Organizing the poor

Abstract

Piven and Cloward aimed to be provocative, but they did so by badly overstating their argument. They are too fair-minded to ignore completely the contribution and courage of organizers in these movements. In spite of their thesis, they pay occasional obeisance to movement organizers and exemplars. “There were nevertheless organizers in these [labor] struggles,” they acknowledge. “Some of these organizers were insurgents from the rank and file; others were radicals whose vision of an alternative future helped to account for their exemplary courage. Wherever these organizers came from, their vision helped goad workers into protest, and their courage gave workers heart and determination” (148). Nor can they ignore the role of organizational activists in the civil-rights movement. They seek exemption from the implications of this activity by noting that these organizations were not much concerned with building formal membership and were “cadre organizations.” But the idea of cadre organizations doesn't appear in the index, is introduced in an ad hoc manner to preserve their argument, and is never developed. In their account of the National Welfare Rights Organization, Piven and Cloward advocate a cadre organization, modelled on the successes of the civil-rights movement and of SCLC in particular (, 282–85). When Poor People's Movements goes from general thesis to specific case analysis, the argument becomes less provocative but more reasonable. Apparently, it is not every organization that discourages insurgency, aspires to create a mass membership and hierarchical bureaucracy, and is willing to sell its birthright for a mess of elite pottage. Some movement organizations' stimulate anger and defiance, and escalate the momentum of the people's protests. Some use their communication networks to spread disruptive forms of collective action and their organizational planning to chart strategy and timing, and to increase the effectiveness of collective action. Some institutionalize their dependence on their own constituency rather than come to rely on elite resources for survival. If some militant organizations later become tame and abandon their oppositional politics, other formerly docile organizations sometimes become centers of militancy - as the black churches and colleges did in the Southern civil rights movement. The intellectual task becomes the more exacting one of figuring out what types of organization are likely to facilitate insurgency or abandon their oppositional politics under different historical conditions. Poor People's Movements might be interpreted as providing one kind of answer to this question, an argument against mass-membership organizations. This is certainly a much less dramatic and provocative thesis. But in the end, an analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of different forms of organization is a great deal more useful to students of social movements than the anti-organizational phillipic that the authors offer us.