Word: cloward
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...past when "Black Power" was the only way. What will help the mass of poor Blacks more is a movement of all the poor combined with the political left, which Blacks will dominate--through sheer numbers--but not control. Radicals such as Francis Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward predict such a realignment of politics among class lines if only the left follows a new strategy of voter registration and coalition building...
...more sharply divergent approaches to the same subject would be difficult to imagine. Piven and Cloward argue that politics is the expression of deeper conflicts between economic classes. To this familiar Marxist analysis they add the interesting notion that American history is largely the story of workers using democratic political freedoms to regain the traditional economic subsistence rights wrested away from them by a bourgeois-dominated state. This conflict--"Democracy vs. Capitalism"--eventually produced the Welfare State to protect workers (or "ordinary people," or the "poor" Pivan and Cloward interchange these phrases quite loosely) from the ravages of unemployment...
...perhaps the question for the 1980s, made more pressing by the gloomy prognoses of MIT economist Lester Thurow and Harvard's Samuel Huntington, two distinguished scholars who see an American government losing its ability to meet the demands placed upon it by various segments of society. Piven and Cloward, who see democracy principally as a means for working class advances, answer a tentative "yes" to this question when they predict a new mass movement for redistribution of power and wealth...
...this is a rather narrow and altogether too optimistic forecast. As Phillips recognizes, there are other groups at large on the political scene now, using their democratic freedoms for ends Piven and Cloward will never consider progressive. Mass political participation produced Martin Luther King--but also Howard Jarvis, George Wallace, and Jerry Falwell. To put it another way, Piven and Cloward correctly assess the contradiction between capitalism and democracy: Phillips, however, paints a subtler picture of an America bedeviled by multiple contradictions--regional, cultural, racial, religious, and ideological. Nowhere is this basic flaw in their analysis more evident than...
...wake of its failure, the prospects are indeed that the American political system will come slightly unhinged, and that deadlock will be the result. Despite the approaching confusion, a plausibly discernible set of new battle lines are emerging. One is the old class boundary noted by Piven and Cloward. Both Wall Street and organized labor seem to be solidifying old ties to their respective traditional parties, the Republicans and the Democrats...