THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW FRANCES FOX PIVEN

...One worry I have is that the consequences will be invisible...

...But of course the steps outlined in the new bill will only worsen these flaws: People will be even poorer and will face even more humiliating restrictions and investigations...

...But at the same time, they didn't really want to see people simply get cut off...

...For one thing, people will delude themselves into believing that by collecting canned goods for the poor or whatever, that they're really accomplishing something...

...But I worry about charitable approaches, too...

...Even George Will and other conservative intellectuals are distressed about what's going to happen to the children...

...I know it's a terrible defeat to go from an entitlement to charity, but a lot of kids aren't going to have winter jackets, stuff like that...

...But not only did Clinton fail to explain the need for welfare, he actually used the issue to stir up resentment in order to get himself elected...

...I think of Heather Booth actually working for the Administration to build support for the (ugh) Clinton health-reform plan...

...People are very susceptible to education and argument on this issue...

...We have to keep poor people's lives in public view.' Piven: Absolutely, but we have the responsibility to help build a progressive third party whether or not we vote tor Clinton...

...I agreed only because I was thrilled at the idea of working with her...

...Whether thev think of welfare recipients as lazy and immoral or simply as poor women trying to raise their children and stay afloat depends to some degree on the images political leaders evoke...

...Do we have a similar legislative focus now...

...We can't let the families that are cut off AFDC disappear like that...

...Before the bill was signed, the focus was on getting Clinton not to sign it...

...Piven: The big flaws of welfare are that it keeps people too poor and that its procedures humiliate them...

...Piven: Right, you'd think from "Stand for Children" that the biggest problem poor children face is drive-by shootings...

...But this isn't true...

...But this discontent isn't being shaped into protest by the organizations that grew out of the feminist movement...

...But I think that a lot of people like Edelman and others in the Beltway social-welfare advocacy circles think they have a real relationship with Clinton: that they somehow have access...

...The biggest question is whether we're going to be able to build a movement to restore welfare...

...I don't think he was sure what the reaction would be, and he may have been waiting to find out...

...I would have thought Edelman had strained her relationship with him with the op-ed she wrote on welfare in The Washington Post in November 1995, where she did say this was his "moral litmus test...

...Women still face plenty of problems, but there isn't the same urgency to feminism that there was twenty years ago...

...So our first task is going to have to be to document the effects of the cuts: the cuts in benefits, all the new sanctions that will be imposed on those who "misbehave," the new time limits...

...But for more than thirty years, her biggest concern has been welfare...

...Recently, I worked with Piven in the Women's Committee of 100 to oppose punitive welfare reform...

...Could we have lost the policy battle and won the war of ideas...

...Eventually there were studies showing that, years later, only about 20 percent of the men cut off had found employment...

...Piven: True, as soon as they become adolescents, everyone's afraid of them...

...They're terribly flawed, but they still have to be defended...

...If we can make the federal government do that through something like the Wellstone Amendment, fine...

...Suddenly, Joe Klein is aghast, writing in Newsweek that he was wrong to have favored welfare "reform" all this time...

...You don't smash it...

...But we didn't threaten him with a wide airing of the issue—especially what the bill will do to children...

...Piven: No, although I'm not outraged at people who do...

...Piven: Well, maybe a lot of liberals just weren't paying close attention for the last few years...

...Q: But conservatives have been going after children in a big way...

...That's the only restriction, an upper limit on what they can do...

...But younger children are still seen as human and deserving...

...Piven: Yes, and Clinton's defenders on the left have an excuse for what he did to welfare: that he had no choice, he was just a victim of public opinion...

...It will be fifty states, each going its own way...

...Piven: I get very irritated by the argument that welfare is flawed and therefore it can't be defended...

...It's puzzling: We know from poll data there is a lot of discontent among women and disaffection from the Republican-Democratic program...

...In the 1960s, Piven worked with welfare-rights groups to expand benefits...

...Q: It's the same problem with so many public services, like schools...

...They seemed to think that, say, having a nice lobbying meeting with Leon Panetta was really doing something...

...We're going to need a political movement willing to be disruptive, and willing to exert real pressure by threatening Democratic politicians with the loss of their jobs...

...An acclaimed political scientist, she is a distinguished professor at the City University of New York graduate center and is the co-author, with her husband, Richard Cloward, of a number of books, including Regulating the Poor and Poor People's Movements...

...It's a whole lot easier to reform something that's in place than to start from scratch and have to reestablish the very notion that people have a right to support...

...Piven: The way to do that is to focus on what happens to children...

...This is crazy...

...And I can't think of a better way to focus on the plight of the post-welfare poor than by appealing to middle-class people with concrete cases of hardship...

...Most people don't like welfare, but ask them if poor mothers should have some support and they'll say "yes...

...They deserve our attention and concern, too...

...Then, in a year or two, when we have the results coming in, showing the effects...

...Q: Increases in infant mortality, in homelessness, tuberculosis, malnutrition, etc...

...Q: How do you account for Edelman's failure to challenge him in any serious way...

...This is something the left always has trouble with: How to defend flawed programs from cutbacks while at the very same time not losing sight of those flaws and the need for much more profound and basic reforms (and I mean "reform" in the old-fashioned sense, not as a euphemism for "destroy...

...It seems kind of cold to just do that...

...So one task for community groups is to publicize this information...

...The reason not to vote for him...

...The other problem is to figure out how to do charitable work in a way that forces the middle class to respect these people and their struggles, rather than pitying them...

...the bill is being interpreted as a moral test that he was given and that he failed...

...I interviewed her in her New York apartment on September 10, a few weeks after President Clinton had signed a bill ending the sixty-year-old federal commitment to welfare...

...Too many of them accepted the argument that welfare generates all these perverse incentives— making people lazy, encouraging them to have babies out of wedlock, etc...

...Either way, the aim should be to come back to Clinton in a couple of years with the awful consequences of what he's done and demand that he rebuild a welfare program...

...The Beltway organizations—women's groups and social-welfare advocacy groups—restricted themselves to an insider strategy...

...You don't smash it.' BY BARBARA EHRENREICH Frances Fox Piven is my favorite intellectual role model...

...I find myself wanting to organize some kind of charitable response, some kind of actual aid...

...But our trump card is that this crazy punitive policy is being applied to kids, who obviously are in no way responsible for their situation...

...Q: So what are we going to do in response...

...Piven: Extending oneself to others is always good...

...Q: So we monitor what's happening and document the disastrous effects...

...when she asked me to help her plan the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, of which she was then president...

...Instead of redounding to Clinton's favor, Barbara Ehrenreich is the author, most recently, of "The Snarling Citizen," a collection of essays about the 1990s...

...Piven: Yes, and the states can do pretty much whatever they want under the bill—except give aid to people for too long...

...We're going to have to start all over fighting for every dollar, every single entitlement...

...So Clinton's other option would have been to do some real educating—explaining the plight of poor women, the inadequacy of wages and child care, and so on...

...You can argue that the adults have been damaged by "dependency," but dependency is part of the condition of childhood, and you can hardly blame kids for being "dependent...

...And the arena won't be the federal government anymore...

...Rogers later objected to the story, saying that his comments were rewritten and did not reflect what he believes about welfare...

...Piven: Yeah, then we go to Clinton with these results, push them in his face, and demand that he restore welfare...

...It's not enough just to tell people to monitor the effects...

...With Cloward, she was an initiator of the "Motor Voter" bill to encourage voter registration, especially among low-income groups...

...Imagine if someone of her talents and experience had been working to build the constituency for real, single-payer health reform...

...Groups like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities will be monitoring what the states are doing and the impact on people...

...We have to do two things: monitor what the states are doing and publicize what is happening to the poor themselves...

...after all, is to deprive him of a landslide...

...Q: But then I read, in In These Times, New Party founder Joel Rogers sounding rather cavalier about the elimination of our "fundamentally flawed" welfare program, as if it would be easier now to replace it with something better...

...First, find out who or what committee is doing the planning to create the welfare program for your state...

...Q: The problem is going to be to get middle-class attention...

...Try to get represented on that committee...

...And the women's movement has been weakened by the relative success of upper-middle-class women in getting into the professions and management...

...Piven: Yes, we have one...

...Instead of trying to change the stereotypes and misconceptions, he exploited them to get into office...

...Maybe we need a combination of direct aid with a program of documentation...

...Secondly, start monitoring the effects of cutbacks at the grassroots level...

...In the hysteria about child crime, which Mike Males has written about, poor children are being described as potential "predators"—which is a way of saying that they aren't even human and certainly not deserving of love...

...Like the New Party...

...Programs that demean people tend not to have a lot of public support...

...She's also a dedicated activist...

...A lot of terrific people—good organizers and media types—came to believe that they had a friend in the White House and that it was the job of progressives to defend him against the right...

...But he did veto one version of the welfare bill after that, so I guess at that point there was still a relationship to preserve...

...When many able-bodied adults were cut off general relief a few years ago, a lot of them just disappeared from public view...

...Piven: We need something along the lines of Union Summer...

...Piven: Well, lots of liberals failed, too...

...Piven: One thing to do would be to try to pass the Wellstone Amendment, which would mandate the federal government itself to do the monitoring...

...Q: Since Clinton signed the welfare bill, there seems to have been a change of heart among a lot of people...

...I don't like a total focus on children—what about the adults...

...Q: So will you vote for Clinton this time...

...We have to keep poor people's lives in public view...

...And with the near-destruction of Legal Aid, there's an awful lot of advocacy that needs doing...

...The larger cause was simply that there was nothing to stop them...

...No one went after him, not even Marian Wright Edelman, until after he had announced he would sign the bill...

...Q: So what would you tell people to do...

...State governments aren't closer to people than the federal government—in some ways they're farther away and harder to keep track of or to influence...

...We need a very specific focus...

...We have to do two things: monitor what the states are doing and publicize what is happening to the poor themselves...

...She organized that "Stand for Children" demonstration last spring, for example, and didn't use the occasion to protest welfare reform...

...This was one of the Achilles' heels in the left defense of welfare...

...And then it was too late...

...Q: It seems to me that if we don't vote for Clinton we're taking the responsibility to help build some real political alternatives...

...In the weeks after the signing, everywhere I looked, someone was denouncing Clinton for abandoning the poor...

...Q: And college students, what should they think of doing...

...I met Piven thirteen years ago...

...in the eighties and nineties she has campaigned relentlessly against welfare cutbacks disguised as "reforms...

...But whether we vote for Clinton or not isn't the biggest question...

...Labor is very damaged, for example...

...But to do that we're going to need more than documentation...

...It's easy enough for me, voting in New York, because New York will go for him anyway (and if New York doesn't, no one will...

...Q: But I do think there's been a sudden opinion shift, at least among a lot of pundits...

...What happened wasn't just because of business pressures or the rightwing agenda or Clinton's opportunism...

...For one thing, he could have done what Bush did—just not raised the issue...

...It's the essentially human thing to do...

...It should be like VISTA, with the volunteers being resource people for advocacy and organizing in poor communities...

...Theda Skocpol said something like that in The New Republic: that we have to smash it so we can start all over again...

...It was the beginning of an enduring friendship...

...Q: I would generalize and say that this fantasy of access has been the undoing of the American left since 1992...

...The rest were homeless, and some were too sick to work...

...What they needed to do was threaten Clinton with some serious political costs if he signed the bill...

...We only have welfare "as we know it" because of the disruptive social movements of the 1930s and 1960s, and those movements have been severely weakened...

...With or without representation, lobby and harass it...

...And then they got bored with the issue, reassuring themselves that since Clinton had vetoed two welfare-reform bills, he'd veto a third one, too...

...Q: So have we come up with a specific agenda for progressive groups that want to be involved...