Pearl River Waking up one recent morning, way too early, I noticed in the early flood of emails, one that I didn’t recognize. It was from a professor of urban studies and planning with a university in Berlin. She was reaching out to me with a nod at one of my many hats, as publisher and editor of Social Policy. Crawling down a research hole for something she was writing, she had seen a reference to an article that Francis Fox Piven, legendary social theorist, professor, author, and comrade, had written in the first edition of the journal in 1970. She wanted to know how she could access the archive, and what the cost might be.
We have been stewarding Social Policy for more than 26 of its 56th years. As a smaller publication, we’ve never digitized everything, and, even if we could, we don’t have access to every past issue. I shared with my German inquisitor that I thought we had a copy of the first edition somewhere in my office, and I would try to look over coming weeks, but didn’t want her to hold her breath. After sending the email, I thought, what the heck, I’m sure she’s already done this, but I’ll Google the title and see if I can lucky. I found a reprinted version of Piven’s piece that had been included in a book called, The Public Bureaucracies, “reprinted with permission of Social Policy, May/June 1970.” I downloaded the PDF and sent it on, saving me time, and her money.
Reading Fran’s essay “Whom Does the Advocate Planner Serve?” was interesting. She was tilting at some windmills still producing at the time, that had sprung up with Great Society support in LBJ’s War on Poverty with federal funding via Model Cities, OEO, and other programs. She walked an interesting tightrope. She acknowledged some of the contributions of legal services lawyers along with some social workers, architects, and planners who were engaged in “a new kind of practice, advocacy for the poor,” but she did so in the spirit of “something was better than nothing.” She came not to “praise Cesar, but to bury him.” The heart of her argument, which she and Richard Cloward would later develop in a series of books, was that advocacy for the poor was almost a form of cooptation, because the power of the poor was not found in access to services to ameliorate their conditions, but in disruption and their inherent threats to the stability of governments and society.
Essentially, she was trying out the argument that would become her signature in this first edition of Social Policy. There were “comments” from other scholars of that era who were unfriendly to her position that she easily eviscerated, as I had seen her do often in strategy meetings of the National Welfare Rights Organization. Piven could brilliantly counter arguments from organizers, who she both loved and supported, as she tried to convince us to redirect our time to more action, less organization.
She boils the questions implicit in her essay targeting planning advocates this way:
First, what kind of force will precipitate governmental efforts to integrate the poor, and do planning advocates escalate or curb that force? Second, what are the terms of integration – that is, do the poor get anything from the process – and do planning advocates help them get more?
The questions anticipate the answers in the negative.
She’s more explicit in responding to comments with examples from NWRO, saying,
When the National Welfare Rights Organization seizes the mike, their militancy over health issues may be more important than whether they demand “More Ambulatory Care Facilities” or “A Family Doctor for Every Welfare Family.” The slogan will not determine government’s health-care response any more than NWRO’s “demands” for a $5500 guaranteed income determined government’s welfare responses. It was not NWRO’s “demands” which led to rising welfare expenditures and proposals for welfare reform. But trouble in the cities did, and the turmoil NWRO created in welfare centers compounded that trouble…. If instead of agitating in welfare centers NWRO groups had devoted the last several years to studying guarantee-income plans to decide “their own best interests,” they still would not have gotten a guaranteed income, or the welfare dollars they did get.
Here, following the title of her essay, Piven is dissecting the planning charades where community “representatives” are engaged to assist in making the plans, supposedly given input and gaining voice in lengthy and tedious exercises, often never being funded or realized. That was then, and, if anything, it’s worse now with less interest in “integrating” the poor and less money to fund the schemes as well.
Piven and Cloward were constantly needling organizers to spend less time and energy in building organizations than organizing actions. This was a tension in welfare rights and beyond. Piven was always supportive of ACORN, but couldn’t conceal the fact that she still wished I was being arrested at a demonstration, rather than creating a dues-based membership. In these days, when we have so many self-appointed, almost professional advocates, rather than the advocates, who are professionals, in the time when she wrote the Social Policy article, some of her critique of advocates would still be powerful today, even if she might have lumped organizers in the same barrel.