Fighting the Corporate Duopoly at the Ballot Box (w/ Kshama Sawant)

Chris Hedges

In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Chris Hedges speaks with Kshama Sawant, a revolutionary socialist based in Seattle, Washington, who is challenging long-time incumbent Democrat Adam Smith for Congress. Sawant served in the Seattle City Council for more than a decade during which she and her supporters won unprecedented victories for higher wages, affordable housing, taxing Amazon, LGBTQ rights and more. She then went on to organize a national working-class movement, Workers Strike Back.

Sawant is building on that work by running a courageous and unabashed anti-capitalist campaign for the working class. Her platform includes defunding and opposing wars and genocide, supporting universal public health care, education and affordable housing, challenging the power of police and ICE agents, and advocating for LGBTQ rights, issues to which Democrats, even those who claim to be progressive, pay lip service at best. She frames her campaign in the current political moment where the billionaire class is wreaking havoc on people and the planet with the help of Democratic and Republican parties and gatekeepers in the labor movement who engage in ‘business unionism,’ which she describes as “being aligned with the bosses, having made peace with the bosses, which also means… being aligned, intertwined with the bosses’ parties.”

Sawant, who has faced these attacks throughout her time in political office and prevailed, sheds light on how the Democrats, in collusion with Republicans, deploy Machiavellian schemes to thwart anti-establishment candidates; they will run multiple candidates to split the vote, exclude challengers, malign them in the media, and, if a figure becomes threatening enough, ignore them outright. She says, “If you are fighting for the working class, you will become enemy number one of the Democratic Party,” a title she proudly embraces. Despite the many obstacles, Sawant has built a powerful base of support locally and nationally.

During her time in city council, Sawant succeeded because she used her platform and office to organize an unwavering and strategic working-class base focused on specific demands and confronted anyone who attempted to undermine their efforts. She explains how one office in Congress that does the same could make significant breakthroughs in policy. For those who say that electoral politics in the United States are a dead end, Sawant responds, “Capitalism is class war. Working people didn’t choose the system, but this is the system, and our only choices are we sit down and accept the class war from the billionaire class against us, which is the status quo under capitalism, or we stand up and go to class war back against the billionaire class and their political representatives.”

Host

Chris Hedges

Executive Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Margaret Flowers

Transcript:

Margaret Flowers

Crew:

Diego Ramos

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Chris Hedges: Kshama Sawant, a socialist who served for over a decade on the Seattle City Council and launched a national coalition called Workers Strike Back to organize for a $25 an hour minimum wage, build grassroots labor unions, especially in corporations such as Amazon, and advocate for a shorter work week without a cut in benefits and pay, is running for Congress. She is attempting to unseat Adam Smith, a tool of big business, who is funded and subservient to the Israel lobby. Kshama, since she was first elected in 2013 to the City Council, has been a fierce advocate for the working class. She has fought tenaciously against the billionaires who have destroyed our democracy. She has denounced our endless wars and the genocide in Gaza, calling for an end to military aid for Israel.

The billionaire class has pumped millions of dollars into city council campaigns to defeat her. It orchestrated a recall vote in 2021, which she fought off and won. Her current campaign for Congress is part of her long commitment to wrest power from the hands of the global ruling class. Kshama advocates a massive green jobs program that can employ millions of workers in clean energy and prevent climate catastrophe, along with public ownership of the big energy corporations. “Only the bosses profit from divisions within the working class,” she notes. She opposes anti-trans legislation and the right-wing attacks on LGBTQ people. She calls for legal, safe, free abortions for all who need them, an end to racist policing, putting police under the control of community boards with full power over department policy, hiring and firing. She advocates for rent control with no rent increases above inflation, as well as a massive expansion of publicly owned, high quality, affordable housing by taxing the rich. “We’re dying from unaffordable health care,” she notes, “as the pharma bosses and for-profit health insurance industry profit from our sickness.” A centerpiece of her campaign is the call for free, state-of-the-art Medicare for all, owned and democratically run by working people.

She also understands that the Democratic Party has betrayed us and is captive to the war industry and the oligarchic and corporate elite. Even so-called Democratic Party progressives in Congress, she notes, have been domesticated by the party hierarchy and have nothing of substance to offer to voters.

Kshama, in her decade as a member of the Seattle City Council, has an impressive track record. She helped win a $15 minimum wage for workers, pushed the council to tax Amazon, and championed renter protection as the chair of the Renters and Sustainability Committee. She organized demonstrations for marriage equality, participated in protests to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was a strong supporter of the Occupy movement. She is an active member in the American Federation of Teachers Local 1789, fighting against budget cuts and tuition hikes.

Joining me to discuss her congressional campaign is Kshama Sawant. Let’s begin with the obvious question: why you are running against, I think they have now two Democratic candidates running against you, but just explain the impetus for your campaign.

Kshama Sawant: Yeah, the stakes could not be higher, Chris, for the working class. And a lot of what you said resonates with the moment. We are in a national and international emergency for the working class, for the planet. We are at the precipice of climate catastrophe, of climate apocalypse. We are seeing endless war, slaughter, and genocide in the Middle East with the Palestinians, Yemenis, Lebanese, Iranians, Iraqis, just endless communities of people being butchered. And at home in the United States, in the richest country in the history of humanity, we’re seeing half of Americans saying they can’t any longer even afford groceries, let alone have affordable housing, any kind of decent health care. We’re seeing young people being drowned in student debt. And we’re seeing a crisis of such epic proportions that at this moment, what we need more than anything else, are historic breakthroughs for the working class. And those breakthroughs, unfortunately, and I hope we’ll talk more about this in this conversation, those breakthroughs are not coming through the labor leadership. I mean, right now, members of Workers Strike Back are at Labor Notes, which is this most important labor conference that happens once in two years. Right now, it’s happening in Chicago. And Workers Strike Back members and volunteers for our campaign are reporting that in those discussions, the leadership of Labor Notes is not even allowing them to ask questions by voice. You’re supposed to send in only notes. This is the kind of censorship and the lack of real debate and discussion that’s happening in the labor movement. And the labor movement is in a stranglehold of what I call business unionism, meaning an overwhelming majority of the labor leadership being aligned with the bosses, having made peace with the bosses, which also means making peace with the bosses’ parties being aligned, intertwined with the bosses’ parties, which is both the Democratic and Republican parties.

Both of these parties are parties of the war-mongering, genocidal billionaire class. The Democratic Party, contrary to what we are told by corporate media, is not a lesser evil. It is one of the two most powerful parties of global capitalism. And so, what we need, as I said, is breakthroughs. And we’ve shown through our example of the city council, when I was the revolutionary socialist of the city council, that actually it is possible and we need to, it’s gravely necessary that we have leadership where we are able to use even one elected office in such a way that we can build mass movements, actively mobilize and organize a mass of working people and union members into action to winning actual victories. And at this moment, we don’t need any more status quo politicians. We don’t need business as usual in Congress. What we need is something that will disrupt the bipartisan, warmongering, anti-worker, pro-billionaire agenda in Congress. And that is why I am running as a revolutionary socialist for the US Congress.

And as you said, Chris, my campaign is fighting to end all military aid to the Israeli state, to end weapons and tech for genocide and imperialist war. We’re fighting to stop the AI data center and mass layoff juggernaut. We are also fighting to shut down ICE and the detention centers, to win free health care for all funded by taxing the rich, to win national rent control and a massive expansion of affordable housing, also funded by taxing the rich, and for a $25 an hour national minimum wage.

Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about the Democratic Party. I know from having followed your political career that it’s the Democratic Party that has been the engine to try and destroy you politically. That was also true for Ralph Nader when I worked for Ralph. So, let’s talk about the kinds of things the Democratic Party has done and is doing to thwart your campaign. And then, let’s talk about the bankruptcy of the Democratic Party itself, in particular, focusing on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

Kshama Sawant: Yes. So, my main opponent, as you mentioned earlier, Chris, is Adam Smith. He’s a twenty-nine year incumbent in Congress. And he’s a classic example, I would say, just an absolutely classic example of, an illustration of the one of the key features of our times, which is the chasm between the fury that working people feel against the Democratic and Republican parties, with both parties having approval ratings in the toilet, and yet a very high incumbency rate in Congress. How do you explain the two absolutely contradictory facts, right? I mean, if the vast majority of working people hate Congress, then how is it that these people are getting elected? And how is it that somebody like Adam Smith gets to be in Congress for 29 years, almost 30 years? I mean, he’s been in Congress as long as the Republican Susan Collins from Maine has been. And so, the only way to explain that is that there has been for decades and still, other than the exception of my campaign, there hasn’t been any real left militant working class challenge to the Democratic and Republican parties. And that is what’s so unique about our race that we have an actual revolutionary socialist running against a genocidal Democrat. A revolutionary socialist, not only with a powerful program of demands that are extremely popular among the American working class, all the way from Seattle to Florida, but also a socialist with a track record of having gone up against the billionaire class. And yes, the Democratic Party.

And as you said, Chris, Seattle is not a Republican stranglehold. It’s a very left-leaning city. And the party that controls the politics of this city, the party that represents the Chamber of Commerce and all the corporations that are headquartered here, like Starbucks and Amazon and T Mobile, that party is the Democratic Party. So, yes, the Democratic Party was always at war against us, and it reminded people that this is class war. Capitalism is class war. We didn’t choose it to be so. Working people didn’t choose the system, but this is the system, and our only choices are we you know sit down and accept the class war from the billionaire class against us, which is the status quo under capitalism, or we stand up and go to class war back against the billionaire class and their political representatives. And that is exactly what we did using my one elected office. And so even the Seattle Times, which hates my guts, they stand for the billionaire class, they were forced to admit that my first election victory in 2013 was a referendum on $15 an hour because, unlike all these other election campaigns of the Democratic and Republican parties, I was not running on personality or personal narratives. I was running on actual concrete demands. And it was not about, well, elect me and make my career. I am not a careerist. I’m the antithesis of a careerist. Instead, our campaign said, “We’re fighting for $15 an hour to tax the rich and for renters’ rights and for rent control. If you want to win those things for your own family, for your co-workers, for your friends, then you need to join us.”

This campaign that we ran in 2013 was a call to action for $15 an hour. And when I won the election against the most powerful Democrat that year in the city, it became a referendum on $15 an hour and provided the momentum for us to actually win 15. When I took office, I launched the 15 Now Movement. That is the same principle, that is the same fighting strategy that we are using now for our congressional campaign. And we are seeing not only Adam Smith, but also another Democrat in this race… And just to be very clear, Adam Smith, his record is drenched with the blood of over a million Iraqis who have been killed in the war on Iraq, and also the Palestinians who have been slaughtered in the genocide in Gaza, because this guy hasn’t met a war he did not like. He’s one of the remaining five Democrats in the House, in the US Congress, who voted for the war on Iraq, but he has also voted for tens of billions of dollars for the genocide in Gaza. He voted to ban United Nations food assistance to Gaza. He voted to create and fund ICE. But what most important for us to remember is that Adam Smith is obvious you know he is caricaturely villainous, but he is not an exception to the rule. He represents the agenda of the Democratic Party.

173 Democrats voted to fund the genocide in Gaza, including 56 members of the so-called Congressional Progressive Caucus. And a strategy the Democratic Party often uses, and which is exactly what they’re using in this race, is to run another Democrat. They’re not able to launder Adam Smith’s reputation. I mean, they’re trying to, but it’s impossible for them to do that because he is so clearly a warmongering candidate of Palantir and Anduril and the billionaires and also the Zionist lobby like AIPAC. AIPAC was his biggest funder in his last election in 2024. They’re not able to sell him as something else.

And so, although they’re trying their best to, but so what they’re doing is they’re running another Democrat in this race. And the establishment as a whole, the Democrats and Republicans together, have made sure that there’s only one, and their strongest Republican candidate running in this race, unlike in other years, this Republican actually said publicly, I’m paraphrasing him, but he said publicly that he was recruited to run in order to keep me from getting into the general election, not to defeat Adam Smith in any way. He’s run against Adam Smith many times, and the intention was never to defeat Adam Smith because Adam Smith is, as one commentator said, “He sounds more Republican than Republicans themselves.” And so, the idea here is to keep the revolutionary socialist out of the general election. And that is what the Democratic Party is trying to do.

Chris Hedges: That’s not a new tactic. They’ve run so-called progressive Democrats against you before. But just lay out for people who don’t know some of the nefarious moves that the Democratic Party has made throughout your career to try and drive you from office.

Kshama Sawant: First of all, it’s hard to describe what the Democratic Party has done without also explaining what the Labor leadership has done because they’ve been in lockstep. And it’s not just here. This is not some unusual case. This is true throughout the United States, where the labor leadership is in lockstep with the Democratic Party. And so, when we were campaigning for 15 in 2013, some of the labor leaders did join us, the left-leaning militant labor leaders, but they were the exception to the rule. For the most part, the labor leadership was overwhelmingly opposed to my campaign calling for 15. And they would literally come up to me and shout at me saying, “Don’t call for 15. We don’t want to be held to that.” But obviously, we didn’t accept that.

And that is the first lesson. The first lesson is if you want to win anything, you cannot bend to the gatekeepers because when you have opposition against a working-class agenda, that opposition doesn’t come in the form of Jeff Bezos. I mean, obviously Jeff Bezos is looming behind the scenes, but it’s not like Jeff Bezos comes and tells me personally, “I’m not agreeing to a $15 minimum wage or the Amazon tax.” The people who try to block the working-class movements are gatekeepers who come in the form of labor leaders or so-called progressive Democrats and that is what happened throughout. And the bedrock, the backbone of the success of my fellow revolutionary socialists and I in Seattle was that we refused to cave to the gatekeepers and we refused to do that despite an ongoing campaign of character assassination against me. They will say, “She’s not a team player, She’s divisive.” I mean, I’m not looking to be a team player on ‘team genocide’ and ‘team billionaires’. So, I wear that proudly as a badge of honor. But the point is that we never caved in to all these personalized attacks against us because we knew that ultimately our loyalty is to the working class, and the working class did strongly agree with our demands, which is the basis of all our election victories.

And I won all my elections, as you said, on the city council. We were never defeated precisely because we never sold out and we never stopped fighting. And the Democratic Party was always opposed to every single victory that we have won. And in fact, it’s not that they were a minor hindrance, they opposed everything viciously. Just to share a quick anecdote. When I first took office in January 2014, two of the most powerful Democrats came to my office, sat me down, and told me it’s all well and good, you have rabble roused your way onto the city council, but we are here to tell you City Hall runs on our terms and you are not going to win any minimum wage increase, let alone 15. And less than six months after that, we had won15. See, that is the kind of psychological warfare that the Democratic Party uses where you know they target the leader of the movement and they try to get them to back down by actually threatening or intimidating them.

Also, one of the tactics that the Democratic Party uses when you’re in elected office, and I experience this every single day, is it’s like being in a Mean Girls episode. They ostracize you socially. They try to make you feel like you’re isolated, that you are not welcome, all of that. And it is so crucial, because without this we cannot win, it is absolutely fundamentally crucial that the leadership of the working-class movement be completely clear. This is not about you. You are not there to make friends. You are not there to have a comfortable workday. No. The whole point is that if you are fighting for the working class in the halls of the power of capitalism, which is what a city council or US Congress is. They don’t exist to give working-class people better lives. These are institutions of the capitalist state. They exist to defend capitalist interests and so when you go there, you are not going there among colleagues. You are going there and the people who sit next to you are your class enemies. You are there to fight for the working class. And so, you have to be unbowed and unbroken in the face of all of this. And these are not exaggerations. This is exactly what it looks like. And it takes what I did, what we did, in order to win against the Democratic and Republican parties.

Chris Hedges: Those tactics have worked quite effectively in domesticating figures like AOC in Congress.

Kshama Sawant: Yes, you’re absolutely right. And in fact, in a rare moment of honesty, actually AOC, you’ll remember this, Chris, she was asked, “Why didn’t you fight for Force the Vote?” There was a demand on The Squad, at least then they were called “The Squad,” the most left-leaning members of the US Congress. They were asked, you have the numerical balance of power to withhold your vote from… this was in early 2021 against Nancy Pelosi being speaker because the Democratic Party had a majority in that year, and force the vote on Medicare for All, withhold your vote until you get a vote on Medicare for All. And AOC and all the so-called progressive Democrats, they absolutely refused to do it.

And then later, when Kevin McCarthy, the Republican, was due for speakership and the MAGA Republicans actually carried out force the vote for their very right wing and very anti-worker reactionary goals. But the point is that they used the force the vote tactic to great avail for their ends. The politicians like AOC were asked, “You said this couldn’t be done, but they did it. The MAGA Republicans did it. Why didn’t you do it?” And so, in response to that, in a rare moment of honesty, AOC admitted that had she done that, she would have incurred what she called “relational and reputational harm”. And she is right in the sense that the Democratic Party goes to absolute war against you if you dare to fight for the working class. And that is the whole point. If you are fighting for the working class, you will become enemy number one of the Democratic Party. So, it is up to you if you want to be a leader of the working class, then you have to embrace that enemy number one status as something that is necessary. And in fact, as I said, as a badge of honor.

If the Democratic Party started being happy with me, Chris, I would worry that I was doing something gravely wrong and I would have to examine my own record. For me, when they are against me, it’s an indication that that I’m actually standing up for the working class. And that is why the whole concept of careerism is the death knell of working-class movements. When supposedly leaders of the working class look at politics, and it’s not just politics in city hall or congress, but also labor leadership or so on, if you look at these positions as positions that are meant to advance your own career, that is when you start selling out. Because in order to advance your careers, whether in the labor movement or in Congress or City Hall, you have to curry favor with the Democratic and Republican parties. You have to be somebody who’s acceptable to the billionaire class, to the Chamber of Commerce, and that is when selling out actually happens. That is what it looks like. And that is why if you are going to actually win for the working class, it does need leadership that is not careerist. You can’t have a little bit of both. It doesn’t work that way.

Chris Hedges: It’s the Democratic Party, with their betrayal in particular the NAFTA and thirty million mass layoffs that devastated American families that gave us Trump. But the bankruptcy I thought was on full display with the leaked post-mortem by the DNC. It was kind of an amazing document, utterly tone-deaf, utterly disconnected from the democratic base, seventy-seven percent of whom want to stop arms shipments to Israel. And I think this bankruptcy is very, very dangerous as we move towards a kind of full out police state or fascist state.

Kshama Sawant: It really is. And that autopsy, the fact that they tried so hard to suppress it, the fact that it got leaked and the fact that it confirmed everything that both our analysis was, yours and mine, was revealing, but also statistical evidence. I mean, let’s not forget some of the crucial statistical evidence here, which is from the exit polls in 2024, that of the nearly 19 million people who had voted for Biden in 2020 but refused to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024, the vast majority of them said that the genocide in Gaza and the cost of living crisis were the top two reasons why they refused to vote at all. I mean, these are 19 million people who voted for Biden but then refused to vote at all. It’s not like they voted for Trump. These are just votes that Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party straight up lost.

And now you have a new parade of the same old, same old, Gavin Newsom, all of these candidates, Amy Klobuchar and whoever else, all of these corporate candidates, especially when you look at Amy Klobuchar’s record, she’s another one who has voted to fund the genocide. And Gavin Newsom recently has made anti-trans statements. So, whether it is ending the wars, winning universal, public health care, or defending the LGBTQ community against right wing and Trump attacks, none of these goals are going to be fulfilled by having any faith in the Democratic Party.

And just to give you a concrete example, Chris, from this race, you mentioned earlier that there’s another Democrat in this race. So, here’s what’s going on in my race. On the one hand you have Adam Smith, who is an out and out warmonger and representative of the billionaire class, who needs to not only be thrown out of office, he needs to be on trial for war crimes. But then you have another Democrat, Melissa Chowdhury, and there’s a lot of confusion about her in in the district. A lot of people want to believe that she is a progressive Democrat, and also she’s Muslim and so people want to believe that she’s against the genocide because of her identity. And she certainly, in my view, uses her Muslim identity to present herself as against the genocide. But here’s the reality. The reality is that the words “genocide”, “Israel”, “Palestine”, “occupation” appear nowhere, either on her campaign website or in any of the speeches I’ve heard, and I’ve heard her speak many times in including on her social media, She never talks about any of that. She is not campaigning to end all military aid to the Israeli state. She’s not campaigning to end the occupation. She’s not talking about ending the AI data centers. She’s not talking about the need for universal public health care. And as a matter of fact, I found even more revealing evidence here from a recent candidate interview that she and I were both at where, and I brought this up, on her website, she refuses to talk about LGBTQ rights. And she is standing by that. In fact, that is even more just gravely disturbing to me, and it should be to all of us, because not only is this now the 21st century, but this is happening in Washington State where right now in November there are going to be two extremely anti-trans bills, horrific bills that have been put forward by the right wing. And I am campaigning against those bills. I am openly campaigning against those bills, and I have a long track record of having fought for the LGBTQ community and won many victories, including being the first elected representative in Seattle to have stood with Trans Pride here in Seattle, the first Trans Pride happened the same year that I was first running for the city council on in 2013, and I was the only candidate that was willing to support Trans Pride. And I proudly spoke at Trans Pride. I also won consecutive years of declaring Seattle’s Trans Pride Day through our People’s Budget campaign from my office. I won millions of dollars for LGBTQ senior community, for LGBTQ mental health services and health centers and so on. And here you have a candidate who wants to be seen as progressive, who is refusing to support the LGBTQ community.

The words “abortion rights” don’t appear on our website either. And I saw in one of her questionnaires she talks about how abortion should be rare. I mean, those are the words of a conservative Democrat. I mean, this this is what the Democratic Party is running as an alternative to Adam Smith. And that is why we have to be very clear. And I want voters in the 9th Congressional District of Washington State to be very clear. There is only one progressive campaign running, and that is mine. And you have two Democrats, and one of them is running as somewhat of an Adam Smith lite. And I also want to share some other things about her, which are quite scandalous. One of those things is that Adam Smith, as you know, Chris, he’s not only just an out and out warmonger, he has been violently opposed to the anti-war movement. And when the protests were going on at Columbia University and New York University with very courageous students and faculty fighting against the genocide, he called the anti-war protesters “left-wing fascists” and demanded that they be arrested. And he’s carried out that demand. There was a peaceful anti-war protest at one of his public town halls that included Workers Strike Back members, and even the police told the media that there were no assaults or anything happening. They were just handing out flyers. In fact, there’s video of these activists being arrested while peacefully handing out flyers on a public college campus. And then later on, Adam Smith’s office slapped false charges on some of these activists. And this question came up at the candidate interview, and I was just really flabbergasted. I was nonplussed and I was really, really just alarmed to see this supposedly progressive candidate Melissa Chowdhury actually joining Adam Smith in condemning those activists in that interview. And we have to be very clear that if anybody is joining in attacks against the anti-war movement, that is not an anti-war candidate. This is somebody who is running to make a career in the Democratic Party.

And in fact, I have to say, everything about her reminds me of the role that Elizabeth Warren played. Elizabeth Warren, if you look at her, what she stands for on paper, it’s all progressive. But what role did she play in 2020 in the Democratic primary when you had all of the other candidates, the centrist candidates, drop out in order to make way for Biden? Only Elizabeth Warren remained. Why did she remain in the race? She was there to take progressive votes away from Bernie Sanders to clear the way for Joe Biden. That was the role she played and that was her role at that moment. And Melissa Chowdhury’s existence in our race, it reminds me of that, except that I think it’s giving Melissa Chowdhury too much credit to even compare her to Elizabeth Warren because even on paper, Chowdhury’s program, there’s no aspect of her program that can be called progressive.

Chris Hedges: So, one of the problems with third party candidates is that they don’t have any real base, although of course I have supported third party candidates going back to 2000. And I think you get the importance, especially of building a militant labor base, that without that base it’s almost window dressing or a kind of boutique activism. Can you address that issue?

Kshama Sawant: The situation we’re in, Chris, is that we have a stranglehold of the Democratic and Republican parties, which are the premier political representatives of the capitalist class. The stranglehold of those two parties, and especially of the Democratic Party, in every sphere of political organizing. So, we’re not in a situation where we could say, “Well, electoral politics sucks. I’m going to organize in the labor movement.” It doesn’t work that way because everywhere you go, the power of the capitalist class appears in the form of, as I said, gatekeepers. And so even in labor organizing, if you say I don’t want to be part of electoral fights, I want to be in labor organizing, what is happening in labor? Let’s look at what happened in the days in the lead up to January 23rd, when a hundred thousand people protested in Minneapolis against the murder of activists like Renee Good. And these are courageous people fighting against the ICE terror in our cities. And obviously, the bottom line is we are fighting for the immigrant families who are being targeted by Trump’s ICE. And first of all, let’s not forget that ICE itself was created and funded by both Democrats and Republicans. I mean, there’s a graph that hopefully we can show on this program where if you see the funding for ICE and the Customs and Border Patrol departments, it’s on an ascendancy across Democratic and Republican presidencies, across the years when the Democratic Party or the Republican Party had a majority in the US Congress. It is a bipartisan agenda. And that bipartisan agenda, the pro-capitalist bipartisan agenda shows up in the labor movement as well. And so, when it was at a moment when ordinary people were saying, “We need a general strike.” I mean, I’ve been in I’ve been an activist and an organizer for now nearly 17 years. Never before January of this year had I seen just ordinary workers who have no access to the unions or at all, because you know 90% of workers aren’t unionized right now, talking about a general strike. It was a pivotal moment.

The anger against ICE Terror was a really unifying force. And it was a perfect moment for the labor leadership to actually organize, if not a general strike, at least major strike actions in Minneapolis. You know what the labor leadership was doing? They were busy sending emails to their members saying, “Hey, here’s the language from your contract that has the no-strike clause. And you might get fired if you go on strike, so better be careful.” I mean I’m paraphrasing, obviously, but this was the message that they sent. And so, there is scandal upon scandal here.

The first scandal is that we are at a moment in labor history of America where the majority of labor contracts have no strike clauses. No labor leader has any business accepting a no-strike clause because going on strike and shutting down the profit machine of the capitalist class is the only real weapon that the working class has against this brutal machinery of capitalism and war and cost of living crisis. And so, giving away the only real weapon that we have is a criminal act by the labor leadership. And that’s the situation we are in right now. So not only that that’s scandalous, and then the scandal upon that scandal is for labor leaders to instead what they should have done for January twenty-third is ignore those no strike clauses that they themselves put, but they should have ignored that because that’s what the moment called for it, and organize strike actions regardless, because no strike is illegal. The only question is whether a strike succeeds or fails. That is the question. And that’s what the West Virginia teachers showed in 2018. Their strike was technically illegal because it’s a Republican stronghold, right to work, state, but they went on strike regardless and they won historic victories. And they had to defy their own labor leadership, the leadership of NEA and AFT, in order to continue that strike. And that’s the kind of fight back we need.

But the tragedy, Chris, is that that was the one exception and that was eight years ago. We need that type of rank-and-file militant action and we need breakthroughs for that type of militant action. And that is why I’m running for Congress not because I think that we are going to be able to reform Congress or reform capitalism. No, I’m a revolutionary socialist. I don’t think capitalism can be reformed. I think capitalism needs to be overthrown and replaced with actual democratic ownership by workers of all society, of all the commanding heights of the economy. That is the only way we will be able to actually stop data centers and save the planet to be a habitable place for human beings and other animals. But it’s a question of where we get the breakthroughs from. And those breakthroughs are not going to come anywhere unless we have leaders who are willing to actually challenge the domination of the Democratic and Republican parties. And that’s what we are doing through this campaign, just as we did throughout when I was on the Seattle City Council.

Chris Hedges: But I think when you were on the city council, you were only one figure on the city council, I can’t remember how many they had, but the power you wielded was that you had a strong grassroots movement. And I’ve heard you speak before and it’s why you founded Workers Strike Back that we need political representation, but without those movements, we’re essentially neutered.

Kshama Sawant: Absolutely, and it is impossible to decide which is more important. They go together. You need the mass movements, the masses to be mobilized. I would not have won any victories had I not had tens of thousands of Seattle’s workers on my side, but neither would have we won any victories had we not had the leadership that my office provided, where it was crystal clear who’s on our side, who’s not, what is the strategy, what are the tactics in order to actually do this. I mean, just to give you a couple of concrete examples of why the leadership is just as crucial, and it’s not about figures, it’s about the ideas. It’s a question of what ideas dominate the movement, that’s going to decide whether we are going to succeed or fail because at the end of the day, the capitalist class, these are the billionaires, the multimillionaires, and now Elon Musk, a trillionaire, they have all the wealth because they own practically every square inch of planet Earth. They have all the wealth. They have all the political clout. They have the institutions of the state, like the police and like all the other machinery that they use to repress us, and they will even use violence if they need to. So, the status quo of capitalism is that the balance of forces is completely stacked against the working class. The only way we can win is if we have a strategy of tipping the scales in favor of ourselves and against the bosses. And the only way of doing that is to have leadership that is crystal clear about the strategy of the movement. And so just to give you a concrete example, why leadership is so crucial for working class movements is that when we launched the 15 Now movement, and we launched it through my office after I took office in January 2014, and there was huge momentum. There was really wind in our sails at that time, and every new opinion poll, was showing we had increasing support for 15 from the working class of Seattle. Throughout that whole time, many of the labor leaders they were actually in direct contact with the business entities, with the Chamber of Commerce, who were just viciously opposed to any minimum wage increase, let alone 15. They didn’t want to give an inch. They absolutely didn’t want to give an inch. And they were pretty naked in their hatred and contempt of working-class people. And many of the labor leaders were in direct communications with these business leaders. And there was a moment when the support for $15 an hour was just unbelievably high. At that moment, one of the main labor leaders came to this labor caucus meetings we used to have that they were forced to include me in because obviously our campaign and my office had initiated and led this movement. And at that meeting, they this labor leader said, “Look, I’ve talked to these business guys. Look, guys, we’re not gonna win 15, we’re not gonna get 15. In fact, they’ve told me know you gotta accept 11. You gotta tell your people to accept 11, otherwise we’re winning nothing and I’m so sorry this is all we can do.” And all the other labor leaders, there were lots of tears shed as well like saying, “Wow, I guess we have to give in.” It was quite something to witness that moment of shame in the labor leadership. It took me, and I’m not sharing this story as self-praise, I’m sharing this as a concrete example of what kind of leadership our movements need. So, it took me to stand up and say, “It’s absolutely shameful, this is all a contrived thing. You’re all shedding tears, but what you’re really doing is allowing big business to have their way, allowing the billionaires to have their way at a moment when support for 15 is sky high. And if you go ahead with this betrayal, I will hold a press conference tomorrow and I will name names.” That is what it took to get them to back down because they were actually afraid of being exposed to the eyes of working-class people.

And during the Tax Amazon movement, we had launched the Tax Amazon movement coming out of my 2019 re-election victory where we defeated Amazon’s million-dollar money bomb and we won the election. And we turned my inauguration in 2020 into the launch of the tax Amazon movement. And we had lots of support. And then the George Floyd rebellion happened obviously, and we continued campaigning both for BLM and for the rebellion and for Amazon tax. We connected the two. And then you had a whole array of BLM, what I call misleaders. I mean, they were BLM leaders, but they were really BLM misleaders who started talking about how the Amazon tax is not a black issue, and they said, “Kshama is not black. She needs to sit down and let Black voices prevail”, which is classic gatekeeper language for doing the bidding of the Democratic Party and big business. And then you had DSA leaders following them and saying, “Yeah, Kshama really should back down. The Socialists should back down. We should let black people lead.” And we said, “This is not the voice of black people. This is the voice of NGO leaders who are looking to make a little bit of money for their NGOs in or in return for selling their soul to the Democratic Party. We’re going to go to ordinary black people and ask them what they think.” And not just black people, obviously, it was a multiracial working-class movement. So, we defied the gatekeepers, and that’s what it took. We went to the protests themselves and to the rank and file of the George Floyd Rebellion protest movement. We went there with our clipboards saying, “We need an Amazon tax to fund affordable housing.” And we asked the rank and file of the movement, “Do you think we should have an Amazon tax?” And people were like, “Fuck yeah. I want to defeat Amazon. I want an Amazon tax.” The affordable housing crisis disproportionately hits the black community. And the clipboards were practically flying out of our hands. That’s how eager people were to sign it. And we collected 30,000 signatures in three months at the rate of 10,000 signatures a month for our Tax Amazon ballot initiative because it became a credible threat that if the city council didn’t vote on our Amazon tax, we were going to go directly to the voters. And we had phenomenal support and a strong chance of winning. That’s the credible threat that it took to force the Chamber of Commerce and Jeff Bezos and the Democratic Party to concede to our Amazon tax demand. And at the same time, would we have been able to do it without tens of thousands of working-class people getting involved and actively fighting? Absolutely not. So, the two things go together: the leadership and the movements, and the leadership of the movements. Those are the criteria for working class victory.

Chris Hedges: Great. And we need leaders like you who don’t sell out. And I’ve been involved with your career since 2013 and I know you won’t. How can people find you? Can you give us a website?

Kshama Sawant: This is a district wide campaign, obviously, and also a national campaign because so much is at stake. And look, the bottom line is the way things change politically is not by some politician getting elected and passing a bill and then you know incremental. No, that’s all nonsense. The way things change in society, the way we can win substantial shifts in society, and right now, concretely, what are those? Those are things like winning an end to all military aid to Israel, ending the genocide, ending the forever wars, imperialist wars, winning free health care for all, funded by taxing the richest. These are concrete things that we need. We need to shut down ICE. We need to cancel student debt. We need to fight actively to protect the rights of the LGBTQ community. We have to fight against Islamophobia. None of these things happens through this bill or that bill or this Congress member or that Congress member. It happens through mass movements. It happens through a mass rebellion organized nationally.

And so, the strategy that we used, as you were explaining, Chris, of building movements, using our office, that is the reason we won. We didn’t win just because we had one office. We won because we had an office that was used in service of building mass movements. That’s what we need in Congress. So, if we can win even one office in Congress that is willing to defy the labor leadership and to break the stranglehold that business unionism has on working class movements and to use that office to actually build mass resistance and mass rebellions, that is what we need. That is urgently needed. And that is why I would say that every person who is watching this who agrees with this program of demands and who agrees that we need a fundamental shift away from the billionaire class in American society, then you have a stake in this campaign no matter where you live. It doesn’t matter where you live. And that is why our campaign, Chris, has the incredible distinction of being an independent party, openly revolutionary socialist campaign, and yet having raised over $600,000 just in the primary election, which is more than two and a half times that any progressive challenger of Adam Smith has raised in their entire primary plus general campaign. It is an incredible campaign on the ground. And we have eight and a half times more donations than Adam Smith does in our district, even though obviously he has a lot more money because he has AIPAC and AI and crypto money and health insurance CEOs donating to him. But we have the support of ordinary people, working people in our district, and we have donations from all 50 states and also Washington, DC and Puerto Rico. So, people who are watching this need to support this campaign. Go to KshamaSawant.org and click on donate. Also volunteer. We have people volunteering from across the nation. Some people are actually also taking time off and visiting here to canvas on the street. We have people from the Bay Area and so on. And so, we need all of this support immediately. Because let me tell you, the Democratic Party strategy is to keep me out of the general election. That is their goal because if I get into the general election, then it becomes a head-to-head matchup between me and a genocidal Democrat named Adam Smith. They want to avoid that head-to-head matchup at all costs because the chances of us winning, they just exponentially catapult if I get into the general election. So, their strategy is to keep me out of the general election. And that’s why likewise our strategy has to be to fight to get us into the general election, get this campaign into the general election.

The primary is on August 4th. So, we have under two months to do this. Time is of the essence. It is, I would say, at this moment, this is a do-or-die campaign. This is the only campaign that shows any sliver of daylight for a breakthrough for mass resistance by the working class. And that is why everybody, whether you belong in a union or not, I think it is our moral and political duty to make sure that our campaign gets into the general election so that we can actually have then a fighting chance of getting into Congress. And at this moment, it is crucial that not only people donate, but also people try to come to Seattle if you can, because canvassing is very important. And the reason it’s important is that the corporate media is trying to carry out a blackout against our campaign because even if they attack me, it actually helps our campaign. So, they’re trying not to talk about my campaign at all.

And unfortunately, a lot of the so-called progressive media are also not talking about our campaign. There are also the media that say, well, the electoral doesn’t work and that’s why they’re not supporting us. But that actually ends up helping people like AOC. If you are angry at AOC, you should actually be helping our campaign because we have a track record of never selling out. So, I hope people join us in this campaign and help us fight for and win every possible vote so that we can get into the general election.

Chris Hedges: Great. Thank you, Kshama. I want to thank Max, Diego, Nawelle and Thomas who produced the show. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.

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