Praxis for the Poor

Piven and Cloward and the Future of Social Science in Social Welfare

Sanford F. Schram

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780814783542
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Praxis for the Poor puts the relationship of politics to scholarship front and center through an examination of the work of Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward. Piven and Cloward proved that social science could inform social-policy politics in ways that helped energize a movement. Praxis for the Poor offers a critical reflection on their work and builds upon it, demonstrating how a more politically-engaged scholarship can contribute to the struggle for social justice.

Necessary reading for political scientists, sociologists, social workers, social welfare activists, policy-makers, and anyone concerned with the plight of the poor and oppressed, Praxis for the Poor shows how social science can play a role in building a better future for social welfare.

PART I

The Theory of Practice

1

What Accessibility Can’t Do
The Politics of Welfare Scholarship

The call for compromise bulks large in welfare scholarship. This is especially the case when welfare scholars take on the role of “public intellectuals” who seek to influence public discourse on issues of social welfare policy. In several ways, a persistent tension runs through scholarship on social policy politics to moderate the level of abstraction and the critical perspective employed in order to reach a larger audience and mobilize a sufficient number of the mass public to support policy reforms. Write simply and propose feasible reforms: these are the edicts of responsible welfare scholarship today. They are often taken as givens, not subject to contestation. They combine to make for a preference for what we can call a “politics of blandness.” The politics of blandness emphasizes clear and simple prose to offer basic facts that prove just how reasonable its proposals are. The hope is that this strategy will then lead reluctant Americans at least to support moderate improvements in social provision. The idea is to provide an analysis that both resonates with and is understood by the mass public.

In this chapter, I call this popular strategy into question. I examine two examples: one reflecting the belief that effective welfare scholarship should feature simple writing that focuses on a plain presentation of facts, and another emphasizing how a moderation in proposals is essential for welfare scholarship to connect effectively with politics. In both cases, I suggest that what seems patently obvious is less than meets the eye. Both examples point to what I call “dilemmas of accessibility,” where moderation in terms of both writing style and policy proposals increases one’s access to the mass public. However, this occurs at the cost of the ability to promote a critical perspective that might help get beyond the prevailing prejudices that hold down social policy. Both examples suggest how politically effective welfare scholarship requires something other than moderation of writing style and policy proposals. I conclude by suggesting alternative ways in which welfare scholarship can better inform ongoing struggle against the reigning structures of power and thereby can constitute a “praxis for the poor.”

Middling Politics

One aspect of the accessibility problem for welfare scholars who want to inform public discourse is to make arguments that will resonate with the mass public. This is especially an issue for public intellectuals who seek not only to discourage elitism but also to promote democracy. From this perspective, it is imperative to couch a reform agenda in terms acceptable to the broad middle of the political spectrum. Without an effective pitch that will appeal to the middle classes, attempts to improve social provision are doomed to be ignored. For Theda Skocpol, no recent policy debacle more glaringly highlighted this necessity than the failure of health-care reform in the early 1990s under the Clinton administration.¹ In The Missing Middle: Working Families and the Future of American Social Policy, Skocpol focuses on the need to develop a way to hook the middle class into accepting a more generous and universalistic set of social welfare entitlements.² For Skocpol, a compelling hook, more than facts or an argument, is what is needed. While arguments and facts are important, to be sure, neither of them will matter much if they are not couched in terms that are appealing to the middle class. Welfare scholarship that seeks to be politically effective will go nowhere if it does not find a way to connect its proposals to middle-class values, ideologies, and interests. Such is the nature of scholarship that seeks to be effective in democratic systems. Skocpol writes:

The call to reconfigure social supports to build a family-friendly America amounts to a moral vision, not just a laundry list of legislative prescriptions. This runs against the grain of politics today, because our national conversation seems increasingly dominated by policy wonks and economists mired in technical details or by media people focusing on short-term personal maneuvers and scandals. However, from the 1960s through the 1980s, conservatives showed that a politics of broad social mobilization around clearly articulated values, not just narrow policy prescriptions, could move the center of national debate and reshape the landscape of politics. Now it is time for Americans who believe government has a pivotal role to play in building a just society to undertake a similarly bold and visionary strategy.

A family-oriented populism focused especially on working parents can revitalize the tradition of successful social policy making in American democracy—generating civic dividends in the process. Americans believe in linking national support to important individual contributions to community well-being. Mobilizing government to work with nongovernmental institutions to better support parents is an endeavor very much within this vital tradition.

Pursuit of supports for working families can strengthen Americans’ sense of community—not just in particular localities, but also across lines of class and race.³

“Working families” is the key term here, and would be used by Al Gore in his bid for the presidency in 2000.⁴ Skocpol preferred it as a way to create cross-generation, cross-class, cross-race, and cross-gender alliances on behalf of a more generous and inclusive system of social entitlements. Such cross-cutting alliances could create the needed public support for more universalistic forms of social provision. Skocpol adds: “A morally grounded appeal to shared concerns does better in American politics than any explicit call for class-based mobilization.”⁵ This goal could be achieved once we recognize that such alliances will come about only when we begin to build on the country’s traditions and values for providing social assistance in terms of the contributions people make to the social order. Therefore, it is necessarily “working families” rather than children, the needy, or some other identity that takes the central subject position of such an agenda for social welfare reform.

This is in some respects a strategy of seduction designed to lure the middle class into supporting that which it would not otherwise support by tying more generous forms of social provision to an appealing metaphor. It is also, then, a strategy with real dangers that risks reinscribing hierarchies of privilege and deservingness in terms of who is working at what. There are other traps as well, which Skocpol recognizes others might want to emphasize. She writes:

Many progressives who read this book will worry about my repeated stress on “family” well-being, and my claim that children ideally need the support of two married parents. In recent decades, many progressives have been unwilling to highlight family needs or champion two-parent households for fear of appearing to ostracize single mothers. But surely Americans of all political persuasions can acknowledge that children do best in two-parent families supported by the nation and local communities, without denying the single-parent families also deserve our support.⁶

Yet, it is just such privileging of the two-parent family that has led to denying aid to single-parent families on the grounds that it will just encourage family dissolution. In the United States, especially in recent years, public policy grounded in privileging the married two-parent family necessarily means denigrating the single-parent family. While it is surely possible that this need not be the case, it would be treacherous to ignore that this is the way social welfare policy gets made today.

It is somewhat ironic, then, that Skocpol in the end calls for public intellectuals to have the courage to offer a moral vision that will ground social welfare policy in supporting “working families.” She writes:

Americans who care about recentering our civic and political life must, in short, pursue strategies that look further ahead than the usual Washington time horizon of the day after tomorrow. With public intellectuals self-consciously taking a bolder stand than most elected politicians can be expected to embrace at any given moment, supporters of a more equitable society and stronger supports for families must frankly proclaim their moral vision, linking it to specific proposals. They must organize inside and outside the electoral system, and push politicians and other institutional leaders toward a bolder stand on behalf of all working parents and their children, even as broad swatches of Americans are brought together for action and discussion about the needs of communities and families.⁷

Where is the courage in couching appeals in terms that the middle class will find comforting? How will this create the capacity to think anew about how the class system re-creates processes of marginalization on a daily basis? Without sufficient attention given to questions like these, the strategy to offer a “moral vision” on behalf of “working families” risks reinforcing the privileges of the gender-race-class system as it is currently practiced.

Skocpol’s effort here is laudable in its attempt to move beyond technicism and to speak more directly to the values that move the public to support or oppose social welfare policy. She says: “The policy specifics are less important than the principle.”⁸ Yet, less laudable, no matter how well intended, is her attempt to smuggle more generous and universal forms of social provision into the welfare state by way of legitimating that agenda as consistent with middle-class values. Such a strategy does not enhance our critical capacity to challenge the existing biases that constrain social welfare policy. And equally important, such a strategy is likely to reproduce those biases in whatever social welfare policy reforms it engenders. While welfare scholarship might prove to be politically relevant under such circumstances, its relevance should make us nervous.

Skocpol understands that welfare scholarship can only play a small role in mobilizing support for change: “American social policy will not change simply because people write books.… A new vision can help inspire the popular support to change the status quo. But people must be organized.”⁹ Yet, it seems that even its small role is here being mortgaged to the bank of political feasibility in ways that just pay more homage to the class, race, and gender hierarchies that go into making the social order. Her protestations aside, the consistent invocation of work and family values, the persistent focus on “working families,” the constant need to shape policy to fit the predilections of some broad, imagined middle class, end up reinscribing the subordination and marginalization of low-income families who do not measure up to middle-class work and family standards. In the end, the universal policies that Skocpol supports become less realizable under the sign of “working families.” Such are the risks when one succumbs to the lure of the siren of political accessibility.

Keep It Simple, Make It Popular

Another aspect of the accessibility problem for welfare scholarship is to make arguments that will be readily understood by the mass public. This strategy is extremely popular among welfare scholars. Every few years a book is published that is designed to be accessible to a broad audience and to state plainly that government is far more effective than it is often made out to be, or that social policy is really not destructive of basic work and family values, or that the time has finally come to push for a progressive agenda to guarantee access to a decent education for all, good jobs for those who can work, social insurance for those who cannot, and public assistance for those who for legitimate reasons are not able to have their needs otherwise met. These books usually are true to their word: accessible, demonstrating government’s effectiveness, and outlining a modest progressive agenda. There was John Schwarz’s America’s Hidden Success,¹⁰ America’s Misunderstood Welfare State by Theodore Marmor, Jerry Mashaw, and Phillip Harvey,¹¹ and E. J. Dionne’s They Only Look Dead.¹² There was also America Unequal by Sheldon Danziger and Peter Gottschalk.¹³ More recently, a particularly pertinent example has been provided with What Government Can Do by Benjamin I. Page and James R. Simmons.¹⁴ This book is in many respects similar to its predecessors: well written, well documented, and with a convincing plea for a real welfare state in the United States. It provides a noteworthy example of one prominent approach showing how to connect scholarship to social policy politics.

What Government Can Do has many virtues. It does not just reiterate or even update work that has preceded it: it is distinctive in its own right. Its distinguishing argument is that government social and economic policies are not just needed but are actually quite good at reducing poverty and inequality. Page and Simmons provide a survey of public programs to indicate that if only given the chance, government could reduce inequality and even begin to eliminate poverty. This is no small claim, but What Government Can Do largely delivers on it in the most concrete and straightforward way. Rather than offer a sophisticated theoretical argument, it makes its case by way of supplying an avalanche of evidence.

In three different ways, Page and Simmons address the issue of the need for government policies to attack inequality and poverty. First, they provide statistical evidence that inequality and poverty are serious problems for American society. Second, Page and Simmons effectively place the reduction of inequality and poverty among the major functions of government, highlighting how government policies that limit inequality and poverty buttress the fulfillment of other fundamental purposes of government to establish the foundations for a market economy, provide basic public goods that cannot be provided efficiently through the market, ensure economic growth and stability, and help promote a sense of fairness, community, and inclusiveness that is conducive to maintaining social order. Third and most impressively, Page and Simmons provide extensive coverage of all the major social and economic policies of the government today, highlighting their strengths as well as their weaknesses. They are especially effective in supplying concrete information that debunks myths about the supposed ineffectiveness of social and economic policies. Where there are weaknesses in current policies, What Government Can Do highlights how politics has often constrained policies so as to placate special interests and minimize interference with profit-making opportunities through the market or from government handouts.

What Government Can Do surveys tax policy, education, jobs policies, social insurance, and welfare programs. Its conclusion is that if serious political commitment were made to supporting policies that reduce inequality and poverty, the government’s effectiveness in attacking inequality and poverty could shine through for all to see. The political explanation for problems in social and economic policies is not new. But Page and Simmons do a good job of updating it for various policies with the latest statistical evidence on such matters as who benefits from tax breaks, how corporate welfare is wasteful, and how social policies, whether for subsidizing incomes of single mothers or providing public housing, are constrained by the necessity to placate powerful political interests during the policymaking process.

Page and Simmons also use the latest empirical evidence to effectively demonstrate the solvency of Social Security and to question the supposed negative effects of welfare on work and family values. Using evidence to cut through the fog of deception regarding our most fundamental social policies is important political work and it is done in the most thoroughly documented way here. Yet, What Government Can Do is most especially effective not so much in debunking the opposition to social policies as in demonstrating the effectiveness of those policies, as they are operating in government today even before reform sets in to correct the distortions wrought by politics. The book is especially effective in doing this when it comes to social insurance programs; Page and Simmons use of the latest empirical evidence is also impressive in demonstrating the effectiveness of wage supplementation policies, education programs, and even much-maligned welfare programs such as the Food Stamp program.

In the end, Page and Simmons return to the progressive agenda that others have advocated. Consistent with the their method throughout, Page and Simmons want to emphasize how the facts basically speak for themselves and support the classic model of a social welfare state where everyone is guaranteed a quality education, a good job at decent pay supplemented by government policies where necessary, with social insurance benefits to cover those situations where people cannot work and public a...