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I'm not sure of the protocol here on the WNYC website, and since I've carried on this kind of discussion in dozens of posts over at TPM and in several daily newspapers (Washington Post "Outlook" and chat session, Boston Globe, etc.) I'll d refer Chris Malone and others to those columns, posts and the comments. They're all at www.jimsleeper.com under "Latest Work". The comments that others have posted in the past day at TPM about my Piven-Cloward column have drawn a number of responses from me, so you can go right there and see them, and if you'd like, join in.

Here let me just say that Piven was more than a little too slick on the show yesterday, claiming twice that she wasn't presuming to challenge capitalism, while, at the same time, her defenders here emphasize how wrong it is to accuse her of racialism because she's really going after the big structural issues (as, of course, she is). Anyone who reads my TPM posts (for example, three on corporate "speech" and the Supreme Court's ruling on it, one of which was tweeted by Katrina Van den Heuvel as a 'must read') will decide that I'm more far more scathing of corporate capitalism than the disingenuous Piven who appeared on the show yesterday. So I'll leave her and her celebrants to untangle themselves

For my own part, I'm all for strong social and political movements from below. But if I were a religious person, I'd get down on my knees and pray that none of them will ever again be like the National Welfare Rights Organization, whose demonstrations were so sadly similar to the Tea Partiers' "town hall" meetings last summer that it's no wonder Piven tried to sanitize it more than a little on the air.

"These connections are just fantasies drawn on Glen Beck's blackboard." Fantastic!

This was a very insightful segment that illustrates just the type of woman Frances Piven is and her work throughout the years.

Mr. Sleeper -

I have read your piece. Your stance as a "civic republican" who steers to the middle between two extremes is articulated there and elsewhere. That is fine. However, your insistence on the critique of Piven and Cloward's "racialist strategy" is curious; again, I would refer you to Regulating the Poor, or Poor People's Movements, or some of their other work which clearly outlines a more broad-based response to the inhumaness of American society.

But more than that: you disagree with the Piven/Cloward "strategy" and you claim that theirs makes Tea Partiers look tame by comparison. Strategy aside, it is not clear from your points, here and elsewhere, whether you agree with the goals of these movements, which are aimed at providing those at the bottom of American society with a modicum of humaneness. How would you get us there? Do you even agree that such movements are necessary? Do you really believe that all of the changes which expanded the great promise of democracy in this country would have come without these struggles?

It strikes me as convenient to assume that the changes of the past were inevitable without a little bit of turmoil. Or perhaps you agree with a different type of turmoil. Either way, your silence on these matters is curious. If there is an artful dodge here, it comes from you - not from Frances Piven.

Please know that I say all of this with all due respect.

Hey Jim--this isn't about you btw. Civic-republicanism may be a debatable academic position, but do you really think you are talking to Jimmy from Staten Island? Say what you will about the welfare movment of the 70's and Piven & Cloward's position then, but en toto their lives and work have had wide-spread, measureable and positive impact on the lives of low-income Americans--not least through the Motor Voter bill. Your take has never been forged from a position of critical solidarity in the service of a cause, but from a self-congratulatory middle "above the fray" position. My guess: at the actual Boston Tea Party you would have been castigating the radicals then too. Turmoil inevitably results when those from below challenge the unearned prerogatives and arbitrary use of power by elites . Back to Piven & Cloward!

Much as I appreciate the critical comments above, they -- and Fran Piven's response to the bit that Brian quoted from my column -- are pretty much what one would have to expect from people who did not read the column itself. It's a short column. And I think you'll be surprised.

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/04/05/beware_racial_conspiracy_mongers_--_on_both_sides/index.php

In response to the fragment that Brian quoted, Fran did a familiar, old dodge, calling me a "wobbler" between "the liberal left and the conservative right." As a civic-republican, I am occasionally scathing of both left and right, not because I think that both sides are equally bad but because Piven's part of the left plays so reliably and inexorably into the hands of the more-powerful right.

One consequence of this which she and her defenders just can't escape is the comment elsewhere on this thread by "Jimmy of Staten Island." He isn't fodder for the Tea Party, but neither will he ever be reached by people who think like Piven.

We tend to forget, by the way, that the welfare-rights histrionics which Piven and Cloward touted as a "politics of turmoil" in the late 1960s had a lot of "Tea Party"-like behavior in it. Does anyone remember it -- not only what showed up on the evening news broadcasts but what actually happened? It made the Tea Party look like a garden party, and Piven's title for it, "The Politics of Turmoil," was quite literally right, and on the show she wasn't honest about that, about its willful racialism, and about her belief that precisely such racialized street theater was the best way to force the larger questions of class.

It wasn't. It was a disastrous mistake but, for some on the left in those years, it was a default option. It may feel satisfying to think otherwise, but it's politically costly too.

Here here Chris Malone and Margaret from the Bronx. Its prettty amazing that it took a dim-wit like Glenn Beck to call significant attention to Piven & Cloward's relevance in our times. . But its not the '66 welfare rolls strategy (which Jim Sleeper continues to misunderstand as a "racialist" strategy instead of the class/powerless strategy it is/was in the context of racialized poverty!).; no its not that "strategy" but the Poor People's Movement thesis that is so meaningful right now: under certain circumstances (like those about us!) disruptive protest on the part of the poor can lead to governmental concession and greater political and economic equality. What circumstances? Economic crisis (check), political instability and competition (check) and a shared sense that the system is unjust (check?) and open to change (hmmm). Its the last point here that the Tea Party is dead set on frustrating with its kooky distractions like this phonied up assault on the '66 Piven and Cloward. Like bad street magicians (look here, not there!) the Tea Party is desperately trying to distract insecure Americans from the real insight in their work: this is a GREAT moment for poor/working-poor Americans to assert their dignity and rights through the leverage of joyful, noisey, disruptive protest! Obama needs a protest movement! So thank you Glenn Beck, David Horowitz and newbie Kyle Olson for sensing (fearing?) their work might be meaningful in these times. Now fans can set the record straight on a media platform you generated with your distortions. Ooops?

Of all the greatly insightful things that Professor Piven said in this interview, the one which stands out is her point about the importance of social protest movements in the US. She is undeniably right when she says that the only way American politics has become more "humane" in its 200+ year history is when people have fought for their rights to make it more humane. Do we need to remind ourselves of this fact? Slavery and civil rights; women's rights; farmers and workers' rights; the LGBT movement; "poor people's movements"; and so on. Concessions were never granted without a struggle. Piven and Cloward's entire body of work makes this clear over and over again. At best most Americans - and unfortunately most on the right - treat the historical advancement of a more humane politics as if it happened magically or it was inevitable. At worst, they treat it as if all of that "turmoil" was a tragic mistake.

And it seems to me that, with all due respect, Jim Sleeper is wrong to characterize Piven and Cloward's collection of essays "The Politics of Turmoil" as a "racialist solution" to the problems this country faced in the 1960s and beyond. On the one hand, Piven and Cloward didn't create the racialized society they were writing about in the 1960s; it was there for them and all others to analyze. On the other, no other American scholars have written more thoughtfully and deeply about broad-based, multicultural and multi-ethnic movements of the POOR which transcend race. Mr. Sleeper, I urge you to reference their other works for a more complete picture.

At a time when the welfare system kept its costs down by unfairly denying poor people benefits they were eligible for, and by offering below-subsistence benefits to families with no other means of support, Piven worked with the women of the National Welfare Rights Organization to demand fair treatment. They were able to win some modest improvements in the welfare system, even if they did not win the larger improvements they hoped for. This is democratic politics, from the grassroots up, at its best.

Jim Sleeper would prefer that we ignore the way in which race shapes our conversation about issues like poverty and welfare. I can't see how ignoring that helps us understand the issues any better.

Brian tells me he may quote from my column in TPM today about Piven-Cloward, but whether or not he has time to get to it, here it is.

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/04/05/beware_racial_conspiracy_mongers_--_on_both_sides/

Naturally I loathe conspiracy theorists who've been reviving the ghost of 1960s blunders, but that doesn't mean that Piven and Cloward's "welfare rights" strategy wasn't, indeed, a blunder. It was, for reasons I tried to explain in The Closest of Strangers and do in this column and in the comments below it. Jim Sleeper

Great caller re globalism. Another unwitting shill for the corporate right.

Still a Democrat, still Union, but Lord Almighty, folks like Ms. Piven do little but alienate the folks in my local, and weaken their allegiace to the Democratic Party.

Her "strategy" to cause rifts within the voting blocs that make up Municipal Democratic Parties, obstensibly to force LBJ's hand, did nothing but bring about Nixon-Reagan, and the long-term kneecapping of the greater, national Democratic party.

To still spout that "rights" without "responsibilities" is "humiliating" is just sad, and does nothing to retain a cohesive Democratic majority.

Someone please point out that what truly has caused the current economic crisis is not a left wing conspiracy, but a generation of right wing success. Where, privitazation, de-regulation, and class warfare in favor of the rich was pursued.

This is merely another version of the "starve the beast" theory of the Bush-led Republican Party, whereby government programs were ended, not formally, but de facto, by underfunding. Here, the theory is that state budgets are being overrun rather than underfunded, to force a single-payer revision. It's the same idea; stealth attacks via funding manipulation.

Another manifestation of this view (make it lousy so they will make it better) caused people to vote for Ralph Nader in 2000. We all know how that turned out -- things got really, really worse before they got incrementally better (Obama is still trying to clean up the mess).

Responsible people don't try such stunts, and Obama is responsible. So "no," that's not the idea.

a guaranteed education would be more helpful.
but cloward-piven is interesting when you consider which states get the most federal tax dollars
http://www.taxfoundation.org/UserFiles/Image/Blog/ftsbs-large.jpg

The offensive against the "Cloward-Piven strategy" reached new lows in January when a Republican operative posing as a student gained access to Piven’s apartment under false pretenses, interviewed her, and later posted pieces of their conversation on the conservative Web site Big Government – the same site, using the same underhanded tactics, that secretly filmed ACORN employees last year.

This is about more than an attack on one person. When Beck et al. attack the “Cloward-Piven strategy” – the idea that an organized and outraged public can and ought to demand change – they are really attacking our most basic democratic tradition. Piven is a target precisely because her work has always supported democratic politics from below. That’s exactly what Glenn Beck wants Americans NOT to do, and it helps explain why the right is working overtime to offer a counter-narrative.

They are using scare tactics, scapegoating, distortions, deception, lies and intimidation to immobilize or demobilize or better yet misdirect people to attack the right’s perennial targets – like progressive taxation, social safety net programs or a widened franchise – rather than the real causes of our social and economic ills. These tactics undermine democratic politics. And as last summer’s instructions to go shout down Congress people at town hall meetings turn to this spring’s instructions to “break their windows” and legislators are subject to death threats and mob taunts, it is imperative that all small-d democrats respond.

So please:

(1) If you are a journalist, columnist or blogger, please write about this. If you have journalist, columnist or blogger friends, ask them to write about it.

(2) If you are a teacher, please teach your students about our history of protest politics and the essential role that the democratic mobilization of people to demand change has played in our nation’s progress towards social justice and equality. Consider doing a teach-in using Piven’s Challenging Authority. How Ordinary People Change America.

(3) If you are a member of a professional organization, consider passing a resolution condemning the scapegoating, fearmongering, intimidation tactics of the Tea Party right and their attack not just on Piven and Cloward but on democratic politics.

(4) No matter who you are, go out and organize for the change we need in this country. Defend democratic politics by living it.

(5) Become a fan of the Piven and Cloward page on Facebook and urge your friends to do the same.

(6) Spread the word. Let folks know about whatever you do to respond (and let us know on the FB page).