Challenging Authority: An Interview With Frances Fox Piven

[amyrose2712]

Challenging Authority: An Interview With Frances Fox Piven

Frances Fox Piven is an eminent scholar of American politics and social movements at City University of New York’s Graduate Center and has long been an honorary co-chair of Democratic Socialists of America, the parent organization of Young Democratic Socialists. She is the author of Poor People’s Movements, Regulating the Poor, and Challenging Authority, among numerous other books and articles. In 1966, she and her late partner and collaborator Richard A. Cloward wrote an article for The Nation called “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty,” which called for a welfare enrollment drive that would create fiscal and political pressures that might potentially lead to the establishment of a guaranteed minimum income. In a chain of “reasoning” that is too convoluted and bizarre to explain here, right-wingers such as Glenn Beck have seized upon the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” to portray Dr. Piven as the sinister mastermind behind the Obama administration’s supposed drive toward socialism. She was gracious enough to sit down for an interview with Chris Maisano, the editor of The Activist, to discuss her newfound notoriety, the history of American social movements, the prospects for meaningful reform under the Obama administration, and many other topics.

http://theactivist.org/blog/challenging-authority-an-interview-with-frances-fox-piven