No 'Rich Men' Fought Revolutionary War: Piven Declares 'Love of My Life' Occupy 'Belongs' Beside War of Independence in History

The Blaze's Erica Ritz contributed to this report.

On May 12th Professor Frances Fox Piven gave an impassioned speech entitled "The Crisis and the Left" on behalf of the Socialist Register, a leading International leftist publication.  In the talk, she seized upon the "new love of her life," the Occupy Wall Street movement, and launched into an elaborate description of how OWS deserves a prominent place in American History, on level with the Revolutionary War of 1776.

Key Piven Quotes:

•  "What I really want to talk about is, what is my, the love of my life now: Occupy.  I want to try to explain why Occupy is becoming one of those great, national movements that has changed American history--  But amazingly, very, very few people can locate Occupy in American history, and that's what I want to try to do."

• "So let me say something about why I think Occupy belongs in a serious history of the United States.  In the United States we call this very sophisticated study of American political history "American political development."  And now it isn't just a study of great men, and they are all men-- Betsy Ross just made the flag."

• "There's another history of the United States and it's much more erratic, and much less easily described or explained by American institutions, and it's much more important, and it gets much less attention-- and that's the history of protest movements, and the way protest movements impact on the existing constellation of institutions and interest groups and voter coalitions and alignments."

• "It's a history that tells the story of the American Revolution and the War of Independence not as a war fought by the merchant and land-owning elites-- actually they didn't fight the war, you know, rich men don't go to war--but it's a history, rather, of the Revolutionary War as compounded not only of elite influence in gaining political independence from the British Crown and the British merchant class, but it's a history also of the popular uprisings which generated enormous popular energy."

• "[In 1776] the ideas of radical democracy were sweeping the country at the time.  And if you pay attention the philosophy of radical democracy that animated the dirt farmers, and the artisans and the laborers-- that doctrine was really a little like Occupy."

• "They believed government should never be far from where they were, and that they should be able to watch what it did.  There should only be a legislature-- it should be unicameral, one House, no House based on property-- and they believed also that they should be able to un-elect these characters every year."