piven and cloward, poor people's movements

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[1] organization -- very clear that their argument doesn't target the fact of organization, but rather the kind of organization, and its tactics. organization (in the sense of 'coordination') ends up being indispensable to their stories of success--they say as much, even if they're not as clear as they could be.

in short, where they attack organization, they're not in fact attacking the fact of organization, nor even a form of organization ('formal mass-membership', they sometimes say), but--it seems to me--a particular tactic [Communists, in "Pop Front" era, were not the inevitable result of the Communist Party]

(another way of saying the above is that the fact of organization, and even the mass-membership form of organization can actually help coordinate disruption--why not? what they're worried about is mass-membership organizations becoming electoral machines, rather than mechanisms for co-ordinating disruption. and fair enough).

[1b] Michels -- their argument seems to be that the rise of an internal oligarchy is an invariable result of the waning of mass protest. in other words, organizations will be co-opted by elites, who have recovered capacity, as the basis for mass disruption dissolves. it would have been helpful, though to specify whether this is an endogenous fact about organizations (which seems to be what is suggested by the attack on organization), or an exogenous fact determined by the changes in social structure?

[2] winning -- when they say that disruption forced concessions, the implied definition of victory is 'concession'. but is this tenable? is it the case that organizations of the oppressed that have organized differently -- say, through political parties -- haven't won concessions. even in the US it seems difficult to make the case (and they admit something like this, re: unions), but what about in Europe and Social-Democracy?

two things here, then:

(a) the great counterfactual that they give no mind to, in their account, is the possibility of a third-party being organized in the 1930s -- particularly, it's often argued, for the 1938 election. whether or not this was possible is a question I don't think is that important. their suggestion, though, is that there were two options open to the mass movement -- continued, disorganized disruption, or cooption by political elites. but what about this third alternative--considering this in more detail would help sharpen their discussion.

I think there's no question that something like this is our way out of the conundrum that their argument leaves us with. the suggestion being that, absent the large, uncontrollable social changes that explain mass willingness to be disruptive,

(b) if you want to salvage the idea that disruption is essential, their definition victory needs to be more precise. we need something that will exclude instances where lower-class has won concessions without disruption/active threat of disruption. maybe what we're interested is not 'concession,' but the build-up of working-class power, or the progressive accumulation of capacity (so other tactics can win you concessions for much longer and more successfully than they think, but in a way that forfeits power over the long-run). [is this different from saying that they underestimate what political organizations can win you in the short-term, even as they seem to be correct about them, over the long-run?]

[3] disruption -- the definition of disruption needs to be a bit sharper. to be clear, I think they basically have the right idea; but the idea of 'mass defiance of what's normal' too readily collapses different degrees of power into the same category. mass protest on the streets (stepping out of line as a member of civil society) and a mass strike (stepping out of line as a worker) are both instances of 'mass defiance of what's normal' that imperil the normal operation of society, but one a kind of structural power that the other doesn't, I would argue. we could think of this as having been demonstrated in Egypt; if you buy one account of the regime's fall, workers were the straw that broke the camel's back.