Cindy Wiesner of the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance joins the show to share reflections on her 35 years of internationalist organizing on the US Left—from the global justice movement of the 1990s and early 2000s, through the antiwar movement of the 2000s, to the growing international climate justice movement of the 2000s–2010s. Throughout that journey, she has been working to build power from the grassroots in the US, and with allies across the globe, especially in the Americas. She shares her perspective on that trajectory, and where we find ourselves now.
Cindy Wiesner is the Executive Director of the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance (GGJ). She helped co-found the Climate Justice Alliance and the Rising Majority and has been a leader in many cross-border movement-building initiatives.
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This transcript was automatically generated and may contain minor errors.
[00:00:00] Sound on Tape: This podcast is presented by Convergence, a magazine for radical insights.
[00:00:07] Cindy Wiesner: Again, we can’t be historical. It didn’t start with the, the student encampments created in or not. It broke through the psychic break, like Occupy created the psychic break, but there were years and years of organizing that had been happening to create that.
[00:00:23] And then how do we end these moments? as the left, as the progressive movement, keep pushing.
[00:00:34] William Lawrence: This is the Hegemonicon podcast, where we are investigating the workings of power. What is power? How does it work? Who has it? What are they doing with it? How the heck do we get it? And other small questions like that. I’m your host, William Lawrence, and I’m an organizer from Lansing, Michigan. Currently I work with the Rent is Too Damn High Coalition, an alliance of tenant unions and housing justice groups across the state of Michigan.
[00:01:03] Formerly I was a climate justice organizer for 10 years, including as a co founder of Sunrise Movement, the youth organization that put the Green New Deal on the political map. Just a quick note. We recorded the interviews for this season between May and July. Now we’re releasing them in August and September.
[00:01:20] A lot has happened in the world in between those times, such as Biden dropping out of the race. So if you hear us speaking with blissful ignorance of what was to come that’s what’s going on. But I think that the conversations are going to hold up very well for our tasks of building an internationalist left in the months and years to come.
[00:01:40] I am very honored to be joined today by Cindy Wiesner to continue our series on internationalism speaking today about grassroots internationalism from the bottom up. Cindy is a 35 year veteran of the social justice movement in the United States and internationally. She is the executive director of the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance or GGJ, and she helped to co-found the Climate Justice Alliance and the Rising Majority.
[00:02:08] And has been a leader in many other domestic and cross border movement building initiatives. Too many to name, but she’ll get into many of them in this conversation. Cindy, I’m so glad to have you here. Welcome.
[00:02:20] Cindy Wiesner: Hey, William. Good to see you. Good to hear you. Good to be reconnected again.
[00:02:26] So you’ve
[00:02:27] William Lawrence: been working hard to organize for grassroots internationalist power. In the United States in solidarity and relationship with people abroad for decades. How about you start by just giving our listeners a little introduction to your organizing over the years and how it came to take on this internationalist emphasis?
[00:02:46] Cindy Wiesner: I, I started like many folks as a young student organizer in the early nineties and quickly got very politicized both I think in the first Iraqi massacre in 1991. And then and being part of mobilizations in the Bay Area that took over the bridge that really began to articulate this notion about the war, connecting the war here in our communities and the war abroad.
[00:03:14] And what the U. S. government was doing to people, the Iraqi people, but also to people, primarily people of color here in the United States. I was also part of the Rodney King uprisings. I’m originally from Hollywood, the working class part of Hollywood, and I was part of the Rodney King uprisings. And when that happened, it was a moment of massive radicalization for myself, but a whole generation.
[00:03:39] That again, made the connections around state violence and the attacks. Particularly with the black community. I went on to become an organizer. I started off as a labor organizer with when what was then called HERE now unite here and then. did a whole bunch of worker organizing, independent worker organizing that took me to Miami, the Miami Worker Center.
[00:04:04] And that’s through that process, I met Grassroots Global Justice Alliance through the social forum process. So I’ve been involved in a number of start helping start and helping doula, many co doula, many organ movement organizations. And I’ve been just You know somebody who has been very inspired and grounded by international social movements.
[00:04:28] My background is, my family is from El Salvador in Colombia two countries completely impacted by U. S. intervention and, and civil war and revolutionary movements. And I think that for me Once I understood, I think my own experience growing up as a working class kid daughter to a domestic worker.
[00:04:52] I feel like I tried to think about, like how did this all happen to me and my family? And I think that what became clear was through getting politicized, getting grounded in history, and also liberatory struggles from around the world that I began to understand our context and connecting that to then the organizing that I did.
[00:05:14] Bringing those two together and having it be a way that I understood what we needed to do.
[00:05:20] William Lawrence: Thank you. You mentioned, this is a very timely conversation. I’m doing these, this sequence right now, because I think the whole left is really grappling with what the role of internationalism in our broader work as the sort of, racial and economic justice organizing.
[00:05:37] There was a big domestic emphasis in the Bernie years is now washing ashore in the Biden. administration, and we have the return of foreign policy via Ukraine, via Gaza, via the rising tensions with China. So I w I wonder if we could just begin by having you give us a review of kind of what as some key elements of the, this present conjuncture, this present moment.
[00:06:02] Cindy Wiesner: Yeah. We’re witnessing a massive transition, right? Instability, uncertainty, and crisis at every scale around the world. And I think that’s been one of the dominant qualities of this period. And, economic inequality is at its highest since before the great depression.
[00:06:20] And we are seeing people’s lives disrupted and displaced by conflict and the climate emergency and corporations exploiting these crises, right? Deploying disaster capitalism, accelerating violent resource extraction and exploitation of workers and communities and the police state perpetuating, murder and mass incarceration of Black lives.
[00:06:44] The militarization of borders and communities and right wing extremists and power, all of us responding to this threat of neo fascism, right? That has been, entrenched historically in, in this territory, in this country around the world. White supremacy, heteropatriarchy and xenophobia.
[00:07:03] And I think they’re, what they’re up to is really securing minority rule. And, and I think in this moment of the acceleration of the structural crisis of what gendered capitalism we’re seeing that after, Decades of deregulation, financial speculation austerity politics and really shrinking the social state and we’re seeing that the that’s one of the things that the right wing’s agenda, not just here in this country, but globally.
[00:07:37] Is the dismantling the state as we know it, I believe Steve Bannon’s quote pre Trump that’s one of their efforts. And part of that is that we are seeing, this economic contraction where, the elites are trying to run business as usual, but then as a result of the global pandemic, the sort of, the shortages of goods that the rising of global starvation.
[00:08:03] The stable destabilization and polarizing economies like we’re knowing that this we’re at a point of where, there is this kind of worldview battle happening, right? And I think in a lot of ways, the way I like to think about it is that there’s really like these two competing hegemonic views on one level about the future of the planet and the future of humanity which is really one that sort of prioritizes an economy of death.
[00:08:31] That then is based on just, profit, it’s based on extraction, it’s based on isolation, it’s based on individualism, it’s based on violence, extreme violence in terms of what we’re seeing also in, in Gaza and around the world. But also, It competes with this world, alternative world vision, right?
[00:08:51] A different cosmo. I like to call it a cosmo vision like Indigenous folks talk about that really is about an economy that puts people and nature and life at the center. And part of that is when we are then in right relationship with each other, when we’re right relationship with nature, when we’re Where we put kind of our values, right?
[00:09:14] Our values of dignity and respect and equality and cooperation and sovereignty. And I think that’s like the moment that we’re in which, in this moment of war, violence, the rise of neo fascism, I think it’s become strikingly clear. About these important choice points that we have to be making as a society, as a people’s as a at this at this particular juncture.
[00:09:42] William Lawrence: And we’ll come back around to some of those choices that you think ought to be made. I want to stay at the at the big picture level for a minute and ask about Over your career, what you’ve observed and also studied about the tendencies of the U S American population, when it comes to its attitudes towards, call it internationalism, call it just awareness or consciousness of the rest of the world.
[00:10:13] I think it’s important to say that, Both militarist attitudes and anti militarist or anti imperialist attitudes each have a, multiracial heritage in the United States. That being said, white people, I think it’s fair to say have often been among the most zealous in favor of U.
[00:10:31] S. imperialism while the Black communities and communities of color in which you’ve based much of your organizing have often given root to the most radical anti militarist movements in the United States. So what can you say about, the U. S. Population, including the role of race and other identities and its role in shaping support or opposition to U.
[00:10:55] S. militarism and U. S. imperialism.
[00:10:59] Cindy Wiesner: There’s a long lineage of struggle that has really talked about abolition, right? And I think it’s a lineage of struggle coming from the black liberation movement. And I want to start there because part of what abolition speaks to, right? It’s a multi generational, multicultural black led plan to end how prisons, military, the caging of people, the violence that is enacted on people, the dominance of people is a plan to end that, right?
[00:11:36] And it’s not just about, closing of prisons of enslavement of police, of surveillance, of punishment. It’s really about the belief that those things the ways of the way we deal with things, and deal with punishment or consequences, there, that there needs to be an alternative, right?
[00:11:56] And part of that demand is that for us to really think about, different systems of punishment and war, that need to be invested in terms of well being of communities and visions of healing and repair. And I start there because, I think about, folks like Brittany de Barros from About Face, who’s one of our leaders.
[00:12:18] And GGJ, she talks about, abolishing the deep cultural militarism and dismantling the military industrial complex, will require a deep questioning and unlearning of that logic, right? That leads to lies at the heart of policing prisons, anti immigration agencies, and beyond. And that We need to be rejecting this common logic that tells us that violence somehow makes us safe, that cages somehow maintain security, that war somehow create peace, right?
[00:12:53] And I quote her, I quoted her because I feel like she’s, she and many folks organizing, that’s against the war. People who’ve been really at the crosshairs of knowing what the damage that we do to each other not only in community, but also in the, on behalf of the United States and the political project of the U.
[00:13:14] S. Is that it’s really dismantling, right? It’s dismantling that notion and part of it is almost, it’s like a counter hegemonic thinking that needs to exist. And I think that in the name of safety and protection and being, we in the United States need to know that, That, that history was there from the very beginning, from the genocide that happened with Native peoples, with Indigenous people, original peoples, with the enslavement of people, with the taking of land from other territories from setting up colonial settler territories, and then This manifest destiny, the sort of this notion of expansion of control of being able to create dominance and being able to use that war.
[00:14:01] And many of us have bought into that, in terms of Oh yeah. In order for patriotism and defense and our wellbeing. And I think that’s some of the stuff that we have to unlearn. We have to do some of that counter hegemonic work, that deep political education that to know about not in our name, to to hold our government accountable for the historic harms, but also for what it currently does in the name of U.
[00:14:28] S. imperialism and world domination.
[00:14:31] William Lawrence: I’m curious to just hear you say a bit more. You’re speaking about the counter hegemonic vision that has existed and needs to be further cultivated. I wonder if you could just speak about the strength, the durable existence of the hegemonic ideology in the major segments of the U S population in ways that are very popular, that poses challenges for the organizer who is seeking to, bring people together around the alternative and, Yeah,
[00:15:01] Cindy Wiesner: Yeah, no when we do organizing, we usually are on the ground and fighting the righteous fight.
[00:15:07] And and that’s important, but and, we usually talk about the need for also having a strategy and a plan to counter the ideas, to counter the dominant ideas. That I think people have, I, I started off as a as a welfare organizer and, what level, and that was in the mid nineties.
[00:15:26] And that’s when Bill Clinton was changing welfare as we know it. And there was so much. Racism and sexism in the articulation and the right wing, Newt Gingrich and the right wing going after particularly like working class black mothers, right? And you’re just like, wait a minute.
[00:15:45] And when we were doing like the political education, so many of those women, working class women just thought they were the, they fucked up, that they had individually made bad choices and fucked up. And then when we were doing the political education and talking about actually the federal budget.
[00:16:02] And we were talking about the corporate role, the role of government supporting corporations and all that. And what was the actual percentage of the welfare budget on the national level? People were like, Oh, wow. The people really on welfare are these. Are these companies, the people getting bailed out consistently and not paying taxes, they’re like, we’re working, we’re doing reproductive labor, and we’re also working, we’re domestic workers, we’re students we’re recyclers, we’re trying to do all this stuff, and I think that, to me, was a huge sort of lesson, right?
[00:16:37] It’s going to the root causes because so much, so many of us internalize the dominant sort of hegemony, right? That actually is completely enlaced with, all the isms. And then we Internalize it ourselves and then therefore in a lot of ways it curves our ability to act And then when people begin to understand the root causes and it awakens it creates bigger space to then maneuver and then for us to be able to organize and so many of those women that we organized and did that deep political education with over 25 years ago 30 years ago they’re still organizers.
[00:17:20] They went on to be organizers and leaders of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, of the Right to the City Alliance, organizing in their communities. And you’re just like, oh, it’s that sort of critical consciousness that begins to activate you. And I think that’s part of the task of organizers, is to really think about like, How are we connecting not just the bread and butter issues, but doing that deeper political critical consciousness to then awaken something a deeper understanding of the systems that are at play.
[00:17:52] William Lawrence: Thanks for that. I think you’ve got about two decades on me in your. Movement tenure I arrived around 15 years ago and in the Obama years and occupy was the first big movement moment that I, it was super transformative and that sort of set off a cycle through the 2010s that went through various other street uprisings and then.
[00:18:16] Taking on this political character especially beginning in 2016 with the Bernie movement and then all that followed. But before that and most of that was really domestically, focused, I think it’s fair to say we were fighting for racial justice, economic justice here in, in the United States of America.
[00:18:33] But in the decades before that, there was, really a 15 to 20 year movement cycle in the 1990s and then into the 2000s that was I think much more internationalist in, in its emphasis than many of us were in the 2010s and this, You know is often called the global justice movement.
[00:18:55] It began in the, mid 1990s is my understanding In my inherited memory. I wasn’t there you know some of the key moments in this, in this cycle where the zapatista Uprising in 1994 and the broader fight against nafta, transnational You know the 1999 battle in seattle and other demonstrations at trade summits And then beginning in 2001 The world social forums, which were bringing together left wing social movement forces from around the world.
[00:19:25] And my sense is especially from around the Americas. And I wonder if you could take us through some of those years with an eye towards, the character of these struggles, but also specifically, who are some of the constituencies and organizations here in the U S who were Participating in these transnational movements and mobilizations.
[00:19:47] Cindy Wiesner: Sure. You’re taking me way back.
[00:19:49] William Lawrence: Got to do it. People don’t know.
[00:19:51] Cindy Wiesner: Hey, this is yes. Challenge the ahistorical nature shit. So let me, I think in the backdrop, I, this was, this was the era when I was a young buck and getting politicized. And I can’t step into the nineties without talking about the legacy of the anti apartheid movement, in solidarity and support with South Africa.
[00:20:11] And also the, all of the anti intervention work that happened in solidarity with Central America, particularly El Salvador and Nicaragua and Guatemala and different folks. But I think in particular, those struggles that happened because there was so much a deep level of activism and organizing work that happened, of deep solidarity, particularly from people in this country towards those struggles.
[00:20:38] But I also, when you started mentioning, the battle in Seattle, the first thing that came to mind was like, Dan, the direct action network, right? And the convergent spaces and the anarchist movement and the kind of the heyday of the Of the beginning of what was being called the alter globalization movement, which we then called the global justice movement.
[00:21:01] And there was an article that was written in the year 2000 by one of my comrade, compañeras mentors Betita Martinez. And she wrote an article called, where was the color in Seattle? Looking for the reason why the great battle was so white. And she talked about, like so many people had talked about this, like splendid victory of the WTO, like a very impressive move of over 50, 000 people mobilizing in the streets of Seattle, battling out with the police, closing down sort of the ministerial meeting and really looking at, why and how did we understand the role of people of color and what it meant to name this new international movement against imperialist globalization.
[00:21:51] And so part of that in the article, she talks about just the global delegation that was here and that often, gets erased in history. And she talked about like people from Pakistan and Malaysia and Ghana and Mexico and folks from the Caribbean and South Africa and India and China that were here to talk about the direct impacts of the WTO.
[00:22:14] What would that have in terms of their country and their context, but also naming. The role of the people of color grassroots groups, right? Like folks like snitch, right? The Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice that was based in Albuquerque and had actually had been born on the eve of the anti NAFTA fights, and had done a lot of cross border work between Mexico and the South and organizations in the Southwest.
[00:22:44] And, and there was a lot of other there was like, people talked about it as like the turtles and the teamsters, right? But within that, there was a lot of rank and file folks of color that were there. And I think this. The battle in Seattle happens at a moment where there was all these mass mobilizations, right?
[00:23:04] Wherever the WTO went, wherever the IMF went, there was mass popular cross sectoral mobilizations. And it was, I think it was a moment. Also, where the World Social Forum was born, right? Which is for those of you who may not know, there’s a annual meeting called the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
[00:23:27] And it’s, where the capitalists gather, not only government, but also the but also corporations and some level of civil society. And so the social forum comes at a moment where it basically begins to talk about a counter hegemonic globalization, right? That was needed and that it was at the same time.
[00:23:48] And to be able to then, and it was held in Porto Alegre, Brazil. And the significance of Porto Alegre was because the workers party, right? The PT in Brazil had actually had taken power and they were participating, they were doing deep work around participatory budgeting and decided to hold this. this world social forum.
[00:24:11] And it was a place where people, they brought in all these organizations, all these social movements, all these NGOs, and part of it as a space this open space, plural, non governmental, nonpartisan space that tried to bring people to share experiences, to share reflections, to have decentralized debates, and to really think about what would have more.
[00:24:37] The slogan is another world is possible. And what is it that we needed to bring to create an alternative space to neoliberalism. And so part of that is that the world’s social forum, I think for all its beauty and its power, and, we ourselves also brought and helped do a social forum here in the United States.
[00:24:57] States in 2007 in Atlanta and in 2010 in Detroit, which were like amazing and awesome and powerful. But the problem with the social forum was that it was a, the beauty of it was a place of deep exchange, deep relationship building and being able to, on a lot of ways, meet our global counterparts, right?
[00:25:17] But what was the limitation of it was that the space was was not a place of formal statements on behalf of the participants. It was not a space of collective agreement, and it was not a space of high level of coordination, right? And I think that it was more on the Occupy side, right?
[00:25:36] It’s we’re just going to organize and bring people together and in the hopes that something may come out of it. And part of what I think then a lot of social movements ended up thinking after a couple of years is really saying we need something actually more binding, we need something much more intentional.
[00:25:55] We need something we need to be able to hold and do campaigns together because the assaults that we’re facing at that point was really squarely called. neoliberalism, and we saw the era of the FTAA the free trade agreement of the Americas where the U. S. was trying to go like NAFTA on steroids and do this agreement with all the countries in the Americas minus Cuba.
[00:26:19] And there was a concerted effort that then happened on behalf of not only the left governments, right? So not just Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Fidel and Lula from Brazil, but it was also social movements, right? It was social movements and a broad front of social movements from trade unionists to environmentalists to faith community.
[00:26:43] To the feminist, to the left parties, to the left folks that then basically saw the impact of what this free trade agreement would have on the Americas and ended up having more than a decade long campaign against it. And everywhere the FTAA ministerial went to meet, it was confronted with mass popular organizing on the outside and then on the inside, the left government’s actually pushing, pushing against the negotiations that the U.
[00:27:16] S. was trying to do. And I think this early 90s, 2000s, really marks this like moment in the continent that was like, the U. S. Was trying to impose a neoliberal economy, right? But structural adjustment with the I. M. F. Part of this, like Washington consensus and ultimately, ultimately, there was unity and diversity.
[00:27:43] And there was a way that people were able to after years be able to finally bury it right. And in the U. S. And Miami played a huge role and we played a huge role. We played our part. We played our part. We took the assignment and played our part. And there was a big battle in Miami, right? That happened.
[00:28:04] And that was where the Miami worker center power, you, the coalition of Immokalee workers created a coalition called the root cause. coalition and the root cause coalition decided to do a 34 mile march. It did it decided to do a tribunal and it had decided to invite other grassroots groups from around the country.
[00:28:29] Those, some of those who had gone to the WTO, the battle in Seattle, some of those who had been doing economic justice work, environmental justice work, and actually all came together in Miami under this root cause coalition. And we did so much of the work to connect what we were facing, like the, to the Black community in Liberty City.
[00:28:52] What did this ministerial have to do? And then when we did the deeper work is that they were going to do the Secretariat there in Wynwood. And in a community that was like Puerto Rican and black and working class, and that it was going to completely change the whole contour of the city and the black and Latinx community in Miami.
[00:29:14] And then when we started making the connections about what these policies meant for farm workers, for low income tenants, for folks across the country, we’re like, Oh, we understand this connection. And this thing being hosted here in Miami, what impact it was going to have. And so we then went into like months and months of political education preparation, and then the mobilization happened.
[00:29:37] And then, history plays itself out. And, this thing dies. And this was a global, I’m sorry, a hemispheric victory that I think was really significant in terms of challenging Western dominance and imperialism, but a coordinated strategy across the continent that I think is there’s so much lessons there learn because it was almost like a united front experience right between a broad cross section of social movements and peoples.
[00:30:08] People from the center, like even like business people that are we’re against this, to government to left governments and left parties. And I think that to me, there’s something really important in that example, especially in these moments when we’re thinking about Gaza and we’re thinking about the fight of the ascension of fascism, what is it that we need to be thinking about broad and wide and over time to then have a common target and to be able to move forward.
[00:30:35] Know where it goes. Let it succeed. Because we basically shut down the meeting and were able to, it could no longer be viable. Miami was no longer a viable location for the ministerial to be hosted. I say that story because I think that gives the roots. Root Cause then creates the basis for us forming Grassroots Global Justice.
[00:30:58] So many of those people and many of those organizations that were part of Root Cause were then founders of GGJ.
[00:31:07] William Lawrence: Could you just say a bit about what GGJ was then has become for our listeners?
[00:31:13] Cindy Wiesner: Sure. So grassroots global justice is a national alliance of community based organizations and regional and national networks and independent worker organizations.
[00:31:27] That is, was founded in 2005 as a membership alliance. It is multi it’s multi it is multi racial multi, multi gendered. intergenerational multisectoral that comes together around the issues of climate, justice, and just transition. We come out of the environmental justice and climate justice movement around the work around demilitarization, not only around demilitarization in our communities and the fights against the police the INS.
[00:32:02] the military budget, but also around the wars and occupations around the world and around racial and gender justice. And so part of what we’ve been also working on as an alliance is really reclaiming grassroots feminisms. And really talking about needing an alternative to this, racial and gendered capitalism and imperialism.
[00:32:24] And that being our political project is helping build a feminist anti racist regenerative economy. And So yeah, so we, we believe in movement building and not only here in the U S and the territories, but also internationally and serve as a bridge to social movements in the Americas in particular, but also globally.
[00:32:47] And so we’ve been part of, we were born out of the world social forum process. We were born out of this route, this battle in Seattle and root cause. And we have been. Evolved and developed and helped play that role. Movement building role.
[00:33:01] William Lawrence: And to this day, I want to ask one more question about the you talked about the broad front, the kind of unity and diversity that was required to, beat back the free trade area of the Americas.
[00:33:12] And I’m curious about, how the state socialisms you mentioned of, Chavismo, Cuba and then, other states as part of the pink tide, the first pink tide in this era, how that was relating to these bottom up grassroots social movement forces that you are in a alliance with and are part of, this was a time, after the fall of the Soviet Union, a kind of Searching or recomposition of the left in the post Soviet post capital C communist era.
[00:33:42] And I remember just growing up as an adolescent at this time, this was a time when, capital C communism or capital S socialism as practiced by, Venezuela or Cuba were, very much demonized in a way that I think at least on the left. These days, there’s a curiosity about some of those experiments.
[00:34:02] But I recall in my adolescence, maybe it’s just because I wasn’t adolescent, but there was a greater anarchist, anti statist sort of tendency, which you also mentioned, which was, I almost dare say mainstream within the left, the grassroots left in the United States at that time.
[00:34:19] And so I guess I just wonder if you could, how some of those dialogues played out between states and social movements between anarchists and socialists or communists and how you navigated those those tensions in order to cohere a broad front against us led financialized globalization.
[00:34:39] Cindy Wiesner: Okay, big question. You had a lot of things in here. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna actually, I’m gonna answer it from this point, from my perspective now, and then go back. I think that there has been there has been some pretty intense Pitched strategic and tactical differences in the movement.
[00:34:57] And I would say not just here in this country, but around the world. And in a lot of ways it’s based on, an ideological worldview, perspective, and then how do you, and then what’s your theory of change and then what are, what’s your assessment of what needs to be done? And I think that there, there has, There’s many movements that have competing assessments, right?
[00:35:20] Competing assessments of what is necessary. What is what can we do? And there’s also different movement history, in different contexts. And I think that in, in our more current history in the United States, like we have not and I would say my generation too is that we have not experienced what it’s like to have a vibrant left party, a left party of the masses that is connected to our struggles that we are then able to coordinate at a much deeper and broader level.
[00:35:55] And in the absence of that, I think we there’s been a set of challenges, but in other countries, I’ll come back to that, but in other countries, you’ve seen a much more vibrant ecosystem, of not only social movement left, but you’ve also seen the role of revolutionary or left parties of, the whole.
[00:36:16] Around the whole spectrum of the left and you’ve also seen different formations, right? Much more articulated and developed formations, whether they’re anarchist formations, horizontalism, horizontalist formations and different things. So I think in a lot of ways, we in the U. S.
[00:36:34] are still maturing those forms of organizations and maturing our perspective. But I would say that. People in the past and even now have had strong kind of lines political lines. And I’d like to talk about what the Chilean social movement framework that we’ve been using a lot at G.
[00:36:56] G. J. That’s really helped us is that there needs to be struggles. Within the state, and then there needs to be struggles against the state and there needs to be struggles outside of the state and that framework at different moments, those have been pitched battles, like I said, between different strategies and tactics, but I think at this moment, more than ever, we actually need to be practicing and thinking about those strategic orientations simultaneously because there’s people who are like and who are like, we don’t want to we don’t think electorally is the means to win power, but many of those those countries that you talked about, Venezuela and Bolivia and and Ecuador and El Salvador, you go down the line.
[00:37:45] Once the revolutionary arms struggles were in a lot of ways. put down for many reasons, mostly U. S. intervention and right wing bourgeoisie and the military in those countries. People, leftists, decided to take the electoral route and see if it was possible to win win and you saw that happen with Chavez.
[00:38:08] You saw that happen time and time again. You see it happening right in this hemisphere, but also globally. And I think that the left has learned a lot of lessons about what it means to build power electorally, which I think the right is the fascist right. Is now taking that playbook and using the electoral arena as a way through populism and as a way to be able to also gain state power.
[00:38:36] But I think that the other side is that we have to, I think no matter what, and this is my politic, personal politic, no matter what, I believe in permanent revolution. I’m not a Trotskyist, but I believe in permanent revolution. And part of the permanent revolution is that even if we win, we never stopped actually changing and transforming.
[00:38:59] And I think that some of the examples that we’ve seen, the socialist experiments that we’ve seen, have made some pretty grave and very huge errors and actually have gone, has been countered to the revolutionary ideals that I think many of us uphold. And I think that there’s something about Once you get to power that you don’t perpetuate and I think we have to have the movement overall has to have way more conversations about power and we have to have much more conversations about how do you know how do we then from the very beginning have, intersectional analysis is not just like a thing about identity and representation.
[00:39:46] It’s actually, It helps you actually address questions at scale about what to do with land, what to do with water, what to think of how you think about feeding people. How do you think about sharing power in a very dramatically different way? And if you don’t from the very beginning, what put at the center, an anti patriarchal, anti homophobic, anti white supremacist, anti ableist framework, you’re gonna answer in a very particular hegemonic way, right?
[00:40:20] The dominant way. And so I think some of that is what we saw. Some of the failures, some, to be honest, about our socialist experiments, right? And at the same time, I think there’s an opportunity where there is actually a lot of reevaluation, a lot of saying, we need something dramatically different than racial and gendered capitalism.
[00:40:43] And we need something completely different. And we need to evolve the socialist experiments. There’s a lot of things that are really important, but there’s a lot of things that we have to reimagine. And one of those is the state. And I think that part of that is that we have to continue in this like permanent transformation because that it never ends.
[00:41:06] And I think, I hate the question. It’s what are you going to do when the revolution, I want to be a cook. You’re going to be a cook. No, we have to continue being, we need to continue actually being in, in that transformation because it never ends and the contradictions. And if we go back to our assessment of the crisis.
[00:41:25] We’re going to keep being in crisis, right? If all of our projections around climate and democracy and empire continue I think that we’re going to be in continued crisis. And so I think that’s the thing that we need to be prepared for over the longer it’s actually never finishes.
[00:41:42] And then the last thing is the building of alternatives. So oftentimes it’s Oh, okay. And then here are the horizontal list or here are the collectives or the co ops. That is absolutely necessary, but we got to do it at scale and we got to do it in a more mass way because Ultimately, those are the places where we train people on how to govern, right?
[00:42:05] So when we talk about union organizing and student involvement in their schools and all this stuff, it’s like all of that, we have to think about it. As preparing to govern and preparing to practice democracy and a radical new democracy. And so all of that to say is that there is this framework that I think is really helpful, like against the state, within the state, outside of the state.
[00:42:30] And we need to be developing strategic orientations on those three levels simultaneously. And it’s about a division of labor and it’s about how they complement each other. Because at this particular moment, We can’t afford to be like hating on the folks who do electoral work or hating on the folks who just do mutual aid or not or ignoring them, or saying that, you’re just all about action faction.
[00:42:56] It actually has to be a combination of all of that. So to answer your question is that I think that we as leftists have a critique of, systemic oppression and exploitation, and we need to Apply that into really thinking about even in our most progressive, most revolutionary experiences, we need to be actually bringing all of our thinking and our practice there as well, and so I think that to me, I’m very convinced about, and I think that what we’re seeing in Cuba right now, it’s like, Cuba’s in crisis, economic crisis, political crisis, but there are Cubans in Cuba really trying to figure out what is our generation’s articulation of the revolution at this stage, moving forward, what have we learned, and part of that is really How do we reimagine things?
[00:43:49] And I think that’s the task of any conscious force, any revolutionaries to constantly be assessing and then thinking about in collective about what should we be up to and doing given the changing conditions.
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[00:44:55] William Lawrence: And the other thing that you mentioned that I appreciate is this thing about after the revolution, your paradise that you’re going to live in, or your bakery you’re going to operate, or your garden you’re going to tend after the revolution, I think we should be tending gardens and gardens.
[00:45:08] having bakeries, here before the revolution. But if what you’re looking for is some sort of paradise, basically with no suffering, where you just get pure enjoyment. I’m like, I’m sorry, what you’re looking for is heaven. This is a Christian concept. And you don’t get it in this life.
[00:45:22] Maybe you get it in the next life if you believe that. But so I share that with you that, Revolution is gonna be an ongoing process. It’s gonna be an ongoing process. That being said, I think the distinction between reform and revolution and what we can call truly revolutionary is another really interesting debate, a place where we could stand to achieve more clarity because these concepts about reform and revolution are so bandied around and become really intense fault lines at times in our movements.
[00:45:49] And I think we could do better to have some usable concepts of what we actually mean by revolution, what we mean by reform for that matter than we’re currently working with. But I don’t think we’re going to get into this today, but maybe on another episode. I want to move us forward through the two thousands and then bring us back up to the present briefly.
[00:46:08] Now, I had heard a story that, September 11th, 2001 really was a, a big blow or took the wind out of the sails of the global justice movement due to the severe, and I think very popular in the United States, patriotic and militarist reaction of the global war on terror.
[00:46:28] And it took, A year or more for, any significant anti war movement against the global war on terror to gain traction. And it really was Iraq. That was the thing that spurred the biggest mass movement. Now I’m also aware that your free trade area of the Americas, big mobilization in Miami was in 2003 and then GGJ got started in 2005.
[00:46:49] So you’re already complicating my periodization here. There was movement continuing through this period, the first half of the of the two thousands. But take us a little bit back into the era, right after 9 11 and then leading into the Iraq war, how the character of the movement did change as a result of this new, militarist offensive on the part of the U.
[00:47:10] S.
[00:47:12] Cindy Wiesner: Yeah. I was coming back on a plane on September 10th from Durban, South Africa. I was part of a woman of color delegation that went to the World Conference on, against racism known as Durban One. That was held from the 31st of August to September 8th of 2001.
[00:47:33] And I literally passed New York City. I came through New York City the day before 9 11 and that conference. Is was really important and a lot of work had happened up until that point. And I think history actually could, it’s like the moment of 9 11 kind of changes history, the course of history, right?
[00:47:55] But I think if we would have followed what would have happened, what happened at the at the World Conference Against Racism was that there was a Two of the main issues, and it’s very relevant to today, two of the main issues, the most controversial issues inside and outside the UN conference was how to have reparations for Slavery and and then Palestine and Israel and the Palestinians and like the Arab world was really trying to underline that the actions being committed by Israel against Palestinians were racist, right?
[00:48:35] And really talking about Zionism, right? And there was a whole. process of writing into the document, the draft document equating Zionism with racism. And the final declaration of the program about action did not contain that text because the U. S. and Israel completely objected to that text and voted out the delegates for that.
[00:48:59] And then, the U. S. and Israel withdrew. But I think that there was an, a parallel conference, like we always do the movements when we’re not inside, some of us are inside, but we turn the inside out. And there was a parallel process where there was a declaration and a program on its own in which, it, it really did talk about.
[00:49:20] Both those things very clearly around equating Zionism as racism and the need for reparations, not just people in the continent, but people, the diaspora of African peoples and the trans Atlantic slave trade. So 9 11 happens. And it was like, three days after the conference and it really just impacted the, not only the news, but also impacted.
[00:49:46] international relations and politics that I think was like a really important moment that you know, Bush Bush was president, and completely created, the sort of the war on terror and the, like the axis of evil. And I think a lot of the rollbacks begin to actively happen at that moment.
[00:50:10] So it’s, in a lot of ways, this alter anti globalization movement, the fight against racism, the fight against U. S. intervention, the mobilizations. And then 9 11 happens, and a complete reshift of the paradigm happens, and I think that we need to understand that in the historical context, too.
[00:50:34] Movements got completely attacked. And the criminalization of dissent, the criminal is the Islamophobia that sort of caught fire and completely went after innocent people like and Muslim comrades and whole countries and territories completely ship reshifts, right? The global order.
[00:50:58] And I think that then we needed to learn. How to organize in under the Patriot Act, we needed to learn how to organize under what it felt like the U. S. As then a victim, of an attack on U. S. soil. It’s like what we see, we see attacks on people in Palestine. Like we see it on a daily basis around the world.
[00:51:21] But this was something that qualitative shifted, with the loss of, the civilian life and loss of all those innocent people at the World Trade Center, and I think because many of those were workers and regular folks and, were innocent people in this moment. We had to really reshift how we understood what the organizing line, but I think we had to, it took us a while to understand the impact of what 9 11 as we were living through it, what it would have, and then the US kind of administration’s role in that.
[00:51:54] And I think it took us a good decade, I think that was like, you saw the height of the anti war mobilizations and all that stuff. But then. You also then began to see the fragmentation, and the fragmentation like in the anti war movement around Palestine, in particular around challenging Islamophobia and being able to really then think about Against, what people’s, I hate to say this so rudely, but like what people’s were palatable to defend or not, and I think that’s some of the ugly part of the left that we don’t talk about where people make choices around who they throw under the bus. And I think that at the end of the day, I think it took a, like a real sort of a resetting of the new kind of condition. about operating in, like this much more highly surveilled, much more police state.
[00:52:48] And at the same time, how the movement needed to talk about the differences we had in a principle way. And I think there was just a lot of fracturing that ended up happening. And so I would say there was a lot of rebuilding that took place in the last, 20 years that brings us to here.
[00:53:09] And, and I think that to me, this moment that we are in, particularly since October 7th, the anti war movement, the anti militarization movement getting regrounded. In that historical past, about U. S. imperialism and U. S. Hegemony and dominance, but also like a new articulation, I think a new articulation about what does it mean to begin to consolidate a new demand, which I think has been around, not just stopping and calling for permanent ceasefire and ending the genocide, stopping the genocide.
[00:53:51] But it’s also about really where our priorities are as a people, and it’s, and you’ve seen the popular, many of us have been working, including you, all of us have been working around divestment for years, and investment for years, from student divestment, from extractive industries and fossil fuels and divestment from, policing and divestment from, The military budget, but now it is a popular demand where people are being clear about what kind of world do we want to live in where, you put more money into, military aid versus like people’s like healthcare and education and wellbeing, and what does it mean to actually stop, stop this madness, stop the genocide, stop the killing of innocent people. And I think, and I think that’s where we’re in this moment where I think that people are getting coming back to this question, the root causes, but also having a battle about where our priorities are.
[00:54:52] And I think that’s a very important moment. For us to not take for granted, there’s been a lot of rebuilding, slow rebuilding in the last two decades that have laid the groundwork for this. Cause that’s where, again, we can’t be historical. It didn’t start with the, the student encampments created in or not.
[00:55:11] It broke through the psychic break, like occupy created the psychic break, but there were years and years of organizing that had been happening to create that. And then how do we in these moments. As the left, as the progressive movement, keep pushing. And then being able to say, this is we, how do we take it from this?
[00:55:29] I kind of mass mobilization moment into organizing into permanent, more durable change into policy, into. Accumulating historical like relationships and trust. That’s what that this moment is also sharing. And I think that’s what many of us learned since 9 11 about the importance of that interplay between these like mass mobilizations, these moments of crisis and then and the ongoing, durable organizing work.
[00:56:00] But then also, how do we then contend and lead? Because I think at this point, this question of power, we started talking about that, this question of power is really fundamental, right? We have to dis, we have to depatriarchalize power but we also have to reclaim it and we have to think about.
[00:56:21] How we think about what is, what does it actually mean? And I think that, at the rising majority, we talk about it as building, not only like social power, narrative power, economic power, but also governance and governance is just not electoral. It means about like, how do we make collective decisions around the priorities, so taking it from the micro level onto this macro level, it’s like, Are we going to keep funding Israel and the genocide of the peoples? Are we or are we going to actually turn that around and actually put the resources of what we have? It’s not infinite, but it’s like what we have to a different use,
[00:57:03] William Lawrence: right?
[00:57:04] So just to put a point on it. I’m, I heard you talk about how during the largest expressions of the anti war movement against the Iraq war. There were still these fissure points, especially around willingness to I think some people said that, Afghanistan was the good war at that time.
[00:57:22] Iraq was the bad war. And then there’s also this fissure around Palestine in particular and people saying we can have a anti war movement in Iraq, but we can’t be, we can’t be pro Palestine here. And now after 10 7, there was an anti war movement that was pro Palestinian and anti Zionist that was prepared to emerge and has continued to emerge in new ways.
[00:57:51] As things have gone on since 10, seven, so you’re noting that as a sign of advance and a sign of work that was done in relationships that were built movement that was built among this broad grassroots internationalist anti war movement of which you’re a part, of course, led in the Palestinian case by Palestinian organizers and the Palestinian diaspora.
[00:58:13] But now it’s prepared to take us into, harder fights, fighting the fighting the wars that the empire considers to be the good wars, the most necessary wars. So I need to keep that in mind because it seems very dark, but the fact that we have a Palestinian human rights movement, a pro Palestinian anti Zionist ceasefire movement that can be a mass expression is not something at all, that’s been To be taken for granted.
[00:58:39] And it’s been decades, 75 years in the making, really.
[00:58:43] Cindy Wiesner: Yeah, absolutely. No, absolutely. I think for me being able to see, yes it’s the decades in the making. It’s about, a Palestinian diverse tendency movement that I think at different moments has dealt with several contradictions and historical junctures in the past.
[00:59:02] 70, 70 plus years, and that I think has been intergenerational, has been intergenerational for the Palestinians and the Palestinian diaspora. Yeah, I remember when I first, I got my, I got a keffiyeh when I was, In 1991 was when I began to understand I was a young person and part of the anti war mobilizations.
[00:59:24] And I began to really understand the role of, settler colonialism, not only here in this country, but also around the world and in particular learning about the Palestinian struggle for self determination, and I think that part of this moment is that it has. become something so never before have I seen and many of the Palestinian compas say this has it become such a global issue, such a reality for various sectors of society.
[01:00:00] You have Doctors and teachers and trade unionists and, different people of civil society that, you know, outside of the traditional left that have come to the call for the stopping of the genocide, for the freeing of all prisoners, and all hostages that have talked about ending.
[01:00:20] The blank check, to, to Israel. And I think that to me, that is a, that it’s potentially becoming a cornerstone issue for the election, our national elections, I think it’s pretty profound and it’s been the decades of organizing. And it’s also been that liberation struggle that has withstood time.
[01:00:43] And that at this moment, there’s almost A real heart connection to the genocide. I think many of us, many of our generation has been desensitized to violence and to genocide because we have witnessed many genocides and many levels of deep violence, from the Congo. You can go down the, from what’s happened in Haiti to the Congo, to different parts of the world.
[01:01:08] And that, but there’s something about this moment that there was a collective awakening that I think is drawing the line. And my hope is that it goes beyond Palestine. I think we are, we cannot we could, we need to continue, even if there’s a ceasefire, we need to continue.
[01:01:24] And it is our moral and political responsibility to support the repair and the reparations. the Palestinian people and for their self determination. But I think that I hope that this is a moment that whatever struggle happens, whether it’s to indigenous communities, to the black community, to white working class communities, to whoever, that there is a political moment now that we need to be able to continue to build on.
[01:01:54] William Lawrence: It does. that way as if this is one of those revelations that there’s no going back from the extent to which people were, have viewed a bombardment of Gaza for months and months on end. And so much of it in the early months was just streamed every single day and people were viewing it, which is why they want to ban Tik TOK because they don’t want you seeing that.
[01:02:18] And so I don’t think that there’s a going back for organizers or people at large who have Experience the revelation. Oh, and this is also what has been happening. Oh, and this is also like the fundamental nature of us power on a world stage is to enable this sort of thing. And it has been, I right now we’re in a mass movement moment.
[01:02:40] There’s a lot of participation. It’s not a majority. You can find polling that will support a ceasefire, but do does do, does the majority support, a position of full Palestinian self determination or anti Zionism? Probably not. There have been other times when you’ve, the groundwork has been laid and it’s been a very much a minoritarian sort of struggle of small numbers, trying to keep the flame alive, trying to do political development work, political education, build organization to allow for a moment like this.
[01:03:11] As more of us start to make anti militarism or anti imperialism a more central and durable political commitment, which I can say that’s something I am doing as a result of everything I’ve seen in the last year, I wonder if you could, by way of conclusion, I know it’s another big question we have to wrap up.
[01:03:34] Say a word about scale, majorities and minorities. This is the heart of the empire. This is a militarist and imperialist nation. And a lot of people have deeply internalized the ideas, but also the interests of militarism. People in America, in the United States do benefit by American.
[01:03:53] Imperialism in a variety of ways. And so with this all in mind, should it be the task of anti imperialist organizers in the U. S. to pursue and achieve majorities, social or political, or is this position destined to remain a Minority position and therefore organizers should, seek to pursue the most effective minoritarian strategies, not expecting to get, 75 percent of the U.
[01:04:25] S. Population on board.
[01:04:28] Cindy Wiesner: There is a organization that I helped co found which is called the Rising Majority. And I think that part of the premise there is that it’s not just a numeric it’s just not a numeric sort of composition, but it is about what becomes more possible when we move together and in greater alignment.
[01:04:51] And part of that is aggregating, I’m aggregating our power and part of that is coherence. And so the task that I think that is, is for all of us, and I take this very seriously, is is really building a coherent force. Within this kind of broader front for change. And I think that part of that coherence is that we have a level of, it requires a high level of alignment, but then it’s about shared interventions that we decide to make together.
[01:05:27] And the decision to cohere is because we’re not going to, Accomplish what we need to accomplish, right? Whether it were majority, majoritarian we can have a debate on numbers, but I think that the lesson that I think I continuously learned from my own organizing work here in this country, but also from around the world, it is that coming together.
[01:05:53] Of different forces and cohering, we might not agree on everything. We’re not going to agree on everything. In fact, and not everyone has to do everything, but we, and we should be open about those disagreements and how we hold those disagreements, but then we struggle in a principled way. And that basically allows us to move in ways that are.
[01:06:17] Then I don’t think we’ve seen move in a long time, right? And I think it becomes like, if we’re strategically aligned, the hypothesis here is if we have a higher level of strategic alignment, engage with each other principally, and then be in joint practice, that allows us to be able to flank each other, provide political cover, but also create those durable political vehicles to hold those commitments.
[01:06:44] To hold those commitments. And part of that, I think, is where, things like the rising majority is being built. That’s why we’re building it is because we don’t have a place of shared analysis, shared assessment, shared tools, curriculum, and then a place where we then say, let’s be in joint practice, right?
[01:07:01] And how do we federate in a lot of ways our resources, but also have a political home. And so this thing about, having a shared strategy, is important. It’s not controversial, but it’s like the implications are right. And strategy is about making those hard choices. But I think to me in the end, it’s about acknowledging that we have to I think we have to be able to continue to build that mass protagonism, that deep work.
[01:07:28] In building our basis and building the character of the left that, that I know I’m part of, which is grassroots, which is of color, which is working class, which is queer, which is internationalist and intergenerational and and right, promoting being right in relation to nature. But I think that’s part of.
[01:07:49] Yeah. Not everyone holds that. We’re not hegemonic. We may never be. But I think that there is something about working in conjunction and then with others outside of ourselves. And I think this is where this broader question of the united front is so important. It’s we may not see eye to eye with different forces, right?
[01:08:08] To the people to, even to people, to the left of us or people, to the center or right of us. But I think that where we can come to common. Agreement and common alignment and move. That’s important. And I think that’s the task. I think of conscious forces revolutionaries in this moment is to be very clear about our threats.
[01:08:31] It’s what are our threats? Know who our current opponent is, but really know what our threat is. And I think right now in this moment, we’re facing, the ascension of the fascist, and I think we have to do everything in our power to stop it. Not only here in this country through the electoral means, but also everywhere else.
[01:08:53] And the reason why that’s so important is because at the end of the day, we have to protect space and create and go into pitch battles around our political projects of our just transition to that feminist anti racist regenerative economy, that place where we’re able to meet the needs of people where we live in relationship with each other and nature.
[01:09:20] And I think that is place that we’re at we have many struggles, but we have to have like that one movement for liberation and, we have to really ground in this moment of. Continuing crisis. Like it’s either going to be like. Going towards like this, the, what coming back to like where you move and center death and profit, or it becomes that simple, and extraction or you center, Eco dependence, interdependence and life.
[01:09:50] And I think that’s the choice point of where we’re at.
[01:09:54] William Lawrence: Cindy Wiesner. Thank you so much. This has been terrific. There’s about a dozen more questions I didn’t get to ask you. But look forward to continuing the dialogue in various forums as we all continue with this work. Thank you.
[01:10:08] Cindy Wiesner: All right.
[01:10:08] Thank you. Thanks.
[01:10:11] William Lawrence: William Lawrence. Our producer is Josh Elstro, and it is published by Convergence, a magazine for radical insights. You can help support this show and others like it by becoming a subscriber of Convergence at convergencemag. com slash donate. Standard subscriptions start at 10 and really help support the sustainabilities of shows like this one.
[01:10:32] One time donations of any amount are welcome there as well. You can find a direct link to donate or subscribe in the show notes. This has been the Hegemonicon. Thanks for listening, and let’s talk again soon.