For a decade as the lone socialist on the Seattle City Council, Kshama Sawant led fighting movements that won historic victories like the nation’s highest minimum wage, the Amazon Tax, lifesaving renters’ rights, and countless others. Despite millions spent by Amazon and big business to unseat her, she won four elections as an independent. Kshama took home only the average worker’s wage, donating the rest of her six-figure salary to workers’ movements. She left office undefeated to build Workers Strike Back, a national movement launched to organize fighting campaigns against the rich and their two parties.
Now, Kshama is running to unseat AIPAC-backed Democratic Congressman Adam Smith, one of those most responsible for the genocide and starvation in Gaza. We are organizing the strongest anti-genocide, pro-worker campaign in the country to end the brutal occupation and stop all US military aid to Israel; to stop the deportations and shut down ICE and the detention centers; to win free healthcare for all paid for by taxing the rich; and to build the fight for
national rent control.
Working people are furious with the Trump administration’s cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and other hard-won programs. Meanwhile, Democrats — far from fighting back — have carried out their own
attacks, including billions in cuts to state programs. This is nothing new. The first major cuts to Medicare and Medicaid came not from Republicans, but from former President Bill Clinton’s Balanced Budget Act, which Adam Smith voted for. The Democrats’ long history of anti-worker attacks and betrayals, now capped with backing a genocide in Palestine, explains their record-low approval ratings, worse even than Trump’s.
There has been much recent discussion of Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic mayoral primary in New York. Mamdani’s campaign was an important rebuke to the Zionist lobby and Wall Street, and it shows the massive opening to fight for working-class demands like rent freezes and free transit.
However, in order to win any of the demands Mamdani campaigned on, he would need to use a fighting, movement-based strategy like Kshama Sawant used in Seattle — going to war against the political establishment, rather than trying to appease it. Unfortunately, so far Mamdani has shown no intention of doing so. Instead, he has been making overtures to Wall Street bankers and Democratic establishment figures like Barack Obama and New York Governor Kathy Hochul.
Kshama used her office to build militant working-class movements to force the Democrats to vote for historic policies like the Amazon Tax and renters rights, and against their corporate interests. A bitter, but honest, assessment of this was given by landlord lobbyist Jamie Durkan, who complained that because of the Democrats’ fear of “Sawant’s army” of workers and renters, “anybody who spends a dollar lobbying the Seattle City Council is wasting a dollar.” The pro-corporate Seattle Times, was forced to note in the context of our 2014 minimum wage victory that Kshama had “come out of nowhere to commandeer the city’s political agenda.”
The fact is that in recent decades, there is nowhere that workers and renters have won such historic gains as they have in Seattle through the movements led by Kshama Sawant and her socialist city council office. Our experience shows that not only is it possible to win elections as an independent, but that it is necessary to do so, because we urgently need to build an alternative to the billionaire-owned, warmongering Democratic Party.
To end the genocide in Gaza, to stop the deporations, and to win free, universal healthcare, we need to completely upend capitalist politics-as-usual in Washington, D.C., the same way Kshama did in Seattle. We have to expose the warmongers in the Democratic Party like Adam Smith, who voted for the Iraq war and every war since, attacking workers while championing tens of billions of dollars for military aid to Israel and voting to block UN food aid. If we defeat Smith, Kshama will use her inauguration as the first revolutionary socialist in the U.S. Congress to launch a mass movement to end all U.S. military funding to Israel.
The billionaires will spend millions to try to defeat Kshama, but our experience in Seattle shows that when we fight, we can win. One month after launching her independent, anti-genocide campaign, Kshama had more donors than Smith had in his entire previous election cycle. In our first three months, we have raised over $200,000 from over 2,000 donors from all 50 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico. We are building for a national week of action culminating with a major national campaign rally on October 12 in Seattle.
We need to build Kshama’s grassroots campaign into a fighting national movement. Whether you can build the campaign in your state, call working-class supporters in Washington, or donate, it is crucial that you join us in this fight.