First Views from Rome

The first time I read Poor People's Movements, I had spent a year in Italy back when the term social science was still uttered by leftists in the same breath as capitalist running dog. As Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward were writing sensitively of “the poor” or “working people,” my radical Italian friends were affecting proletarian costume, sneering at the Communist Party for its moderate parliamentary path, and regarding the industrial proletariat as the hero of history.

PPM was not sanguine about the prospects for progressive change in America, but it was far more realistic than the strategic stance of the Italian left at the time of the book's publication, in 1977. Pessimistic about the minimalism of the Communist and Socialist Parties, the most extreme Italian leftists tried to apply a rhetoric invented in the rice paddies of North China to the piazzas of Milan and the factories of Turin. Their discourse was dominated by a species of “workerism” that combined the abstract theories of scholars like Mario Tronti and the concrete experience of the “Hot Autumn,” when Italian workers had shown an amazing combativeness and autonomy from official party and union direction.

If Italian leftists noticed it at all, PPM must have seemed as strange to them as the American left that the book depicted.¹

PPM was also a difficult mix of pessimism and optimism: It was structurally pessimistic, because, for its authors, the poor were heavily constrained by their historic circumstances and institutions; but it was optimistically activist, because it saw collective defiance as capable of occasionally punching through the walls of the poor's oppression. But rather than calling for the “collective intellectual” (a term much in vogue in 1970s Italy) to lead the poor to socialism, Piven and Cloward were critical of the role of mass organization. How could such a book be received by a European left still stuck between a Marxian structuralism and a Maoist voluntarism?

The answer is that it wasn't. Few of my Italian friends recognized either its language or its key concepts as authentically on the left. The book was too concrete, too episodic, too quick to give pride of place to politics rather than history. When I pointed out that America had an authentic radical tradition of its own that did not revolve around the by-then-mythic figure of the proletariat, they sneered, “Populism!” and reminded me of the reactionary history of that tradition in Italy.

PPM's argument about organization was what stuck most deeply in the craw of the few Europeans who reviewed it. In his spirited essay in The New York Review of Books, Eric Hobsbawm praised the book for being rooted in the daily-lived reality of poor people, but had little sympathy for Piven and Cloward's suspicion of leadership and organization. “Any historian of past social movements,” he wrote,

The European left was not ready for PPM in 1977.

The View from New York

Was the American left any more ready for Piven and Cloward? True, Regulating the Poor (published in 1971) had become a standard text in social work courses, as PPM had for courses in social movements. But the latter appeared just as America entered the era of Ronald Reagan. Soon the left was reeling from a managerial/political assault on labor rights, the poorly understood effects of globalization and deindustrialization, and the growing split between the heirs of the black civil rights movement and those of the anti–Vietnam War movement.

But not all the left's problems were “objective.” The Reagan years were also a time when the failure of neo-Marxism became patent, when the trade unions entered a prolonged period of crisis, and when part of the intellectual left became ensnared in the toils of postmodernism. In his much-maligned book The Twilight of Common Dreams, former New Left leader Todd Gitlin sees the problems of the left as revolving around identity politics. After narrating the tragicomic episode of how a progressive California history text was savaged by the Oakland school board for insufficient sensitivity to minority identities, Gitlin remarks:

What does Gitlin propose instead of “the identity obsession” of the American left? Although he has no nostalgia for “the Marxist cycle of eschatology and disillusion,” he yearns for the kind of universalist vision that lay at the root of both traditional Marxism and the Enlightenment. In fact, he calls for a return to the spirit of the Enlightenment—particularly its capacity to unify diverse standpoints and its ability to transcend its own defects. “What is a Left without a commons,” he rhetorically asks, “even a hypothetical one?”⁶

From these abstract debates between identity and universalism, the university and the popular left, Black Power and white radicalism, PPM was largely absent. For Piven and Cloward's progressive vision turned on disruption, not doctrine; on the political process, not the intellectual one; on interaction with allies and enemies in the real world of contention, not debates inside the academy. PPM had little to say either to the acolytes of the new postmodern left or to those who sought a return to a pristine Marxism that had never flourished in America.

But it did have a lot to say to students of and activists within social movements. Indeed, it is Piven and Cloward's emphasis on the poor's capacity for disruption that explains its continued success. In the 1960s and early 1970s—as in the 1930s—a great deal of disruptive protest erupted in the United States. Conversely, the mid-1970s through much of the 1990s were dominated by intellectual debates, identity politics, and identification with other people's struggles. Piven and Cloward's embrace of disruption as the truest expression of social protest gave young people (and not a few older ones) relief from debates in the academy and a standard against which to measure real social movements. As the university left tied itself into intellectual knots around the themes of identity, essentialism, and, more recently, globalization and postcolonialism, Piven and Cloward refreshingly wrote that “people experience deprivation and oppression within a concrete setting, not as the end product of large and abstract processes” (20).

PPM also converged with, and indeed helped to foster, a growing theme in both sociological and political science debates on social movements: the “political process” approach.⁷

But this political approach to social movements raised the problem of how to specify the role of institutions. When we think back to the movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, as well as those of the 1930s, we are most likely to recall a lot of disruption. But can we really separate the disruptive capacity of those movements from the dynamics of the institutional politics around them? For example, can we understand the remarkable organizational growth of the industrial conflict of the 1930s without taking account of the Wagner Act and the New Deal in general? Can we understand the civil rights movement's “disruptive period” without noting its earlier judicial successes and, even earlier, the Truman and Eisenhower administrations' Cold War–induced rhetorical support for civil rights? Disruption as a strategy depended upon—and to some extent was facilitated by—a favorable structure of political opportunity within institutions.

The other side of that coin, of course, was the stagnation of disruptive politics from the late 1970s through most of the 1990s, when that opportunity structure was constricted. From this point of view, the institutionalization of civil rights into electoral and patronage politics, the decline of the labor movement, and the ossification of the university left are of a piece—but not a piece that PPM helped us to understand. By arraying disruption versus institutional politics, PPM made it difficult to specify the role of institutional politics in relation to disruption. An extreme form of disruption takes us back to Western Europe.

Violence and the Decline of the European Left

As Americans like Gitlin began to yearn for the kind of universalism that Marxism used to offer, European leftists were becoming disenchanted with the workerist Marxism I had encountered in the 1960s and 1970s. The post-1968 dissolution of neo-Marxism, the rise of an autonomous feminist left, the Thatcherite assault on the unions, the collapse of the country of “real” socialism, and the shift of revolutionary energy to the global South all put paid to that. But there was something else as well: the growing association between leftism and violence.

Interestingly, for a book that proffers disruption as the most effective form of social movement activity, PPM had little to say about violence (see pages 18–22 for the clearest statement). The authors argued cogently that violence is not the same as disruption, frowning upon the former while describing the latter as the foremost tool of the poor. They also correctly dismissed the false association between lower-class protest and violence that came out of both the conservative reaction to the French Revolution and the sociology of Talcott Parsons. But they neglected to address the dynamic relationship between mass disruption and small-group violence that several observers of the European left have noted.⁸

Every cycle of protest has different phases in which there are varying ratios of mass protest and sectarian violence. The earliest phases generally lean toward mass protest peopled by dedicated activists as well as peripheral but enthusiastic occasional participants. Members of the latter group tend to fall away as the going gets tough and exhaustion sets in, leaving subsequent phases of the cycle dominated by more practiced activists who are hardened by clashes with police or opponents and are willing to take more chances on behalf of their claims.⁹

This was the outcome of the Italian sessantotto and of the 1960s protest cycles in a number of other European countries.¹⁰

Between Europe and America

Now the European and American lefts have become less distinctly separate in the eyes of European intellectuals. Consider Geoff Eley's monumental work Forging Democracy.¹¹

Poor People's Movements in the New Century

Although PPM was largely ignored by the theorists of European neo-Marxism in the 1970s and 1980s—and denied by the acolytes of the American postmodern left in the 1980s and 1990s—its relevance is greater than ever today. In both Europe and the United States, inequality and unemployment are on the rise, the official lefts are in disarray, and it is hard to find much difference in practice between the pallid centrism of a Tony Blair and the relentless chauvinism of a George W. Bush. As the longawaited revival of the institutional labor movement remains, well, long-awaited, reserves of militancy have appeared in oncemarginal corners of society on both sides of the Atlantic: among janitors in Los Angeles and chambermaids in Las Vegas; unhoused immigrants in Paris and lorry drivers in London; tuna fishermen in Spain and earthquake victims in Italy; and port workers from Liverpool to Oakland to Sydney. What unites these groups is their structural position in late-capitalist society and their willingness to disrupt its institutional routines. Both Europe and America are entering a new cycle of protest powered by PPM's people.

However, an important query remains. In PPM and even more centrally in Regulating the Poor, Piven and Cloward offered evidence that when the left makes a breakthrough, it is because the poor have taken advantage of opportunities opened up by a broadly felt tremor in the body politic. The emergence of protest is thus the result not of organization or leadership, but of political process and timing. But when it came to movement decline, rather than use the same broad-gauged political factors they used to elucidate emergence, Piven and Cloward narrowed their explanation to the drag of mass-membership organization on the poor's capacity for disruption. This imbalance between a broadly extra-movement model of emergence and an intra-movement explanation of decline has always seemed to me an odd asymmetry in their work.

These are not just academic meanderings. We are at the start of a new global cycle of protest in which both intra- and extramovement factors are likely to prove critical. The emergence of the new cycle can be partly explained externally: by globalization and its inequalities, as mediated by the institutions of advanced capitalism, which provide both targets and opportunities to the protesters. But every protest cycle eventually passes its peak, and those who seek progressive change would do well to reflect on the extra-movement sources of decline that Piven and Cloward left unspecified. Clearly, leaders will emerge, organizations will be formed, and institutional strategies will be hammered out; but as we have seen in the United States since September 11, 2001, it is the structure of political opportunities and risks that shapes the possibility of turning brief moments of protest into long-term strategies of reform.

What sources of external support can the left rely upon in the new century? In the late 1960s, antiwar organizers found external support in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, in a press hungry for political conflict to cover, and in a burgeoning mass movement schooled in the experience of civil rights. But in the first half decade of the new century, the press has been bought or intimidated and the Democratic Party shows few signs of life. If activists against the bellicose policies of the Bush administration have any external support, it is in the newly enlivened left wing of the trade unions, in an intellectual left that has emerged from its postmodern ghetto, and in the convergence of massive European and American antiwar opinion. To such a new cycle of protest, PPM has a lot to teach.