"... the only power that poor people have is the power of disruption."

[Sapphire Blue]

Homeless Shelters:
A Feeble Response to Homelessness
Betty Reid Mandell

~ an excerpt ~

In tracing the history of poor people's movements, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward conclude that the only power that poor people have is the power of disruption. Therefore, they argue, the role of organizers is not to try to form permanent membership organizations but to mobilize the poor for disruptive action when the time is ripe. Membership organizations, they argue, always end up by losing their base in their struggles to get funding and to hold on to leadership roles.

Organizations endure . . . by abandoning their oppositional politics. . . . Organizers tended to work against disruption because, in their search for resources to maintain their organizations, they were driven inexorably to elites, and to the tangible and symbolic supports that elites could provide. Elites conferred these resources because they understood that it was organization-building, not disruption, that organizers were about.52

During the Great Depression, there were rent riots when small bands of people prevented marshals from putting furniture on the street. People also stormed the relief offices demanding relief.

As the unemployed became more disruptive, even cherished procedures of investigation and surveillance of recipients were relinquished . . . As indignation mounted . . . some people not only defied the prohibition against going on the dole, but some even began to defy the apparatus of ritualized humiliation that had made that prohibition so effective.53

People began to shake free of what William Blake described in his poem London as "mind-forged manacles," which had locked them into submission and into internalizing their oppressor's view of them as not deserving of respect and equal rights. The general population also began to shake those mind-forged manacles when they understood that structural reasons created poverty, not people's individual failings.

The playwright Jean Racine expressed it well in his play Brittanicus. Narcissus says to Brittanicus:

As long as you are seen as a mere suppliant,
Uttering complaints but not inspiring fear;
While your resentments spend themselves in talk,
No doubt of it, you will complain forever.54

Piven and Cloward conclude:

One can never predict with certainty when the "heavings and rumblings of the social foundations" will force up large-scale defiance, although changes of great magnitude were at work. Who, after all, could have predicted the extraordinary mobilization of black people beginning in 1955? Nor can one calculate with certainty the responses of elites to mass disruption. There are no blueprints to guide movements of the poor. But if organizers and leaders want to help those movements emerge, they must always proceed as if protest were possible. They may fail. The time may not the right. But then, they may sometimes succeed.55


http://www.wpunj.edu/~newpol/issue43/BMandell43.htm



Indigo Blue (Sapphire Blue's daughter)

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[electropop]

2. An interesting perspective.

It's a useful way to think of organizing, something like the "flash-mob" fad of a few years ago.

[Indenturedebtor]

3. Very good read. Thank you n/t

We should organize to disrupt. That should be the point of organizing.