Thread by @LoganLancing

In 1966, Richard Cloward & Frances Fox Piven published an article in The Nation magazine outlining a strategy to force the US government to create a basic universal income by overwhelming the welfare system.

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https://twitter.com/LoganLancing/status/1848009259692314856

They argued that forcing more people onto the welfare rolls would create such massive bureaucratic disruption and strain on local & state budgets that a national solution would be inevitable.

They believed this strategy was more likely to succeed than previous efforts to mobilize the poor because it offered immediate economic benefits and did not require mass participation.

They suggested this strategy could also help build political power in the ghetto by delivering millions of dollars to the masses, which could translate into political support for those who helped them.

This strategy was the perfect wedge to help catalyze what Herbert Marcuse would later call the "Great Refusal" of the established order. Marcuse envisioned a total rejection of America's morality, culture, and Constitution.

Both Marcuse and Cloward & Piven recognized that the working-class was stabalized by advanced capitalist societies. Marcuse observed that the working class had become integrated into the system, adopting its values and resisting radical and revolutionary change.

Cloward & Piven argued that their strategy could overcome the inertia of traditional movements by offering tangible economic rewards; a catalyst for a revolution that would start at the bottom and eventually break everything, including the counter-revolutionary working class.

Marcuse described the "biological need for socialism" as a "new sensibility" to emerge among anyone who had a grievance with the status-quo.

He suggested that this "new sensibility" had the potential to catalyze broader social change, even if it originated in minority groups, or "ghetto populations," as he called them.

The Cloward-Piven strategy, by directly benefiting and empowering "ghetto populations," could contribute to the development of this "new sensibility."

The promise of guaranteed "free money" could spark a sense of solidarity and radical consciousness - a "biological need for socialism" - potentially leading to a tangible revolution.

All of this is to say that communists and their allies have been trying to overwhelm the system by intentionally breaking things for a very long time.

The strategy is simple: overwhelm systems and break them. "Immiserate the workers" so they will demand socialism.

Make people poor and miserable by intentionally breaking things. Then, those people will be more susceptible to giving up their Constitutionally protected rights for what they think is going to be a miracle cure.

It's never a miracle cure. It's always more poison.