The Cloward Piven Strategy

Cloward and Piven were both professors. Cloward at the Columbia University School of Social Work. Piven was a professor of political science at the Graduate Center of City University.

The strategy aims to utilize "militant anti-poverty groups" to facilitate a "political crisis" by overloading the welfare system via a massive increase in welfare claims, forcing the creation of a system of "guaranteed minimum income" and "redistributing income through the federal government.

There are two key elements

1- Mobilize the poor and marginalized to demand their “rightful” benefits from the government,

2 - Overloading the welfare system through mass enrollment.

Purposefully creating a crisis- planned chaos is anticapitalist leading people to socialism or communism. The strategy is unethical and a recipe for disaster. All programs are affected including Social Security retirement benefits, Veterans, and Disability.

There were additional details to their plan that were printed

Piven and Cloward's plan- the professor's scheme for mass voter registration could change the face of the Democrat party goes into many details.

Twice in American History, the federal government has greatly expanded social welfare programs. The New deal and the great society. Piven and Cloward argued that the process of registering millions of lower-class people to vote could be in and of itself a protest movement.

They stated that existing Federal law would not allow certain people to help register people to vote but social service workers could. Legally they could but ethically could they? They argued that they could. They also stated that only 5 percent of the social workers would need to help because they could sign them up in waiting rooms and in lines while they waited.

Cloward and Piven looked to support from the Democrat Socialists Of America