The following essay was adapted from a talk Kshama Sawant gave at an NYC Veterans For Peace meeting and has been edited for length and clarity.
Kshama Sawant, a revolutionary socialist, was elected to the Seattle city council in 2013. Since then, she won four elections during a decade in office, overcoming bitter opposition from big business and the Democratic Party. Her office won the first major city $15 an hour minimum wage in 2014, a wage that will soon be over $21 an hour. She used her office as a platform to build mass movements of working and young people. While in office, she accepted only an average worker’s wage, and after taxes donated the rest of her six-figure city council salary to a solidarity fund for worker organizing. Kshama has since founded Workers Strike Back, an independent movement organizing on the streets and in workplaces against the billionaires and their political servants.
Kshama Sawant will be running for US Congress in 2026.
We need people with indomitable courage, solid principles and fierce integrity in Congress. In a time when the specter of fascism stalks the land, revolutionary socialist leaders who will not compromise what they stand for are essential and rare, Kshama Sawant is such a leader.–The editors
I greatly appreciate the opportunity to be able to speak with you all. In the two years since the genocide began, over half a million Palestinian people have lost their lives in Gaza, according to scientific estimates from the British medical journal, The Lancet. The ceasefire announcement and any pause in the killing is a desperately needed relief for the Palestinian people. Every life that can be saved must be saved and every injury or loss of limb that can be prevented must be prevented. Credit for this goes not to Trump or the Republicans or Democrats or any politicians of imperialist America or Western imperialism. Credit goes to the Palestinian people themselves who have refused to back down even in the face of such unimaginable savagery. Credit goes to the international anti-war movement, the global working class that has risen up against this slaughter, including the Italian working class who carried out a general strike.Every time there was a ceasefire deal in the past years, Israel took Gaza back into what Muhammad Shehada, a Gazan writer, has described as the slow, latent, invisible violence of starvation and engaging people in a permanent state of non-life.
Despite the ceasefire announcement, the flow of US sponsored weapons to Israel is continuing uninterrupted. The United States is responsible for 70% of Israel’s weapons. Now is not the time to slow down or pause the anti-war movement. Now is the time to escalate. We also must ask ourselves some sobering questions if we want to build movements that can succeed. 60% of Americans oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This is earthshattering. This is the first generation in the United States that a majority is against Israel’s policies. And yet the supply of arms to Israel continues uninterrupted. 60% of Americans support universal healthcare. Most Americans want rent control. Poll after poll shows that the majority of Americans support taxing the rich. 67% support a billionaire tax. Why do America’s working people have none of these things?
Another sobering question and relevant to what Tarak was saying, is that Trump is less popular than ever. Trump ended his first term as the most unpopular president in modern US history, yet he’s back for Trump 2.0. Attacks on immigrants and the divide and conquer of the working class through using xenophobic rhetoric was actually the flagship issue that Trump used to win the election last year. Yet now the majority of Americans oppose his attack on immigrants, especially the use of masked ICE agents that are terrorizing communities across America. Despite all of this, the Democratic Party has the lowest approval rating in 35 years. The Republican party also is deeply unpopular. It has only 38% approval, but the Democratic Party manages to have an even lower approval rating of 30%. Chuck Schumer, the most powerful Democrat in the nation, has an approval rating almost 20 points below Trump’s. What is happening here?
The full story is that most Americans are angry at both Democratic and Republican parties. Which brings me to the next sobering question, Over 60% of Americans want a new party. On top of that, they don’t just want any party. They reject another billionaire backed party. This is from a CNN poll. In other words, the conclusion is that Americans want a new working-class party and yet we don’t have one. Why is that?
Despite Democratic and Republican parties both being deeply hated, over 90% of the politicians sit in Congress for many decades. They win re-election after re-election. How do these politicians keep getting elected over and over? The answer to all these questions lies in the fact that for decades there has been no working-class left alternative to the two parties of the billionaires. In the absence of any independent working-class party or even independent working-class candidates these two parties keep carrying out their genocidal and anti-worker bipartisan agenda. Democratic and Republican politicians in the US Congress have continuously bankrolled Israel to carry out the genocide. In the last two years, the first 15 months of the genocide were presided over by President Biden and the Democratic Party and then later under Trump.
As Tarak mentioned, I’m running for the US Congress as an independent socialist. My campaign is demanding a permanent ceasefire and a permanent end to the genocide. We also are demanding a permanent end to all US military aid to Israel and an end to the occupation of Palestinian lands. My opponent, Democratic Congress member Adam Smith, is one of the politicians who has voted to send tens of billions of dollars to Israel for the genocide. Smith also repeatedly voted to block United Nations food aid to Gaza despite reports of catastrophic mass starvation. He called anti-war protesters left-wing fascists and demanded their arrest.
Adam Smith has the blood of Palestinians on his hands. He needs to be on trial for war crimes. The bare minimum price he and politicians like him need to pay is to be thrown out of office. Adam Smith has been in office for 28 years. Throughout that time, he has consistently voted for billions of dollars for Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign. No wonder that Smith is a darling of AIPAC and the Zionist lobby. AIPAC was his biggest funder in the election last year. Smith voted for the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. He supported the wars in Kosovo, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and the current bloody imperialist proxy war in Ukraine. He has the blood of literally millions of people on his hands, as do many of his fellow Democrats and Republicans. No wonder that for nearly three decades, Smith has been bankrolled by weapons industry profiteers such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, and so on.
Adam Smith and Democrats like him claim that they are fighting against Donald Trump. But that is exactly what he and other Democrats have not done. Adam Smith and other Democrats have been among those most responsible for the rightward lurch by the Democratic Party, paving the way for Trump to come to power. The Clinton administration paved the way for the George W. Bush administration, the Barack Obama administration and the Hillary Clinton disastrous campaign in 2016 paved the way for Trump 1.0 and then Biden’s administration and the Democratic Party paved the way for Trump again. Nearly 20 million people who voted for Biden in 2020 refused to vote at all last year. They didn’t vote for Trump. They refused to vote at all and their top two reasons were the genocide and anger at the cost of living. Putting faith in the Democratic party is the wrong strategy if you want to defeat Trump, the right-wing, and the billionaire class.
If we are trying to understand how Trump found this opening to be reelected most of the labor leadership has unfortunately completely failed to fight against the rise of the right wing. They have failed to fight the billionaire class. For decades the militant labor that actually won the New Deal that won a lot of the victories decades ago, that militant labor has been hollowed out and most of the labor leadership for the last three, four decades has followed the ideas of what I would call business unionism, meaning trying to make peace between the bosses and workers. These are two classes with opposing interests under capitalism. An aspect of business unionism is also being tied at the hip to the boss’s parties. The boss’s party are both democrats and republicans that are parties of capitalism.
The labor leadership has absolutely refused to call for the strike actions that are needed and has acted as an obstacle to any type of fight back. This is criminal. It’s a criminal lack of accountability and responsibility on the part of the labor leadership. Look at the contrast. The Italian general strike starting with the dock workers who refused to load weapons on ships bound for Israel. That was followed by the general strike that created crucial momentum for the global anti-war movement. Contrast that to the United States.
The United States supplies 70% of Israel’s arms so labor action here would be decisive for anything that can be done on behalf of the Palestinian people. The labor leadership in the United States has been missing in action. They have also failed as far as the genocide is concerned but they have also completely failed to take action against Trump’s brutal trillion dollars of cuts to Medicare and the attacks on federal public sector workers.
We all know what’s happened with the Department of Veteran Affairs where they’ve cut thousands of workers and this is on top of the VA being severely understaffed for years. So what has the American Federation of Government Employees, the union for the federal workers, done? It has failed to call strike action. And I think we have to do that if we are serious about understanding how to actually change the situation, fight back effectively and defeat Trump and not just Trump but the rise of Trumpism, the dangerous right-wing reactionary ideas and the overall attacks on the working class, on oppressed communities, on immigrant communities by both the Democrats and Republicans and by the billionaire class. We have to answer these questions and understand that these are obstacles to building the kind of fight back that’s needed.
Working-class people are itching to fight back, but what’s missing is the leadership. One of the most crucial lessons from the 10 years of my socialist city council office in Seattle is that working people’s representatives, whether you’re elected in city council or congress, whether you’re a leader in the labor movement or a leader of a social movement, it doesn’t matter which arena, working people’s representatives must go on the offensive and use our positions to build movements of working people around concrete demands. That is why I am also using my election campaign to build a militant movement for free healthcare for all funded by taxing the rich, for national rent control, and for a $25 an hour federal minimum wage. And this wage should be at least $30 an hour in major cities like New York and so on. It was through a militant fighting strategy that we won the nation’s highest minimum wage in Seattle, which obviously started as $15 an hour, but it’s now going to go up to $21.30/hour in January of 2026. It was the first big city minimum wage victory, and it spread across the nation.
Tens of millions of workers nationally in America have got a historic wage increase because of the movement we led in Seattle.
In Seattle we won an unprecedented renter’s rights laws like the $10 cap on late rent fees, a ban on eviction during winter months, a six-month notice for all rent increases, and a law that requires that your landlord give you three months worth of rent money if they force you to have to move because of a rent increase of 10% or more. We also won what we call the Amazon tax, which is a tax on the wealthiest corporations, that raises hundreds of millions of dollars every year for affordable housing by taxing Amazon and other businesses. And so what we’ve shown is that when we fight, when working people fight, we can win. But what is a fighting strategy?
A fighting strategy means that leaders need to become a threat to the political establishment if they want to win anything for working-class people. And you can only be a threat if you use your elected office or your public position to mobilize hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of working people. You cannot win by trying to make peace with the bosses or their political representatives. That is a mythology that you can do that. You can’t do that. Most importantly, a fighting strategy means understanding who is on the side of the working class and who is not.
A fighting strategy in the United States means understanding that the Democratic Party is not a friend of the working class but actually our class enemy. If you try to get cozy with the Democrats, regardless of your intentions, you will end up selling out working people. This means that a leader has to put the interests of working people first, not your career or your day-to-day comfort.
Winning for the working class requires you to go into battle against all the political representatives of the bosses, whether it’s Democrats, Republican politicians, labor leaders or NGO leaders who are obstacles to winning victories. You have to understand that your day-to-day life as a leader is not going to be a cozy workplace where you go and make friends with your so-called colleagues in the Democratic party. That’s not how it works. You go there to battle. You go there to fight for the working class. It’s a battleground. That that cannot be helped. That is the way it is.
In any arena, mass movements are crucial. And in any arena an uncompromising kind of leadership for mass movements is crucial. Without either one of these two things we are not going to win victories. In Seattle, we won because we had a unique leadership through my office and through my fellow revolutionary socialists. But the reason we were able to win was because we were able to harness that leadership into mobilizing tens of thousands of people, an army of working-class people to fight back.
Some people ask, what can we do with one congressional office? There are 100 senators and 435 house members. One elected office cannot achieve anything. What I would say is that what we were able to achieve in Seattle is not simply a game of how many votes I had on day one. If that was the case, then we would not have won a single victory with just one elected position. I was surrounded by working-class enemies in city hall. It was exactly our ability to use our office to build powerful movements. That was what won unprecedented victories.
There are hundreds of Democratic Socialists of America elected officials. None of them has done what we did in Seattle, which is use our office to become a threat to the ruling class and to build the kind of movement army that was needed.
The Seattle Times is not a friend of our work. They very much represent the Chamber of Commerce, but they were forced to acknowledge that with just one elected position, we completely commandeered the city’s political agenda to win victories. As Mother Jones magazine said, we dragged the Democratic Party politicians by the nose to win victories. Working people forced them to vote yes on our bills. They forced them to concede. We forced big business to concede because of the strength of the movement.
I have pledged that if I am elected, I will turn my congressional inauguration into a mass rally of 10,000 people in Washington DC and immediately launch a nationwide fighting campaign to end all military aid to Israel and to win free healthcare for all, funded by taxing the rich.
These methods are not new. I have not invented them. These are the methods of revolutionary socialism. These are the methods used by the labor leaders of the teamsters general strike in Minneapolis in 1934, which was one of the three general strikes that forced democratic president FDR to pass the New Deal program. That was entirely the victory of a militant labor movement. And it was through that type of militant movement building, the threat of revolution and new parties of working-class people that public health care and social safety nets were won in Canada and Western Europe. These were also the methods that won the Russian revolution in 1917.
Finally, the crisis of the working class and the planet will not be ended without ending capitalism. Palestinian oppression will not be ended without ending capitalism.
Seven out of 10 people around the world want their countries to make the switch to clean energy as quickly as possible to tackle the climate crisis. And yet what is happening today, is that the capitalist governments around the world are ramping up coal, gas, and oil extraction, which is going to put climate goals completely beyond reach. All of this shows that we need to get rid of the capitalist system once and for all if there is going to be any future for humanity or for that matter the thousands of the other species which are being extinguished by the system.
