Frances Fox Piven

Can Power from Below Change the World

Prevailing perspectives on power cannot explain why political protests from the bottom of societies sometimes result in reforms that reflect the grievances of the protestors. I propose a new theory of “interdependent power” that provides such an explanation. I argue that, contrary to common views, globalization actually increases the potential for this kind of popular power.

Labor parties in postindustrial societies

The decline of labour parties, Frances Fox Piven labour force changes, working class decline and the labour vote, Ivor Crewe class, consumption and collectivism, Joel Krieger the changing face of popular power in France, George Ross Swedish social democracy and the transition from industrial to postindustrial politics, Goran Therborn smooth consolidation in the West German Welfare State, Claus Offe postindustrial cleavage structures, Gosta Esping-Andersen electoral politics and economic control in Israel, Asher Arian and Ilan Talmud the roots of social democratic populism in Canada, Neil Bradford and Jane Jenson the Democratic Party and city politics in the postindustrial era, Alan DiGaetano structural constraints and political development, Frances Fox Piven.

DEVIANT BEHAVIOR AND THE REMAKING OF THE WORLD

My remarks tonight will consist of a critique of the societal reaction or labeling perspective on deviant behavior. The societal reaction school belongs almost exclusively to sociology, and I am not a sociologist. I am a political scientist. I do not want to claim great clarity about the scope and substance of my field, but I do know that it includes the study of power and the bases of power in social life; and it includes the study of the state and the uses of state force in social life. My discussion of the societal reaction school is shaped by these preoccupations. I will try to show that the arguments of the school are implicitly arguments about power and about the state, and thus about the central issues in the study of political life. But the particular understanding of the nature of power and of the nature of the state, in the world constructed by the societal reaction school, flies in the face of a good deal of human experience. In order to develop my critique, I first need to locate the ideas of the societal reaction school by retracing some of the main steps in the development of sociological thought on deviance. For a very long time and long before there were sociologists, social thinkers, usually out of an expressed concern for social order, have tried to understand why people sometimes break the rules of their society. The reason for this focus seems evident. Social order depends on the observance of rules. But inherent in the imposition of many rules is the exercise of power, the domination of some people by other people against their will, and the use of the state to enforce that domination. And inherent in the defiance of many rules is not only a threat to social order, but a challenge to the particular pattern of domination on which that social order rests. Domination and challenge, and thus conformity and deviance, are at the center of history. They are expressions of the basic dialectical movements through which societies change, or perhaps fail to change. Grand theories of state and society-because they are about the nature of social order and the nature of challenges to that order-are, however indirectly, statements about that basic dialectic. Grand theories of state and society are, in order words, also theories about the phenomena we have come to call deviance.

Government Statistics and Conflicting Explanations of Nonvoting

When turnout fell to a near-historic low in 1988, the two sources of government statistics suggested opposite reasons. One is that fewer and fewer people are registered to vote, and the other that registered voters are going to the polls less and less. According to the figures supplied by state election officials who tally up county registration totals and record election returns, voting by registered voters is down 15 percentage points since 1960: 85.4% voted that year, but only 70.5% in 1988. By contrast, the U.S. Census reported that 86.2% of registered voters cast ballots in 1988, down only 4.8 percentage points since 1968 (when the Census postelection sample surveys of both registration and voting were first undertaken) (U.S. Bureau of Census, 1989). The 1988 result confirmed the earlier Census summary conclusion for the presidential elections between 1968-80 that registered voters “overwhelmingly go to the polls” (U.S. Bureau of Census, 1984a). The Census surveys show that falling registration is the more important cause of declining turnout: the level slipped from 74.3% in 1968 to 66.6% in 1988, or 7.7 percentage points. Adjusting that result downward by about 10% to correct for the tendency by some respondents to tell the Census interviewers they are registered when they are not, the 1988 level of registration was 59%. State data, by contrast, show a much higher registration level: 70.9% in 1988, off only 4.5 percentage points since 1960.

Neoliberalism and the welfare state

As its name indicates, the UK Social Policy Association has always been dedicated to an examination of the complex of policies we call the welfare state. Appropriately, this year’s conference has been dedicated to the emerging conflicts between the welfare state, in its imperfect realization as we imagine it in our more utopian moments, and the new phase of contemporary capitalism that we call neoliberalism. We might also call this phase hyper-capitalism or super-competitive capitalism, or as a colleague of mine phrases it, the return of “ordinary capitalism”. I will stick with neoliberalism, and there is no longer any debate that your country, my country, and much of the rest of the world is now in the grip of what could be called the neoliberal era. Part of what this means is that markets in capital, goods, information, culture, and even labour are now international, or in other words it means globalization. Everything that can be traded moves across national borders, and government policies have been adjusted to smooth the way with, for example, the proliferation of new trade pacts that eliminate customs duties and other barriers. Globalization and its handmaiden “just-in-time production”, have facilitated the rise of new regimes of production sometimes called “flexible accumulation”. The old industrial goliaths of yesteryear have spun off subsidiaries to low wage and low-tax regions, or similarly they outsource their production to low-cost areas, or they spin off workers, turning them into “temps” or “independent contractors” so as to strip them of the union and regulatory protections such workers once had. This complex of changes in the economy, all facilitated by new government policies, is often blamed for rising inequality and the institutional changes which lead to inequality, including the weakening of welfare state policies, the decline of wages, and the rolling back of worker rights and especially the weakening of unions. All this is often depicted as a kind of inevitable result of economic globalization and the intensified competition that results. Or, in other words, the “self-regulating market” imagined by laissez-faire proponents of the nineteenth century has now been enlarged to a world scale. Karl Polanyi depicted the nineteenth-century idea of the self-regulating market as a crazed utopian idea, and I think the same might well be said of the expansion of the idea

Globalization, American Politics, and Welfare Policy

The welfare state is under attack in all of the rich countries where it flourished over the course of the twentieth century. Rollbacks are said to be imperative. The big argument for why this is so emphasizes globalization and technological change, which together have heightened international trade and investment competition. But rather than a widespread race to the bottom that these economic determinants would suggest, welfare state outcomes have been very different from country to country. These variations, and in particular the fact that the United States has been the rollback pioneer, argue that politics plays a large role in contemporary welfare state politics. American developments are best explained by paying attention to the political mobilization of business over the past two decades, on the one hand, and the uses of the politics of resentment and marginalization on the other hand.

Déjà Vu, All Over Again: A Comment on Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, “Winner-Take-All Politics”

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s article makes an important contribution to our understanding of the politics of income distribution in the United States. The authors use data from Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty to dismantle the claims that the United States’s shifts result from technological or economic imperatives, and they argue effectively that a plutocratic distribution of income has grown steadily worse through the political interventions of powerful economic actors. Along the way, they advance a valuable critique of the way that other political scientists have grappled with this phenomenon. Our admiration for their intellectual achievement is, however, combined with a sense of déjà vu as we consider their theoretical argument. Hacker and Pierson argue that they are advancing a view of “politics as organized combat,” which allows them to recognize the systematic exercise of power by business interests. But this is hardly the first time that political scientists have recognized the centrality of business power to American politics. This was, after all, the central theme advanced by critics of political pluralism such as C. Wright Mills, Grant McConnell, and William Domhoff in the 1950s and 1960s.

National Voter Registration Reform: How It Might Be Won

12. In 1988, Bush demonstrated the benefits that vice presidents derive from their affiliation with the president in the nominating contest: even in the early, contested primaries, he won well over three-fourths of the support of the primary voters who approved of Reagans performance as president. 13. Eight vice presidents died or resigned in office, nine became president when the president died or resigned, and eleven either chose not to run for president or lacked the opportunity to do so. Only George Dallas (1848), John C. Breckinridge (1860), Charles Fairbanks (1908), Garner (1940), Nixon (1960), and Humphrey (1968) sought the presidency from their position as vice president. See Sirgiovanni (1988).

The Social Structuring of Political Protest

consists in the primitive force of a warrior caste or the technological force of a modem army. And it is true whether the control of production consists in control by a priestly class of the mysteries of the calendar on which agriculture depends, or control by a financier class of the large scale capital on which industrial production depends. Moreover, since coercive force can be used to gain control of the means of producing wealth, and since control of wealth can be used to gain coercive force, these two sources of power tend over time to be drawn together within one ruling class. Common sense and historical experience also combine to suggest that these sources of power are protected and enlarged by the use of that power not only to control the actions of men and women, but also to control their beliefs. What some call superstructure, and what others call culture, includes an elaborate system of beliefs and ritual behaviors that 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 from these beliefs. Because this superstructure of beliefs and rituals is evolved in the context of unequal power, it is

Interdependent power: Strategizing for the Occupy Movement

Protest movement from the lower reaches of society cannot deploy the resources to which we usually attribute the effective exercise of power. This article argues that when such movements do succeed, it is because the protestors have activated a distinctive kind of power. This power is rooted in their ability to disrupt the cooperative arrangements that constitute societies. ‘Occupy Wall Street’s’ contemplation of a debtors’ strike is an example of such a strategy and the formidable obstacles to its actuation.