Ten Lessons from the Decade of Kshama Sawant’s Socialist Seattle City Council Office

Long before democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were household names, socialist Kshama Sawant — a co-founder of Workers Strike Back — won an openly socialist campaign for the Seattle City Council in 2013. Kshama was the first socialist elected in Seattle in nearly a century.

After a decade in office, and having overcome unrelenting big business opposition to win historic victories and four consecutive elections, Kshama left the City Council undefeated. She also left office with an unparalleled record of victories for the working class, which stands as an important and unique contrast to the failures, betrayals, and broken promises by the Democratic Party, including its so-called progressive wing.

In 2014, within six months of first taking office, Kshama and the 15 NOW movement that she launched, along with fellow organized socialists and rank-and-file workers, made Seattle the first major city to win a $15/hour minimum wage. Today, Workers Strike Back is fighting for a 25-dollar-an-hour minimum wage. But ten years ago, before we won, $15/hour was dismissed as utopian and ludicrous by the Democrats and the corporate media. It was only because of the victory of Seattle’s working-class movement led by Kshama’s office and the 15 NOW movement that the $15 minimum wage spread around the country.

Kshama’s office won the historic Amazon Tax in 2020, which funds affordable housing and other needs to the tune of over $214 million annually, by taxing the city’s wealthiest corporations. 

That was the same year that Kshama and working people won the nation’s first-ever ban on police use of chemical and so-called “crowd control” weapons against peaceful protests, with hundreds of Seattle’s working people speaking in City Council public comment in support of the legislation.

Kshama Sawant speaks to a crowd of supporters of the 15 NOW movement in Seattle in March 2014

Kshama’s office rejected business-as-usual in the annual public-sector budget vote by the City Council. Like politicians in virtually every city, Seattle’s Democrats hold long and process-heavy budget meetings every year, during which they attack social programs for working people and the poor. At best, they throw a few crumbs to social and community needs and pat themselves on the back, while ensuring an ever-regressive budget that serves the interests of the wealthy. Starting with her first year in office, and alongside fellow socialists, Kshama launched the annual People’s Budget campaign, which hundreds of activists used every year to get organized and win millions of dollars in funding for affordable housing, renter needs including defense against evictions, and social services.

Together with indigenous and urban native activists, we ended Seattle’s gross celebration of Columbus Day and replaced it with Indigenous People’s Day in 2014. Later, in 2016, we won a resolution expressing solidarity with the Standing Rock movement against the Keystone XL pipeline, and condemning the violence and police repression directed against them in the fight against fossil fuel corporations and big banks.

We won a long list of renters’ rights laws, which corporate landlords are enraged about and pressing the new City Council to undermine and even dismantle. These include the right to an attorney for tenants facing eviction; a requirement for six months’ notice for all evictions, caps on exorbitant move-in fees and a payment plan for them; school-year and winter eviction moratoriums; the requirement that landlords pay relocation assistance worth three months’ rent for rent increases of more than 10 percent; banning rent increases on buildings with housing code violations; a $10 cap on the late fees landlords can charge for overdue rent; and an end to exploitative “junk fees.”

Renters and socialists pack Seattle City Hall to demand an end to winter evictions in February 2020

In early 2020, there were protests in Seattle and other cities against what were anti-Muslim and anti-poor citizenship laws by India’s right-wing Hindu fundamentalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party. Kshama and South Asian American community activists won the nation’s first City Council resolution condemning these laws. Later that same year, we won another landmark resolution in solidarity with the farmers and workers in India, who were then fighting the Modi regime against pro-corporate-agribusiness laws. 

Immediately after the reactionary Supreme Court dismantled Roe v. Wade, our office brought forward legislation making Seattle a sanctuary city. According to the legislation, Seattle police are prohibited from arresting people based on outstanding warrants related to anti-abortion laws around the country, and prevented from otherwise aiding in investigations of those cases. People with abortion-related warrants are able to live in Seattle without being extradited to whichever state is attempting to prosecute them. We immediately followed this up by winning full funding to make abortion free for all who need it in the city, through our People’s Budget campaign.

We made Seattle the first jurisdiction outside South Asia to win a ban on caste-based discrimination. The caste system is an ancient system of oppression devised by the ruling classes in South Asia over two thousand years ago, which still exists under capitalism.

Just over a month after the start of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, Kshama’s office brought forward a resolution calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, and an end to U.S. funding for the Israeli military and to the Israeli state’s occupation of Palestinian lands. Despite the Democrats shamefully watering down the resolution, we won it, and made Seattle the largest city to pass the strongest ceasefire resolution.

A call to action issued by socialist Councilmember Kshama Sawant’s office in November 2023

And that is a far from complete list of the victories won by Kshama, alongside socialists, workers, union members, and community activists. 

Kshama’s record as an elected representative of the working class is all too rare in general, and unparalleled in recent decades.

After Kshama was first elected, we saw AOC and other members of the Squad get elected to the U.S. Congress. The Democratic Socialists of America exploded in membership, and hundreds of left and self-identified socialist candidates were elected. 

Yet, what have we seen? Not only have the Squad not succeeded in winning any comparable victories, they’ve refused to fight the Democratic Party’s corporate establishment in any real way. They failed to stand up against the election of Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House, and shamefully voted a year ago to block the railroad unions’ strike. They have repeatedly given cover to President Biden as he has sold out working people. And this year, Squad members Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush lost their Democratic primary elections.

Why has Kshama’s office been able to defeat big-business interests, the right wing, and the Democratic Party establishment again and again, whereas Bernie Sanders and the Squad haven’t? Is it because it can only be done on the local level, and things are much harder for AOC? Is it because big business and the super-rich don’t mind it if workers win things in cities? Is it because Seattle is just different?

Lesson Number 1: You cannot be loyal to working people AND keep big business happy — failing to understand that is how progressives sell out workers.

For many decades, corporate media and prominent political commentators have perpetuated the idea that in politics, it’s all about “collaboration” and genteel conversation, and that it is important not to be divisive. It is routine during elections for candidates to proclaim that they will represent “all their constituents,” both working people and corporations.

But this is an impossibility in the context of capitalism, with its extreme inequality of wealth and power. In virtually all political issues, the needs and interests of the vast majority of the working class and the poor are diametrically opposed to the interests and the greed of the super-rich. So if you genuinely represent working people, let alone fight for their needs, you will inevitably anger big business and the elite. And no amount of genteel conversing on your part is going to make the rich feel you are on their side. Conversely, if you are trying to make the elite happy, it will require you to sell workers out.

Kshama’s Council office has been called divisive not only by corporate media and Chamber of Commerce spokespeople, but also by progressive Democrats. Each time she ran for election, or launched a campaign around a demand, the media wrote her political obituary. And one of the mainstays of their expectation that she and her fellow socialists would die a quick political death was their conviction that our bold call for working-class demands would be off-putting to everyone. What they missed, despite repeatedly being proven wrong, was that it had the exact opposite effect on most working and young people. 

When we ran for our second re-election in 2019, we made it very clear that the election was going to be about one question: who gets to run Seattle, Amazon and big business or working people.

Amazon spent nearly $1.5 million in 2019 trying (and failing) to elect Egan Orion and other corporate Democrats to City Hall. Kshama Sawant was their main target.

Our opponent in the 2019 general election was the Amazon and big-business candidate. 

He opposed any and every progressive demand our campaign raised – whether it was rent control or taxing big business or ending the inhumane sweeps of homeless neighbors. 

But he tried hard to fool working people by pretending that there are no class conflicts. He campaigned on this false message of “It’s not us vs. them. It’s just us.”

We have also seen examples of how when progressives speak from both sides of their mouths, ostensibly trying to keep big business happy while telling working people they are the progressive candidate, it can totally backfire. 

The results of the 2021 elections in Seattle offer a great example.

In 2021, Kshama’s office faced a recall attempt, which was led by corporate landlords, the Trump-supporting right wing, and big business as a whole. Not one self-described progressive Democrat on the City Council spoke out against this right-wing recall effort. 

Kshama Sawant speaks to supporters at a rally after defeating the billioniare-funded, right-wing recall campaign against her in December 2021

And once again, our political demise was predicted. Pundits spoke confidently that the socialist was finally going to be driven out of City Hall. Many of the Democrats and their dedicated staffers could barely conceal their glee.

But we proved them all wrong and won. 

As we expected, it was a very narrow victory, but the point is that despite all of the money and the media and the Democratic Party support, the recall effort lost. 

The punchline of this story is that as we won, that same year, two progressive Democratic candidates, Nikkita Oliver for City Council and Lorena Gonzalez for Mayor, both lost against their corporate opponents. 

In our recall fight, we made it clear that we were up against big business and the right wing, and that voting for the recall was a vote in favor of rapacious corporate landlords and the Trump-aligned Republican Party. We raised the banner of rent control, increasing our Amazon Tax, and COVID economic support.

In contrast, Oliver and Gonzalez each ran a milquetoast campaign. They refused to raise any concrete working-class demands, lest they anger big business. They spent the whole campaign trying to sound palatable to everyone, regardless of class interests. And they lost.

Lesson Number 2: Genuine socialist and working-class candidates CAN defeat powerful establishment incumbents and opponents.

And they can do so without capitulating to the Democratic establishment.

Kshama ran as an independent candidate in all the four City Council elections — and each time as an unapologetic socialist running on clear and bold working-class demands.

In every one of those elections, she was fiercely opposed by big business and the Democratic Party establishment. In 2019, Amazon broke city records trying to buy the Seattle elections, single-handedly spending $1.5 million.

We defeated big business each time. In fact, without taking a dime in corporate money, we out-fundraised our corporate Democratic opponents in 2015 and 2019 re-elections, and also the right-wing recall campaign against us in 2021. In both 2019 and 2021, we broke the fundraising records for all previous City Council campaigns — entirely through grassroots, working-class donations.

It wasn’t easy, it took hundreds of volunteers to win each of those campaigns.

Campaign volunteers put up a poster during Kshama Sawant’s re-election campaign in 2019, where Amazon alone spent nearly $1.5 million

Equally important were the demands that working people could see would make a real difference in their lives. Working people could see they had a stake in our campaigns.

We defeated 16-year Democratic incumbent, Richard Conlin, in our first City Council election in 2013 on that basis, by raising the banner of the $15/hour minimum wage. 

When Kshama first ran for office, the political establishment had all kinds of “tips”. Drop “socialism” and stop talking about $15/hour: they’re too radical. Don’t talk about taxing the rich – it’s divisive. Don’t campaign on rent control – it doesn’t work.

Those same well-meaning advisors said outright that winning as an independent was impossible, running inside the Democratic Party was a must. And, of course, they saw winning without corporate cash as inconceivable!

We threw all of this advice out, opting to make working-class demands central to our independent, socialist campaign. Our campaign thrust the $15 wage to the center of Seattle politics. We drew a sharp contrast between our campaign and that of our opponent, Richard Conlin.

We forced Conlin to go on the record refusing to support $15, a point he had been trying to fudge because of the growing popularity of our demand.

We weren’t afraid to expose Conlin generally. We also made sure working people knew that he had been the sole vote against the city’s Paid Sick Leave legislation. And when he tried to sell the breathtaking lie that he hadn’t supported Paid Sick Leave because the bill wasn’t progressive enough, we called bullshit on that, too.

If you allow Democrats to talk out of both sides of their mouths, which they almost all do, then you won’t win. You have to fight tenaciously against the establishment and your opponent in order to win, making it crystal clear how you are different. You can’t be afraid to be called “not nice.” Ordinarily, left candidates lose — you have to turn things upside down in order to win. You have to inspire working-class people.

We threw out the liberal rule book, and ran an aggressively socialist, working-class campaign. We made it clear we were fighters, that we were fundamentally different.

Working and oppressed people have lots of reasons to be skeptical. They’ve been sold out so many times. You have to prove yourself. You have to earn their trust.

After Kshama stepped down, the City Council position in her district was won by Joy Hollingsworth, the chosen candidate of the Chamber of Commerce. Unfortunately, this was no surprise. Hollingsworth’s opponent was a mealy-mouthed liberal candidate who tried to be all things to all people. She didn’t want to alienate the establishment, and she didn’t campaign on working-class demands. The one thing she did make clear is she would not be like Kshama Sawant! And she lost by a landslide. 

Lesson Number 3: In order to win anything, working-class representatives need to use their office as a vehicle for movements of working, young, and oppressed people.

Fundamentally, it’s imperative that genuine socialist and working-class representatives understand that our task is not to help run the capitalist state alongside Democrats and Republicans, only in a slightly more humane way. Our task is to disrupt the status quo, and help organize the working-class struggle by mobilizing working people to win concrete gains. And our job is not to reach consensus with capitalism’s political representatives, but to expose them when they betray ordinary people. 

This implies that you as the leader or representative have to withstand the unrelenting pressures on you to betray working people. But you also need to understand that with the most principled position, it will still be impossible to accomplish anything by oneself. Far from winning historic victories, Kshama’s office would have been marginalized, had it not been for her continuous efforts to mobilize working people into struggle. In fact, we would not have been able to win four elections. 

Working people rally in Seattle City Hall in June 2018 against Seattle Democrats’ back-door repeal of the first Amazon Tax. The Tax Amazon movement fought back and won a second, bigger Amazon Tax two years later.

Kshama and her fellow socialists understood this starting with our first election campaign itself, which we used as a platform to begin building momentum for the $15/hour minimum wage struggle.

Within weeks of taking office, Kshama launched the 15 NOW movement to activate rank-and-file union members and non-union workers. We were joined by progressive elected union leaders such as Paula Lukaszek, the president of WFSE 1495. 

Hundreds of working people gather in Seattle’s Washington Hall in January 2020 to participate in the first Tax Amazon Action Conference

The 15 NOW campaign held a series of mass organizing conferences, launched neighborhood action groups, led a series of marches, and then democratically decided to file a grassroots ballot initiative. The ballot initiative strategy gave us a credible threat against big business. It would have allowed us to take the issue to voters if Democratic City Councilmembers failed to act. All of this was crucial to forcing their hand.

Similarly, when we launched the Tax Amazon movement in January 2020, it was a democratically organized movement, with mass Action Conferences that involved hundreds of activists. These public action conferences elected a coordinating committee that was accountable to the action conferences. 

Despite fierce big business opposition and repeated ploys by city and state Democrats to derail it, the Tax Amazon movement won during the height of the covid pandemic and the Black Lives Matter street protests. We called actions and rallies like a Covid-safe car caravan around the Amazon spheres. Most importantly, we again employed the strategy of a viable ballot initiative threat. As testament to the enormous support among ordinary people, the Tax Amazon ballot initiative gathered 20,000 signatures at the George Floyd protests in 20 days, ultimately tallying up 30,000 signatures.

Not one Democrat was willing to speak in support of the Amazon Tax for months, until after we built this momentum and were preparing to file our ballot initiative. 

We also used a fighting approach to winning the renters’ rights victories mentioned earlier. 

In December of 2014, we won a stunning victory against a federal attempt to destroy social housing on a grand scale. This nationwide program was called Moving to Work, a neoliberal assault on the little remaining public and affordable housing. Moving to Work’s plan was to carry out massive increases in public housing rent, with the idea that the tenants would be more motivated to get better-paying jobs. This garden-variety conservative ideology claims that people are poor because they are too lazy to seek better-paying jobs, which serves as an excuse for austerity. This also has a racial dimension, given that a large proportion of public housing residents are low-income families of color, many from the immigrant community, and many comprising single-mom households.

In an Orwellian move, the Seattle incarnation of this program to drag affordable housing backward was dubbed Stepping Forward. If Stepping Forward had been allowed to succeed, it would have increased rents for 4,600 working-class and poor families by an eye-popping 400 percent over six years. 

As single mother Rebecca Snow Landa, one of the tenants, said at the time, “when I got that letter, I could barely get out of bed for about a week. Because it almost felt like a death sentence in a way.” 

This program was presented to the tenants almost as a fait accompli. But the tenants, many of them East African women and young people, were unanimous in refusing to accept this lying down, and wanted to fight against what they knew was a pipeline to homelessness.

So together with other activists, Kshama’s office organized hundreds of the residents. The federal government, hand in hand with the city establishment, had organized public meetings expecting that the tenants would not be confident enough to oppose Stepping Forward. But we turned every public meeting into a protest action, with tenants interrupting the establishment speakers repeatedly with chants and statements. 

These protest actions culminated with us organizing and planning an incredible walkout of hundreds from the last public meeting. Following the walkout, we held our own powerful People’s Assembly!

We built unstoppable momentum with hundreds of East African and other community members of color who had never before participated in a political movement. We completely upended the plans of the Seattle Democratic establishment, and of the Obama administration, which was ultimately responsible for the gutting of public housing funding at the time. 

Under pressure from our campaign, the local Democrats were forced to come out in public opposition to Stepping Forward. And in a historic victory, the federal officials were forced to withdraw Stepping Forward, and allow public housing tenants to stay secure in their homes. To our knowledge, Seattle was the only city in which the Moving to Work initiative was defeated.

In the spring of 2019, the tenants of The Chateau, a working-class apartment building in Seattle’s Central District, learned that Cadence Real Estate, the $185 million development corporation that owns the building, planned to demolish the 21 apartments and displace the tenants. Most of the Chateau tenants were retirees and working families of color, many of them immigrants. Residents ranged in age from newborn to 93. Most of the tenants had nowhere else to go.

Kshama Sawant rallies with residents of the Chateau apartments to fight back against the landlord’s plan to demolish the building and displace its residents

Our office helped organize the Chateau residents, holding a number of meetings where we discussed the need for concrete demands and renter solidarity in the face of Cadence’s predictable attempts to divide and conquer by offering some of them special perks. The tenants stood together and fought back, alongside our office, the Tenants Union of Washington, progressive faith leaders like Reverend Robert Jeffrey, and labor rank and file. 

The Cadence executives were forced to concede to the tenants’ demands, and agreed to relocate all of the Chateau residents to new affordable housing buildings, give each household $5,000 for relocation assistance, and delay redevelopment so that tenants could stay at the Chateau longer and move out without being rushed. This was an unheard-of victory!

Nobody in Seattle has caused more headaches for big business, the billionaire class, and the political establishment than Kshama Sawant, her fellow socialists and working people, and the movements we have used this office to build.

In April 2014, shortly before we won the $15 minimum wage, a columnist for the conservative and pro-corporate Seattle Times, said “if the Seattle City Council passes a 15-dollar wage in the coming months (as appears likely), Sawant will appropriately get credit for coming out of nowhere to commandeer the city’s political agenda.

“Who […] had a quick jump to a 15-dollar wage on their radar a year ago? Yet the political fear of Sawant’s organizing skill has put a radical economic policy on greased rails. In process-loving Seattle, the minimum wage is happening as quickly as a lightning strike.”

Kshama Sawant rallies with socialists, renters, and working people to demand rent control in July 202

Longtime corporate landlord lobbyist Jamie Durkan once said every dollar that corporate landlords had spent over the last decade lobbying the Seattle City Council was wasted because of “Sawant’s army,” by which he meant rank-and-file renters mobilizing to win victories.

These statements from the spokespeople of the ruling class acknowledge that the Democrats in City Hall were forced to concede to working people when they got organized to change the balance of power away from corporate interests.

Progressive media outlet Mother Jones wrote an article in December 2019, titled “Heroes of the 2010s: Kshama Sawant, the Socialist Who Beat Amazon.” In it, they said, “Sawant isn’t a 2010s hero strictly for wage hikes or tenants’ rights. It’s also HOW she secured those victories—by breaking rules, by embracing confrontation, by picking an “unrealistic” goal and building on it, dragging Seattle’s Democrats around by the nose. Who thought one lonely Trotskyist could so upend, in so little time, the American consensus on a fair wage?”

Of course, far from being lonely, our organizing was rooted in the mass solidarity of working people.

Lesson Number 4: It’s NOT “can you compromise,” it’s “what can you win based on the strength of your movement.”

The corporate media likes to talk about “compromise.” They have repeatedly asked Kshama: why aren’t you prepared to compromise? Don’t you think rather than antagonizing “your Council colleagues,” you should try to find common ground with them? Even after her decade in office, reporters still rolled out this tired question at Kshama!

Let’s be perfectly clear, big business has never had any intention of making compromises in the interests of working people — they expect us to do the “compromising”, by which they mean accepting ever lower pay, worse working conditions, and whatever else they can get away with forcing upon us.

Big business and their media will do everything possible to ensure that working people get screwed. This is because every dollar that goes to social programs, wages, healthcare benefits, or workplace safety is one less dollar for their profits. Amazon alone spent $14 million in 2022 on union busting because they don’t want to have to make any concessions to organized workers. Furthermore, the bosses will strenuously oppose even modest demands from workers because they know that the experience of winning is inspiring and contagious: it will encourage the workers to fight for more, and other workers to join the fight.

Hundreds march to Amazon Headquarters in Seattle in March 2020 to demand the Amazon Tax for Affordable Housing

When big business and their media tell a working-class representative to “compromise,” they pretend it is about being “reasonable.” But what they are really telling you to do is sell out workers. 

People constantly ask how progressive change really happens. We should be fully clear that it doesn’t happen through moral persuasion or logical arguments with members of the establishment in their plush offices.

Kshama’s first term in office started in January 2014 with a couple of corporate Democratic Councilmembers coming to privately warn her that even though she had rabble-roused her way into office, she was not going to win any minimum wage increase, much less 15, because City Hall ran on their terms. By June that year, our movement had won the unanimous and historic City Council vote, and proven these rotten politicians wrong. Far from being the result of vote-counting or private negotiations, $15 saw the light of day only because we used our Council position to build powerful momentum on the ground.

Change happens when working people get organized. When they do it powerfully and effectively around concrete demands. When they are clear who is on their side, and who is not. 

One of the main slogans of our movement in Seattle, and also of Workers Strike Back, is “when we fight, we can win.”

But whether we do win — and how much we win — has everything to do with the relative strength of our movement versus the political establishment at a given moment. We call this the balance of forces.

This is fundamentally because establishment politicians want to loyally serve big business, but they also fear working people, and they fear for their own political careers. So they make calculations, cynical ones, about whether they have to make a concession at a given movement, or if they can safely defend the status quo and big business. 

Less cynical, progressive politicians also make their calculations. While they might be less ideologically dedicated to big business, they still fear angering them. They see their career interests in trying to somehow keep big business happy, while also preventing damage to their progressive reputation when they betray ordinary people. 

It is our job, as working people fighting for our interests, to increase their fear of us, by bringing as much pressure to bear as possible through building movements. 

Of course, we do have to sometimes accept that we won’t win everything we are fighting for. That is inevitable because capitalism is a rotten system, and the capitalists own the media and the corporate politicians. We don’t bend to keep these politicians happy, and we don’t back down without an all-out fight to win every possible thing that we can, until the final day and the final hour.

Lesson Number 5: The Democrats are not on the side of the working class anymore than the Republicans are. Working and oppressed people need a party of our own.

The Democratic Party is a party of big business. It is heavily reliant on corporate money. Its leadership goes back and forth between corporate boards, highly-paid executive jobs, and powerful positions within the party. It is tied by a thousand threads to the capitalist class.

Well-meaning progressive politicians will not be able to go into this party and change it from the inside. They will be changed instead, and will sell out, as we saw with the Squad.

There is no real avenue for reforming the Democratic Party because despite its name, it has no democracy in it. It is an electoral machine for the ruling class. In most areas of the country, there are not even meetings of the rank-and-file members of the Democratic Party. Decisions are made from the top down.

When someone does threaten the party’s status quo, every weapon in the party’s arsenal will be mobilized against them.

We saw that in 2016 and again in 2020, when Bernie Sanders ran in the Democratic Primary, and they moved heaven and earth to ensure he wouldn’t win. In 2020, when all else failed, they choreographed the rapid dropping out of a slew of candidates before Super Tuesday, an effort led by former President Barack Obama. Though vicious attacks against Sanders were anticipated, this particular maneuver was stunning and unprecedented. Corporate candidates do not generally drop out en masse to help another candidate — they likely only did so because of a combination of threats and promises made to them by the Democratic Party’s highly motivated leadership. Prior to this move, Sanders was building commanding momentum to become the nominee, and they were determined to block him by any means necessary.

Kshama Sawant speaks to a crowd of 17,000 in Tacoma, WA during Bernie Sanders’ 2020 primary campaign

This year, we saw how, despite the stunning lack of support for Joe Biden, the Democratic Party completely refused to hold any election debates, and virtually no primary process. The plan was for Biden to simply be crowned as the Democratic candidate despite absolutely abysmal polling numbers, huge frustration over the economy, and growing anger at Biden’s two wars: in Ukraine and in Gaza. 

But when the mental decline the Democrats worked so hard to hide became painfully apparent at the presidential debates, and Biden was forced to withdraw, there was still no opportunity to weigh in on who the candidate should be.

The Democrats are fearful of the threat of a progressive challenger and further chaos, as they see it, in their party. So they want no democracy, no real primary. That’s why they orchestrated a behind-the-scenes coronation of Vice President Kamala Harris, who shares Biden’s pro-war anti-worker legacy.  

The Biden-Harris administration has sent over $50 billion in military aid to Israel just since October, including weaponry worth $20 billion to be sent over the next several years. Despite her rhetoric about a ceasefire, Harris has made it crystal clear she does not support ending military aid to Israel. Alongside Biden, Harris broke promises, including on the $15/hour minimum wage, canceling student debt, and on a healthcare public option. 

Bernie Sanders with Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, both of whom he has now endorsed, during the October 2019 Democratic debates

And unfortunately, Bernie Sanders has now sold out. He has refused to campaign for his own platform, including Medicare for All, since the 2020 election, and instead gave cover to Joe Biden, and now, is giving cover to Kamala Harrris. He has refused to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, and has been supporting the Biden-Harris warmongering in alliance with the Israeli capitalist class.

Trump is an anti-worker warmongering billionaire, and is no alternative to Harris.

Working people need a party of our own.

We need a party that takes no corporate money and whose elected representatives accept only the average worker’s wage, as Kshama does. This party would need grassroots democratic structures and must base itself on working-class movements. In such a party, as in Kshama’s election campaigns, the platform and demands must be democratically determined by the membership. And elected representatives must be accountable to those democratic structures and that platform — because the votes and other actions they take need to reflect the decisions made by the membership of the party and the needs of the working class.

Many of the gains made in Europe and other countries, such as public healthcare systems, were made by working-class parties with active memberships of millions of people. The lack of such a party in the United States is a central reason why we don’t have healthcare for all.

A mass working-class party will not appear out of thin air. We will have to prepare the ground to win it. During the Presidential election, this concretely means organizing to win the biggest possible vote for the Left, independent antiwar pro-worker candidate Jill Stein. It would demonstrate to the working class of America that the demand for independent Left politics exists, and that political alternatives are possible if we fight for them. Even a million votes for Stein would be a powerful step in the right direction. If even a fraction of those million people were to get active following the election in fighting against the new administration, whether Harris or Trump, and in building working-class movements like Workers Strike Back, it could have a transformative effect on U.S. politics. Although Stein is highly unlikely to win the election in November, a strong turnout behind her could become a galvanizing victory of its own for the working-class struggle in the years to come. This is also why Workers Strike Back is calling for a mass organizing conference in February 2025 to take forward the momentum from the Stein campaign, the antiwar movement, and workers’ struggles into the new year.

Lesson Number 6: Socialist and working-class representatives must reject careerism.

Kshama didn’t decide to run for her ego or to build a career. Rather,  she had in-depth discussion and democratic debate and vote, along with other organized socialists in 2013, about what we felt was a huge opening for real working-class candidates. The 2011 Occupy movement had revealed the anger of millions of working and young people about economic inequality. By the end of 2012, fast food workers in New York City had begun to question stagnating wages and brought forward the idea of a $15/hour minimum wage. 

In addition to the $15/hour minimum wage for Seattle’s workers, we also campaigned to tax the rich to fund affordable housing and other social needs, and for strong citywide rent control. All these demands got a huge echo from working people throughout the city.

As a working-class candidate, Kshama also pledged during our campaign that if elected, she would take home only the average worker’s wage, and donate the rest of her City Council salary, after taxes, into a solidarity fund for workers’ struggles and social movements. She kept that promise for the whole decade that she remained in office.

Lesson Number 7: Politicians who represent corporate interests are not your “colleagues,” they are your political adversaries.

“Apoplectic!”

That was how a Democratic establishment City Council staffer described the reaction inside City Hall when news broke in November 2013 that Kshama had defeated her Democratic Party opponent.

According to The Stranger newspaper, some of the Democrats remarked that Kshama would be like a mountain lion set loose in a grocery store!

City Hall insiders told The Stranger newspaper that some Democrats were going to try blocking Kshama’s appointment to any Council committee on which she could actually introduce a $15/hour minimum wage bill.

Even before she took office, political pundits and the City Council Democrats lost no time in beginning to malign her and carry out character assassination.

When we won that first election, Kshama correctly said that our campaign was as close as you could get to a referendum on a $15/hour minimum wage for Seattle. She warned that those who opposed workers winning $15 would try and create distractions by carrying out personal attacks on her. 

This is because the ruling class understood as well as we did that if we built a mass movement around $15, it could very likely pressure the Democrats to vote YES. As The Stranger local newspaper pointed out, they recognized that the best way to stop us from winning 15 would be to “kneecap [Kshama’s] credibility first.” 

So within hours of winning our election, Democrats and their cronies began spreading malicious rumors about Kshama. 

One corporate reporter described Kshama’s approach of holding working people’s rallies as “narcissistic!” He also called Kshama “self-intoxicated” and compared her to a “show horse.”

Some of the Democrats went the other route, and attempted charm on a personal basis, thinking that could lull Kshama into going along with the establishment agenda.

They will try both the stick and the carrot. Leaders of the working class have to resist both. 

In 2023, in an increasingly rare moment of honesty, AOC described why she and the Squad members refused to publicly call out the thoroughly pro-Wall-Street leadership of the Democratic Party. She said that it was because doing so would cause “relational harm.”

AOC poses with Joe Biden in April 2024

This gets to the heart of the matter. These so-called progressives don’t want to risk upsetting those in power.

This is what she meant: that she and the Squad were not really going to fight for working people, because in order to do that, it would require them to openly defy and expose the establishment Democrats. And if the Squad did do that, it would spoil their personal relations with the establishment politicians and other powerbrokers of their party.

If you are unwilling to accept that establishment politicians are not your colleagues but your class enemies, and that they will oppose you if you stand up for working people, you will end up selling out, despite the very best of intentions.

All this shows why we need a new party for working people. An organization that stands with the elected representative, that is itself accountable to working people and not big business, and that is democratically organized with rank-and-file membership determining program and strategy together. It is decisive in providing a counterweight to the Democratic establishment. 

Lesson Number 8: Pressure to sell out comes in many forms — working-class representatives cannot bend to pressures from gatekeepers or community leaders linked to the establishment.

Every community has leaders within it who are loyal to the political establishment. This is also unfortunately prevalent in the labor movement — it’s what we would call business unionism. Business unionism refers to labor leaders being preoccupied with making peace with the bosses, while advocating for small gains for their members. This stands in contrast with class-struggle unionism, which recognizes the opposing nature of class interests, and the need for militant, organized, rank-and-file fightback against the bosses. When push comes to shove, business unionist leaders will leap into action to defend the establishment in the latter’s machinations against the interests of working people in their own communities or unions, the very people they claim to represent. We have seen this again and again.

This happened during the $15 struggle. One of the most prominent business unionist leaders came to one of the private labor coalition meetings for $15 and declared that they had talked to business leaders, and there was no way we were going to win $15, that we had to settle for an $11/hour minimum wage, and that if we didn’t, we might get nothing. Shockingly, they made this claim at a time when public support for $15 was at its highest. 

Working people rally in March 2014 as part of Seattle’s 15 NOW movement led by Kshama Sawant and other socialists

Most of the others in the coalition meeting lamented the situation, but in docile acceptance. It was left to Kshama to speak up and call this for what it was, a shameful attempt to crush the 15 NOW movement. Kshama unambiguously drew a line: if they attempted to go ahead with this capitulation, she would hold a press conference the next morning to expose their betrayal and call working people into action. The business unionist leaders were forced to back down.

During the fight for the Amazon Tax, many Black Lives Matter leaders, unfortunately, not only refused to join us, they spread a narrative that the Amazon Tax — to fund affordable housing — was “not a Black issue.” Why did they do this? We believe it is because they were wooed by the Democrats into taking funding for their NGO efforts on the apparent condition that they stand with the establishment against our Tax Amazon movement.

Kshama Sawant speaks to supporters as they occupy City Hall during the George Floyd protests in June 2020, demanding police accountability and the Amazon Tax

Kshama’s office, and the socialists we organized with, refused to accept this gatekeeping. We went to the rank and file of the BLM protests with our Tax Amazon petition to see what Black working people and ordinary community members thought. It turned out that at least 30,000 people agreed with us. Taxing big business to build affordable housing in a city where the Black community was being driven out by skyrocketing rents is very much a Black issue. 

Had Kshama’s office accepted the dictates of these establishment-linked community leaders, the Tax Amazon movement would have died an ignominious and premature death.

We saw another example of this when Democrats tried to betray the anti-war movement.

Over 500 anti-war activists and working people, including Arab and Muslim American community members, crowded into Seattle City Hall in November 2023 to demand the City Council pass a resolution introduced by Kshama’s office calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. Workers Strike Back members joined those who spoke in favor of our resolution, which included demands for an end to U.S. military funding for Israel and an end to the Israeli state’s occupation of Palestinian territories. These demands constitute the strongest ceasefire resolution introduced anywhere in the United States. 

Seattle City Hall became a sharp battleground between activists and our office demanding the resolution be passed in its full form, and the Democratic Party politicians either outright opposing the resolution or attempting to water it down. The same Democrats had refused to allow even a discussion on our resolution at a Council meeting two weeks prior. While they banded together in removing some of the demands from the resolution’s text, faced with intense pressure from hundreds of angry anti-war activists the majority of Democrats were ultimately forced to vote YES. By winning this resolution, we made Seattle the largest U.S. city at the time to pass a ceasefire resolution.

But a big reason why the Democrats felt emboldened in the first place to bring amendments to remove strong clauses from our resolution was the cover they received from some self-appointed Muslim, Palestinian, and Jewish community and NGO leaders, who tried to insist that we withdraw our resolution and let them “work” with Democrats to come up with an alternative defanged version. When Kshama and other Palestinian and Muslim activists refused to back down, these leaders had private meetings with the self-described progressive Democrats, and made an agreement to support their amendments to water down the resolution.

At best, the approach of trying to work behind the scenes with the Democrats is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how social change can be won. However, more often, it is based on self-interested motives by some community leaders, who see that alienating the Democratic establishment and powerful businesses puts at risk their own career advancement and comfortable relations with powerful entities. Such an approach inevitably leads to selling out working and oppressed people, regardless of any professed good intentions.

Lesson Number 9: Seattle may have its own features, but it is possible for the working class to win anywhere.

Some people have argued that what we have done in Seattle somehow isn’t relevant for the rest of the country, or for national elected office.

That it must be something about the water out here, or some other local peculiarity, that accounts for it. More seriously, it’s often said that Seattle is a progressive city, so it was easier for us to win things here. We’re told we shouldn’t hold progressive Democrats like AOC and the Squad to the standards of what our socialist city council office has done.

Certainly Seattle has its own characteristics, as does any city. 

And it does have a proud labor history, including the 1919 Seattle General Strike. This labor movement was also an important feature in the protests against the neoliberal policies of the World Trade Organization, or WTO, in 1999. 

And objective factors are always important — we would not have won the $15 minimum wage without the support, inconsistent though it was, of labor movement leaders in this city. 

But none of these things change the fundamental reality: organizing mass movements is what got the goods. Using an elected office as an organizing center for working-class movements is by far the most powerful way to fight for change whether in Seattle, Washington; in Washington DC; or anywhere else, nationally or globally.

It’s true that the majority of Seattle’s working people are very progressive. But that’s never been reflected on the City Council, with the exception of our socialist office. For the most part, the city’s working people have been well to the left of virtually any politics that’s been on offer to them.

It would have been a complete non-starter for our movements had Kshama decided to eschew open conflict with City Hall Democrats, and chosen to only take on demands that already had “the votes”. An overwhelming number of our movement’s victories, starting with the $15 minimum wage, began with only one reliable vote on the Council — Kshama’s. But we repeatedly won unanimous or supermajority votes, with Democrats coming under pressure from our fighting Council office and movements.

Revolutionary socialists have always had a different approach to elected office. We have always sought to act as tribunes for working people, not as compromisers with the capitalist class.

So while Seattle is undoubtedly a beautiful city with spectacular views of the water, it’s not the water, it’s the socialist politics we brought forward. It is the organized pressure of working people on the streets, in the workplaces, in city council chambers, fighting in every way possible to make it clear to the representatives of big business that there will be a real price to pay if and when they betray us.

Lesson Number 10: The capitalists and their political representatives will fight against working people’s movements everywhere, every time. We need a different kind of society.

We did not run our campaigns to be yet another cog in the machine but with slightly shinier moral credentials. We got here to make real change happen in a highly unequal society in which a tiny elite holds the power, so clearly we cannot be worried about them being against us, because they are going to be.

It’s no accident that we have faced fierce opposition in every single election.

It’s no accident that the Democrats and Republicans teamed up in 2021 to try to oust Kshama through a right-wing recall campaign.

And it’s no accident that the corporate media, the two major political parties, and far too many community and labor leaders, are ALL on the same page when it comes to opposing socialists and working-class politics. They are defenders of the status quo — which they all benefit from.

This status quo is not going to be tweaked and reformed, bit by bit.

Another difference socialists have in running for office is that while we are fighting for far-reaching reforms, we also recognize that those reforms will be far from enough.

We knew when we first campaigned for $15 both that it would be extremely difficult to win, that it wouldn’t be enough, and that it would be attacked in the future. Sure enough, in July this year, Hollingsworth and the other Democrats attempted to undermine and dismantle our $15 victory. Workers Strike Back organized working people and union members and forced Hollingsworth to temporarily withdraw their attack. But they are going to be on the attack again soon, and working people need to fight back.

We knew the Amazon Tax, though also incredibly difficult to win, would not fund nearly as much affordable housing as working people in this city need. That it would not by itself change the fact that, under capitalism, the vast majority of housing is owned by a few big corporate landlords.

We recognize that the renters’ rights laws we’ve won will continue to be attacked by the corporate landlords, with the help of the Democrats, the moment we leave office. The capitalists will always seek to claw back anything we win. They are coming for social security, they are coming for medicaid. Around the world they are coming for socialized medicine wherever it has been won.

The capitalist system is fundamentally bankrupt — it is an engine of inequality, of war, and of environmental disaster.

A system that is horrific for most of us, no matter how hard we fight, is a system that needs to go. Capitalism needs to be replaced, root and branch.

And so we ran for elected office not just to fight for reforms, but also as part of a program to fight for a socialist society. To set an example of what was possible, but also to show how grotesque this system is, and how rotten its representatives are.

We need to run genuine working-class, socialist representatives for office elsewhere, and we need a new party for working people to make that possible. And these genuine representatives should draw serious lessons from our experience in Seattle.

But one final lesson is that we need a fundamentally different kind of society—run by and for working people, not billionaires.

We need an end to the dictatorship of the bosses in the workplace. We need to take the major corporations into democratic public ownership, and run them ourselves.

We need workers’ democracy. We need an end to war and racial oppression. We need to fight for a socialist world.