Better in their words…

By JAMES TARANTOIn the olden days, Frances Fox Piven was a cutting-edge social theorist of the hard left. In a 1977 book, she and her husband, Richard Cloward, argued “that the poor and unemployed are so isolated from the levers of power in America that their greatest potential impact is to withhold ‘quiescence in civil life: they can riot,’ ” as Stanley Kurtz reports in National Review Online: At the heart of the book, Cloward and Piven luxuriously describe instances of “mob looting,” “rent riots,” and similar disruptions, egged on especially by Communist-party organizers in the 1930s.

Many of those violent protests resulted in injuries. A few led to deaths. The central argument of Poor People’s Movements is that it was not formal democratic activity but violent disruptions inspired by leftist organizers that forced the first great expansion of the welfare state. Toward the end of the book, when Cloward and Piven describe their own work with the National Welfare Rights Organization, they treat the violent urban rioting of the Sixties as a positive force behind that era’s expansion of the welfare statePiven is now in the autumn of life, 78 and widowed nearly a decade. But she still dreams of revolution, as evidenced by this article in the Jan. 10 issue of the soft-core hard-left periodical The Nation: Before people can mobilize for collective action, they have to develop a proud and angry identity and a set of claims that go with that identity. They have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry and indignant. . . . An effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece in response to the austerity measures forced on the Greek government by the European Union, or like the student protests that recently spread with lightning speed across England in response to the prospect of greatly increased school fees.

The first paragraph of this passage could describe the Tea Party movement. But the Tea Party is nonviolent, and the second paragraph makes clear that is not what Piven has in mind. In fact, Piven has nothing but scorn for Tea Party, which is the subject of a bigoted rant she delivered last month, which you can hear on Glenn Beck’s site TheBlaze.com: These voters . . . are older. . . . They’re white, they’re all white. . . . These are the people in American society–and you know, they are always there. . . . For them, change is for the worse. After all, there’s an African-American in the White House. That’s sort of beyond their cultural experience. The American population is darkening. That’s also beyond their experience. . . . And you know, I don’t have any data on this, but I am absolutely sure that sex is very important in what is happening to older people.

No doubt the Tea Party’s individualistic orientation also makes it anathema to the superannuated socialist. Piven has gained a degree of notoriety of late thanks to Beck, who has frequently and harshly criticized her ideas on his radio and TV shows. In a Saturday news story, the New York Times reported that “her name has become a kind of shorthand for ‘enemy’ on Mr. Beck’s Fox News Channel program.”A three-part, 15-letter, five-syllable name is “shorthand” for a five-letter word? As we shall see, that isn’t the only thing the Times got backward about this story.This passage in the Times story sums up the Piven-Beck ruckus: Her assertions that “an effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece,” and that “protesters need targets, preferably local and accessible ones,” led Mr. Beck to ask on Fox this week, “Is that not inciting violence? Is that not asking for violence?” Videos of fires in Greece played behind him. “That is not a call for violence,” Ms. Piven said Friday of the references to riots. “There is a kind of rhetorical trick that is always used to denounce movements of ordinary people, and that is to imply that the massing of people itself is violent.”It must be said that the answer to Beck’s question is no. Piven is not inciting violence.[botwt0124] YouTube/”Democracy Now”Piven: “Sex is very important.”  . . .

via Advocate of Violence – WSJ.com.