Poor People’s Movements – Frances Fox Piven & Richard Cloward

Interesting analysis of some historical movements that challenge a lot of what I thought about organizing and social change. Very worthwhile read.

Here are some quotes (sometimes with slight changes for context) that I really liked from the book. Sorry about typos and such.
If something is in quotes, it means that the authors are quoting someone else (which she does a lot).
  • Organizations
    • The mass membership bureaucracy was, after all, not invented by the left, but is rather a form through which the left emulated the modes of organization that exist in the capitalist society the left seeks to transform. that it should be defended so uncritically seems odd
    • activists do not recognize the flaw inherent in the mass-based permanent organization model because they are attracted to the possibility of organizing the lower classes at extradorinary times at moments when large numbers of lower-class peoplel are roused to indignation and defiance and thus when a great deal seems possible
    • those who call themselves organizers do not usually escalate the momentum of the peoples’s protests. they do not because they are preoccupied with trying to build and sustain embryonic formal organizations in the sure conviction that these organizations will enlarge and become powerful. thus the studies that follow show that, all to often, when workers erupted in strikes, organizers collected dues cards; when tenants refused to pay rent and stood off marshals, organizers formed building committees; when people were burning and looting, organizers used that “moment of madness” to draft constitutions
    • organizers not only failed to seize the opportunity presented by the rise of unrest, they typically acted in ways that blunted or curbed the disruptive force which lower-class people were sometimes able to mobilize.
    • co-option
      • as for the few organizations which survive, it is because they become more useful to those who control the resources on which they depend than to the lower-class groups which the organizations claim to represent. organizations endure, in short, by abandoning their oppositional politics
      • elites conferred these resources because they understood that it was organizing-building, not disruption, that organizers were about.
      • they (elites) have little to fear from organizations, especially from organization which come to depend upon them for support. thus, however unwittingly, leaders and organizers of the lower classes act in the end to facilitate the efforts of elites to channel the insurgents into normal politics.
  • Power and Society
    • common sense and historical experience combine to suggest a simple but compelling view of the roots of power in any society. crudely but clearly states, this who control the means of physical coercion and those who control the means of producing wealth, have power over those who do not
    • these sources of power are protected and enlarged by the use of that power not only to control the actions of mean and women, but also to control their beliefs. what some call superstructure, and what other call culture, includes an elaborate system of beliefs and ritual behaviors which defines for people what is right and what is wrong and why; what is possible and what is impossible; and the behavioral imperatives that follow form these beliefs. because this superstructure of beliefs and rituals is evoked in the context of unequal power, it is inevitable that beliefs and retrials reinforced inquwaulity, by rendering the powerful divine and the challengers evail. thus the class struggles that might otherwise be inevitable in sharply unequal societies ordinarily do not seem either possible or right from the perspective of those who live within the structure of belief and ritual fashioned by those societies. people whose only possible recourse in struggles is to defy the beliefs and rituals laid down by their rules ordinarily do not.
    • rich and poor are ascribed to personal qualities of industry or talent; if follows that hose who have littleor nothing only have what they deserve
  • Protest
    • so long as lower class groups abided by the norms governing the electoral representative system, they would have little influence. it therefore became clear, at least to some of us, that protest tactics which defied political norms were not simply the recourse of troublemakers and fools. for the poor, they were the only recourse. 
    • the occasions when protest is possible among the poor, the forms that is must take, and the impact it can have are all delimited by the social structure in ways which usually diminish its extent and diminish its force.
    • only under exceptional conditions are the lower classes afforded the socially determined opportunity to press for their own class interests
    • it not only requires a major social dislocation before protest can emerge, but that a sequence or comintaiton of dislocations probably must occur before the anger that underlies protest builds to a hight pitch, and before that anger can find expression in collective defiance
    • when the structures of daily life weaken, the regulatory capacities of these structures, too, are weakened. “a revolution takes place when and only when, in such a society, people can no longer lead their everyday lives; so long as they can live their ordinary lives relations are constantly re-established.
    • for a protest movement to arise out of these traumas of daily life, people have to perceive the deprivation and disoorganisaion they experience as both wrong and subject to redress
    • within these central city gettos, the unemployment rates in the 1950s and 1960s reached depression levels. the sheer scale of these dislocations helped to mute the sense of self-blame, predisposing men and women to view their plight as a collective one, and to blame their rulers for the destitution and stagnation they experienced
    • since periods of profound social dislocations are infrequent, so too are opportunities for protest among the lower class
    • workers experience the factory, the speeding rhythm of the assembly line, the foreman, the spies and guards, the owner and the paycheck. they do not experience monopoly capitalism. people on relief experience the shabby waiting rooms, the overseer or the caseworker, and the dole. they do not experience american social welfare policy. tenants experience the leaking ceilings and cold radiators, and they recognize the landlord. they do not recognize the banking, real estate and construction systems. no small wonder, therefore, that when the poor rebel they so often rebel against the overseer of the poor, or the slumlord, or the middling merchant, and not against the banks or the governing elites to whom the overseer, the slumlord, and the merchange also defer. in other words, it is the daily experience of the people that shapes their grievances, established the measure of their demands, and pouts of the targes of their anger
    • the poor are usually in the least strategic position to benefit from defiance
    • Opportunities for Protest
      • opportunities for defiance are not created by analyses of power structures. if there is a genius in organizing, it is the capacity to sense what is possible for people go do under given conditions, and to then help them do it. in point of fact, however, most organizing ventures ask that people do what they cannot do, and the result is faliture.
      • opportunities for defiance are structured by features of institutional life. simply put, people cannot defy institutions to which they have no access, and to which they make no contribution.
      • protest is more likely to have a seriously disruptive impact when the protestors play a central role in an institution, and it is more likely to evoke wider political reverberations when powerful groups have large stakes in the distrupted institution.
      • the mass strike is not artificially “made,” not “decided” out of the blue, not “propagated,” but rather it is an historical phenomenon which at a certain moment follows with historicl necessity from the social relations… if anyone were to undertake to make the mass strike in general, as one form of proletarian action, the objector of methodical agitation, and to go house to house peddling this “idea” in order to gradually to win the working class to it, it would be as idle, as profitless, and as crazy an occupations ask it would be to seek to make the idea of the revolution into the object of a particular agitation
      • their use of that power, the weighing of gains and risks, is not calculated in board rooms; it wells up outo of the terrible trials that people experience at times of rupture and stress. and at such times, disruptions by the poor may have reverberations that go beyond the institution in which the disruption is acted out.
    • response
      • protest moments do not arise during ordinary periods; they arise when large scales changes undermined political stability. it is the is context, as we said earlier, that gives the poor hope and makes insurgency possible in the first place. it is this context that also makes political leaders somewhat vulnerable to protests by the poor.
      • in short, under conditions of seer electoral instability, the alliance of public and private power is sometimes weakened, if only briefly, and at these moments a defiant poor may make gain
      • they may ignore it; they may employ punitive measures against the disruptors; or they may attempt to conciliate them. if the disruptive group has little political leverage in its own right, as is true of the lower class groups, it will either be ignored or repressed. it is more likely to be ignored when the distupred institution is not centraual to the society as a whole, or to more important groups. repression is more likely to be employed when central institutions are affected.
    • concessions
      • concession are rarely unencumbered. if they are given at all, they are usually part and parcel of measures to reintegrate the movement into normal political channels and to absorb its leaders into stable institutional roles. thus the right of industrial works to unionize, won in response to massive and disruptive strikes in the 1930s, meant that workers were encouraged to use newly established grievance procedures in place of the sit down or the wildcat strike; and the new union leaders, now absorbed in relations with factory management and in the councils of the Democratic Party, became the ideological proponets and organzationsl leaders of this strategy of normalcy and moderation.
      • nor was it fortuitous that political leaders came to proclaim as just such causes as the right to organize or the right to vote or rate right to “citizen participation” in each case, elites responded to discontent by proposing reforms with which they had experience, and which consisted mainly of extending established procedures to new groups or to new inistutionsal arenas. collective bargaining was not invited in the 1930s, nor the franchise in the 1960s. driven by turmoil, political leaders proposed reforms that were in a sense prefigured by institutional arrangements that already existed, that were drawn from a repertoire provided by existing traditions. and an aroused people responded by demanding simply what political deaders had said they should have.
      • the concessions to protestors, the efforts to “bring them into the system,” and in particular the measures aimed at potential supporters, all work to create a powerful image of a benevolent and responsive government that answers grievances and solves problems. as a result, whatever support might have existed among the larger population dwindles.
      • leaders and groups who are more disruptive, or who spurn the concession offered, are signaled out for arbitrary police action or for more formal legal harassment through congressional investigations or through the courts. in the context of much-publicized efforts by government to ease the grievances of disaffected groups, coercive measures of the is kind are not likely to arouse indignation among sympathetic publics. indeed this dual strategy is useful in another way, for it serves to cast an aura of balance and judiciousness over government action.
    • what these examples suggest is that protesters win, if they win at all, what historical circumstances has already made ready to be conceded.
    • those who refuse to recognize these limits not only blindly consign lower class protest to the realm of the semi rational, but also blindly continue to pretend that other, more regular options for political influence are widely available in the american political system
    • protest wells up in response to momentous changes in the intuitional order. it is not created by organizers and leaders.
    • once protest errupts, the forms it take are largely determined by features of social structures. oraganziess and leaders who contrive strategies that ignore the social locations of the people they seek to mobilize can only fail.
  • Case Studies:
    • unemployed workers movement
      • the discontent these poor might have felt was muffled, in part, by the relief system and the image of the terrible humiliation inflected on those who became paupers.
      • they did not demand relief, for to do so was to give up the struggle to remain above the despised pauper class.
      • the communists brought misery out of hiding in the workers’ neighborhoods. they paraded it with angry demands… in hundred of jobless meetings, i heard no objections to the points the communist made, and much applause of them. sometimes, i’d hear a communist speaker say something so bitter and extreme, i’d feel embarrassed. then it’s look around at the unemployed audience – shabby clothes, expressessions worried and sour. faces would start to glow, heads to nod, hands to clap
      • some people came to believe that if there were no jobs – if the factories and offices and workshops turned them away – then they had a right to the income they needed to survive anyway
      • local protest were declining largely as a result of the Roosevelt Administration’s more liberal relief machinery, which diverted local groups from disruptive tactics and absorbed local leaders in bureaucratic roles. and once the movement weakened, and the instability of which it was one expression subsided, relief was cut back. that this happened speaks mainly to the resiliency of the American political system. that it happened so quickly, however, and at so cheap a price, speaks to the role played by leaders of the unemployed themselves. for by seeking to achieve more substantial reform through organization and electoral pressure, they forfeited local disruptions and became, however inadvertently, collaborators in the process that emaculacated the movement.
      • what leverage these groups had exerted on local relief officials resulted from the very disturbances, the “pressure tactics,” which both leaders and administrator later scorned as primitive.
      • By abandoning distupritve tactics in favor of bureaucratic procedures, the movement lost the ability to influence relief decisions in the local offices. no longer able to produce tangible benefits, the alliance also lost the main inducement by which it had activated great numbers of people.
      • the leadership failed to understand that government does not need to meet the demands of an organized vanguard in order to assuage mass unrest, although it doest have to deal with the unrest itself.
    • industrial workers movement
      • factory workers had their greatest influence and were able to extract their most substantial concession from government during the early years of the Great Depression before they were organized into unions. their power was not rooted in organization, but in their capacity to disrupt the economy. for the most part strikes, demonstrations, and sit-downs spread during the mid-1930s despite existing unions rather than because of them
      • the united states steel corporation was too big to be beaten by 300,000 working men. it had too large a cash surplus, too many allies among other businesses , too much support from government officers, local and national, too strong influence with social institutions such as the press and the pulpit, it spread over too much of the earth – still retaining absolutely centralized control- to be defeated by widely scattered workers of many minds, many fears, varying states of pocketbook and under a comparatively improvised leadership
      • The united states
        • nowhere else was the use of blacklists and the employment of pirate armies, as well as the elaborate network of employer espionage and blacklisting serves, so highly developed as the united states. by the end of the nineteenth century, the ranks of the Pinkerton agents and “reservists” outnumbered the standing army of the nation
        • in no other western country have employers been so much aided in their opposition to union by civil authorities, the armed forces of government and their courts
        • the political alienation to which Bendix ascribes the European working class movement of the nineteenth century did not emerge so acutely in the United States, for workers were at least granted the vote, the symbol of political influence, and they were include in the rituals of political participation as well
      • the reluctance of elites to acknowledge that much was amiss helped turn distress inward, to keep the disorder of private lives from becoming public
      • “i say to you gentleman, advisedly, that if something is not done… the doors of revolt in this country are going to be thrown open
      • it was, however, the inauguration of a president who promised to look to the forgotten man and the passage of legislation which promised to protect the forgotten industrial worker that gave the discontented a rightousnous, that they had not had before
      • they had handed over the high dues that the AFL demanded of its federal locals and then found themselves confused by the jurisdictional tangles their leaders imposed on them, and discouraged by the moderation and conciliation their leaders demanded of them. at this stage, organization failed, and perhaps for that reason, the workers movement grew
      • “we have carried on a stay-in strike for over a month in order to make General Motors Corporation obey the law and engage in collective bargaining… unarmed as we are, the indrotuction of militia, sheriffs or police with murderous weapons will mean a blood bath of unarmed workers… we have decided to stay in the plant. we have no illusions about the sacrifices which this decision will entail. we fully expect that if a violent effort is made to oust us, many of us will be killed, and we take this means of making it known to our wives, to our children, to the people of Michigan that if this result follows from the attempt to eject us, you are the one who must be held responsible for our deaths”
      • a small number of workers could sit down on the line and stop production, without benefit of much advanced planning or advance commitment. with workers controlling the pant, employers could not import strikebreakers.
      • “you’d be sitting in the office any March day of 1937, and the phone would ring and the voice at the other end would say, ‘ my name is mary jones; i’m a soda clerk and Leggett’s; we’ve thrown the manager out and we’ve got the keys. what do we do now?’”
      • the rubber workers in Akron, the auto workers in Flint, the steel workers in Pennsylvania had all be able to overcome employer resistance only because governors dependent on the support of aroused workers were reluctant to send groups against the strikers. and in youngstown and chichago, where state and local governments were hostile, the little steel strike was lost, the workers economic power once more destroyed by government firepower.
      • some of the fiercest struggles in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries occurred when the unions were weakest and sometimes despite the resistance of established union leadership. but while existing unions could not often be credited with the great worker struggles of the pre-depression years, there were nevertheless organizers in these struggles. 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.
      • John L. Lewis and the CIO did not create the strike movement of industrial workers; it was the strike moment that created the CIO.
      • the spirit generated by mass strikes had helped build the industrial unions. the disruptive political force exerted by mass strikes had compiled the federal government to establish a framework that would protect the unions over time. but once established, the unions in turn did not promote disruption, either in economic or political spheres.
      • in 1956, George Meany, president of the now merged AFL-CIO, boasted to the National Associatoin of Manfacturerers: “I never went on strike in my life i never ordered anyone else to run a strike in my life, i never had anything to do with a picket line… in the final analysis, there is not a great deal of difference between the things i stand for and the things that the National Association of Manucacturers stand for
      • when the agreement was signed, the steelworkers not struck in fourteen years, and during that time they had fallen from the highest paid industrial workers to fourteenth on the list
      • the unions had undertaken the responsibility for trying to control the rank and file, standing as buffers between workers and management. in part, the unions did this by introducing some of the rituals of democratic representation into the work place, rituals which tended to delegitimize worker defiance when it did occur
      • what happened, quite simply, was that the organizations born out of the workers’ protest had become over time less and less dependent on workers, and more and more dependent on the regular relations established with management
      • the automatic dues check-off system has removed the union entirely from any dependence on its membership. the huge treasuries, originally conceived to stockpile ammunition for class warfare, have put the unions into the banking, real estate, and insurance business.
      • the notion of contract implies a recognition by the union of its responsibilities for the enforecemtne of the agreement, which sometimes placed even radical union leadership in the seemingly anomalous position of having to act against its own constituency, when the contract was violated by members of the rank and file. thus, the price which the union had to pay for the benefits it received was to become part of the productive system itself
      • Electoral gains
        • What they had won, they had won by force of their belligerency in the mines, and not by their influence in the White House or in the halls of Congress. Of the 219 Democratic congressmen who had voted for Smith-Connally (anti-union bill), 191 and been supported by PAC (pro-union pac).
        • this dismal overall record in electoral and legislative politics was accomplished by the largest issue-oriented voting bloc in the nation
        • neither this vast bloc of voters nor the sophisticated machinery of their organization could muster power sufficient even to resist the erosion of the gains won earlier, in the days before the unions had organized
      • once the movement subsided, it was the democtraic party, not the unions, that gained the ability to command the allegiance of working-class voters and name the issues for which allegiance would be traded. in the absence of the extradorinary fervor provoked by mass protest, the unions played at best a subsidiary role in disciplining the working-class vote
      • as for the labor experience itself, the political moral seems to us clear, although it is quite different from the moral that organizers are wont to draw. it can be stated simply: the unorganized disruptions of industrials workers in the 1930s produced some political gains, but the organized electoral activities of the unions could not sustain them. new gains await a new protest movement – a new outbreak of mass defiance capable of spurning the roes and authorities of the worksplae and of politics, and capable of spurning the rules and authorities of the union system as well.
    • The civil rights movement
      • in the south, the deepest meaning of the winning of democratic political rights is that the historical primacy of terror as a means of social control has been substantially diminished
      • by defying caste domination, and by thus provoking southern whites to employ terroristic methods that were losing legitimacy, the civil rights movement succeeded in exacerbating electoral instabilities which has already been set in motion by economic modernization in the South.
      • before the movement
        • “poor whites themselves may be though of as the primary instrument of the ruling class in subjugating the Negroes”
        • congress refused to making lynching a federal crime until after WWII
        • these legislative enactments were approved by the Supreme Court, which found in 1883 that the Civil Rights Bill of 1875 was unconstitutional; and in 1893, in an opinion that was to affirm the validity of segregation for more than half a century, the Court established the legal fiction that racial segregation was not in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment provided the facilities afforded blacks were equal. finally the vote was gradually denied to blacks by a variety of measures, including literacy and property tests, poll taxes, and “grandfather clauses” (which allowed persons to vote only if their ancestors had voted), and these actions were spurred by the Supereme Court which found in 1898 that a plan advanced by Mississippi to disenfranchise blacks was not unconsstutitioanal
        • the results was consolidation in the South of a ruling class which could easily control the whole of southern life and which faced little opposition until the post-WWII years. “The one party South … and the low political participation of even the whtie people favor a de facto oligarchic regime”
        • by excluding blacks the manufacturing class made “the underpaid white worker satisfied with his ‘superior’ statues” and “threatens the implicit to bring in the Negro in case of ‘difficulties’ with white workers”
      • but with the rise of communism the Unitde States was thrown into intense competition for world domination, a circumstance that demanded an ideology of “democracy” and “freedom”… increasingly the circumstances prevailing in the South constituted a national embarrassment
      • churches acquired mass memberships, fraternal and other communal associations proliferated, small business could be sustained, union locals were formed, and a black press could be nourished. these institutions provided the vehicles to forge solidarity, to define common goals, and to mobilize collective action.
      • Democratic politics
        • it was not, contrary to what other analysts have said, the rise of a substantial black electoral bloc in the northern states that finally set the stage for civil rights concessions; it was the rise of black defections
        • for the Democrats, there was little choice but to champion the measure; perhaps the party could afford southern defections, or black defections, but it could not afford both
      • SNCC had “tremendous respect for the potency of the demonstration, an eagerness to move out of the political maze of normal parlamernaty procedure and to confront policy-makers directly with a power beyond orthodox politics- the power of people in the streets and on the picket line”
      • “because the students were too busy protesting… no one really needed ‘organization’ because we then had a movement. this left the adhesion of individuals to the group fluid and functional, based simply on who was carrying on activity
      • the point is that “direct action… requires only small numbers of persons, but these must be so highly motivated and involved that they are willing to risk great hardships involved in direct action… southern CORE typified this generation”. In short, the direct-action organizations which developed during the civil rights struggle were cadre organizations
      • this mobilization took place mainly through segregated institutions where people were already “organized”: the black colleges, churches, and ghetto neighborhoods
      • “jails are not a new experience for the Riders, but the Freedom Riders were definitely a new experience for Mississippi Jails”
      • the resulting confrontations were many, but on a small scale and usually unpluclized. they could thus be ignored by the White House. In this unexpected way the channeling efforts of the Kennedy Administration had succeeded. It remained, then, for the civil rights movement to continue to provoke mass civil disorder, for it was only when mass civil disorder erupted in its most extreme forms (and sometimes not even then) that the federal government did what it claimed it did not have the authority to do. “We put on the pressure and create a crisis, and they react”
      • Kennedy officials were fearful that “the nonviolent resistance stragey… was not deeply rooted in Negro traditions and there were signs that it might give way to a more violent strategy uncontrolled by responsible leaders”
      • the SCLC leadership believed that a campaign in Birmingham would provoke and expose southern racisism and extremism as no other campaign had
      • “that the demonstrations in the streets and brought results, they had made the exeeuctive branch act faster and were not forcing Congress to entertain legislation which a few weeks before would have had no chance”. Mass protest had forced federal action.
      • it was a point the attorney general also conceded: “The administration’s Civil Rights Bill… is designed to alleviate one of the principal causes of the serious and unsettling racial unrest now prevailing in many of the states”
      • the “rising tide of discontent that threatens the public safety… cannot be met by more repressive police action.. it cannot be quieted by token moves or talk. it is time to act in the Congress…”
      • “The newspaper pictures showing limp bodies of Negros being carried to police wagons became a great tapestry of the times
      • “This is an idea whose time has come. it will not be stayed. it will not be denied”
      • “a riot is the language of the unheard”
      • concessions
        • of the various concessions granted the movement, none had a greater integrative effect than the right to vote, for activists were rapidly channeled into traditional electoral politics
        • as a result protest lost legitimacy, undermined by the force of American electoral beliefs and traditions
        • Furthermore, for the leadership stratum, the incentives of public office were compelling, leading them to turn away from protest, and even to denounce it.
        • “leaders who accepted the well-paying positions with CAP programs found it difficult to maintain active connections with their local affiliates, and since they were generally the most experienced chapter members, the loss was substantial… people on [CORE’s Natuanal Action Committee] even began to complain that the anti-poverty program ‘has been used to buy off militant civil rights leaders.’ Equally important, CORE’s efforts with the CAP projects absorbed conserabdle energy, thus deflecting activity away from specifically CORE projects… on both counts the War of Poverty proved to be a significant contributing factor in the decline of chapter activity
        • in short, the society overtook the movement, depleting its strength by incorporating its cadres and by organizing blacks for bureaucratic and electoral politics
        • the question is whether the exercise of the franchise and the now virtually exclusive emphasis upon electoral strategies by southern black leaders will produce a meaningful improvement in the conditions of live of the southern black poor. we think not.
        • “where Negros can and do vote, they have it in their power to end the indifference or hostility of their elected representatives, but these representatives do not have it in their power to alter fundamentally the lot of the Negro: the vote… can force … the removal from office of race-baiters and avowed segregationists. [but] it can only marginally affect the income, housing, occupation, or life chances of Negro electorates”
    • The welfare rights movement
      • With a rising curve of antipoverty rhetoric, of funding for new anti-poverty services, and of ghetto rioting, applications for relief formed a similarity rising curve. many of the poor had apparently come to believe that a society which denied them jobs and adequate wages did at least owe them a survival income. it was a period that began to resemembe the Great Depression, for in both periods masses of people concluded that “the system” was responsible for their economic plight, not they themselves, and so they turned in growing numbers to the relief offices
      • public officials in the northern cities moved gingerly in those years: the place were schooled to avoid provocative incidents, urban renewal authorities were not so quick to bulldoze slum and ghetto neighborhoods, and welfare officials handed out relief more freely
      • the authors of poor peoples movements wrote up “a strategy to end poverty” which circulated around activist circles at the time
        • an organization of organizers, not members, who would incite the poor to demand relief
        • We maintained that political influence by the poor is mobilized, not organized
        • i think that a crisis strategy has been the only one that has really produced major success in the civil-rights field
        • all that remained, we argued, was for organizers to enlarge and sustain the disruptive behavior in which masses of the poor were unmistakably beginning to engage
        • those who didn’t like the plan felt they had an obligation to protect he poor against any possibility of repression
        • we thought that the role of crisis as a political resource for the poor had not been understood, either by political analysts or by organizers. what we meant by a political crisis was electoral dissensus – extreme polarization of major electoral constituencies. when acute conflicts of this kind occur, political leaders try to promulgate policies that will moderate the polarization, in order to maintain voting majorities
        • in other words, we said, a disruption in welfare could be expected to activate lobbying by other and far more powerful groups for a goal which the poor could not possibly hope to achieve were they simply to lobby themselves
      • It could not be denied that from a conventional political perspective SCLC’s strategy was manipulative. SCLC did not build local organizations to obtain local victories; it clearly attempted to create a series of disruptions to which the federal government would have to respond and that strategy succeeded. we did not think that local organizations of southern black poor (even if they could have been developed on a mass scale) would have ever gained the political influence necessary to secure a Civil Rights Act of 1964 or a Voting Rights Act of 1965, and they probably would not have won significant local victories, either. it had taken a major political crisis – the literal fragmentation of the regional foundation of the national Democratic Party – to finally force those legislative concessions to southern blacks. 
      • problems maintaining membership
        • the central dilemma of mass-based, permanent organizing theory – how to sustain continuing participation in the absence of continuing inducements to participation – had not been solved. it was not a new dilemma
        • “the basic problem with grievance work was that a settled grievance, like other fulfilled needs, left no further incentive to contribute to the group.” moreover, as the welfare rights organizations created a body of recipients who were experienced in dealing with the welfare system, many of these individuals found that they no longer required the aid of the group in solving their individual probles or those of their friends and neighbors. they simply acted on their own, a circumstance that continually depleted the ranks of organized groups.
        • On the whole the recipients who enjoyed this work were not numerous, and as the months and years dragged by it became increasingly difficult to sustain grievance activities except by continually training new cadres to replace those who wearied and dropped out.
      • problems with group leadership
        • the consequence (of making formal arrangements with welfare departments) was to subdue militancy, to create recipient leaders who had a large investment in the maintenance of their privileged relationship to the welfare system, and to diminish efforts to organize new members
        • an equally enormous investment in the politics of leadership naturally followed. these circumstances constrained the expansion of membership, for the leaders came to have an investment in membership stasis. recipient leaders at all levels of the organizaiont had to be periodically reelected; new members represented a threat.
        • It took little organizational acumen to anticipate that a diversified constituency would lead ineluctably to struggles for leadership
        • this was one example of the extent to which the goals of a mass membership had been subordinated to leadership strivings. in these different ways, then, the proliferation of organizational leadership positions constrained the expansion of organizational membership. simply put, organization prevented organizing.
      • shift to lobbying and negotiation over protest
        • but this enlarging flow of resources did not lead to enlarged organizing; it undermined organizing. as NWRO gradually became enmeshed in a web of relationships with governmental officials and private groups it was transformed from a protest organization to a negotiating and lobbing organization. this transformation was total; it occurred at the national level and among local groups everywhere. in the end it produced a leadership deeply involved in negotiating and lobbying, but on behalf of a constituency that was organized in name only.
        • As NWRO’s integration with other groups progressed, the political beliefs of those in the leadership stratum became more conventional, the militancy of the tactics they advocated weakened, and the professed goal of membership expansion receded.
        • the result, everywhere in the country, was the development of procedures for the negotiation of grievances. many welfare departments established advisory councils composed of recipients; sometimes recipients were appointed to policymaking boards
        • it was not remarkable that welfare officials, confronted by turbulent interference with the operation of their programs, moved to grant the disrupters a symbolic role in the system, for it was a time-honored method of restoring calm. what was remarkable was the ease with which the method worked
        • government officials agreed to deal with the WROs buy they exacted a price. sometimes the price was so subtle as to make it appear that none was being asked. it may nearly have consisted in an implicit understanding, all to readily acknowledged by recipient leaders and organizers, that the proper path to welfare reform was through negotiation by leaders and not protest by unruly mobs
        • this tactic (groups going into welfare offices and demanding relief) often worked and when it did, it was the group that had proved its strength; everyone depended upon everyone else. But once grievances came to be dealt with through negotiations between welfare rights leaders and welfare officials, group action no long seemed necessary, and group consciousness disintegrated. the sense of participation in something larger than oneself, the sense of belonging to a movement, was gradually lost
        • in effect it became possible for NWRO to function without a mass base, without a broad constituency
        • in effect, external resources became a substitute for a mass base
      • for one thing much of the leadership of the black movement (as we noted in chapter four) was being absorbed into electoral politics, into government bureaucracies, into the universities, and into business and industry; correlatively the ideology of protest was repudiated and the efficacy of electoral politics was affirmed. as a result the cadres of organizers dwindled, their ranks diminished by the concessions won.
      • the new national rhetoric diminished their responsiveness to the poor and the passing of rioting and other forms of mass protest diminished their fear of the poor
      • Nixon thus decided “that it would be wiser to have an issue than an enacted plan”
      • NWRO itself took generous, if not full, credit for the defeat of the bill. but the facts lead to the opposite conclusion; its influence was negligible
      • the [anti welfare] amendment was passed in the Senate without a single dissenting vote despite the fact that NWRO’s lobbing presence was at its peak during this period.
      • The anger was gone, the spontaneity was gone, and the sense of community, solidarity, and militancy were gone. all had given way to the preoccupation with the maintenance of organizations structure and lobbying activities
      • NWRO had a slogan – “Bread and Justice” – and NWRO understood that for the people at the bottom a little bread is a little justice. had it pursued a mobilizing strategy, encouraging more and more of the poor to demand welfare, NWRO could perhaps have left a legacy of another million families on the rolls. millions of potentially eligible families had still not applied for aid, especially among the aged and working poor, and hundreds of thousands of potential AFDC recipients were still being denied relief in local centers. to have mobilized these poor, however, NWRO’s leaders would have had to evacuate the legislative halls and presidential delegate caucuses, and reoccupy the relief centers; they would have had to relinquish testifying and lobbying , and resume agitating. they did not and an opportunity to obtain “bread and justice”: for more of the poor was forfeited
      • such gains in city and state electoral representation as blacks had made during the sixties were clearly of little consequence in resisting the slashing of municipal budgets when bankers and businessmen were, for all practical purposes, making the budget decisions
      • there are no blueprints to guide movements of the poor. but if organizers and leaders want to help those movements emerge, they must always proceed as if protest were possible. they may fail. the time may not be right. but then, they may sometimes succeed