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The strategy aims to utilize “militant anti poverty groups” to facilitate a “political crisis” by overloading the welfare system via an increase in welfare claims, forcing the creation of a system of guaranteed minimum income and “redistributing income through the federal government”.^[1][2][3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloward%E2%80%93Piven_strategy

The Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. The strategy aims to utilize “militant anti poverty groups” to facilitate a “political crisis” by overloading the welfare system via an increase in welfare claims, forcing the creation of a system of guaranteed minimum income and “redistributing income through the federal government”.^[1][2][3]

History

Cloward and Piven were both professors at the Columbia University School of Social Work. The strategy was outlined in a May 1966 article in the liberal magazine The Nation titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty”.^[4]

Strategy

Cloward and Piven’s article is focused on compelling the Democratic Party, which in 1966 controlled the presidency and both houses of the United States Congress, to redistribute income to help the poor. They stated that full enrollment of those eligible for welfare “would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments” that would: “…deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor. To avoid a further weakening of that historic coalition, a national Democratic administration would be constrained to advance a federal solution to poverty that would override local welfare failures, local class and racial conflicts and local revenue dilemmas.”^[5]

They further wrote:

The ultimate objective of this strategy – to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income – will be questioned by some. Because the ideal of individual social and economic mobility has deep roots, even activists seem reluctant to call for national programs to eliminate poverty by the outright redistribution of income.^[5]

Michael Reisch and Janice Andrews wrote that Cloward and Piven “proposed to create a crisis in the current welfare system – by exploiting the gap between welfare law and practice – that would ultimately bring about its collapse and replace it with a system of guaranteed annual income. They hoped to accomplish this end by informing the poor of their rights to welfare assistance, encouraging them to apply for benefits and, in effect, overloading an already overburdened bureaucracy.”^[6]

Focus on Democrats

The authors pinned their hopes on creating disruption within the Democratic Party:

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