March 17, 2006: Social Movements #3: Piven and Cloward
Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward's Poor Peoples' Movements (1977) looked at social struggle in the U.S. during the 1930s and 60s, and offered some interesting insights into movement dynamics. I've extracted a selection of quotes from the first chapter of the book in order to illustrate their main views:
"[M]ost of the time people conform to the institutional arrangements which enmesh them, which regulate the rewards and penalties of daily life, and which appear to be the only possible reality...Institutional patterns shape mass movements by shaping the collectivities out of which protest can arise. Institutional life aggregates people or disperses them, molds group identities, and draws people into settings within which collective action can erupt...the emergence of popular uprisings reflects profound changes in the larger society...[The significance of disruptive social change is] not simply that people find their expectations frustrated and so feel anger. It is also that when the structures of daily life weaken, the regulatory capacities of these structures, too, are weakened...only under exceptional conditions are the lower classes afforded the socially determined opportunities to press for their own class interests."
Although Piven and Cloward were able to capture certain important aspects of peoples' movements, critics have pointed out several problems with their analysis. One is that they tended to portray subordinate social groups as essentially passive elements, until periods of social disorganization created social stress and a breakdown of consent, at which point a spontaneous form of mass political action would arise.
However, the historical record indicates a more complicated situation, with activist/intellectual networks, movement organizations, and unions also playing an important role in movement upsurges. The existence of these institutions are indicative of well-entrenched cleavages in society, and such institutions maintain an important, if diminished, oppositional social presence during ebb periods of movement activity.
