2007 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS Can Power from Below Change the World?

Frances Fox Piven Graduate Center, City University of New York

Prevailing perspectives on power cannot explain why political protests from the bottom of societies sometimes result in reforms that reflect the grievances of the protestors. I propose a new theory of “interdependent power” that provides such an explanation. I argue that, contrary to common views, globalization actually increases the potential for this kind of popular power.

uch of my academic work has been about American history. This has been especially true Mthe role of protest movements in generat- during the great moments of equalizing reforms ing reforms—reforms that ease the circum- that humanized our society, from the founding stances of people at the bottom of American of the republic, to the emancipation of the slaves, society. And much of my work as a political to the rise of the New Deal and Great Society activist, the source of real joy in my life, has order, to the civil rights acts of the 1960s, and been in collaboration with these movements. so on. In the years leading up to the In this address, I build on that experience by the- Revolutionary War, American elites restless oretically examining the kind of power that is under British rule struck up an alliance with “the at work when movements, in the people out-of-doors” or the mobs of the era. and elsewhere, become a force for change. I Without the support of the rabble, the war with think that the question of how power can be England could not have been won.1 But the exerted from the lower reaches has never been price of the alliance was elite indulgence of more important. It will ultimately determine radical democratic ideas about the people’s whether another world is indeed possible. rights to self governance. Moreover, the dis- Although this is not the way the story of ruptive threat of the mob and their radical American political development is usually told, democratic convictions were imprinted on the protest movements have played a large role in

1 This point is now widely accepted. The pivotal Direct correspondence to Frances Fox Piven work was probably Becker (1909) (see also, Bailyn ([email protected]). I want to thank Lori Minnite 1965; Bridenbaugh 1955; Morgan 1956; Raphael and Fred Block for their comments on this address. 2001; Schlesinger 1955; Young 1999).

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Downloaded from asr.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA BERKELEY LIB on April 18, 2012 2—–AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW provisions of the new state constitutions, and 2000). Or the black freedom movement whose then, more dimly, on those provisions of the extraordinary audacity in confronting the sys- new federal constitution that spoke to popular tem of Southern apartheid led the federal gov- rights and representation—provisions that had ernment to at long last pass the legislation that to be conceded to win popular support for the implemented the promises of the Reconstruction new national government. period. Or the antipoverty protests of the 1960s To be sure, the process was complicated. The that forced an expansion of American social mob was powerful during the revolutionary programs so that the United States began to period because state power was weakened by the look something like a social . Or the deepening conflict between colonial elites, the Vietnam antiwar movement, and especially its British crown, and British merchant interests G.I. component, that finally brought the war in who were influential with the crown. State Southeast Asia to an end, and left in its wake the power was also weakened by the vast distance so-called “Vietnam syndrome,” which inhibit- that separated the colonies from the governing ed the deployment of American military power apparatus and military forces of the mother in the world, at least for awhile. Or