Conversation with Lauren Jacobs
Power Switch Action
Lauren Jacobs and Cindy Wiesner discuss US-based and global movements, the gendered division of labor, and redefining our relationships to work, each other, and nature.
Lauren Jacobs: Cindy, thank you for joining me and for sharing your knowledge with us. As you know, PowerSwitch Action is a network of 21 local grassroots organizations from across the country, who are confronting corporate power and forging multiracial feminist democracy and economies in our cities and towns. Grassroots Global Justice Alliance (GGJ) has been a thought leader in organizing for the commons, and we’ve taken so much inspiration from your work. Can you talk about GGJ’s role in engaging with feminist, Indigenous, and grassroots global movements, and why those connections are so important?
Cindy Wiesner: Thank you for asking me to be part of this conversation, Lauren. GGJ’s unique role is to bring together multiracial, multisectoral, multi-gendered, intergenerational working class groups and movements around a common framework: No War. No Warming. Build a Feminist Economy for the People and the Planet. Our task is to connect movements in the US and around the world, and to help people understand their counterparts — from Indigenous people in the Amazons, to miners in South Africa, to feminist movements in Tunisia, to fisher folks from India, to young people in France, to organizers here in the states. Our political and popular education work involves building a shared understanding that our common enemy is a collection of root causes: racial and gender capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism.
There is immense value for people in the US to learn how different organizations and movements globally have gotten to scale, won state power, and governed. At the same time, there is value for global movements to learn about US-based struggles around police brutality, poverty, water rights, Indigenous sovereignty, and more. From Occupy Wall Street to NoDAPL to the Black-led 2020 Uprisings, there have been important movements that our global counterparts have been hungry to know more about.