Disruption, Organization, and Reform: A Critique of Poor People’s Movements

What the poor win in American politics, they win by mass defiance, not by the use of the regular political system”; in their book Poor People’s Movements, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward draw this lesson from the study of protest movements. Because of its historical richness and provocative conclusions, this book deserves the attention of all those interested in the fate of protest movements in America, and of would-be organizers who wonder what is to be done.’

The book offers histories of four protest movements—the unemployed workers’ and the industrial workers’ movements of the 1930s and the civil rights and welfare rights movements of the 1960s. In these studies and in a theoretica...