The Have-nots

...The most striking fact, however, is not that outposts of opposition have appeared but that the question of the state's responsibility for the welfare of its citizens, forced upon us by Reagan's assault, has met with silence from so many for so long...

...The authors have based their prediction of growing opposition to Reaganomics on logical progression rather than on what members of the working class and underclass actually think and feel about the issues...

...Piven and Cloward predict that, in contrast to past patterns, the current effort to reduce benefits will be thwarted because a new understanding of the state's power to determine economic well-being has taken root in the populace...

...There are signs of resistance to Reaganomics across the land...

...4.95 paperback...

...Thus, most Americans came to see their economic grievances as separate from their political concerns...

...Owners of American capital, already faced with increased competition from overseas, higher energy costs, and environmental restrictions, feel that the dismantlement of the social welfare system is a key to renewing profitability...

...They argue that the drastic cuts in income-maintenance programs, along with the tax-law changes and higher military spending, are the opening salvos in a new war against the poor, the primary aim of which is to increase corporate profitability...

...Ken Auletta's "underclass" is the approximately nine million people who are least in demand in the nation's economy: long-term welfare clients, high-school dropouts, criminals, drug addicts, vagrants, and the like...

...most of the former offenders and dropouts quit the programs or couldn't find or keep jobs, but a significant number of the AFDC mothers and former addicts used the opportunity to find steady employment...

...they pass over some crucial social antagonisms between the extremely poor and the steadily employed, and they slight Reagan's ability effectively to avoid the entitlement issue...

...They constitute fewer than a third of those officially designated as poor, but for Auletta they are "as omnipresent as potholes...

...No economic system can survive without a political arrangement that supports it...

...They believe the changes have made the state the central arena of class conflict...

...Our nation's founders devised a governmental system that maintained a free market, institutionalized private-property rights—the sine qua non of capitalism—and declared the question of these rights to be outside the realm of democratic decision making...

...As Marx saw more than a hundred years ago, the owners of capital have much to gain by the existence of an industrial reserve army—a supply of people who are eager to take the places of those who hold out for higher wages and better working conditions...

...174 pp...

...when protest has died down, the state has responded to pressure from the owners of capital by curtailing aid to the destitute...

...For most of the nation's history, the authors argue, the state's role in affecting individual economic wellbeing was shrouded in laissez-faire ideology and an institutional structure that divorced economics from politics...

...As the state intervened in the market and generated income-maintenance programs on a large scale, it made legitimate the idea that the state should step in to ensure subsistence...

...Instead of insight, he gives the reader an undated Horatio Algerism for the modern underclass: The unfortunates who make it up, if they have sufficient pluck, a dose of luck, and develop the proper values, can eventually land steady jobs as security guards or clerk-typists...

...Piven and Cloward show the common thread running through the erosion of benefits, the attempts to shift responsibility for welfare to state and local governments, and the views expressed by Samuel Huntington, Daniel Bell, and others that democracy is threatened by rising popular expectations...

...Piven and Cloward set the question of the state's role in social welfare in historical context, explain why the attack on social programs is being mounted now, and argue that it is likely to be repulsed...

...These are the changes in consciousness that the authors predict will fuel a stiff resistance to Reaganomics...

...Auletta reports that the M D R C programs in New York and elsewhere had mixed success...

...When popular protest has been strong, the state has granted some relief concessions...

...The Reagan Administration's assault on Federal social programs, and indeed on the whole social welfare philosophy enshrined by the New Deal, has made this a central question of the 1980s...

...Piven and Cloward tend to overestimate the extent to which subsistence is viewed as a right...

...Auletta harps on familiar conservative themes in his discussions of the programs, the underclass, and poverty in America: maladaptive values and behavior, the evils of welfare dependency, welfare cheating, the rising number of black families headed by women, and poverty as a seedbed for criminals and addicts...

...The propertied have wanted welfare reduced not because they have enjoyed watching others suffer but because they have seen that aid cuts increase the demand for work and thus drive wages down...

...With unemployment benefits, food stamps, and welfare to fall back on, workers have been less likely to take any job at any wage...

...JONATHAN COBB (Jonathan Cobb is an editor at Scientific American!Freeman and co-author of "The Hidden Injuries of Class...

...In an earlier book, Regulating the Poor, Piven and Cloward documented how social welfare policy has historically followed a cyclic pattern...

...Piven and Cloward argue that these developments have made more of the economic system appear vulnerable to democratic governance and widened a belief among the people that they have a right to demand subsistence from the state...

...In The New Class War, Piven and Cloward show that under Ronald Reagan, the state is, indeed, helping a class of people who are helping themselves—to more and more...

...With the practical introduction of Keynesian economics into American life by Franklin Roosevelt, however, this disguise began to disintegrate: Since then the power of the state to determine individual economic well-being has become increasingly obvious...

...Laissez-faire ideology meshed perfectly with these arrangements: it suggested that an individual's economic fate was the product of the natural laws of the market and personal characteristics...

...But they now often need government aid to do so...

...THE NEW CLASS WAR: REAGAN'S ATTACK ON THE WELFARE STATE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward Pantheon...

...As an analysis of contemporary popular consciousness, however, The New Class War is disappointing...

...The program provided participants with a year's job and instruction in the skills and values needed to find and hold down regular work—just the sort of project that Reagan and his Congressional allies have been busily eliminating or gutting...

...Piven and Cloward argue in their new book that social programs are being so zealously attacked at this time because corporate leaders believe that these programs are crippling the effectiveness of the industrial reserve army as a depressor of wages...

...That common thread is an attempt to insulate capitalism from democratic demands generated by the growth of social welfare programs since the 1930s...

...While he is surely right in his assertion that more income alone won't cause all heroin addicts to throw away their syringes, all thieves to become sanctimonious about private property, or all AFDC mothers to wake up with the effects of a lifetime's demoralization washed away, Auletta has little fresh to say on these topics...

...What is the state's responsibility for the welfare of its citizens...

...Ken Auletta, in The Underclass, and Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, in The New Class War, address themselves to this question, but they answer it in different ways...

...Auletta spent seven months in 1979 and 1980 observing and interviewing dropouts, former addicts and offenders, and A F D C (Aid for Families with Dependent Children) mothers who participated in a New York City program sponsored by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC...

...11.50 hardcover...

...Piven and Cloward are probably right that the forces behind Reagan won't be able to gut social welfare programs completely...

...As an analysis of the current reaction, laissez-faire ideology, social welfare policy, and the changing role of the state, The New Class War is the best now available...

...Although Auletta rejects subsistence aid as a matter of course, he does believe that the state should help those who help themselves...

...With the role of the state in the economic fates of individuals so well disguised, a populace that began with a more democratic governmental structure than any European nation came to have the least developed social welfare system and the weakest socialist movement...