Quotes from Frances Fox Piven

I believe in the necessity for struggle by people at the bottom of any society.

I propose that there is another kind of power based not on resources, things, or attributes, but rooted in the social and cooperative relations in which people are enmeshed by virtue of group life.

For a protest movement to arise out of traumas of daily life, the social arrangements that are ordinarily perceived as just and immutable must come to seem both unjust and mutable.

What some call superstructure, and what others call culture

Many critics of capitalism have argued that the maintenance of a surplus of unemployed workers is not simply a by-product of market fluidity but a deliberately contrived condition, designed to ease the flow of labor and to lessen the bargaining power of workers in market transactions.

Briefly stated, the main argument of this chapter is that protest is also not a matter of free choice; it is not freely available to all groups at all times, and much of the time it is not available to lower-class groups at all.

Any institution that distributes the resources men and women depend upon for survival can exert control over them: the occasion of giving vitally needed assistance can easily become the occasion of inculcating the work ethic, for example, and of enforcing work itself, for those who resist risk the withdrawal of that assistance.