Following on "Frances Fox Piven on the Importance of Social Movements Being ‘Unruly’" and
"Frances Fox-Piven: “We Should Be Prepared for Incredible Waves of Mass Protest”"
From Jacobin Magazine June 17, 2020:
Just last month, social movement scholar Frances Fox Piven predicted “waves of mass protest” in the US. She was right. In an interview with Jacobin, Piven discusses why disruption must be central to protests, the thorny questions of violence and property destruction, and how organizers should and should not see their role in the streets.
In a mid-May interview, Frances Fox Piven predicted “waves of mass protest” in the United States’ near future. Since then, the country has erupted into an unprecedented multiracial mass movement against police brutality.
It’s no surprise that Piven predicted this uprising, given that she has spent the last fifty years studying the background conditions that enable mass protest to emerge. Piven’s attention to the dynamics of protest, her study of race and class in US social movements, and her experience as a welfare rights and electoral organizer give her an essential perspective on this moment.
Mie Inouye spoke with Piven about the conditions that contributed to the current uprising, the reasons for its multiracial character, the role of organizers in a movement moment, property destruction as a tactic, the movement’s electoral implications, and the possibility of a revolution in the United States. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
MIJust a month ago, you predicted “waves of mass protest” coming off of the pandemic and its gross mishandling by the Trump administration. Since then, we have seen protests in every US state and territory, many with record-breaking turnout. In your view, what political and economic factors contributed to this uprising?
FFPDonald Trump had a lot to do with it. Trump has been virtually working to create a kind of legitimation crisis in the United States. Of course, he comes in the wake of a series of campaigns to strip away New Deal concessions to working people in the United States that left the system bare, exposed, without the softening and the protections that unions gave people and that the Democratic Party once gave people before it became a Wall Street party. So, in the wake of an aggressive neoliberal assault on working people, we got a leader who was, in a way, a reflection of delegitimation because he was so crude and so vulgar and so aggressive in attacking black people and immigrants. But in the end, he also attacked white working people by ridiculing and dismissing the programs that they depended on.
So what we’ve had is not only waves of protest, as I said to Marc Kagan a month ago, but more extensive waves than I think we’ve ever seen.
I remember in 1968 reading a newspaper headline that said, “Eight Cities Burning.” It wasn’t just eight cities this time. It was hundreds of cities. There was even a protest in the little town next to me here, which has only about 2,500 people, and this is Trump territory.
Not only is it huge, but it is also the only deeply interracial protest I can recall having ever occurred in the United States. That is so important, because racism has been a kind of prop of holding the white working class in the system no matter how they themselves fare as a result of being in the system.
So on these two grounds alone, this wave of protest is remarkable, and such a relief, to tell you the truth, because it really did look as though we were marching down the road to fascism.
MIIn Poor People’s Movements, you and Richard Cloward argued that people needed to gain two beliefs in order for a social movement to emerge. First, they needed the belief that the system was unjust. But then they also needed to believe that they could do something about it.
It seems like what you’ve just said about the delegitimation of the state, combined with the massive unemployment numbers we were seeing last month, provided the basis for these beliefs. Were you surprised, though, that it was the murder of George Floyd by police officers that sparked the movement?
FFPIt was hard not to be puzzled, if not surprised, because there had been so many murders before Floyd. But the triggers or sparks that light up a protest movement are numerous. They’re all over the place, if the underlying conditions are right. There was nothing new about this grotesque murder in particular, except that it was filmed. But that seems to me not enough to make it so distinctive.
It was the coming together of this kind of inciting, outrageous act with the underlying conditions — and underlying conditions not only of hardship but also of gross incompetence on the part of the government in charge — which contributed to the sense that people could win something, that they could make an impact on their society.
MIWhat about the conjunction of what we tend to understand as a particular form of racial oppression, police brutality, with the underlying economic and political conditions that accompanied the pandemic? Was that surprising to you? How do you think about the relationship between racism and economic exploitation?
FFPI think that people experience them as very similar. The poverty of blacks is a reflection of racism, isn’t it? The fact that black home ownership is so much less widespread than white home ownership, and that when blacks do own homes, they’re more likely to be foreclosed on and to lose their homes — that’s a form of racism. I think we experience racism, or other kinds of nationalism, economically as well as in the attitudes or slogans or songs or advertisements of the dominant media.
MIIn your past work, you’ve written about racism as the basis of mass movements in the United States. For example, the civil rights movement was one of the four cases you studied in Poor People’s Movements. But as you’ve said, this was not a deeply multiracial movement.
Why do you think that so many white people are making abolitionist demands in the streets right now? Do you think that they are protesting because they understand policing to be an issue that affects their own interests? Or do you think that they’re protesting out of moral outrage on behalf of black Americans?
FFPIt’s a combination of moral outrage on behalf of black and brown Americans with the shock of a leadership that defies all of the softening norms of American political culture. Norms that say, “we are all one people,” “we care about one another,” “we would not cut old people off of Social Security.” But we would! That’s what they’re busy trying to do right now!
It would have softened the police transgressions if the president of the United States, whoever he happened to be, had come out and spoken to his people about how awful this was and how we have to all pray to God that this never happens again, and how we’re going to have a commission so that it never happens again, not in our fine country. None of that happened.
What happened instead is we had a set of leaders, but especially the president of the United States, defending the police and ignoring the appalling brutality of what they had done and had been doing.
MIThroughout your career, you’ve argued that poor people’s power lies in their capacity for disruption, rather than their ability to work within “the system.” And this uprising has been breathtakingly disruptive. We’ve seen a police precinct and countless cop cars destroyed, statues defaced and toppled, and businesses looted.
I’ve heard some people who support the protests suggest that these acts of property destruction are understandable reactions to police brutality, but not smart political tactics. What would you say to those skeptics?
FFPFor a very long time now, people who are sympathetic with movements from below and who study movements from below have drawn the line at violence. There’s been a kind of fetish, almost a sort of religion of nonviolence in movement studies.
There’s a reason for this. Movements are playing to a public, because they interact with electoral politics, which depend on the behavior of mass publics in the voting booth. The public shrinks from violence, especially violence from below.
On top of that, we have these grand movements, like the civil rights movement, that came to be understood and celebrated for their nonviolence, even though that’s not a good analysis of the civil rights movement. There was violence both within the movement and allied with it. The Deacons for Defense, for example, were very important in protecting civil rights protestors. But we choose to forget about that and just like the people who turned the other cheek and spoke Christian sayings in responding to white racism in the South.
That has crippled our analysis, because there’s always been violence associated with mass movements. And there are two important things to be said about that. One is that a lot of the sort of quasi-religious regrets about violence ignore the fact that most of what people decry as violence is property destruction, not violence against persons. That distinction has to be made.
And the other part of what we ignore in the study of movements is that people often have to threaten or exercise violence in order to defend their ability to disrupt social and economic relations by refusing to do what they’re supposed to do.
Look at the history of strikes. There would not have been any strikes without the threat of collective violence by workers who were trying to defend their ability to withdraw their labor by preventing scabs from replacing them. That’s why every mass strike in American history involved physical confrontation at the plant gates, as workers tried to protect their property right in the job from these transgressors who were going to replace them.
We go so far to ignore that. Today, we treat the picket line as a little dance that striking workers do outside their place of employment. They have to keep moving, and they have to be a certain number of inches apart from one another, and it’s all regulated by the dance instructor that is the courts. But the picket line originates as a show of brute force by the workers whose jobs are at stake against the henchmen and other workers who are trying to replace them.
MIHow does that way of narrating historical movements frame our vision of contemporary movements, like the one we’re in now?
FFPEverybody seems to agree that we have to be nonviolent. I think that’s a judgment that has to be made for each movement action. I do agree that the public that we play to doesn’t like violence. But at the same time, the violent capacity of the crowd is an important way of defending its ability to exercise disruptive power.
This movement has been very disruptive. Well, its disruption hasn’t been that of the classical strike. These are crowd disruptions. These are disruptions of our streets and our cities, disruptions of traffic patterns, disruptions of commerce. These are important forms of disruption. We’ve seen that throughout the Global South and especially in Latin America. You have to defend your ability to do that kind of action, and the defense is knitted very closely to the action itself. It’s the crowd’s capacity for violence that is the defense of its ability to shut the city down.
MIThat brings me to my next question. I recently attended an online panel organized by the George Wiley Center at which you spoke. In response to a question about property destruction as a tactic, I think I heard you say something like, “The left needs more tough guys.” Can you explain what you meant by that?
FFPInstead of shrinking from either acknowledging or experimenting with the role of violence in movements, we have to be tougher and look at what actually has happened in historical movements.
Look at the difference, for example, between strikes that walk out and strikes that occupy factories. Strikes that occupy factories have much more leverage than walkout strikes, all other things being equal. (Of course, all other things are never equal.) But the success of the sit-down strikes in the 1930s, and the reason for their success, is not quite appreciated.
Those workers had control of the plant! Of the equipment! Of the factory! Now workers never control the plant, the equipment, and the factory, and as a result, they are massively replaced when they walk out. And if they can be replaced, their strike capacity is greatly weakened....
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