Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail

by Frances Fox Piven, Richard Cloward

Have the poor fared best by participating in conventional electoral politics or by engaging in mass defiance and disruption? The authors of the classic Regulating The Poor assess the successes and failures of these two strategies as they examine, in this provocative study, four protest movements of lower-class groups in 20th century America:
-- The mobilization of the unemployed during the Great Depression that gave rise to the Workers' Alliance of America
-- The industrial strikes that resulted in the formation of the CIO
-- The Southern Civil Rights Movement
-- The movement of welfare recipients led by the National Welfare Rights Organization.

Genres: Politics, History, Nonfiction, Sociology, Social Justice, Social Movements, Activism

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Frances 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.

Reviews

[Public Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book a little like eating a plate full of spinach every day for lunch. You know it's good for you, but that sure doesn't make you look forward to reading it. That said, there is a lot of good information here. I kind of had to check some of my assumptions about how movements accomplish their goals. Overall I learned a lot.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

a very instructive history of 20th century social movements - specifically, the unemployed movement of the Great Depression, the industrial workers' movement of the 30s, the civil rights movement, and the welfare rights' movement of the late 60s.

Piven's argument is that movements succeed through disruption (direct action). disruption causes elites to have to appease movements with reforms, whereas negotiating, lobbying, or other tactics are more easily ignored. Piven also contrasts disruption with attempts to build "organization", which is presented as the bugaboo. what is meant by "organization" is hierarchy and bureaucracy. movements that fell into hierarchical institutional patterns, such as the ones highlighted in this survey, generally became co-opted by the system and lost their radical edges. consequently, they were no longer able (or interested) to make real change happen, and became more about managing constituencies. the classic case is the labor movement, where labor leaders became another part of the restraining apparatus against workers' militancy.

however, i bristle at the sweeping attack on "organization" itself. does Frances Fox Piven know nothing of nonhierarchical, directly democratic organizing? surely she isn't so inexperienced. instead, the book reads as an overreaction against the insanely hierarchical and bureaucratic National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), which Piven and Cloward were heavily involved in until the 70s, when this book was written. it's as if their experience there left such a bad taste in their mouths that any positive associations with genuinely radical, democratic organizations such as the IWW, SNCC, or SDS, were tainted in their minds and no longer worth considering.

in summary, if one substitutes the words "hierarchical/top-down organization" for the overly broad "organization" found throughout the book, this actually becomes a very helpful summary of where some key movements in the 20th century made huge inroads, only to become part of the system they originally set out to topple.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Had a hard time getting into this book, but it was worth it in the end. I would actually recommend that potential readers read Howard Zinn's People's History of The United States first, as this would provide a good background. The conclusions drawn from the inter-war industrial strikes were a welcome surprise and the argument concerning the Civil Rights movement similarly new for me, as well as convincing. Finally, the final chapter on the National Welfare Rights Organization was unlike anything I have read before!

[Emily Alvarado · Rating 5 out of 5]

This text is amazing. Surprisingly radical--- its a marxist based analysis of social movements.....very pragmatic with historical examples and extremely well synthesized theories of how political movements succeed/fail

[Drick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a classic in the study of social movements. The authors were scholar activists in the 1960's and 1970's who looked at the ways poor people's movements in the 1920's and 1960's were able to make signficant gains, but then also lost momentum and saw some of those gains retrenched by the ruling elites. Essentially, the authors posit that the greatest resource that poor and working class people have to initiate change is the capacity to gather large groups of people to create social disruption.From the authors' perspective, when these movements gained some social and political legitimacy they were easily incorpoated and derailed by the ruling bureaucracy and those lost some of their power to continue to make change and maintain changes that had been won.

In light of last fall's Occupy Wall St occupations around the country, the authors raise interesting questions as to whether significant social and political change can be achieved through working in the system or if in fact disruptions and chaos may be necessary to get power elites to listen and act.

[Jeremy Meadow · Rating 4 out of 5]

The initial chapter serves as a summary for the examples to follow. The authors assert that political gains to the left are driven by protest that is eventually coopted into progressive organizational bureaucracy bogged down in electoral politics. As the momentum from protest wanes with political gains, elected officials’ incentives to support the poor diminish and concessions are reversed by a wave of reaction. The role of the organizer is to generate as much protest as possible to maximize gains from each opportunity. The theory seems largely correct to me.

I found the following chapters summarizing specific movements to be less insightful, perhaps due to their density, but also because the authors neglected to propose alternative actions to supplement their criticisms of overengagement in the electoral system. The best criticism provides a realistic path of action that could have been implemented, and unfortunately that is not provided in this book.

[Stas]

Unfortunately, i didn’t know about Poor People’s Movements (1977), until Glenn Beck branded Piven a dangerous radical. Having just read Piven’s introduction to the paperback edition of her book, I actually see why Beck would choose her book to lash out against. Her thesis is that worker “organizations endure, in short, by abandoning their oppositional politics”, that concessions made by the elites are a response not to the organizational strength of the movements, but to the chaotic, mass disturbances of the actions of the crowds and masses of workers. Organizations only come on the scene as a result of spontaneous mass mobilizations, and they stay and grow less because they harnessed and continue to rely on the masses, then because they are co-opted by the elites to become a stabilizing factor.

[Dana Sweeney · Rating 4 out of 5]

An extremely compelling sociological / historical view of social movements in the United States. Piven and Cloward are convincing contrarian thinkers whose critiques of the typical "community organizing" model are necessary and historically grounded. This work challenges me to think very differently about how communities can (and often cannot) leverage significant social change. It is extremely well-researched, tactically and strategically valuable, and productively discomforting.

All of that being said, it reads like a brick. Reading this book is work. On the upside, some sections are useful in case of insomnia.

[Craig Werner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written by activist scholars who were involved in shaping the Welfare Rights Movement in the late 1960s, this book is a hybrid of history and political philosophy. The history sections show their age; there's been a ton of scholarship on the labor movement and the civil rights movement that would change the picture they paint in important ways. But their perspective on the relationship between local and national politics as well as their defense of "disruption" and "mobilization" as strategies for addressing poor people's concerns remain relevant for those thinking about how to address similar issues today.

[Brandon Wu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compelling and persuasive, but also depressing and kind of disempowering - Piven and Cloward's classic study of how marginalized people in the United States succeed and fail at mobilizing for social change holds up to scrutiny 35 years after its publication. Interestingly, I've heard that today, Piven is somewhat less intensely structural, and is more focused on agency and relational power. That makes me want to read her more recent work, as Poor People's Movements is extremely well-argued but very much a downer for anyone interested in actively organizing for change.

[Steven Peterson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is another work by the authors of "Regulating the Poor." It probes the question of why poor people's movements succeed--and fail. The authorts develop four case studies, representing the Great Depression Era and the post-war time frame. When can mass defiance work? Piven and Cloward do a nice job in trying to explain that.

[Donnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an informed smack in the face from the world of social science to the face of a wide-eyed liberal arts/american studies major. But the pain felt very nice.

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting read. Probably the only people (that I am aware of) to suggest that the civil rights movement could possibly be considered a failure, in one respect.

[Aja · Rating 4 out of 5]

Movements against injustice are unstable if they are not involved in policy making and legislation.

[David]

Articulating the very important distinction between mobilizing and its less effective counterpart: organizing.

[Tatiana · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that's been sitting on my shelf for a while, and I picked up at a very timely moment, as I watched the aftermath of a year of BLM protests after George Floyd's murder. I watched all of the companies that had suddenly learned about racism and other 'isms and made broad promises to change go right back to what they were doing before except with new marketing that ticked some diversity boxes at bare minimum. I also watched all the promises made internally at my job evaporate, and the big corporation double down on their employees not actually mattering. So it was a relief to walk into this introduction and breakdown about how the powers that be keep their power even when they make concessions to protest movements. Always nice to know that one is not actually crazy.

[Charlotte · Rating 4 out of 5]

very eye-opening argument about organizing methods. if they had wanted this book to be more widely read, it should have been much shorter. they got hung up in the details, though they did provide a thorough history. the glaring omission from this book was the women’s movement. the authors missed the connection between women’s rights and labor protests. despite their ability to understand class, I do think they were sexist (at least when they published this book).

[Canyon Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

really thought provoking, read it with a coworker in a book club style analysis over the last month. i work at a 51 year old community based organization that is services based, but does tenant organizing. a lot of this hits at home, specifically: non-profits being the government lifeline to maintain stability at the bottom-end of the socioeconomic ladder; organizations and planning taking interest away from direct actions; and the detachment that comes with both of those concepts once removed from the base. i don't think all of the book is incredibly clear - especially with the NWRO, it's not certain to me that their strategy would have not prompted the same response as the welfare roll slashing that took place. altogether a worthy read. i think some things could have been shorter though, especially on the history side of these case studies since it isn't necessarily relevant to the takeaways. but in all my political organizing outside of work, it's very true that the organizations associated with power are really shells of a once-mobilized base that is now totally irrelevant to the funding streams and power structures internally and externally.

[lauren]

It had gotten to a point where I had written way too many papers citing Piven & Cloward to have not gotten to the whole thing. This is rich, dense, complicated, and rewarding for anyone interested in the state of "radical" welfare theory in the 60s and 70s. It's also surprisingly mostly withstood the test of time despite the fact that the entire notion of movement and mobilization has transformed with the Internet.

There are some days when I'm all for their central thesis that institutional disruption is more salient than covert organization within established structures. There are other days where it just feels far too idealist considering how even our most "enduring" social and welfare movements are vilified, kept in a cyclical stranglehold, by those with ridiculous power. The Internet throws a really weird wrench into this idea because we've seen how it may foster solidarity between communities that may never otherwise be in touch. But at the same time, it's hard to quantify or gauge how ~real~ that solidarity is because literally anyone is posting anything for any reason at any moment with no guarantee of intent, commitment, etc. It stratifies any potential mobilization as much as it seems to foster it, maybe even more now given how ideological the algorithms on our dominating platforms for discourse have become.

in short i want to know what P&C think about twitter

[stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

absolutely brilliant account of social movements, social theory, and how politics plays its part - looking at how people try to affect the system from the outside. her assessment of power is smart, clear, and well-written, and she never shies from saying that as citizens we should be doing more. piven is the type of person when i think of "patriot", and i mean that as a compliment. it's an astounding work of social criticism and in the end, hope.

[cory · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written by veterans of the welfare rights movement, this book analyzes four mass movements in U.S. history in the 1930's and 1960's and draws interesting conclusions about the reasons behind their successes and failures. I don't agree with all the conclusions, but it's definitely food for thought, echoing some themes of "The Revolution Will Not Be Funded."

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Overall clasic that every organizer should read. I'm looking forward to Piven's new book "Challenging Authority." Here's a blog I wrote on it: http://machete408.wordpress.com/2008/...

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another recommendation from Mr. Wildchild. In depth study of political movements, how they come together and why so many have not achieved a lasting impact.

[Stoiph]

ever hear about the bonus army movement after the great depression? me neither!

[Felix Kolb · Rating 5 out of 5]

A classic on the outcomes of social movements and still worth reading!

[Sydney]

An exceptional book that will make you think

[Stefan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book on the subject of social movements, and the role that political opportunity structures and mass disruption play in their success and/or failure.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

A classic. Absolutely still worth reading.

[Jake · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magisterial

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very materialist study of why certain movements succeed and fail