Kshama Sawant Speaks at the DNC Protests: No Harris! No Trump! End the Genocidal War!
The following is a transcript of a speech given by socialist & former Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant on August 20, 2024 at a Workers Strike Back protest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago alongside Left independent antiwar Presidential candidate Jill Stein, which was attended by more than 200 working people in person, with more than 140,000 viewing online.
Sisters, Brothers, Siblings:
It’s very important, and inspiring, that thousands of people have come to Chicago this week to protest the Democratic National Convention despite all the obstacles in front of working people and the antiwar movement. That we are not silently standing by as the Democrats carry out this genocidal war and all their attacks on workers.
The Democratic elite say that Harris is somehow not complicit in the war, that she was not responsible for the Biden-Harris’s administrations betrayals of working people. That Harris and Walz represent a progressive change of course.
This is The Great Lie that they are selling.
A few blocks from Chicago’s Union Park, the Abandon Biden movement relaunched itself yesterday as Abandon Harris. Workers Strike Back and I were at the Abandon Harris press conference on Monday, where we saw Arab and Muslim American leaders reject this lie — reject the idea that they, their communities, or other working people can support this warmongering candidate.
Unfortunately, leadership that is willing to stand up to the Democrats is in exceedingly short supply right now. We have had an onslaught of misleadership, led by the Democratic Party, BUT ASSISTED by so-called Left media figures and by labor movement leaders.
This misleadership is having a disorienting impact on our movement. It is why we saw 5,000 people on the streets of Chicago this week, and not 50,000 or 100,000, as was projected before the coronation of Harris.
It was only a couple of months ago that the media, including the New York Times, were making comparisons to the protests at the DNC in 1968, which helped define a generation. When the Vietnam antiwar protest movement put its stamp on history in Chicago.
Now, instead of feeling the pressure from our movement, corporate media and the Democrats are celebrating. The Christian Science Monitor ran a headline yesterday: “Forget 1968. The DNC is underway in Chicago with minimal disruption”.
Is this because Harris has taken a position on the genocidal war that is different from Biden’s? Or Trump’s? Of course not.
Harris has repeatedly reaffirmed that she will continue to back the Israeli war machine to the hilt. She met with Netanyahu the day after he received 58 separate standing ovations from the U.S. Congress. Harris’s campaign has directly confirmed that she does not support an arms embargo. Indeed, SINCE Harris became the nominee, another 23 billion dollars have been appropriated for the Israeli military.
Entire bloodlines are being wiped out in Gaza. Countless people, including children and babies, are losing limbs. Disease is spreading. The United Nations said last month that Israel's intentional and targeted starvation campaign has led to the spread of famine throughout the Gaza strip. Gaza has been reduced to rubble.
None of this would have been possible without Biden and Harris, the two warmongers-in-chief of U.S. capitalism and imperialism.
We can have no illusion that Trump or RFK Jr would do anything different. Trump is a warmongering anti-worker billionaire con man.
But Trump left the White House as the most unpopular US president in US history. And yet there is now a possibility he could return to power. And the only reason for that is because the Biden-Harris administration sold out the working class in every sense of the term.
When they ran for office in 2020, both Biden and Harris said they supported the $15 minimum wage. Biden said he would be the most pro-union president in history. Harris said she supported Medicare for All. Harris said she opposed fracking.
These promises, like much of Gaza, lie in rubble. They sold out the railroad workers, they abandoned $15 and even a healthcare public option.
Working people face a deep cost of living crisis, historic credit card, medical, and student debt, war, and climate catastrophe.
They look back at the last four years and its massive levels of inflation, the sky high cost of everything from bread, to fuel, to housing, not to mention The majority of American working people are also calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
And for all of these reasons, millions of working people want to vote AGAINST the status quo in some form. And many of the labor leaders and the liberal media are strongly encouraging people to think Harris is that change.
But the cold hard reality is that for the people of Gaza and for working people in the US and around the world, Harris and Walz are just a change of deck chairs on the Titanic. And many working people know it.
Make no mistake. The Democratic Party is the best builder of Trumpism. It was the betrayals of Clinton that led to Bush and the Iraq War. It was the betrayals of Obama, in bailing out Wall Street banks instead of workers, in escalating the war in Afghanistan and abandoning single payer healthcare - that led to the right-wing Tea Party and Donald Trump.
Last night at the Democratic National Convention, AOC sold and celebrated the Great Lie. She claimed that Harris was “working tirelessly to secure a cease-fire in Gaza and bring the hostages home.”
She called Trump a two-bit union buster, and claimed that Harris fights every single day to lift working people out from under the boots of greed trampling on our way of life. Yes, Trump is a union buster and deeply hostile to workers and the union movement. But Harris was Biden’s other half in the blocking of the railroad workers’ strike — the most shameful act of union busting in decades. Harris’s campaign donors are a who’s who of the billionaire class. The CEOs of the big corporations, every single one a ruthless union buster, are said to be euphoric that Harris is the Democratic nominee.
By peddling her breathtaking lies last night, AOC — the former self-described socialist and working-class representative — is cementing her position to rise to the top of the most powerful party of the capitalist class in the world.
Last night’s DNC extravaganza also saw the president of the UAW, the auto workers’ union, Shawn Fain do his own share of spreading lies. Fain called Harris a “fighter for working people.”
Fain is also one of the many labor leaders who have publicly called for a ceasefire and for an end to US military funding for the Israeli state and then turned around and endorsed both Biden and Harris, with no discussion or vote by the rank-and-file members of their unions.
This type of sleight of hand is gravely damaging to working-class organizing and the antiwar movement. And it is particularly devastating at this moment. Last year was the year of the largest number of American workers participating in major strike action. By refueling illusions in Harris and the Democrats, labor leaders like Fain are allowing the Democratic Party, and the billionaire bosses they serve, to co-opt the genuine desire of working and young people to fight back.
What should Shawn Fain and other labor leaders have done instead of cheerleading Harris at the DNC?
They should have been mobilizing tens of thousands of rank-and-file union members to the protests outside the DNC. They should have called for a day of coordinated strike action across the nation to shut down the bosses’ profit machine.
If this had been done, the streets of Chicago would look very different. Harris and the Democrats would have been VERY afraid. And the potential for a big vote for Jill Stein to help lay the ground for a new mass party of the working class would be far greater as well.
It is that kind of threat, the threat of labor strikes, social upheaval, and millions of votes for Jill Stein, that is needed to end the war on Gaza, and to win real victories for working people.
We should learn lessons from the history of class struggle and social movements.
The Vietnam War was ended by mass movements of working and young people. For the first time in history, US imperialism was forced to abandon a war.
The war was started and escalated under Democrats. It was ENDED under Republican President Nixon. Not because of his support, but despite him.
Because there were millions of people on the street: a mass antiwar movement. There were mass social movements: the Black Power movement, the women’s movement, latino movement. The soldiers were organizing themselves and refusing to fight. The labor movement carried out massive strikes in the 1970s that changed US history as well.
This is what is needed now.
BUT we simply CANNOT disentangle the question of how to end the war and US military funding to Israel from the question of how to vote in November or from the Democratic Party.
The problem is that as long as labor and other leaders promote the Democratic Party, the warmongering party of the billionaire class, it will continue to stymie and paralyze any steps forward. The Democratic Party is the graveyard for movements.
If we are going to rebuild a fighting labor movement in the US, and powerful enough antiwar movement to end the genocide, we not going to do that by putting our illusions in the Democrats or the leaders who tell us we should trust the Democrats. We need to rebuild the militancy of the rank and file. That is why we launched Workers Strike Back, and why we are using it to help build the antiwar movement, and to fight for the biggest possible antiwar, pro-worker vote in this election — for Jill Stein.
But we also need to be sober about what this week means for our movement going forward. The low turnout this week represents a setback.
Unless we build a much stronger movement, the Democrats are going to lead many working people down a blind alley once again.
We can’t let that happen without a fight. Whether we win hundreds of thousands of votes for Jill Stein as the strongest anti-war, pro-worker candidate, or we win millions of votes, we have to fight for every possible vote.
I’m not using these kinds of numbers to be discouraging, but for our movement to have a real and honest assessment of where things are.
The Great Lie, if it is not effectively countered by our movements, and EVEN if we do everything right, is going to mislead many people. And many others who reject it will vote for Trump or not vote at all.
Every vote for Jill Stein is a clear vote AGAINST the genocidal war, AGAINST the billionaire agenda.
And every single one of those votes mean something.
Every vote for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, conversely, is a vote FOR genocidal war and the further undermining of the working class and our movements.
Being real about assessing our movement’s strengths and weaknesses does not mean in any sense being pessimistic. In fact, it guards against the demoralization that would be inevitable unless we developed an honest, scientific assessment of reality. We should draw accurate conclusions and plan our next steps.
If we win a million votes for Jill Stein, that would be a victory, in the context of the Great Lie.
And rather than be discouraged, we should use that to take our movement forward.
When we ran our first election in 2012, to the Washongton state house of representatives, I received 9% of the vote on primary night. We saw this as a real step forward, however, because we knew the obstacles of running a revolutionary socialist for elected office. We campaigned relentlessly, and that year, we won 29 percent of the vote in november. And we saw that election as a building block.
The following year, in 2013, we became the first socialist elected to the Seattle city council in over 100 years. We won because we fought against the Democratic Party in Seattle and organized working people - not by kissing up to the Democratic politicians.
This election year, and the anger of millions against the war and the cost of living crisis, has shown there is a huge opening for a new party for working people, even if it is temporarily being set back by The Great Lie and the fear of Trump.
There is still an important opening from now until November 5th to win hundreds of thousands of working-class and young people to our movement.
Most people learn from experience. This will be a radicalizing experience, particularly if Harris is elected and completely betrays working people as Biden just did.
We need to focus on the election, but we also need to take our movement beyond this election. We are calling for a mass organizing conference in February of next year to do just that. I hope you will all join Workers Strike Back, if you haven’t already.
The Democrats and Republicans are rotten parties of the billionaires, and the system they represent is rotten to the core, as well.
Under capitalism, the resources of society are owned and controlled by a sliver at the top.
Capitalism is a system of crisis, a system of war, an engine for inequality and environmental destruction.
The corporations act only in the interests of maximizing short term profits, at whatever cost in human lives and human suffering.
We need to take the big corporations into democratic public ownership. Because we can’t control what we don’t own.
US imperialism will continue to back the Israel state to the hilt because they see it as their key ally in the oil rich Middle East, and an essential ally in the US China Cold war, the defining conflict of the present period.
The brutal occupation of Gaza is at the root of this crisis, it did not begin on October 7th. The Palestinian people have a right to defend themselves including with arms, and to the right to self determination.
But we should recognize there is no solution to the occupation on the basis of capitalism. We need a socialist Palestine, a socialist Israel, an end to the apartheid system and full rights for all Palestinains within Israel.
And we need to dismantle capitalism entirely, to remove it root and branch. This is why I’m a socialist. If you’re a socialist also, then in addition to joining Workers Strike Back, you should also consider joining my organization, Revolutionary Workers.
Solidarity!