Professor Piven Gets Her 15 Minutes

So Sociology is finally having its 15 minutes of fame. Frances Fox Piven in The Nation laments the lack of revolutionary spirit in the current age. Where ARE those cannon fodder proletariat anyway.

The problem of how to bring people together is sometimes made easier by government service centers, as when in the 1960s poor mothers gathered in crowded welfare centers or when the jobless congregated in unemployment centers.

Could it be that maybe that’s not the droids we’re looking for? But wait, there’s more.

Second, before people can mobilize for collective action, they have to develop a proud and angry identity and a set of claims that go with that identity. They have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry and indignant. (Welfare moms in the 1960s did this by naming themselves "mothers" instead of "recipients," although they were unlucky in doing so at a time when motherhood was losing prestige.) Losing a job is bruising; even when many other people are out of work, most people are still working. So, a kind of psychological transformation has to take place; the out-of-work have to stop blaming themselves for their hard times and turn their anger on the bosses, the bureaucrats or the politicians who are in fact responsible.

Oh, yes, anger. That’s THE ingredient for the Revolution (along with Draino and Prell). After all, that’s been the scenario when Capitalism replaced the Agrarian Modes of Production. Marx and Engels Speak!

But Professors Altman and Taranto dissent and voice a distinct opinion (okay, Taranto is not REALLY a professor—in fact he did not finish college but he IS the opinion editor at the Wall Street Journal and that’s LIKE being a professor since he’s in a position where he doesn’t care if we don’t like him or not—is that like tenure?).

The uproar Frances created generated some angry attacks—apparently people consider HER to be a good target for THEIR anger! This was met by the Four Riders of the American Sociological Association (REAL Professors) professing THEIR support of their fallen angel and returning fire at those ANGRY under educated masses (the Proletariat?). In short, the academic world is turning out to do what they do best—hiss.

This is so much fun! It’s like being back in Gradual School! I get to watch really cool guys and chicks (er, professors) discussing REALLY high level stuff like Marx and Engels. They are oh so hip and cool. When I grow up, I wanna be a sociologist just like them! Still to this day, I wanna be a sociologist, too.



We could pretend its 1979 when all the cool professors were ex SDSers who had made it. And THEY can give over a really powerful sermon on the Gospels of Marx and Engels. REALLY worth your time and they can use the FTE's.

In seminar, the professors sit poised on the divan while we students merit the floor at their feet. Gracefully, Frances (it's her seminar) gives over the Truth of THE Manifesto according to Karl and Fred.

Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many ways, the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all times, with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own instruments of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie. [They ALWAYS add the italics and bold print when they lean forward to preach their points!]

Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling classes are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.

Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.

So, we learn the Holy Word that The Revolution comes when members of the Bourgeoisie, like Prometheus, leave their Towers to teach the masses the means and modes of revolutionary technologies. After all, the Proletariat are not up to learning these tools themselves being unemployed factory workers and all.

But, wait! There’s danger in the fields. The wolves run wild in the cold Russian Winter Nights chasing lone horse drawn sleds filled with terrified children and their mothers where Grandmothers leap from sleds to be eaten to save the precious little ones from certain death! Grandma! Don't do it!

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat, they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.

Frances leans forward and whispers that even though a massive coagulation of American humanity is coalescing about Tea Rooms—they are NOT the Revolutionary Ones. They are reactionary POSERS out to LOOK like a Revolutionary Class, aware of itself acting for its own self interest. Oh no! These are the ones trying to roll back the times to some Ancient Order—to a Halcyon Age when White Men gathered to throw off the tyranny of a King, another White Man. Yes—they want to bring back the ancient glory of the Constitution.

But, do not trust them, my pretties.

In the conditions of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family-relations; modern industrial labor, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.

Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.

So this cannot BE those frequenters of Tea Rooms. No. The Revolution MUST be violent. That’s what our studies have shown. And, we KNOW.

At this point, the visiting professor, who looks real cool with his tweed jacket, leather elbow patches, thick brown tortoise shell glasses rimmed by his thin balding brown hair, bespeaks from his reclined place on the divan.

"But, Frances," he purrs. "Just what DO these proletariat look like? I mean, is it not an empirical question? Just what is the spark that sets this off? After all, Frances, would not one person’s Revolutionary be another person’s Reactionary? Would we even recognize what they look like? Are they like us just poor and unemployed or do they not bathe and reek of the odiousness of labor, street effluvia, and body odor? What would Frederick Engels say to get this Revolution happening?"

Good question and one that was asked to Frederick Engels over a century ago. His response is classic. But first some background.

The questioner was Isaac Hourwich, an economist and a jurist from Russia who taught at the University of Chicago and Columbia and periodically was an organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. He was also my great grandfather. [I come from several generations of Gentle Marxists and Marxettes.] He had been a rabble rousing Revolutionary in The Old Country and was sent to Siberia for the Cause. His sister translated the Manifesto into Russian for its first edition there. So, the family was pretty Red. His daughter told me about the wolves. When I teach the Manifesto, I always apologize on her behalf—my fault. I also blame Global Warming.

Anyway, Isaac wrote to Fred in 1893 to see if Fred could say a few things to encourage the Serfs of Russia to rise up against their Oppressors. Fred’s words to Izzie ring true still.

London, 27 May 1893
122 Regent's Park Road, NW

Dr. Isaac A. Hourwich

Dear Sir,

Many thanks for your interesting study on the Economics of the Russian Village, which I read, I hope, not without profit.

As to the burning questions of the Russian revolutionary movement, the part which the peasantry may be effected to take in it, these are subjects on which I could not conscientiously state an opinion for publication without previously studying over again the whole subject and completing my very imperfect knowledge of the facts of the case by bringing it up to date. But for that I am sorry to say I have not at present the time. And then, I have every reason to doubt whether such a public statement by me would have the effect you expect of it.

I know from my own experience of 1849-52 how unavoidably a political emigration splits itself up into a number of divergent factions, so long as the mother-country remains quiet. The burning desire to act, face to face with the impossibility of doing anything effective, causes in many intelligent and energetic heads an over active mental speculation, an attempt at discovering or inventing new and almost miraculous means of action.

The word of an outsider would have but a trifling, and at best passing effect. If you have followed the Russian emigration literature of the last decade, you will yourself know how, for instance, passages from Marx's writings and correspon¬dence have been interpreted in the most contradictory ways, exactly as if they had been texts from the Classics or from the New Testament, by various sections of Russian emigrants.

Whatever I might say on the subject you mention, would probably share the same fate, if any attention was paid to it. And so from all these various reasons, I think it best for all whom it may concern, including myself, to abstain.

Yours very truly,
F. Engels

[Source: Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishing Group Corp, 2004) Vol. 50 pp. 144-45.]

Now THIS is how a true Marxist Scholar SHOULD address the issues of the popular uprising in America:

Yo, Dude (or, Dudette as the case may be); I’ve haven’t the FOGGIEST notion of how this is playing out, who the players REALLY are; and I am the very LAST person on earth to ask about such matters.

Are Tea Room attendees the formation of the Proletariat revolutionary force or not? Are the twenty-first century technologies associated with the information the New Mode of Production that the Prophet and his Priest foretold in their visions? There are some social scientists who say yes, some say no, and eventually, when the facts are in, we'll all know a portion of the explained variance. It is, after all, an empirical question.

So, Frances, go back and study your sources and quit posing. You are far too established and Bourgeois to be manning the picket lines—you’ll have to give up your pension. As a sociologist, you may have something to offer but only after the facts are in. That's the problem with science. You have to wait until events have unfolded to assess whether or not your hypotheses are correct. As attractive as it is, the lecturn is not a bully pulpit.