Special Episode Part 2: Lauren Jacobs and Harmony Goldberg on facing corporate power and authoritarianism and how to build long-term governing power

This episode is part two of a two-part special episode. You can listen in any order. Unlike our standard episodes where we zoom in on one particular campaign, we’re zooming out around broader strategy themes. To help us zoom out, we invited five insightful thought leaders, who each recently wrote vital resources for campaign organizers, to talk with Andrew. 

In part two of two, we talk with two guests. First Lauren Jacobs of Power Switch Action highlights the role of corporate targeting campaigns in resisting authoritarianism, pulling from her co-written article Reining in Amazon to Build Up People-Powered Democracy in The Forge. Then, we hear from Harmony Goldberg of Grassroots Power Project, about interventions from her co-authored guide Governing Power. Beyond cutting issues for easy wins given a terrain of power, she invites campaigners to orient toward the long term project of winning durable governing power, to transform the terrain of power itself. The episode touches themes of effective allies, building enforcement into demands, narrative struggle, and the importance of base building fundamentals. 

Lauren Jacobs is the executive director of PowerSwitch Action, a national network of local powerbuilding organizations that weave together community, labor, faith, racial justice, and environmental justice movements into powerful coalitions. She has dedicated her life to supporting working people as they gain power to shape their own working and living conditions. Lauren has organized with textile, janitorial, security, and restaurant workers at UNITE, SEIU, and the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United. She recently published an article on Why Jeff Bezos Loves Trump’s Big, Ugly Bill.

Harmony Goldberg is the Director of Praxis at Grassroots Power Project and has been providing political education and strategic facilitation for social movements in the United States for more than 25 years. She cut her teeth in California’s youth and student  movement in the 1990s, where she helped to found and lead SOUL, the School Of Unity and Liberation. Then, she worked closely with the domestic workers movement and other low-wage workers organizations as the workers center movement was coming into its own.  Harmony completed her PhD in Cultural Anthropology at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, where her research focused on the promising forms of worker’s struggle and class politics that were emergent in domestic worker organizing in New York City.  At GPP, Harmony works closely with People’s Action, and she leads the development of strategic education programs. She recently coauthored a booklet on Governing Power.

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