Flashback 2000 : Frances Fox Piven Calls For Violence at Socialist Scholars Conference

Flashback year 2000. Noted socialist Frances Fox Piven called for conflict:

The eighteenth annual Socialist Scholars Conference took place in New York before about 1,800 participants from more than a dozen countries. The Conference theme was “Rockin’ the Boat: Building Coalitions for a New Century,” but the haunting specter this year was globalization.

Meeting right before the Washington, DC mobilization against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, the weekend panels and plenaries focused on on resistance to global corporate domination. The Union for Radical Political Economics, Dollars & Sense, Monthly Review, New Political Science, New York Student Environmental Action Coalition and community college students all held panels analyzing the economics and politics of the integration of trade and investment. Gone were the sterile debates of past years over the whether globalism was a new phenomenon or just another name for imperialism.

CUNY DSA, the primary organizer of the Conference, sponsored major sessions that included DSA Vice-chair Frances Fox Piven, DSA NPC member and Temple professor Joseph Schwartz, Julie Eisenhardt of the Johns Hopkins Student Labor Coalition, speaking to a large audience on the subject of What Next? Organizing Strategies and Tactics for a Humane Globalism. Drawing on her experience as one of the leading strategists of the welfare rights movement, and analyst of social movements, Fran Piven pointed out that the usual way of organizing, individual by individual, to build enduring institutions, join in majority coalitions, and thereby deliver votes, doesn’t work. The social victories that U.S. labor won in the 1930s came about by threatening workplace disruption and the Democratic coalition. New movements, Piven said, “can do what conventional movements can never do.” While parties in our political duopoly achieve voting majorities by appealing to the middle ground and doing nothing, “protest movements thrive on conflict. In-your-face politics, like those in Seattle, make social movements grow and encourage mass defiance — the only way that our issues can enter mainstream political discourse and lead to concessions.”

Just a reminder, your tax dollars fund comrade Piven. Who could forget that comrade Piven is one of the leaders in America's largest socialist organization that wants to get rid of " an economic order sustained by private profit"?