Do Not Vote for those Who Support Genocide (w/ Kshama Sawant) | The Chris Hedges Report
This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.
A truly representative and honest voice for the working class—one that takes part in the struggle, resists cozying up to the centers of power, makes tangible, material commitments rather than settling for empty rhetoric—is hard to find in the United States. Kshama Sawant, the socialist and former Seattle City Council member who won the battle for a $15 minimum wage, introduced the Amazon tax and championed unprecedented renter’s rights joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss the 2024 election.
Sawant frames the election as an opportunity to build a worker-led movement, explaining her support for Jill Stein’s campaign and introducing Workers Strike Back, a nationwide organization she co-founded to advance the cause for working people.
“If genocide is not a red line, then there is no red line,” Sawant declares. She emphasizes that while a victory for Stein is not in the cards, Sawant argues that being honest is crucial, especially when the Stein campaign is capable of outlasting this election cycle and become a catalyst for an anti-war, pro-worker movement capable of taking on the big business-backing, warmongering parties.
Sawant says that even if Stein captures only 1% of the vote, it is still a powerful statement: over a million people reject the two party system. In her experience running for Seattle City Council, she explains how numbers like this can energize and mobilize working people—only if the candidates are honest and upfront about the gains they stand to make. After telling her constituents that she expected to win 1% in her primary but ending up with 9%, “nobody walked home after primary election night feeling demoralized. People walked home thinking, I'm gonna get up tomorrow and fight like hell in the general election,” Sawant tells Hedges.
Sawant insists that the struggle is about changing the lives of working people. Evoking her political history, she describes what it means to be a Marxist: “it means you lead a fight back. It means you show actual examples of class struggle, meaning going up against the forces of capitalism and winning despite all their might and having the strategy of bending the balance of forces towards the working class.”
“That is what it's all about,” Sawant asserts.
Sawant will continue these thoughts on an election night (November 5) stream on YouTube, analyzing the results and discussing what can happen next for working people.
Thanks for reading The Chris Hedges Report! This post is public so feel free to share it.
Host:
Chris Hedges
Producer:
Max Jones
Intro:
Diego Ramos
Crew:
Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges
Transcript:
Diego Ramos
Transcript
Chris Hedges
Former Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant, while campaigning in Dearborn, Michigan for the Green Party presidential campaign of Jill Stein and her national labor movement Workers Strike Back, said, “We need to be clear about what our goals are. We are not in a position to win the White House. But we do have a real opportunity to win something historic. We could deny Kamala Harris the state of Michigan. And the polls show that most likely Harris cannot win the election without Michigan.”
Her remarks earned her the ire of liberals who accuse her of being a stalking horse for Donald Trump.
But she argues that unless the Democratic Party is made to pay a price for its support for the genocide in Gaza it will never reform itself and this genocide and future genocides will not stop.
Kamala Harris needs the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to win the election. She is in as statistical tied with Trump in those three states. But it increasingly appears she is in serious trouble in Michigan, home to some 200,000 Arab Americans. Dearborn residents regularly attend funerals for loved ones or friends killed in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. The anger about the scale of death and destruction in Gaza has been stoked by Israel’s bombing campaign and incursion in Lebanon, increased attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank, including land seizures, and the refusal by Harris and the Democratic Party to use its leverage to halt Israel’s mass slaughter.
Joining me to discuss the election and her call to walk away from the Democrats and Harris – even if it means the election of Donald Trump – is Kshama Sawant.
Let's begin with what you said—I'm going to be completely upfront. I'm in total agreement with you—let's begin with what you said, and why you said it.
Kshama Sawant
As you said we said in our meeting, rally in Michigan, in Dearborn, that was a rally jointly organized by Workers Strike Back alongside with Abandon Harris and the Jill Stein campaign, and our starting point was—and you alluded to this, Chris—is no votes for genocide, that if genocide is not a red line, then there is no red line. And that is why we need to turn out every possible vote for Jill Stein, who is the strongest left anti-war, pro-worker candidate, and especially where they matter the most, which is in swing states like Michigan, which could actually decide the outcome of the election. And in fact, we are joined by the activists at Abandon Harris, who have also said that this needs to, the Democrats' role in the genocide has to mean that they have to pay a price for what they have done and what they continue to do. And for us, we don't believe that the Democratic Party, by itself, is going to reform itself simply because of a message that is sent by the Muslim voters and by the anti-war movement if that indeed happens. And I think we should be clear, it's not a straightforward thing. In fact, we have to work really hard to turn out the vote for Jill Stein in states like Michigan and Workers Strike Back activists are, right now, on the ground to do that. But the purpose of doing this, first of all, is, as we said, it's a moral and political question. If genocide is not a red line, then there is no red line. And beyond that, it is to illustrate that at the end of the day, neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump, neither the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party has any interest whatsoever in stopping the genocide, let alone stopping wars in a general sense. They have no interest in fulfilling the needs of hundreds of millions of American working people. And for us, for the anti-war movement, for the American working class, for us, the only way forward is independent of the Democratic and Republican parties. And we see this, this meaning the fight to defeat Harris in Michigan, and potentially for it to defeat Harris in the election as a whole, for us to win every possible vote for Jill Stein, all of this is a stepping stone to build a powerful anti-war movement that is independent of the big business, warmongering parties of US capitalism, and also pointing towards the dire, urgent need for a new anti-war party for the working class.
Chris Hedges
We should be clear, and this was, of course, the fallacy of Bernie Sanders campaign, you're not going to build a movement like this in an election cycle.
Kshama Sawant
Yes, exactly. And in fact, that has been one of the abiding flaws of the approach that has been used by many left candidates over and over again. Obviously Bernie Sanders is top most among them. And in fact, it's important to examine how far Bernie Sanders has gone, not to mention AOC and the squad. I don't necessarily put them in the same category as Bernie Sanders, but Bernie Sanders is a very useful education of what not to do, where, even despite good intentions, and I don't doubt his good intentions. Despite that, if your political analysis tells you that the best we can do, the best that working people and anti-war activists can do, is to get behind Biden, and then after that, get behind Harris, then that is a dead end. And at that point, good intentions don't matter if you are leading the working class and movements, both working class movements and the anti-war movement down this dead end of supporting the very party that represents the interest of the the same billionaire class that is completely antagonistic to the interests of working people, and the same billionaire class that has an interest in this genocide, and they're not innocent bystanders, they are driving this process. They are also not just tolerating Netanyahu's extreme practices, but really not wanting it. No, I mean, that is all political theater. The purpose of that is to create a grand illusion that somehow the Biden-Harris administration is reluctantly supporting the Israeli state. That is absolutely not the case. In fact, the whole history of American capitalism and capitalism as a whole shows it, proves it to be a consistently bloody and blood thirsty system in which the blood that flows is, of course, not of the billionaire class, it is of working people and poor people. And if we tie ourselves to the political representatives of this system, then we are going to go down the same dead end that Bernie Sanders has gone and I think we also need to mention the role of the labor leaders. After the Dearborn rally, we also did a rally in Seattle alongside the Jill Stein campaign and Abandon Harris, this was on Tuesday, October 15, and at that rally, when I spoke, I said that, actually, the labor leaders who are cheerleading Kamala Harris, after having cheerled Joe Biden, they will have a lot to answer for in history. That history is going to take note of the fact that while 350,000 Palestinian people, babies, children, elderly women were being massacred indiscriminately at that moment and with the Democrats, and with Kamala Harris herself with blood on her hands. At that moment for labor leaders, you know, progressive labor leaders like Shawn Fain to be cheerleading Harris, this will be taken note of and future generations are going to ask, at that moment when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were being slaughtered, what was your position at that time? And you cheerled the very purveyors of that genocide. And in my speech, I urged Shawn Fain and other labor leaders to take back that position and rescind their endorsement of Kamala Harris, not that I expect them to do that, but the point is that we have to call them out for their shameful role.
Chris Hedges
Let's talk about the criticisms of your position, first and foremost being that Trump is worse. He recognized the Golan Heights, he moved the embassy to Jerusalem. Rhetorically, he is worse than the Democrats. How do you address that criticism?
Kshama Sawant
Well, if you look at the project of the State of Israel, from the very inception, from 76 years ago, that was a project of British and American capitalism. You can say imperialism, but Imperialism is a part and parcel of the capitalist system, and by its very inception, the Israeli state was going to be deeply oppressive towards the indigenous people living there. And when you understand that that's the history behind it, then it helps you to understand that all the political representatives, all the spokespeople, not only the politicians, but also the political pundits, the commentators, all of whom, who are in alliance with the interests of US capitalism, are going to be completely and utterly devoted to the project of the Israeli state, which includes the currently ongoing genocide, not to mention the decades-long brutal occupation, and as some have correctly called it, sort of the slow and ongoing type of genocide of the Palestinian people. So by that measure, both the Democrats and Republicans are completely dedicated to this project, and it won't matter really if Kamala Harris wins the White House or Donald Trump wins the White House, as far as the genocide is concerned, there is no way out unless the anti-war movement builds independently of both of them. Now, if you want to look at overall the differences between Democrats and Republicans and Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, I agree with you, Chris, there are differences in rhetoric, there might be differences also in the positions overall that are taken. I mean, there's no doubt that the Republican Party, and especially the Trumpist version of the Republican Party, does have deeply reactionary ideas, and some of those ideas were attempted to carry it out in his first term, for example, the Muslim travel ban. These are odious ideas, his statements about the immigrant population and so on, immigrant working and poor people. But if you look at the actual outcomes for various entities, whether you're looking looking at immigrant people, poor people, working people, outcomes on war and aggression, if you look at all of this in reality, the US states or the US capitalism's history is one long continuum of similar policies throughout Republican and Democratic administrations. Ronald Reagan broke the strike of the air traffic controllers back then, who broke the strike of the railroad workers? It was Democrat Joe Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris, who is now the Democratic candidate. So in fact, really, before the genocide red line was crossed by the Democrats, they had crossed, the Biden-Harris administration, had crossed another red line, which was of breaking a strike. So working people, I mean, our message, my message to working people as a socialist, as a founder of Workers Strike Back, has been that absolutely you cannot vote for anybody who is a purveyor of genocide, but even before that, working people cannot vote for a strike breaker. So if you look at issue after issue, it has been one long series of attacks on working people, both in the United States and internationally. If you look at the coups that have been carried out by US capitalism in country after country, whether it is Latin America or Asia or Africa. If you talk about the wars that have been instigated from US capitalism worldwide. If you look at the attacks on working people as a whole, it's both Democrats and Republicans, in equal measure, responsible for all of this. And then setting aside all of that, if you want to look at how Trumpism and right-wing populism has grown in the first place in recent years, you know, in the last 20, 30 years, even there, you can see that first of all, for example, the Tea Party movement, the right-wing Tea Party movement, that really gained ascendancy in the wake of Barack Obama, another celebrated Democratic president, having broken his promises on many fronts, including on Medicare for All and the public option, and, most importantly, the fact that he, this was during the Great Recession, he bailed out the very big banks and Wall Street that were entities that were responsible for the Great Recession. He bailed them out. He bailed out the billionaires and the multi-millionaires and working and poor people were faced with a devastating economic crisis with millions of home foreclosures, people losing their jobs, becoming homeless, the public sector workers taking on mandatory furloughs and in some cases, voluntary furloughs because they wanted to sacrifice and what did they get in return for it? Ever lower living standards and more and more attacks on state and city public budgets. And then, of course, the other broken promise from Obama was that he famously promised no troop surge in Afghanistan and the one of the first things he did was a troop surge in Afghanistan. He became the deporter-in-chief, devastating policies towards working class and poor immigrants. And then you had Joe Biden breaking his promises on $15 an hour, on Medicare for all, on canceling student debt. And, as I said, he was also the strike-breaker-in-chief. And now Donald Trump left the office as the most unpopular president in modern US history, and now he has a real chance of winning back the White House. Why? Because of the betrayals by the Democrats. So in other words, not only are the Democrats and Republicans fairly aligned on most policy fronts, whether it is domestic or international, they, together, represent the interests of the capitalist class. In fact, beyond that, it's also true that the Democrats are the best builders of Trumpism itself. So it is backwards and circular logic for us to be told that we have to vote for Kamala Harris in order to prevent Trump from getting into office while Trump has a chance to get into office again, precisely because of the betrayals by the Harris and Biden administration.
Chris Hedges
You've been attacked as being kind of stooge for Jill Stein and the Green Party. In fact, I've heard you be very critical of the Green Party. I want you to talk about that, and then I want to talk about you to talk about your break with Socialist Alternative. You represented Socialist Alternative on the city council in Seattle. You had a long relationship with that party. But let's talk about those two issues because you're backing Stein and the Green Party, not because you are a full endorser of either Stein or the Greens.
Kshama Sawant
I think we have shown a really good example on an ongoing basis with our support, Workers Strike Back support, for the Jill Stein campaign. We have shown on an ongoing basis, what it looks like to have an example of principled unity on the left in the interest of the working class, while also having a friendly debate and discussion on disagreements. In fact, even at our rallies, it's clear that we have some disagreements, in fact, on the very point that you started this interview with, which is our—our meaning Workers Strike Back's and my very clear position—that that the critical objective for working people in using the Jill Stein campaign this year to build the anti-war movement and working people's movement is to fight to defeat Kamala Harris in a key swing state like Michigan, whereas you'll hear the Green Party and the Jill Stein campaign not really embracing that position and mostly talking about how working people, American people, need more options. And I don't exactly agree with that, because it's not that working people are looking for options like different type brands of toothpaste, what working people are hungering for is a party that represents them versus the warmongering billionaire classes interests. And so for us, that is the driving force, and the other difference that has emerged, and again, we have had a friendly debate about it, is, how do we build this campaign in the interests of the working class, in the interest of the anti-war movement and the Muslim community, which is, especially the Palestinian and Arab communities, which are directly hurting, having their own family members lost, which is a devastating loss for them, which is that we in Workers Strike Back, we believe that the best way to build this movement and using this campaign is to be truthful and sober about facts with working people. When we organize, we take the question of organizing working people very seriously in Workers Strike Back. And we believe that it doesn't help us to build the morale of working people, of the antiwar movement, of the Muslim community that wants to fight to end the genocide and is angry at the Democrats and Republicans to tell them that maybe Jill Stein can win. We don't agree that that is useful, because if you look at what's likely going to happen after election night, and maybe the results won't be settled on election night. But the point is that on Inauguration Day in January, it is going to be either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump in the White House. I think we have to be crystal clear about that and explain the need to fight for every possible vote for Jill Stein from the context of how it can play a key role in building an anti-war movement that is independent of the Democrats and Republicans, that emboldens working people, builds up the moral of the Muslim community by sending a powerful message to Harris and the Democratic Party. And I strongly believe, and my fellow activists in Workers Strike Back strongly believe, that working people are fully capable of understanding this and being energized to fight back. They understand that Jill Stein is not going to win. So the Jill Stein campaign saying that 10 times that they're going to win is not going to convince people that they're going to win. Instead, unfortunately, it could be counterproductive, potentially, because when the results show that Jill Stein campaign is nowhere near winning, I mean, we've seen, the trajectories, it's going to be, as we said, if our campaign gets 1%, that should be celebrated. But how that same 1% or 1.2% or whatever it is gets perceived by working people, very much depends on how the strategy has been laid out. If we were to go around saying Jill Stein could win or just an could get 20% whatever, and then she gets 1% or 1.2% then, instead of seeing that million or million and a half votes as a tremendous confirmation that a whole section of working people are rejecting the Democrats and Republicans and are ready to fight, instead of seeing it as a message of being a building block, instead it could be, I'm not saying it will, but it could be seen as demoralizing. That, oh well, we were told we could win. We were told we could win 5, 10, 20% and instead, it's such a small result. Nothing works. Third parties don't work. I'm just going to check out of politics. So those risks are quite significant, and that is why we believe that it is important to be truthful and honest to the working class and make the case in a way that will actually energize working people. And we've had a lot of people tell us that they appreciate that we're being honest about it. And furthermore, we should also examine the further point that if, instead of getting 1.5% Jill Stein were to get 5%, that would be massive. I mean, I don't expect that it will be but I would be happy to be proven wrong. I want the Jill Stein campaign, I want the anti-war vote to be as strong as possible. But my point is that if you warn people with a sober understanding of what's likely to happen, and then your results are better than that, then nobody's going to blame you for misleading them. I mean, it's just going to add to more of the energizing effect. And we're not speaking about this hypothetically. We used this approach in our election campaigns in Seattle. You know, in 2012 I ran against the most powerful Democrat in the State House, Frank Chopp. He was the Speaker of the House at that time, we did not expect to come anywhere close to winning in the primary. We were running against another Democrat, actually. And we told people in our activism, during the primary campaign, that we are probably going to win about 1% but it was still worth fighting for, because this was the first example in 100 years of a socialist working class campaign, and we got tremendous support from working people. I mean, it was such a fiery, energetic campaign. We won 9% in the primary. It was a huge shot in the arm for people to think that, wow, we went from expecting 1% to 9%. Nobody walked home after primary election night feeling demoralized. People walked home thinking, I'm gonna get up tomorrow and fight like hell in the general election. Even there, we said we're not going to win, but let's fight like hell to win every vote. And then we got almost 30% of the vote, which was the highest vote at that time that any of Frank Chopp's opponents had ever gotten, and we used that as the building block to then win the city council election, which we won the very next year. But even there, we did not run the campaign saying we're going to win. Instead, we said, look how uphill it is. Look how the Democrats fight viciously against us. We need every single one of you out here, so we use that as a rallying cry to help people understand that this is not about admiring me and voting for me and leaving it at that. It's about you getting involved, because we will need that movement on the streets and in our workplaces
Chris Hedges
Before I talk about Socialist Alternative, as you know, I worked with Ralph Nader in his campaign, and Ralph made precisely that argument. It wasn't to win, but Ralph, who understands corporate power probably better than anyone else in this country, had watched the incremental corporate coup that had pushed out traditional liberal Democrats like [J. William] Fulbright and others that he once worked with, and realized that, essentially, the Zionist lobby, the corporatists owned the Congress, and that if he could pull—these are his words— 5, 10, 15 million people away from the Democratic Party, that was the way to put pressure on the Democratic Party. I want to talk about Socialist Alternative, but I just also want to mention that the Democrats are running scared in Michigan, and are have prepared a series of apparently negative ads about Jill Stein that they are about to dump on the public.
Kshama Sawant
I believe that. In fact, already we are seeing their signs of nervousness with their almost historic, because I don't think it's happened before, where the Harris campaign, Democratic Party candidates campaign themselves, released an attack ad against Jill Stein, and it backfired on them. Most people have greeted that attack ad as a confirmation that, oh, maybe you're getting really scary internal polls about how you're doing against Trump. And so it has widely been perceived by working people as a sign of weakness as it should, because that's what it is. I mean, if they're attacking her in that way that, it betrays their anxiety about their own election outcomes. And we've seen that kind of attack backfire repeatedly. I mean, Jill Stein went on the Breakfast Club podcast, which is these Black commentators, including this odious woman, Angela Rye who uses her Black and female identity as a battering ram, against the left, against working people in service of the Democratic Party. It's a perfect example of how insidious these individuals are and the role that they play. But it backfired. I mean, that that YouTube has, I don't know, I mean, last time I checked thousands upon thousands of comments by many Black people, but not just Black people, working people in general, saying, I didn't even know about Jill Stein's campaign, but now I'm going to vote for her. Because the whole setup where they were viciously attacking Jill Stein completely backfired. But I think overall, as you said, the fact that the Harris campaign is responding is confirmation that this type of combative strategy from working people on the left, as we have put forward, which is defeat Harris in Michigan, fight to defeat Harris in Michigan, fight to extract every possible vote for Jill Stein in Michigan, that type of offensive strategy is the way to go and and the best confirmation, as we've always seen throughout our work in Seattle, where we won the $15 minimum wage, the Amazon tax and unprecedented renters rights, despite the opposition of every Democrat in the city, and not to mention big business, we've seen that the best confirmation, the best compliments, come from the ruling class themselves, because of the way they respond. When they feel threatened, they start responding, they start attacking. Otherwise, if they're not attacking you, then you should know that you're irrelevant and you're doing something wrong. And so this is confirmation that this type of offensive strategy actually works, and it's also what working people want to get involved in. When we put forward this point that let's actually get organized to fight against the Democratic Party, that is what people want to hear, working people want to hear. And I should also mention that the way Workers Strike Back has been campaigning, and our overall strategy is by no means, as I was alluding to earlier, limited to just this election. As you said, it's not about surfacing every four years for an election. It is about using election campaigns themselves, win or lose, as a platform to build future struggle. And I do disagree with the Jill Stein campaign, they have put forward this idea that somehow Workers Strike Back and I are using this strategy because we don't want to talk about winning or we're less excited about winning. I mean, that's nonsense, obviously. I mean, our record in Seattle is there for anyone to see. We won four elections despite the millions of dollars and the absolutely grotesque opposition by the Democratic Party. All their attacks, personalized and political, all kinds of attacks, despite all of that, we won four elections. We won historic victories like the $15 wage, and we left office last year undefeated and launched Workers Strike Back, this nationwide organization. So unfortunately for the working class, the example that we have provided in Seattle over our decade is, at this moment, the only example, the only contemporary example of the kind of fight back strategy, the fighting strategy, to use elections as a vehicle to build social movements. And we are doing no different here. I mean, we are talking about fighting for every possible vote for Jill Stein. But again, our strategy is to build the anti-war movement, build the working class movement. And we need what we are campaigning for, which is an organizing conference in February, on the February 22-23rd weekend, we are going to have, on one day, a national organizing conference, and on another day, the Workers Strike Back National Convention, and we are inviting working people and organizations from across the country to join us at that. We want you there, Chris Hedges, absolutely. Because we can't stop with this election. I mean at the end of the day, it is going to be a warmonger-in-chief in the White House, and so we will need to continue organizing. And in order to organize that, we are going to need a fighting strategy, this similar kind of offensive strategy in the anti-war movement. And we're going to need working people in the labor movement, union members, rank and file union members in the labor movement, to begin building a militant layer inside the labor movement, because that is going to be crucial. I mean, the role of the labor movement and, flowing from that, the role of the rank and file against the labor leadership that is tied to the Democrats is going to be part of the backbone of fighting against this war and fighting for the needs of working people.
Chris Hedges
Well, it's just an understanding of how power politics work. That's what made Saul Alinsky effective as community organizer in Chicago. Frederick Douglass, power concedes nothing without a demand. These naive appeals to the goodness of centers of power don't work. That's just a fact. And that segues into my question about your break with Socialist Alternative. I read a memo by them that was, frankly, I had a hard time believing it came from Socialist Alternative, but because it repeated this "least worst" dogma, which doesn't work. If there's no pressure, things get worse as they have worse and worse and worse. So speak about that break with the party you were associated with for many, many years.
Kshama Sawant
So the break that happened for several of us from the organization Socialist Alternative, which I was a member of for 15 years, emerged from long standing differences over some very fundamental questions. So the most overarching fundamental question over where the breach happened, and in fact, really saying it happened is inaccurate, because I think the breach sort of a pre-existed like before I joined the organization, but it became more and more potent and came more and more to the fore because we won our elected office in Seattle in 2013. And this sort of also exemplifies what happens on the left, which is that if forces on the left, if working people, activists, organizations, if we don't fight to become relevant, meaning, if we don't fight to pose ourselves as an actual challenge, as an actual threat, to the political parties of capitalism and to capitalism itself, to the billionaire class, then what we do or say does not actually matter, and it's when we, working people, step on the stage of world politics and an actual class struggle is when what we say matters, and that's when people's real opinions or real positions start coming out. So the differences started emerging much more clearly after we won our elected office in 2013 and as I've said before we had that office for a decade, and throughout that time, most leading members of Socialist Alternative had the opinion that our council office was too critical of the Democrats and just to be clear to your viewers, Socialist Alternative is a nationwide organization. We, meaning those of us who are leading the work in Seattle using our council office, we almost exclusively, we were the ones who led the work. The rest of the leadership of Socialist Alternative really did not play any role at all, not for the lack of us asking them to. They were just not interested ever and there were very few discussions inside Socialist Alternative of the only groundbreaking and historic work that was going on. Over the years, it was really astounding to me that we're making history here. We're changing the lives of working people. We are showing in real life what it is to be a Marxist. What does it mean to be a Marxist? What does it mean to be a Trotskyist? What does it mean to base oneself on the ideas of the Bolsheviks, of Lenin and Trotsky and the Russian Revolution? What does it mean? It means you lead a fight back. It means you show actual examples of class struggle, meaning going up against the forces of capitalism and winning despite all their might, and, sort of having the strategy of bending the balance of forces towards the working class. That is what it's all about. And these are smaller class struggles, but in order to actually change society, in order to actually end capitalism and bring about socialism, which is the stated goal of every Marxist, we will need to engage in far bigger revolutionary struggle. Some of them will be bloody struggles, because there will be tremendous violence inflicted on the working class fighters at that time. But the starting point is having courage to go up against the forces of capitalism, which means, in actuality, it's not some abstract entity. What does it emerge as in Seattle, for example? It's the Democratic Party. And I only mentioned the Democratic Party in Seattle because the Republican Party isn't a real force. Let somebody say that well, you know, you're only talking about the Democrats. Well, that's why. The Democratic Party in Seattle is the powerful political entity that oversees the interests of big business. And that is why to win anything significant for the working class, you need to defeat the Democrats. And that's what we did each and every time. We, in the words of the conservative Seattle Times itself, commandeered the political agenda of the city to win victories at lightning speed. I mean, this is part of a quote from one of the editors at the time, but that required us to have the same kind of combative, offensive strategy that I was talking about earlier. And I believe that the leading members of SA although they never fully fleshed it out there. One problem with their approach was they never fully were open about their disagreements, but that was clearly indicated in every which way that our council office was too critical of the Democrats, too critical of the labor leaders, too antagonistic to them, and then also, in the presidential elections, it was clear that they were increasingly moving toward a lesser evil position in the presidential elections. I mean, this was starting to emerge back then, when you had, in 2016, when you had Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump sort of face off at that time. It was visible at that very moment. And then with every subsequent election, it was more and more clear, more and more sort of entrenched, the lesser evilism type of position. And you can see this playing out right now in the election. That article that you referenced, Chris, in that, they talk about how they are also endorsing Jill Stein, which, by the way, just to let your viewers know they were very reluctant to do that. They were forced to that because of our clear position, because of Workers Strike Back's clear position on it. But they tie themselves in knots and make all these circular arguments where they say, Well, we are also endorsing Jill Stein, but we cannot talk about defeating Harris. I mean, that makes no sense. In other words, that is a lesser evilism in another name. So you are cosmetically saying, Yes, we are voting for Jill Stein almost like having an insurance policy, like, oh, you can't accuse us of having supported Kamala Harris outright because, hey, look here, we've endorsed Jill Stein. But you're also condemning anybody who is fighting to actually end the genocide by sending a message of saying that genocide is a red line, which is what defeating Kamala Harris is all about. And so that, in my view, is lesser evilism by another name. And you can also see their position in how they refused to criticize Shawn Fain and other labor leaders. There was also a fundamental difference over Workers Strike Back itself. You know, I was a member of Socialist Alternative when Workers Strike Back was co-founded by me and other socialists. But for a whole year, there was an ongoing and, really, what turned into a bitter debate about what Workers Strike Back's role, even is, and how should we actually build it, which is the promise we had made, which is the promise I personally had made to the working class. And I took that seriously. I take that seriously, but it turned out that most of the SA leaders didn't really want to build Workers Strike Back, but they like saying that, okay, we have launched Workers Strike Back and really just continuing to chug along doing their internal stuff. And so that also reflects the fundamental disagreement that started this response, which is that they fundamentally don't agree with us that the principal role of Marx should be to actively help lead class struggle, meaning not just talk about it, but actually be there to win things, to show the example, to educate working people and to then build future fight back. They called what we were doing, our whole approach, they called it, they had a word for it. They called it "substitutionism," meaning we can't substitute ourselves for the working class as a whole. That's completely erroneous and also just completely simplistic, and also this position is also something that gives them a way out. You know, it's disguise for abdication of responsibility, meaning doing much less with your elected position. That means completely betraying working people. Because when you win an elected position, you have a huge historic responsibility on your shoulders as a Marxist, to use that position as a platform to build class struggle. So if you say, you know, it's such a false modesty, like, you know, I'm not going to substitute for working people, they should do it. And I'm just going to sit here cozy, take my nice paycheck, and be cozy with the Democrats. That is a complete betrayal of working class interest in the name of, oh, we are respecting working people, so we disagreed with that as well. And all of this really came to a head with their absolute unwillingness to actually build Workers Strike Back. In fact, after more than a year of having launched Workers Strike Back, the only real chapter of Workers Strike Back was in Seattle, literally only one. And then they began to take votes inside the organization to further deprioritize Workers Strike Back to take an increasingly abstentionist position on class struggle. In fact, their watch word throughout the last months of the debate before we left was stability and resources. It was always like, well, we don't have resources to do anything. We have to hunker down and keep our resources. We have to bring about stability inside the organization. As I said, they didn't want to endorse Jill Stein. They have not lifted one finger to campaign for the anti-war vote for Jill Stein. In fact, they have attacked Workers Strike Back for campaigning. You know, these things happen, unfortunately, and we did everything possible to push them to the direction that we thought was correct. It doesn't really benefit for us to be in separate organizations if those agreements can be achieved. But those agreements weren't possible to achieve, and we could not go along with undermining Workers Strike Back, which is a straight up breaking of the promise that we made. I mean, let's be clear, working people have donated over a third of a million dollars to Workers Strike Back on the basis that we were going to build it to become a fighting organization, and we, those of us who left, refused to participate in a betrayal of working people. So after a period of debate, we realized we had to leave, and we're building Workers Strike Back, but we're also building a revolutionary organization called Revolutionary Workers. And of course, we welcome anybody who wants to join Revolutionary Workers if they have reached similar conclusions as we have in terms of a Marxist understanding of the need to end capitalism. But we welcome everybody, all working people, all activists, to join Workers Strike Back. Because you don't have to be a socialist or Marxist to build Workers Strike Back to be a part of Workers Strike Back. Workers Strike Back stands for a $25 an hour minimum wage, Medicare for all, and affordable housing and basically free healthcare, and for a fight against oppression, and also for a new party for working people. So if you agree with that program, you should join Workers Strike Back. And in fact, we've seen more people join Workers Strike Back once we left Socialist Alternative and were able to build Workers Strike Back in earnest.
Chris Hedges
You should just tick off for people who don't know some of the achievements you made in Seattle while you were on the city council, because it's a pretty impressive list.
Kshama Sawant
Yes, we won the first major city $15 an hour minimum wage, which we won within six months of my having taken office in 2014. We won that by launching... right after I was inaugurated as a new city council member, which, by the way, was the first socialist city council member in 100 years, we launched the 15Now grassroots movement. Which had working people, rank and file union members, some of the left and working class-oriented labor leaders. We won that victory. And after we won that victory, we had 15Now spread nationwide and many other cities, including Los Angeles and Minneapolis and many other cities, Chicago, these cities won the $15 minimum wage also. And we saw the $15 minimum wage become a real issue that Bernie was able to campaign on in 2016 and it actually forced Hillary Clinton to lie. You know, she said in one of the debates, I'll never forget, she said, I really supported Seattle's $15 minimum wage. No, she did not, but it forced her to say that, which meant that there was real pressure. But the origination of that pressure came from Seattle having won, and it's also about how we won that victory. It was won on the basis of, again, going into political combat against the Democratic Party, which had all the other seats, and it always had, all the other eight city council members were always Democrats. I was always the only socialist. And yet, with one elected office for working people, we were able to win this historic victory despite having the hotel industry, the restaurant industry, Amazon, Starbucks, all these corporations and all their CEOs and their billionaires and major shareholders absolutely against us, spreading all kinds of lies about what would happen if $15 an hour passed. So it was just absolutely, and it still is, a shiny example of how, when working people fight, we can win historic victories. And then we use that same kind of fighting approach to also win, in 2020, the Amazon tax, which raises over $214 million annually to fund affordable housing by taxing the sliver of wealthiest corporations in our city, not struggling small businesses. So corporations like Amazon and Starbucks. For them to pay, this is a historic thing. I mean, because Seattle and Washington state have the most regressive tax system in the entire nation. Nobody thought it was going to be possible. And in fact, the 2020 Amazon tax victory came in the wake of Amazon and Jeff Bezos having spent historic amounts of money to try and defeat me in the 2019 re-election campaign. So the year before and and we campaigned in 2019, we said we need to fight against Amazon, and we need to win the Amazon tax. We need to win rent control. And when we launched our re-election campaign in January 2019, I said, and this was a prescient statement that we made, that this election is going to revolve around one question, who gets to run Seattle, Amazon or working people? And that's how it exactly turned out. The whole year was Amazon and Jeff Bezos attacking us relentlessly, and us winning despite that in 2019. And then using that victory to launch Tax Amazon. In fact, my inauguration ceremony in January 2020, we combined that with the launch of Tax Amazon itself. So that shows you the example of how we use elected office. The elected office, if we want to win something for working people, simply cannot be about an individual's ego or career, even if that person is well meaning. If you make it about yourself, you will end up betraying working people. And so we also showed this example of how the inauguration itself is not of me, per se, but of the work that we are going to launch for the next term, for the next four years, and by virtue of the same principle, throughout my tenure on the city council, I took home as a socialist principle, Marxist principle, I took home only the average worker's wage and donated the rest of my salary, after taxes, into a solidarity fund from which we donated money for social struggles, class struggle, including to donate to union strike funds when unions went on strike. And we carried this principle out throughout our 10 years on the city council. And it's really important to note also, because the Seattle City Council has the second highest salary in the country to the Los Angeles City Council. So in other words, it's not about taking a vow of poverty or are pledging any kind of allegiance to lifestyle politics, because none of that works. You know, we need class struggle politics. But the point is that it shows that our leaders, are committed to the working class movements, which means that we are not going to enrich ourselves at the expense of the working class, and we think that this should be the principle for the new party that we want to build, and this should also be a principle that we should fight for inside the labor movement. Aside from $15 and the Amazon tax, we also won a whole host of renter's victories. In fact, we made a sort of a bullet point list of the renter's Bill of Rights, and we won many of them, including a six month notice for any rent increase, a real limit to $10 for any late fees. Also, economic evictions assistance, meaning if your rent went up by 10% or more and that forced you to move out, then your landlord owes you three months worth of rent. I mean, these victories are unheard of. We also fought for rent control, we could not win it, which is not surprising, because the corporate landlord lobby went to war against us, and it's an illustration of how we need an even stronger movement than we had in order to win these bigger victories. But in addition to all of these victories, we also played a historic role in preventing just gratuitous attacks on working people. I mean, the victories we won are too numerous to mention, but I'll just mention one, because it was a standout victory, which was a few months after we won $15 an hour in 2014, there was a federal mandate—and keep in mind, this was under Obama—a federal mandate, it was a recipe to destroy federally funded, publicly-owned affordable housing, which had been a lifeline for working class and poor people for decades. I mean, these were programs that the militant labor struggles won in the wake of the Second World War. And so this type of housing has existed in many cities, including Seattle. It is fast disappearing. It's almost gone from most cities because of policies like this. So in 2014, the federal government, the Housing and Urban Development, the HUD Corporation, the publicly owned corporation. They came up with this policy called Stepping Forward, which is a really Orwellian name, and what it was, was 400% increase in rents over five years. I kid you not, I mean, every time I mention that figure, people think I'm somehow misremembering or mis-reading it. But no, that's what it was, which, in other words, as we said at the time, it was a ticket to homelessness for many of these families, and they were all poor or working class, and they were majority East African, East Asian immigrants, very, very vulnerable communities. And when that happened, we got into action, and we built a campaign against it, and we were able to defeat it, and we also forced the, ultimately, executive director of the local housing authority in Seattle to also move from his position, because it became a shameful thing that they did. And to my knowledge, Seattle is the only city where this dastardly program was defeated. So this is really the kind of track record we left behind us, and that's also the approach that we are using to build Workers Strike Back.
Chris Hedges
I'll just close by asking why the left, in your opinion, in the United States, is so anemic.
Kshama Sawant
I think there's a long history to this. Obviously a big, big aspect, big dimension of that history is the historic attacks on the labor movement, starting with, especially the new Liberal era, but especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall, after the fall of the Soviet Union. Obviously, you remember this, Chris, very well. This was the period that Francis Fukuyama, for example, famously called, this was the end of history, by which he meant capitalism has won forever. This is the only system, there is no other system. Socialism, or any idea of socialism was defeated permanently. And it was in that context that massive attacks on the labor movement began, historic attacks. But really, the attacks had begun even before that. Starting from the late 1970s throughout the '80s, and then, of course, after the fall of the wall, in the '90s, these attacks were happening systematically. Also I want to say that we've seen throughout the history of the labor movement, throughout the 20th century, there's been a tussle between what I would call class struggle unionism and business unionism. These are opposite ideas. Business unionism is the idea that labor leadership, the business unionist leaders, have this idea that their role is primarily to mediate and bring about some sort of peace between the boss's interests and the workers' interest, as if there is some sort of meeting ground for those two things. And this idea is completely flawed. Like I said, even if you're well meaning, if you're a practitioner of this idea, you are going to end up betraying working people for the simple reason that it is in complete denial of the actual nature of capitalism. Under capitalism, the interests of the bosses and the interests of the workers are, by definition, diametrically opposed. So yes, it is a zero sum game. In other words, when the bosses, when the billionaires, when Jeff Bezos and whoever else, billionaires get wealthy, they get wealthy at the expense of billions of working people by stealing more from them, from their wages, from whatever they're able to take home as a fraction of the fruits of their labor. And when working people win victories, when we win the $15 minimum wage, for example, when we won the Amazon tax, that came out of, I mean, that was a pocket change for the billionaire class, let's be clear, but the point is that it didn't come out of the ether. It came out of billionaires having to pay for it. And so in that sense, capitalism is absolutely a zero sum game, and being in denial of that does not help working people, actually, it leads them to defeats and failures and a class struggle unionism is the type of idea that understands some of the basics of capitalism. Even if you're not anti-capitalist, at least you understand that you have to go to war against the bosses, because otherwise the bosses are going to war against workers. And so that it's posed as a political battle. And throughout the 20th century, there has been a battle between these two ideas. And to the extent that business unionist ideas, the idea of making peace with the ruling class and their political representatives, to the extent that that idea gained ascendancy, you've seen the labor leadership, for the most part, being tied at the hip to the Democratic Party, and that same leadership often trying to make peace with the bosses, telling workers don't go on strike, or even if you go on strike, let's not threaten the bosses too much. Let's have a mild version of a strike, that sort of thing. And so the reason I'm mentioning sort of the long arc of history is that all of that has to come to bear for us to understand why the left is anemic. And the reason I'm focusing on the labor movement is that the labor movement is the decisive force on the left in either making or breaking the left. And so that whole process, so whenever victories have been won, like the eight hour day, like all the other victories, like whatever victories that workers have won, on health care, on occupational safety, any of that, that came about with rank and file leaders refusing to take on the business unionist idea and wanting a real militant fight back, building a militant struggle and winning victories by shutting down the profit machine. Going on strike and shutting down the profit machine is the backbone of any kind of struggle against the capitalist class. And by going on strike, by going on marches, by building the community solidarity, all of that, the victories that were won were won on that basis. But there's always been a fight between these two ideas, and what we've seen, especially since the last few decades, is that the ideas of business unionism have gained much more ascendancy, and the ideas of class struggle unionism or militant labor movement building, those have been on the back slide. And obviously one of the crucial moments of all of this was when the air traffic controllers union suffered a historic defeat at the hands of Republican Ronald Reagan, but I think the lessons of that are crucial for today. PATCO, the union of the air traffic controllers, were, correctly, angry at Jimmy Carter and the Democrats for having sold them out. But rather than concluding from that, that the labor movement needs to chart its own independent class struggle-based strategy where we need our own party, we need independent class struggle, we need strike action, all of that. Instead of that, they put their eggs in the Republican basket. Reagan made them completely false promises that he's going to look out for them, and the moment he was elected, he went to war against them. They went on strike. And it was very clear, I wasn't there obviously, but it was very clear that Ronald Reagan and the US capitalist class were hell bent on making the air traffic controllers, you know, breaking their strike and completely disbanding them as an example for the rest of the labor movement. And so unfortunately, we are reaping the dismal results of that whole period until today. And even now, even the most progressive labor leaders, like Shawn Fain, like the leaders of UFCW, are cheerleading the Democratic Party. UAW, of course, won significant victories, that's extremely important, and we cannot negate that. But we see many of these other so-called progressive unions mostly trying to make peace with the bosses, and then, of course, not to mention people like Sean O'Brien who are sucking up to the Republicans. I mean, completely shameful. So both these strategies of either time yourself to the Democrats or making overtures to the Republicans, both of these are complete dead ends. And so if the left wants to come out of its anemia, if we want to leave a track record for history, for the historical record, if we want to leave a trail blazing example of an actual fight back then the very starting point of that is to break from the two parties of capitalism, which is why I also don't agree with people who say, Well, I don't care about elections, because electoralism is not what gets the goods. It's a movement on the streets. Of course, that's absolutely accurate. Elections have limited efficacy by themselves. However, saying that you don't care about elections completely leaves the field clear for the Democratic and Republican parties, and it is a specific obstacle not having our own political representation, our own anti-war working class party is a specific obstacle, because at the end of the day, people are left with Democrats or Republicans and working people and the union movement is left with this strategy of business unionism, which is very much tied to the two party system. So you know, we can't disentangle one from the other. So if you want to fight for class struggle, unionism, one of the essential starting points is breaking from the Democrats and Republicans.
Chris Hedges
Great. Thank you. That was Kshama Sawant, Workers Strike Back. I want to thank Diego [Ramos], Thomas [Hedges] Sofia [Menemenlis] and Max [Jones], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment