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Interview :: Peace |
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Resistance has to be more serious |
Current rating: 0 |
by Ricky Baldwin
Email: baldwinricky (nospam) yahoo.com (unverified!)
Phone: 328-3037
Address: 801 E California Ave Urbana IL 61801 |
13 Oct 2004
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Renowned scholar of social movements Francis Fox Piven analyzes movements, elections and how to stop the war. War making isn't democratic, she says, so stopping war takes a long time and requires more than expressing opinion or voting. We will have to "throw sand in the gears." |
Award-winning sociologist and activist Francis Fox Piven has spent much of her career participating in and studying social movements of ordinary people. She has been an outspoken critic of restrictions on welfare, impediments to voting and the invasion of Iraq. Along with political scientist Richard A Cloward she has also researched and analyzed the conditions under which popular movements can effect change as well as strategies that do not work for them. I spoke with her by telephone on October 6, 2004.
Ricky Baldwin: You and Richard Cloward have written about the successes and failures of several movements, particularly in The Politics of Turmoil and Poor Peoples Movements. Is there a lesson for the antiwar movement in that research?
Francis Fox Piven: Well, I think there are always lessons for movements in the history of movements. And the most important lessons have to do with the conditions under which movements exert leverage, exert power. This is not a question that is directly asked in most of the literature on movements, so it’s something that I think activists have to scrutinize for themselves.
Baldwin: There is a lot of discouragement in the antiwar movement right now. Millions of people turned out for demonstrations worldwide, and some European governments said no to the war. There were demonstrations not just in big cities but small towns, and there were even a few antiwar candidates for president before the Democratic primaries. But all that didn’t manage to stop the war, and John Kerry’s not exactly an antiwar candidate.
Piven: No, he certainly is not.
Baldwin: So what went wrong there?
Piven: Well, I think that war-making is never determined by anything like a democratic process. War is something that governing elites undertake, and they don’t undertake it in response to popular opinion. If that were the case, we would probably never go to war, because ordinary people pay for war with blood and with their wealth.
One kind of evidence for that is that candidates never campaign as war candidates. Lyndon Baynes Johnson, who kept us in Vietnam, promised not to go to war in Vietnam. You can see that again and again. Candidates always campaign as peace candidates.
Another kind of evidence is that antiwar movements, popular opinion against wars expressed in marches and demonstrations has rarely succeeded at the outset. It’s as the war grinds on and people become more and more angry and disillusioned with the war that popular opinion, popular resistance to the war begins to take its toll on the capacity of government to make war. So in a way the antiwar movement is being too impatient. They expect to win too easily.
And in any case it should be said that what that movement did was express opinion. They marched in large numbers, they rallied, and it was a kind of voting, voting in the streets. I think a successful antiwar movement has to act in ways that throw sand in the gears of the war machine. Resistance has to be more serious.
Baldwin: It has to be disruptive, I mean directly?
Piven: Yes. It has to make war making very hard to do.
Baldwin: Any suggestions?
Piven: There are numerous ways in which popular resistance could express itself. You know, all the war material has to be shipped overseas. And it’s working people everywhere who have to do the shipping, who have to do the hauling.
Now this gets very, very difficult, and I think we have to acknowledge the difficulties, because of at least two reasons. One is that war making usually involves whipping up patriotic sentiments, and people who act to retard or impede the nation, the flag, are going to face a lot of resentment.
And the other reason that it’s difficult is that it is American soldiers who are over there. You hear that vulnerability being used by the Bush-Cheney team all the time, when they accuse Kerry, in voting against an $85 billion appropriation, of voting to deprive ‘our boys’ of material that they need to fight the war.
Baldwin: I want to ask you one more question about the electoral problem, because I know that you and Richard Cloward have written quite a bit about that, too, about voting and barriers to voting. Particularly in Why Americans Don’t Vote, I think there were a lot of problems that probably most people thought had gone out with Jim Crow. After that you worked hard for the Motor Voter law. How that has turned out?
Piven: Well, the Motor Voter law was implemented, partially implemented, in drivers license bureaus. But even there, there are a lot of foul-ups in the implementation, some of which I read about just this morning. You know, there are things like people registering to vote at the drivers license bureau, and they don’t get a card from the board of elections telling them where to go to vote.
But another problem is that the law was never really implemented in the other agencies, the agencies that serve poorer people, that are specified in the law: welfare, Medicaid, food stamps and disability agencies -- and in some states in other agencies as well. In New York State, for example, the big universities, SUNY and CUNY, are supposed to offer to register students to vote when they register for classes. And they don’t do it. So the law was a step in the right direction, but the implementation of the law impeded its full effect. That’s part of what happened.
The other part of what happened is that, we did not say in Why Americans Don’t Vote that the barriers to full participation in the United States were solely procedural. We said that full participation also depended on parties that would mobilize those who were procedurally eligible to vote. That couldn’t happen unless people were in the voting pool. But if politicians ignore them, ignore their issues, don’t work in their neighborhoods, don’t speak in their language, then they will be discouraged.
Now in this election, it’s really interesting. There does seem to be a lot of interest among the non-voters in turning out. There is a surge among minority neighborhoods, in poorer neighborhoods and among young people. That’s very, very important. Of course it could end up that we’ll get a surge of several percentage points, Kerry will be elected, and if he disappoints these people by his policies, then the surge will recede and we’ll go back to our fifty percent turnout rate.
Baldwin: Does a campaign like Nader’s or the independent, third parties, do you think it helps? Some of them are also doing voter registration drives and raising more issues…
Piven: Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it helps. You know, my answer has to be sort of contingent. I am in general a third party supporter. I mean, I think third parties serve an important functions in American elections, although they don’t win elections except on the local level sometimes.
But in this election I would like Nader to withdraw, because I think the stakes are so large. The stakes are huge. The stakes are the survival of people all over the world. This could become a very authoritarian, war-making country. So I don’t think this is the time for a third party. I’m a big Kerry critic, but I want him to win.
Baldwin: Do you think there are things like the Electoral College that are also impeding the process?
Piven: Yeah, well, the winner-take-all system in the Electoral College -- it doesn’t have to be that way, but it is in most states -- so that all the electoral votes go to one party or the other, this makes it harder for third parties to win.
Baldwin: Here in Champaign County, Illinois, and other places around the country there have been voter registration drives, and here at least hundreds of registrations have been rejected because, the County Clerk said, they used old forms or forgot to check male or female, or other minor things. Is that still common?
Piven: Rampant. There is so much fraud by election officials in these United States. And we always treat it -- political scientists, pundits and the public -- we always treat it as marginal. It certainly wasn’t marginal in 2000. And I don’t think it’s going to be marginal in 2004, either. But there are multiple kinds of fraud: fraud through tampering with machines; fraud through turning people away for not having filled out one or another inconsequential, nonsensical things; fraud when people come to the wrong polling place or the failure to give them a provisional ballot or to count provisional ballots; the failure to count the ballots of some mail-in voters and not other mail-in voters. Military voters will get counted. Overseas Americans who vote by absentee ballot will find it more difficult to get their votes counted, because they will be Kerry supporters.
Baldwin: You mentioned the machines. There have been a lot of problems with the machines and other new technologies, and there’s a lot of suspicion. Do you think there are enough problems that we just shouldn’t use them?
Piven: Well, I think that we obviously have to move in the direction of using computers, but we have to have voter-verified paper trails. We have to have open source systems where all sorts of people can check the programs that are being used by the computer companies. You know, Australia has computerized voting and it works fine. It’s not impossible. But in this country with our long history of deeply entrenched practices of fraud against voters -- I don’t like to use the term ‘voter fraud’ because the voters are rarely, rarely the ones guilty of the fraud -- we have to be very careful about electronic voting.
Baldwin: Back to the antiwar movement, and the movements for healthcare, living wage and others, you talked about the candidates or parties or campaigns not really mobilizing voters. What should those movements be doing differently?
Piven: I think we should work to get Kerry and Edwards elected, and after that, if Kerry and Edwards are elected, we should raise hell. I think if Kerry and Edwards are elected, the political environment will be much more hospitable to the movements. And the reason is that the Bush-Cheney coalition is made up of groups that are not at all responsive to the issues that these movements are raising. But a Kerry-Edwards victory would be based on a majority that included groups that were very sensitive to the movement issues, and the Kerry-Edwards team would therefore have to be more responsive to the movements. |
See also:
http://anti-war.net
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Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
Comments
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Re: Resistance has to be more serious |
by NRA4Freedom
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
15 Oct 2004
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Sounds a lot like treason to me. |
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How do We Stop This War??? |
by Jack Ryan
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
16 Oct 2004
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Ricky asks the question: How do we stop a war? Ricky, there are two ways to stop a war. 1. Surrender ( The policy that you guys advocate) 2. Win ( The policy that President Bush advocates). Which one do think the American people will choose?
Jack |
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Re: Resistance has to be more serious |
by chuck
chuck (nospam) yahoo.com (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
17 Oct 2004
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"people who act to retard or impede the nation, the flag, are going to face a lot of resentment."
Gee Einstein, I wonder why that is? |
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Re: Resistance has to be more serious |
by roamer
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
20 Oct 2004
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I think that sending people of to die for a lie is like murder. 15,000 innocent iraqis have died for this liberation. Elawi is former CIA, MI6, and Egyptian Intelligence, as well as worked under Saddam and the baath party. The iraqi people know this. They also know that the US. gov and Brits have shall we say not always worked for iraqs best interest. Things may not be as simple as they seem. If you want to continue this war, I suggest you go to the recruiting office and sign up ... or shut up. Send your relative off to get shot at.
Solutions, is any one proposing one? Leaving iraq a smoldering pile is not right. I agree that this war was lies from the go, Saddam was our killer before he got too big for his britches. He does belong in jail next to Rumsfeld, Cheney , jBlair , Bush and Powell and the other maniacs. But what happens to Iraq? Civil war? What is the solution? Patriots, how many people need to die before we declare victory? or pull out?
Bush committed treason by lying to the american people. His daughters should strap on a hard hat and combat boots.
Patriots need to watch listen and learn. |
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Re: Resistance has to be more serious |
by Jack Ryan
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
24 Oct 2004
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Dear Roamer,
I know Patriots, Patriots are friends of mine. You sir are no Patriot.
Jack |
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