Frances Fox Piven on Why Protesters Must "Defend Their Ability to Exercise
Disruptive Power"
By Mie Inouye, Jacobin
30 August 20
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.
MI: Just 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?
FFP: Donald 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.
MI: In 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?
FFP: t 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.
MI: What 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?
FFP: I 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.
MII In 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?
FFP: It'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.
MI: Throughout 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?
FFP: For 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.
MI: How does that way of narrating historical movements frame our vision of
contemporary movements, like the one we're in now?
FFP: Everybody 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.
MI: That 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?
FFP: Instead 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.
MI: Is part of what you're saying that we need not only to be honest about
the facts of history, but also to train to do forms of disruptive direct
action that might not be part of our current repertoire?
FFP: That's right. And we have to figure that out. We have to do it with
caution. We have to worry about repression. We have to worry about the cops
beating our heads in. All that is true. We have to be careful. We have to be
informed. We have to protect ourselves with bail money and lawyers. But we
should not fall on this very narrow path of nonviolence.
MI: One reason that this moment is so incredible is that so many people are
becoming newly politically active. I've heard many organizers, myself
included, look at these crowds and say things like, "If only all these
people belonged to a leftist organization, we could win socialism." And then
I've recalled the line in the first chapter of Poor People's Movements,
where you describe the organizer's misguided impulse to start collecting
membership cards on the crest of an uprising. Do you think that that
instinctive response misunderstands something about the dynamics of protest?
FFP: Absolutely. And you've said it pretty well. I want to point to two
episodes in the very recent past. One is the wave of teachers' strikes that
spread from West Virginia throughout very conservative parts of the country.
Teachers went on strike with a lot of support from their communities and
from the parents of the children they taught. They were strategic. They
worried whether the children would get lunch if they were on strike. There
was a great deal of self-consciousness in this mass action.
But what there was not was a lot of union organization. There were unions
there, but they were very frail. They did not include many teachers and they
did not call the strikes. But those teachers won! And what happened
afterward? The unions that existed took credit for the strikes and claimed
them as a great union victory.
I am very sympathetic to those teachers' unions. But I think we have to be a
little bit more hardheaded about what actually happened. What happened was
that there was an uprising that was smart. Collective action can be smart
even without a union sometimes, especially if there are predecessors like
the Chicago Teachers Union, which has been a very strategic and very
intelligent union organizer of action.
Or the movement that we're in right now - who organized it? Well, there were
a lot of organizations in the Black Lives Matter movement, and many others.
But you could not say that an organization created the movement or should
inherit the movement.
We have to be very careful, very cautious. We need more analysis. I don't
usually say, "We need more analysis." I usually say, "We need more people in
the street." But we need to be more careful about what to do now, because if
what we say we should do now is collect those dues cards, we may be
forfeiting the power that we gain through collective action that is more
loosely organized. It's for that reason that the return of popular protest
after Seattle, after the Zapatistas, the turn away from conventional forms
of organization, was a good thing, actually. It loosened us up. We have to
take advantage of that.
MI: But do you see any role for organizers and organization during this
uprising? For example, I'm thinking of a protest I attended in Rhode Island
that had record-breaking turnout and lots of energy in the crowd, but was
semi-spontaneous and not very organized. One of the consequences was that it
was pretty easily controlled by the cops. At one point, they recruited a
protestor to tell the crowd to disperse before curfew, and a lot of people
went home. It could have been much more disruptive than it was if someone
had stepped up in a leadership role in that moment to encourage disruption
rather than acquiescence to the police.
Is there a role for organizers and organizations to teach people how to
resist that kind of police control?
FFP: Maybe. We haven't developed that role very well, but maybe we should.
Maybe that could be done. I think there is a role for organizers. I know
quite a few people who are good organizers. They know how to talk to people,
they know how to talk to a crowd, they know how to keep up the momentum of a
protest.
But what they're wrong about is the overall role that they play. They are
not the architects of action. They move in a kind of dynamic tension with
the action that is unfolding. They don't build it. We have organizers who
think that you can talk yourself into a movement one by one with each
participant. All you have to do is talk to enough people for long enough and
you'll get a movement. That's not true.
MI: In your study of the unemployed workers' movement during the Depression
you talk about the role Communists played in agitating the masses. You
suggest that, when the Communists were operating as a cadre organization,
they were effective at amplifying burgeoning unrest by providing slogans and
opportunities for direct action. But then, as they shifted toward mass
organization, you suggest that they became less effective. Do you think this
points to strategic distinctions between agitation and organizing and
between cadre formations and mass organizations?
FFP: Maybe. But I think there's something else the Communists did in the
1930s. They created exemplary actions and they put themselves on the outside
perimeter of the action, where they were more likely to receive the blows of
the cops. That was a very important part of the teachings of the Communist
Party USA at the time. There was a little journal called the Communist that
had articles in which they told the comrades that they should always be on
the outside to be the first to receive the blows. I can't imagine an
organizer saying that today!
MI: People might not know that you have consistently recognized the
importance of both movement and electoral politics, and that you've done a
lot of electoral organizing yourself. In the early 1980s, you and Richard
Cloward organized an electoral reform project to expand access to voter
registration. Your efforts resulted in the passage of the "motor voter" act
in 1993. What are your thoughts about the consequences of both the COVID-19
pandemic and the current uprising for the November election? Do you see an
opening for a realignment on the horizon? Do you think that protestors
should be thinking toward November?
FFP: Yes, of course. And the protesters have been thinking toward November
already. The protests have sparked electoral activity. I don't think you
would get people risking COVID-19 by standing in line to wait to vote in the
face of the voter suppression that has become the Republican tool of choice
except for the movement. The standing in line is now a movement action.
That's horrible, in a way, but it's also politically good.
This movement, Black Lives Matter, in particular, is very open to electoral
activism. After the 1960s, activists drew a sharp line between protest
activity and electoral activity, as if doing one meant you couldn't do the
other. What they did not keep in full view was the way in which protest
activism affected electoral activism and the way in which electoral
victories encouraged protest. We can see that pretty clearly now. I don't
think we'll get a classical realignment, but I think we have to look forward
to the destruction of the Republican Party, which has become pretty much a
fascist party under the leadership of Trump.
MI: So you don't see the disruption and the riots as a reflection of
disillusionment with electoral politics?
FFP: No, quite the contrary. And I've never seen that before, either. I've
never seen the way in which they bolster each other and the way that people
explicitly talk about the two kinds of activism.
MI: People sometimes describe your work as "pessimistic." You've always
argued that there are structural limitations on the emergence of social
movements and the forms that they can take, and that, when they do emerge
and win changes, they inevitably dissipate and generate countermovements,
which then erode some of their achievements. If that's still your view, what
do you think is the best we can hope for from this uprising?
FFP: That is still my view, but I also think we are at a historic juncture
where the issue is survival. More and more people, especially young people,
are beginning to recognize it. Maybe that will make a difference. I'm not
sure. But the prospects of global warming and the exhaustion of fossil fuels
really may create historic turning points. We have to hope that that's true.
Three weeks ago, I was feeling very somber about the political situation in
the United States. I saw this party, the Republican Party - that had become
a fascist party, certainly under fascist leadership, with the wholehearted
support of economic interests in finance and in fossil fuels - as the party
in command, and I didn't know where the opposition would come from. It
didn't look to me like it was going to come from the Democratic Party,
although I liked all the efforts, small though they might be, to transform
that party.
Now it's different. All of a sudden, there are new possibilities! We can't
exactly map them, but we have to appreciate them and widen them.
MI: When you say that you think that maybe there are new possibilities for
"historic turning points" because of the question of survival, do you mean
that deeper changes may be possible now than in the past?
FFP: Yes. I don't think that we can do a Green New Deal or we can conquer
the problems of global warming without strong central authority, for
example. That requires big changes in all rich countries. There are
challenges that we may not meet, that we may not be able to handle, but that
require we do things differently.
MI: So this is a moment that is calling for something like a revolution?
FFP: Certainly a revolutionary transformation, yes. Something like a
revolution. It's hard to imagine a revolution in the old style, the French
style, in the United States. But a revolutionary transformation in the
United States, and in European countries as well.
MI: Are there examples of what that might look like that you can point to?
FFP: There are no examples for us. There are no models, for the United
States or for rich countries generally. Nobody has been in this situation
before. So we have to figure it out if we want to survive. There are no
models.