Friday 28 October 2016, 7pm: Old Capitol Books and the Direct Action Monterey Network are teaming up against for the twenty-first installment of the Theory and Philosophy Reading Group. This month, we’ll be reading sections from Poor People’s Movements by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward. Come join local thinkers, activists, philosophers, and readers for a discussion about the intersections between theory, philosophy, and social movements.
“A provocative book that should be read by both students and makers of social history.”–Michael Harrington, The New York Times Book Review
This series of Theory & Philosophy Reading Group sessions is building off the foundational knowledge explored as part of last summer’s Thinking Critically about Society seminar series; in particular, we’ll be exploring themes introduced in the seminar on Marxist-Feminism last August. Our last Theory & Philosophy Reading Group looked at the Marxist theoretical work of Teresa Amott and Julie Matthaei, and this month we’ll continue in that theme with an exploration of Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward’s work Poor People’s Movement.
For this reading group, read:
Introduction
Chapter One: The Structuring of Protest
Full PDF available for download free here
About the book:
“Have the poor fared best by participating in conventional electoral politics or by engaging in mass defiance and disruption? The authors of the classic Regulating The Poor assess the successes and failures of these two strategies as they examine, in this provocative study, four protest movements of lower-class groups in 20th century America.”
About the authors:
Frances Fox Piven is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the Graduate School, City University of New York. She is coeditor of Work, Welfare and Politics. Her other award-winning books co-written with Cloward include Regulating the Poor,and Why Americans Don’t Vote.
Richard Andrew Cloward was an activist and sociology, who was influential in the “Strain Theory” of criminal behavior. He taught at Columbia University for almost fifty years. Other than the book co-authored with Piven, Cloward wrote The Breaking of the American Social Compact (New Press, 1997). He died in 2001.
Old Capitol Books 