>>Not, of course, that they'll vote for candidates who'd do this.
>>
>>Doug
>
>They'd vote for Bozo the Clown. In fact, they often do.
>
>There was one poll where the positions people ascribed to Bush were
>wildly at variance with his stated positions.
A poorer majority of the working class are largely excluded from electoral politics, especially in caucuses and primaries. For instance, "The 2004 Democratic primary electorate of all four states contained a higher percentage of people with postgraduate educations than the 2000 electorate. In Virginia, 31 percent of Democratic primary voters possessed post-graduate degrees compared to 20 percent of the 2000 general electorate" ("The Southern Electorate: 2004 v. 2000," <http://www.brynmawr.edu/Acads/GSSW/schram/schrampoparticle1.pdf>, February 25, 2004). See, also, "Demographic Profile of Likely Voters" in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina ("Primary Preview: Surveys in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina," <http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/198.pdf>, December 8, 2003, p. 18). First, the ruling class and media decide who get to run and be seen as "credible" (candidates who can't raise money and get on the media aren't "credible"); richer and more educated voters than the general electorate -- especially those in early primaries ("Early on in the 1972-76 period all or nearly all of primaries were fought before the race was called. By 1988, however, over one-third of the primaries in both parties remained when the respective party candidates were anointed as winners. Four years later over half the races remained and by 2000 three-in-five, a huge majority, of the primaries remained after the party nominee emerged" [Lonna Rae Atkeson and Cherie D. Maestas, "Racing to the Front: The Effect of Frontloading on Presidential Primary Turnout ," <http://www.fsu.edu/~statepol/conferences/2004/Papers/Atkeson-Maestas.doc>, April 30 - May 2, 2004]) -- get to marginalize and eliminate the "unelectable" (i.e., candidates whose policies are more pro-working-class than the "electable") in the party nomination race; and voters in general elections, who are in turn richer and more educated than the voting-age population, are allowed to vote for the two indistinguishable candidates: "As the table shows, the GSS data suggest that there is typically a 25 to 30 percentage-point gap in participation between the lowest and highest income quintiles" (Esther Cervantes and Amy Gluckman, "Who Votes, and How?" <em>Dollars and Sense</em> 251,<http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2004/0104cervantes.html>, January/February 2004).
What is to be done? In the short term:
<blockquote>The democratic and egalitarian victories in American history were not won with voter guides and get-out-the vote campaigns. Nor were they won by Democratic Party initiatives. When we restrict ourselves to these conventional forms of electoral politics we cannot match the money and propaganda, the voter guides and get-out-the vote drives, of the right.
Electoral politics by itself doesn't work for the left. Or rather it only works in the context of great upsurges of popular protest. This is the lesson of the mobs of the American Revolution, of the abolitionist movement that preceded the Civil War, of the labor movement of the 1930s, and the civil rights and poverty rights movements of the 1960s. The drama and disruption created by these movements gave them communicative power to match the propaganda of party operatives. The issues the movements raised also drew people to the polls in numbers far greater than voter drives can do. And because the movements were disruptive, because they impeded the functioning of major institutions, politicians were forced to respond.
So, yes, we should work on our agenda of democratic reforms, including a national right to vote, a national voter registration system, the implementation of the National Voter Registration Act, Election Day a holiday, non-partisan election officials, and so on. But we have to do more. Everything we know about the Bush regime argues they will be reckless and aggressive, in Iraq and perhaps Iran, and at home with their tax and spending policies that threaten dire economic instability, and with social policy initiatives that are both cruel and short-sighted. The time when mass protest is possible will come. We should be ready and receptive, obdurate and bold. (Frances Fox Piven, "Voting and Voters," <em>Logos</em> 4.1, <a href="http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_4.1/piven.htm">Winter 2005</a>)</blockquote>
<blockquote>The welfare rights case study was one in which Piven and Cloward had firsthand experience as scholar/activists, and it best represents the way they were producing situated knowledge tied to a specific political struggle. The politics of disruption in this case was energized by Cloward and Piven's paper "A Strategy to End Poverty." This widely circulated paper appeared in 1966 in _The Nation_ and later in various other publications.10 Thousands of welfare activists were drawn into the strategy. The paper used recent research by Piven and Cloward indicating that about one out of every two families eligible for welfare was not receiving it. Using this issue as the basis of strategy, the authors proposed mobilizing the poor to sign up for welfare so as to overload the system, underscore its inability to meet legitimate need, and thereby force a crisis that would lead to replacing the inadequate welfare system with a guaranteed income. This approach came to be called the "crisis strategy," and it almost worked when the guaranteed income was seriously considered by the Nixon administration and Congress.
The crisis strategy was what its name says it was: strategy -- not theory -- using a politics of disruption as a critical but contingent tool for creating political change. To highlight the contingent character of such a resource, Piven and Cloward famously wrote at the conclusion of their first book: "A placid poor get nothing, but a turbulent poor sometimes get something."11 Years later, the all-pervasive reality of political contingency became clear. In the face of the 1990s welfare retrenchment, Cloward was asked whether their crisis strategy had backfired, and he responded: "We knew that trouble was coming. Our view is the poor don't win much, and they only win it episodically. You get what you can when you can get it -- and then you hold onto your hat."12
. . . . .
RM theorists often misunderstood Piven and Cloward as diehard proponents of disruption in all cases.19 Rather, Piven and Cloward saw protest politics in terms of contingencies: sometimes there was no other viable course. As early as 1963, Piven -- in support of rent strikes in New York City -- wrote that poor people are "without regular resources for influencing public policy," so "disruptive and irregular tactics are the only resource, short of violence, available to low-income groups seeking to influence public policy."20 For the poor, mobilizing for protest politics was often strategically smarter than organizing to build massmembership organizations. In _PPM_, Piven and Cloward noted that a strategy for poor people's political action that emphasized building mass-membership organizations was flawed for one major reason: "[I]t is not possible to compel concessions from elites that can be used as resources to sustain oppositional organizations over time" (xxi).
. . . _PPM _ suggested that the issue was not whether the poor should organize, but what forms of organization would be most appropriate for poor people, whose main political resource was their ability to be disruptive.21 . . .
It is also a mistake to suggest that Piven and Cloward rejected conventional politics generally. (This is yet another way that critics have missed _PPM_'s nuanced grasp of the contingent relationship between protest politics and conventional politics, electoral politics in particular.)22 _PPM_ reiterated the theme of a 1968 article by Piven and Cloward: while protest politics and electoral politics were different -- one emphasized conflict, the other consensus and coalitions -- they were also interdependent.23 The strategy of _PPM_ was not to pursue protest politics independent of electoral politics, but to play them off each other. Electoral politics often created unsatisfactory results that over time could lead to the development of protest politics, and protest politics could help marginalized groups gain a greater voice in the electoral process. (Sanford F. Schram, "The Praxis of <em>Poor People's Movements</em>: Strategy and Theory in Dissensus Politics," <em>Perspectives on Politics</em> 1.4, <http://www.brynmawr.edu/Acads/GSSW/schram/schrampoparticle1.pdf>, December 2003)</blockquote> -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>