Richard A. Cloward

Richard Cloward...

Richard Cloward was a sociologist and socialist. He was the author with his wife Frances Fox Piven of the Cloward-Piven Strategy for revolutionary social change. The strategy was designed to so over-burden the state with obligations to welfare recipients that revolutionary crisis and change would become inevitable. Later he applied similar priciples to voter registration-working to increase the proportion of low income voters, in order to change social structures.

He was undoubtedly one of the most influential figures on the US and international left in the 20th century.

Cloward died in his Manhattan home in August 2001 age 74.

Career and early activism

Richard Cloward held a PhD in sociology and was a former student of Robert Merton.

He co-authored nine books, including "Delinquency and Opportunity" (1960), written with Lloyd Ohlin and focusing on problems related to gangs. This book received the Dennis Carroll Award and influenced the formation of Mobilization for Youth (MFY), which Cloward helped found in 1961. MFY became the programmatic model for the federal War on Poverty and pioneered community action programs and the anti-poverty legal services.

Social change through welfare crisis

Cloward pioneered the deliberate attempt toof expand welfare rolls to push state services to the point of collapse. His first vehicle for such tactics was the National Welfare Rights Organization, an ancestor of today's ACORN and similar organizations.

In 1966, Richard helped found the National Welfare Rights Organization, the protest movement of poor women. Its goal of winning federalization of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) by building the local welfare rolls to create fiscal and political crisis very nearly succeeded. Instead, Congress granted fiscal relief to states and localities through a new federal relief program called Supplemental Security Income (SSI). SSI was one of the most important federal social policy innovations in the post-World War II period.

In 1971, Cloward, along with his wife and collaborator, Dr. Frances Fox Piven, co-authored "Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare".

"This is a landmark critique of government’s use of public welfare to suppress social disorder among the poor and to reinforce the low wage work market".

Among their other landmark works, Cloward and Piven wrote "The Politics of Turmoil" (1974), Poor People’s Movements" (1977), "The New Class War" (1982), "Why American’s Don’t Vote", (1988) and "The Breaking of the American Social Compact" (1997).

Social change through expanded voter rolls

In 1982, Cloward and Piven founded the Human SERVE (Human Service Employees Registration and Voter Education Campaign, which promoted the idea that people should be registered to vote when they apply for welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, unemployment benefits and driver’s licenses.

A decade later, Human Serve’s program was incorporated in the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. Popularly known as the “motor voter” bill, it became law in 1993.

"This legislation represents an historic advance in the struggle to win full enfranchisement for low-income people and people of color".

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 had stopped government from preventing people from registering to vote. The 1993 act went further by embodying the principle that government has an affirmative obligation to register the eligible electorate.

Socialist Memorial

On Sept. 20, 2001 500 people gathered at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City to celebrate Cloward’s Life and Work. Speakers included Frances Fox Piven, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West, Gus Newport-(all members of Democratic Socialists of America), activists Howard Zinn, June Jordan, Joel Rogers and Tim Sampson plus long time voter registration advocate, Demos president, Miles Rapoport.

References

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