The Cloward-Piven Strategy was inspired by the August 1965 riots in the
black district of Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had
used batons to subdue a black man suspected of drunk driving). In their
1966 article, "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty,"
Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken
the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the
fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when "the rest of
society is afraid of them," Cloward told The New York Times on September
27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs,
wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy
the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a
political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people
would rise in revolt; only then would "the rest of society" accept their
demands.
The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the
inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven's early promoters cited
radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. "Make the enemy
live up to their own book of rules," Alinsky wrote in his 1972 book,
"Rules for Radicals." When pressed to honor every word of every law and
statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise
of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short.
The system's failure to "live up" to its rule book can then be used to
discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist "rule book" with a
socialist one. (source)
