The Cloward-Piven Strategy In Action

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Whether or not the protests actually were rooted in George Floyd's death, it is clear that continued protests, riots and looting are not, but serve some other purpose.

      Obviously, for many involved in the looting, it is just for the money as one Santa Monica looter candidly admitted. He's being modest in what he wants to thieve, though. "Robert Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television, told CNBC on Monday the U.S. government should provide $14 trillion of reparations for slavery to help reduce racial inequality."

      “Wealth transfer is what’s needed,” he argued. “Think about this. Since 200-plus-years or so of slavery, labor taken with no compensation, is a wealth transfer. Denial of access to education, which is a primary driver of accumulation of income and wealth, is a wealth transfer.”

      Johnson, 74 made history as America’s first black billionaire when he sold BET to Viacom in 2001. Shortly after the sale, he started the investment firm The RLJ Cos. He’s no longer on the Forbes billionaires list.

      Calling reparations the “affirmative action program of all time,” Johnson said they would send the signal that white Americans acknowledge “damages that are owed” for the unequal playing field created by slavery and the decades since with a “wealth transfer to white Americans away from African Americans.”

       Yet for others the protests and rioting is, ostensibly, a mechanism for "social justice."  Former President Obama encouraged the continued protests, seeing them as a mechanism for "real change," while stating out of the side of his mouth that he condemned the violence. He writes that "the waves of protests across the country represent a genuine and legitimate frustration over a decades-long failure to reform police practices and the broader criminal justice system in the United States," without mentioning that many modern police practices were a backlash against high black-driven crime rates during the 1960's, 70's, and 80's. However conciliatory Obama sounds, others have dropped pretenses. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar excuses the rioting as being the "voices of people that have no voice." He seemingly echoed a protester who told a CNN reporter: "Nobody gives a f–k about us. OK? Unless we get violent. Y’all care about the s–t getting burned down...."

       But to believe that these riots are purely race riots would be wrong. Many of those apprehended have been privileged or whites from suburbs. Their attitude is probably best summed up by a black Black Lives Matter (BLM) speaker in Trafalgar Squire protest in London:

“It’s time to wake up and get out [of] the house and fuck this place up, man. I’m tired of this shit. We need to burn this shit down. I don’t care what the London mayor says. The West is falling! The West is falling!” 

These are socialist/communist riots organized and encouraged by BLM and Antifa. Attorney General Barr stated the other day that "Groups of outside radicals and agitators are exploiting the situation to pursue their own separate and violent agenda," and that "In many places it appears the violence is planned, organized and driven by anarchic and far-left extremist groups using antifa-like tactics." Andy Ngo, who has both studied and been a victim of both organizations, relates that "[w]e are witnessing glimmers of the full insurrection the far-left has been working toward for decades. The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis was merely a pre-text for radicals to push their ambitious insurgency. In a matter of hours, after the video of Floyd began circulating the internet, militant antifa cells across the country mobilized to Minnesota to aid Black Lives Matter rioters." He continues:

Antifa, the extreme anarchist-communist movement, has rioting down to an art. The first broken window is the blood in the water for looters to move in. When the looting is done, those carrying flammable chemicals start fires to finish the job. Footage recorded in Minneapolis and other cities show militants dressed in black bloc— the antifa uniform — wielding weapons like hammers or sticks to smash windows. You see their graffiti daubed on smashed up buildings: FTP means ‘Fuck the Police’; ACAB stands for ‘All Cops Are Bastards’; 1312 is the numerical code for ACAB.

He also observes:

At its core, BLM is a revolutionary Marxist ideology. Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors, BLM’s founders, are self-identified Marxists who make no secret of their worship of communist terrorists and fugitives, like Assata Shakur. They want the abolishment of law enforcement and capitalism. They want regime change and the end of the rule of law. Antifa has partnered with Black Lives Matter, for now, to help accelerate the break down of society. 

      And that brings me to what I believe to be the raison d'être of the protests and riots: the radical remaking of America by stressing the system until there is no choice but to accept a socialist system. I am, of course, speaking of the Cloward-Piven Strategy to implement socialist revolution.

       First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

      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), Cloward and Piven published an article titled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty" in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called "crisis strategy" or "Cloward-Piven Strategy," as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.

       In their 1966 article, 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 (sic) 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.

        The authors noted that the number of Americans subsisting on welfare -- about 8 million, at the time -- probably represented less than half the number who were technically eligible for full benefits. They proposed a "massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls."  Cloward and Piven calculated that persuading even a fraction of potential welfare recipients to demand their entitlements would bankrupt the system. The result, they predicted, would be "a profound financial and political crisis" that would unleash "powerful forces … for major economic reform at the national level."

        Their article called for "cadres of aggressive organizers" to use "demonstrations to create a climate of militancy." Intimidated by threats of black violence, politicians would appeal to the federal government for help. Carefully orchestrated media campaigns, carried out by friendly, leftwing journalists, would float the idea of "a federal program of income redistribution," in the form of a guaranteed living income for all -- working and non-working people alike. Local officials would clutch at this idea like drowning men to a lifeline. They would apply pressure on Washington to implement it. With every major city erupting into chaos, Washington would have to act. This was an example of what are commonly called Trojan Horse movements -- mass movements whose outward purpose seems to be providing material help to the downtrodden, but whose real objective is to draft poor people into service as revolutionary foot soldiers; to mobilize poor people en masse to overwhelm government agencies with a flood of demands beyond the capacity of those agencies to meet. The flood of demands was calculated to break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears into gridlock, and bring the system crashing down. Fear, turmoil, violence and economic collapse would accompany such a breakdown -- providing perfect conditions for fostering radical change. That was the theory.

The initial efforts ultimately failed because, shocked at the abuse of the welfare system, there was a voter backlash ultimately leading to restrictions on welfare. This necessitated a change in tactics:

        In 1982, partisans of the Cloward-Piven strategy founded a new "voting rights movement," which purported to take up the unfinished work of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Like ACORN, the organization that spear-headed this campaign, the new "voting rights" movement was led by veterans of George Wiley's welfare rights crusade. Its flagship organizations were Project Vote and Human SERVE, both founded in 1982. Project Vote is an ACORN front group, launched by former NWRO organizer and ACORN co-founder Zach Polett. Human SERVE was founded by Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, along with a former NWRO organizer named Hulbert James.

       All three of these organizations -- ACORN, Project Vote and Human SERVE -- set to work lobbying energetically for the so-called Motor-Voter law, which Bill Clinton ultimately signed in 1993. The Motor-Voter bill is largely responsible for swamping the voter rolls with "dead  wood" -- invalid registrations signed in the name of deceased, ineligible or non-existent people -- thus opening the door to the unprecedented  levels of voter fraud and "voter disenfranchisement" claims that followed in subsequent elections.

       The new "voting rights" coalition combines mass voter registration drives -- typically featuring high levels of fraud -- with systematic intimidation of election officials in the form of frivolous lawsuits, unfounded charges of "racism" and "disenfranchisement," and "direct action" (street protests, violent or otherwise). Just as they swamped America's welfare offices in the 1960s, Cloward-Piven devotees now seek to overwhelm the nation's understaffed and poorly policed electoral system. Their tactics set the stage for the Florida recount crisis of 2000, and have introduced a level of fear, tension and foreboding to U.S. elections heretofore encountered mainly in Third World countries. 

       That these riots are planned seems supported on the ground. For instance, videos from New York City, Kansas City, Dallas and Fayetteville in North Carolina all appear to show unattended pallets of bricks in locations where there has been rioting. And looters in Rochester, NY, took to using lengths of 2x4 to nearly beat a woman to death when she voiced her objections to the looting.

     Why the building supplies? Probably because police are unwilling to intervene when there are no "weapons" per se being using. John Boch, writing at The Truth About Guns, discussed what he called "the Battle of Target" in Bloomington, Illinois, observing:

     Police played cat and mouse with carloads of “protesters” for a couple of hours until both cops and crooks met in the “Battle of Target” at about 1:00a.m. Cops retreated after the bad guys chucked hammers, bottles, rocks and bricks at them.

     Seems the local police decided that meeting deadly force with deadly force wasn’t the outcome their leadership wanted, so they retreated. Looters then stormed the store and gutted the interior as cops literally watched a few car lengths away. Before the officers finally drove away, that is.

But, like many locals around the nation, "thanks to video, the whole community saw the impotence of their local law enforcement in maintaining order."

      And that is the point. As Ngo explains, "[e]nding law enforcement is a pre-condition for antifa and BLM’s success in monopolizing violence." Moreover, Ngo writes:

The destruction of businesses we’re witnessing across the US is not mere opportunism by looters. It plays a critical role in antifa and BLM ideology. Their stated goal is to abolish capitalism. To do that, they have to make economic recovery impossible. Antifa sees a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to exploit an economically weakened America during the coronavirus pandemic. 

And perhaps they will succeed at wrecking the economy since it has already been crippled due to the shutdowns due to the Wuhan virus pandemic. As Jim Kunstler points out, "there’s a good chance that the current violence in the streets won’t blow over as it has before. There hasn’t been such sudden, massive unemployment before, not even in the Great Depression — and we’re not even the same country that went through that rough episode."