintaining civil order and enforcing work.”
“Most writers (on welfare) view the system as shaped by morality— by their good intentions, or by the mistaken intentions of others.”
January 19, 2012
Connects Britain's enclosure movement to the plantation ecomony of the U.S. South and relevant to Off the Books. An essential read.
"Compared to the more developed welfare states, [U.S. relief] programs are backward, even cruel. Compared to what they might have been in the absense of protest, the American welfare state is an achievement."
Behind the News Interview with Piven:
http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/R...
"Compared to the more developed welfare states, [U.S. relief] programs are backward, even cruel. Compared to what they might have been in the absense of protest, the American welfare state is an achievement."
Behind the News Interview with Piven:
http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/R...
May 28, 2010
Timeless.
Given the current debate, no, hysteria, re immigration perhaps a sequel is (over) due.
Given the current debate, no, hysteria, re immigration perhaps a sequel is (over) due.
July 27, 2012
Absolutely vital to understanding the sober reality of the position of the American poor in politics.
November 10, 2019
The original edition came out in 1971. I read it not too long later, while in social work graduate school. Being at that time still a bit naive as to the machinations of capitalism and the ruling class, it was eye opening and life changing. I never re-read it (probably I should, there's a new updated edition out), but it testifies to its impact that I still remember it. One of the theses of the book is that our welfare system is not designed to help the poor (especially not to help them out of poverty), it is designed to control them. It aims to make sure that there is always an under class, which helps keep wages low for the working class on the rung just above them, while amieliorating conditions just enough to help forestall revolution (the bread of bread and circuses).
I am thinking of it now, because I am reading Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks. This sort of extends Piven and Cloward's analysis in to today's high tech, digital, data driven, algorithm controlled, high surveillance world. I am not very far into it yet, but it seems similarly powerful.
I am thinking of it now, because I am reading Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks. This sort of extends Piven and Cloward's analysis in to today's high tech, digital, data driven, algorithm controlled, high surveillance world. I am not very far into it yet, but it seems similarly powerful.
July 13, 2021
The next time I hear a conservative (or Democrat, for that matter) bemoan the possibility that welfare payments discourage work, I will eagerly reference this book. As Piven and Cloward compellingly demonstrate, discouraging work ought to be the primary purpose of welfare. The greater a program’s work disincentive, the more bargaining power it affords (which workers can then wield in demand of higher pay and better benefits). The left has surrendered the parameters of public discourse to the right on this issue (among others). If today’s Democrats advocate for strengthen the social safety net at all, they do so under a conservative frame: benefits ought not be so generous as to constitute a meaningful alternative to work as a means of subsistence. That must change if we want progress.
October 22, 2024
A menos que algo importante cambie en los próximos dos meses, este será el mejor libro que he leído este año. La autora adopta una postura crítica contra prácticamente todos los programas de bienestar no universales, argumentando que su propósito no es ofrecer una alternativa al capitalismo, sino aplacar posibles descontentos en su contra. Este libro también ofrece un análisis magistral de los procesos históricos que han dado forma a la construcción social de la pobreza.
March 23, 2025
A stone-cold, doorstopper classic. It's astounding that Piven's and Cloward's thesis still holds up a half century after being published. The chapter on welfare expansion under LBJ's War on Poverty alone is worth the price of admission. For anyone interested in ending the scrouge of poverty and creating a more egalitarian society, this is a humbling and galvanizing text. Also, Piven is an underrated stylist - her writing really flows.
December 31, 2025
Of the books I have read concerning poverty and social policy, this has without a doubt been the most salient and enlightening. The authors' do an incredible job covering not only the history of evolving social policy, but also social sentiments concerning poverty.
October 8, 2022
Wow wow wow. If you think you understand the welfare system that the U.S. was built on you probably don’t. So you should read this book- so incredibly informative.
September 3, 2024
Really good. It’s a long read and packed with info. Important read.
May 5, 2014
The poor have always been with us. This work is an acidic dissertation on the role of welfare upon the economy and labor forces. Capitalism and socialism are compared and contrasted. The authors give evidence that since the 1960s, in the United States that many of the poor feel entitlement to money and services without having to make zany form of labor contribution. An interesting read as the number of unemployed grow and they demand more gifting as a right.
February 15, 2007
I haven't read this in a looong time but it is an essential text in the field of sociology. It first came out in 1971 and the second edition was early 1990s. It explains pretty clearly the necessity of a welfare system and also some of the problems with various welfare plans.
January 10, 2014
Although published decades ago, the book posits a theory that is still applicable today. For those wanting some insights into federal govenment discretionary spending rationale, this is a must read.
April 1, 2017
I read the original edition of this book in 1972, and it made a lasting impression. I recently learned of this revised edition and bought it immediately.
March 21, 2008
I read this book at ten years ago, and I still go back to it for quotations.
June 15, 2012
Reading this book should change the way in which you look upon the poor and upon welfare programs.
If I were a social scientist and had written this, I would feel very satisfied.
A classic.
If I were a social scientist and had written this, I would feel very satisfied.
A classic.
April 19, 2018
I didn't really read it. I started it, but I didn't finish it.
Read
October 15, 2014Absolutely essential book about the relation between welfare programs and low wage work.
May 17, 2015
A critical book to read if you want to understand the development of the welfare state in the US. The authors connect the history of disruption and welfare expansion from the 1920s to the 1970s.
to-keep-reference
October 18, 2016Sobre la “explosión del bienestar social en los ´60”.
Imperio Pág.198
Imperio Pág.198
March 30, 2024
Pg 84 DNF
January 1, 2017
Where to begin with this book…
Frances Piven and Richard Cloward make the argument that public welfare was instituted as a political response to political disorder as a way to pacify classes and “enforce the terms on which different classes of people are made to do different kinds of work (xix).” The dole, they argue, is not some easy alternative to work, but a harsh and cruel mechanism used to make a society’s members contribute to the economy and larger socioeconomic system. Public welfare and relief arrangements function to regulate labor in a couple ways: First, it regulates the turmoil created by high unemployment and market crashes by expanding and absorbing enough of the unemployed to maintain order; and second, when social disorder subsides, relief arrangements are contracted and people are forced to look to the market for work (3). In this way, poor relief, although relieving some of the capitalism’s painful shortcomings such as chronic unemployment, provides necessary support to the operation of the capitalist mode of production and civil obedience.
The emphasis on social control permeates this entire book. The authors seek to break from traditional narrative of how and why relief agreements were created, such as ‘enlightened elites wanted to alleviate the woes of the very poor for moral reasons.’ One way to keep people complacent and obedient is to have stable occupational arrangements and work roles for them; however, capitalism has a tendency for crises, and periodically the occupational bonds people have with their work are broken, leaving many unemployed and socially dislocated. Welfare relief acts as a way absorb this disorder until the market needs to be populated by labor. In this way, I think it’s fair to say that the welfare doles act as a conservative force of revolution and radical challenges to the overarching social structure. The authors give grounded examples of this, but the most powerful example is the turmoil caused by the Great Depression. The Great Depression mobilized the largest group of unemployed people in the United States in history. One strand of thought emanating from this movement was people having a collective response to a systemic failure, rather than the traditional line of thinking that an individual’s failure in the market is a result of the individual. The ideology of people acting collectively played a powerful role in establishing unions and collectives, while also understanding that failure in the market is systemic and not individual—or in other words, the Great Depression starting to send shock-waves of political and cultural disorder throughout a dislocated electorate, prompting a political response to maintain order. When work fails to be the cornerstone of social control, a new mechanism was needed to absorb, pacify, and discipline labor.
Importantly, I think it’s important to mention that this book does a great job explaining not just relief, but the unique story of American racism and the relationship of welfare and the US’s minority populations—especially the black population. I was appalled to find that in some states the application of work-relief was used by state governments and local municipalities to exclusively send blacks back to the cotton fields, well under what a minimum wage job would pay.
Frances Piven and Richard Cloward make the argument that public welfare was instituted as a political response to political disorder as a way to pacify classes and “enforce the terms on which different classes of people are made to do different kinds of work (xix).” The dole, they argue, is not some easy alternative to work, but a harsh and cruel mechanism used to make a society’s members contribute to the economy and larger socioeconomic system. Public welfare and relief arrangements function to regulate labor in a couple ways: First, it regulates the turmoil created by high unemployment and market crashes by expanding and absorbing enough of the unemployed to maintain order; and second, when social disorder subsides, relief arrangements are contracted and people are forced to look to the market for work (3). In this way, poor relief, although relieving some of the capitalism’s painful shortcomings such as chronic unemployment, provides necessary support to the operation of the capitalist mode of production and civil obedience.
The emphasis on social control permeates this entire book. The authors seek to break from traditional narrative of how and why relief agreements were created, such as ‘enlightened elites wanted to alleviate the woes of the very poor for moral reasons.’ One way to keep people complacent and obedient is to have stable occupational arrangements and work roles for them; however, capitalism has a tendency for crises, and periodically the occupational bonds people have with their work are broken, leaving many unemployed and socially dislocated. Welfare relief acts as a way absorb this disorder until the market needs to be populated by labor. In this way, I think it’s fair to say that the welfare doles act as a conservative force of revolution and radical challenges to the overarching social structure. The authors give grounded examples of this, but the most powerful example is the turmoil caused by the Great Depression. The Great Depression mobilized the largest group of unemployed people in the United States in history. One strand of thought emanating from this movement was people having a collective response to a systemic failure, rather than the traditional line of thinking that an individual’s failure in the market is a result of the individual. The ideology of people acting collectively played a powerful role in establishing unions and collectives, while also understanding that failure in the market is systemic and not individual—or in other words, the Great Depression starting to send shock-waves of political and cultural disorder throughout a dislocated electorate, prompting a political response to maintain order. When work fails to be the cornerstone of social control, a new mechanism was needed to absorb, pacify, and discipline labor.
Importantly, I think it’s important to mention that this book does a great job explaining not just relief, but the unique story of American racism and the relationship of welfare and the US’s minority populations—especially the black population. I was appalled to find that in some states the application of work-relief was used by state governments and local municipalities to exclusively send blacks back to the cotton fields, well under what a minimum wage job would pay.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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