by KSHAMA SAWANT
Most of the time, working people have no political representation under capitalism. Both the Democrats and Republicans serve the interests of the billionaires, and both are warmongering parties down to their bones.
My decade as a socialist on the Seattle City Council was fundamentally different. My fellow socialists and I completely flipped the script on how to use elected office. We rejected any idea that my job was to help administer the capitalist state through behind-the-scenes negotiations with Democrats and the Chamber of Commerce.
Instead, my socialist city council office went to war for working people to defeat the strenuous opposition from both big business and the Democratic Party. And again and again, we won.
Winning Historic Victories as a Socialist Councilmember
When I first ran for the Seattle City Council in 2013, I campaigned on a $15 an hour minimum wage (dismissed as “utopian” at the time), on taxing the rich, and on rent control. Unlike the “Squad” and other “progressives,” I kept my promises.
Less than six months after my first election, we won the nation’s first major-city $15 an hour minimum wage, a wage that is now the highest in the country at $20.76 an hour because we also won inflation increases. It was after our victory here that the “Fight for 15” spread around the country.
As Mother Jones noted, “Who thought one lonely Trotskyist could so upend, in so little time, the American consensus on a fair wage? ‘Nobody reckoned with Kshama Sawant,’ the New York Times wrote in 2013.”
In 2020 we won the Amazon Tax, which raises hundreds of millions of dollars annually from the city’s wealthiest businesses to fund affordable housing. So yes, it is possible to defeat Amazon, even on their home turf.
We won a slew of renters’ rights victories, including limits on previously exorbitant move-in fees, a $10 cap on late rent fees, a requirement of six months’ notice for rent increases, economic evictions assistance forcing landlords to pay three months’ rent to tenants forced to leave due to rent increases of 10 percent or more, a ban on evictions in winter months, and a ban on school-year evictions of children and public school workers.
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