29-07-2025
How Wokes Are Deploying Cloward-Piven Strategy To Create Anarchy
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After sowing the seeds of anarchy and chaos in the developed West, the wokes are now moving towards democracies like India and other countries of the global South.
The United States might win some of the tariff battles but it is all set to lose the larger economic war because of the complete surrender of the American corporations to the leftist-woke ideology. These are the lessons that every democracy needs to learn including India.
New York Post journalist Charles Gasparino talked about this 'noxious ideology of progressive politics in the boardroom" in his 2024 book Go Woke, Go Broke: The Inside story of Corporate Radicalization in America. This is an ideology, he says, that 'needs to die a thousand deaths."
'The left-wing forces have assembled to transform Corporate America into something resembling the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. The left might hate capitalism but it has been busy implementing capitalist tools to bend big business at will," adds Gasparino.
Abhijit Joag has dwelt on this issue in detail in his seminal work, Termites: How the Left is Destroying the World through Subversion, exposing how wokes are globally coordinating to destroy the corporate economy in the democratic world. And whatever tariff wars a country may win or lose, all the gains will be ultimately swept away. According to Joag (pp. 230), in the name of social justice, neo-Marxists are conducting audits of company boards to find out whether adequate representation has been given to 'protected groups' like Blacks, Minorities and the LGBTQ, and are pressurising corporates to increase this representation. Behind this seemingly noble cause, the Left wants to promote identity conflict within the corporate sector and subvert it from within.
'Woke consultants conduct Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Audit of corporates and rank them on 'social conduct'. Legal suits are filed against those with poor ranks. This way wokeism has monopolised the right to distribute character certificates to corporates and publish those who do not fall in line.'
Cloward-Piven Strategy
Joag interestingly goes back to the 1960s and helps us recall the Cloward-Piven Strategy which is in full display now not only in the US but is being replicated in most of the liberal democracies and civilisational states including India.
A neo-Marxist couple, Francis Pox Piven, a Professor in Political Science and Sociology at the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York, and her husband Richard Cloward, published a paper on May 2, 1966 that detailed out a strategy to engineer a huge crisis in the US economy, which would augur the way for Communism.
This is known as the Cloward-Piven Strategy.
The idea behind this strategy is to overload the welfare system excessively by discouraging people to work and encouraging them to enjoy freebies. This would ultimately lead to collapse of the system.
The key elements: of this strategy are mobilising the marginalised sections of the society to demand their 'rightful" benefits from the government, and then overloading the welfare system through mass enrolment. Cloward and Piven argued that this would create a political crisis that could only be resolved by implementing more 'progressive policies' which actually meant paving the way for Marxist or Communist regime.
If you remember the riots and violent protests by so-called pro-Palestine supporters over the last couple of years and the anti-farm laws and anti-CAA protests of the 'wokes' and 'Islamists' in India, you should match the script with the prose of the 1967 book by Cloward and Piven: The Breaking of American Social Compact.
The book advocates the use of 'Disruptive Protest' to push their demands. By disruptive protest, they mean, 'incendiarism, riots, sit-ins and other forms of civil disobedience, great surges in demand for relief benefits, rent strikes, wild cat strikes, obstructing production on assembly lines".
The goal is to 'weaken the regime'. When the regime is vulnerable and insecure it is more likely to bargain and compromise. Cloward and Piven say social movements thrive on conflict. So, where there is no conflict, the wokes will have to create one. The fact that this paper came in 1966 followed by the book as mentioned above is evidence of how Marxists have penetrated the capitalist systems since the 1960s and arguably much before.
In a nutshell, there are four steps of the Cloward-Piven strategy: Overload and break the welfare system; create anarchy and chaos; take control of the situation; implement socialism and communism to establish a new order.
It is clear that the sustained pressure of the left is forcing creation of gigantic welfare states across the world. Welfare schemes are seen as entitlements now even in the developed economies and the same is happening in emerging economies too especially wherever there are democratic regimes. This has led to an increasing pressure of debt on the economies. In an increasingly fragmented global economic order, this has added to the fragility of the nation states especially the US and the West.
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After sowing the seeds of anarchy and chaos in the developed West, the wokes are now moving towards democracies like India and other countries of the global South. What we need is a collective will and effort to fight these dark forces both at the domestic as well as at the global level.
The writer is an author and a columnist. His X handle is @ArunAnandLive. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18's views.
First Published:
July 29, 2025, 17:29 IST
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