Reprinted from chrishedges.substack.com
There are ways to defeat the billionaire class and many of these tactics have been pioneered by Socialist City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant and the Socialist Alternative (SA) party in Seattle.
Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant and the Socialist Alternative (SA) party have, for nearly a decade, waged one of the most effective battles against the city's moneyed elites. She and the SA have adopted a series of unorthodox methods to fight the ruling oligarchs and, in that confrontation, exposed the Democratic Party leadership as craven tools of the billionaire class. Her success is one that should be closely studied and replicated in city after city if we are to dismantle corporate tyranny.
Sawant, who lives on $40,000 of her $140,000 salary and places the rest into a political fund that she uses for social justice campaigns, helped lead the fight in 2014 that made Seattle the first major American city to mandate a $15 an hour minimum wage. Following a three-year struggle against Jeff Bezos, one of the world's richest men, she and her allies pushed through a tax on big business that increased city revenues by an estimated $231 million a year. She was part of the movement that led to Seattle's successful ban on school year evictions of school children, their families and school employees. She was one of the sponsors of a bill that protects tenants from being evicted at the end of their term leases, requiring landlords to provide tenants with the right to renew their leases and a bill that prohibits landlords from evicting tenants for nonpayment of rent if the rent was due during the COVID emergency and the renter could not pay due to financial hardship.
The billionaire class has targeted her since she assumed office in January 2014. It has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into a corporate PAC called "A Better Seattle" and saturated television and digital platforms with negative advertising. She and the SA have been denied ads by Google, YouTube, and Hulu. Amazon alone spent over $3 million to defeat her when she ran for re-election in 2019. In December, Sawant defeated a well-funded campaign by the city's business community to remove her in a recall vote. The Democratic Party in Seattle is currently trying to gerrymander her district to separate her from working-class supporters.
You can watch my full interview with Sawant, who has a PhD in economics from North Carolina State University, here. Below I have summarized some of her guiding principles.
Always Be on the Offensive
The billionaire class orchestrated a recall vote last year which they expected would put Sawant on the defensive and remove her from office. Rather than let the oligarchs define the themes of the recall, she and her party used it to collect 15,000 signatures to establish rent control. She rejects the attempt to placate the centers of power by resorting to "moral persuasion and prioritizing peaceful" opposition. This, she says, is a recipe for failure. She is not interested in "cordial relationships" with big business, establishment politicians, the Democratic Party and business lobbyists. They are the enemy. We will not succeed, she says, by "talking nicely" to "convince rich people to hand a little bit of crumbs to those of us who don't have any."
The capitalists, she says, along with the media outlets they control, promote the idea of cooperation so that the public is "lulled into this idea that we're all on the same side, this is a shared situation, that COVID was a shared sacrifice." This belief disempowers working men and women.
"The very essence of capitalism is that the very wealthy at the top make this enormous profit at the expense of ordinary people," she says. "The only way to address the class war is through class struggle."
The Democratic Party Cannot Be Reformed from the Inside
Sawant is one of nine city council members. The other eight are Democrats. The Democrats often rhetorically support progressive reforms, but as is true nationally, they have little intention of implementing them. Sawant's radicalism has exposed the Democratic Party's duplicity. The Democratic Party has repeatedly joined forces with the oligarchs, many of whom are their donors, to destroy Sawant. The self-identified progressives in the Democratic Party, she says, play "a role which is contrary to the interests of working people. Every step of the way they have placed obstacles in the path of winning these victories." She notes that every victory she and her allies achieved, including raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and the renter's rights laws, "has come about despite the overt or backroom opposition and tactics by the Democrats." These victories were won not by appealing to the Democratic Party leadership, but by mobilizing unions members and workers to fight for them.
"One of the first things that happened when I took office was these two prominent Democrats, Democratic council members who came into my office, sat me down, and said, 'well it's all well and good' - I mean, I'm paraphrasing, obviously, I don't remember the exact words - but paraphrasing, that 'it's all well and good, you roused the rabble and got elected as a socialist, but we're here to tell you that City Hall runs on our terms,'" she says. "'You are not winning any wage increase, let alone $15 an hour.' And less than six months later, we had won the $15 an hour minimum wage. So that about sums it up for the Democrats."
"The Biden administration has completely failed," she says. "And you don't have to take the word of a socialist. You can see the approval ratings for Biden are as low as they've ever been throughout his presidency. It's not just him. The Democratic establishment, including his regime, has completely failed in passing any kind of progressive program, whether it is $15 an hour or Medicare for All. He promised to cancel student debt and not even a fraction of that measure has been carried out. This is exactly the reason why now we are staring into potential clobbering of the Democrats by the Republicans and by the right-wing in the midterm elections."
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
