Kshama Sawant asks Greens, left-leaning Oregonians to build mass organization

Presenter: The Pacific Green Party held its summer convention July 26 and KEPW’s Todd Boyle was there. Here’s his question for independent Washington state congressional candidate Kshama Sawant:

Todd Boyle: Loved your campaigns. I videoed I think 10 of them, of your campaign and your victory parties, and especially 15 Now. It’s on my YouTube channel. But I was going to ask: Why do you think that it’s necessary to have a new party, to create a new workers’ party? Because among the alternatives, there are other existing parties that already have ballot access and so forth. So what is your thinking? I’m really interested in that.

[00:00:33] Kshama Sawant (Congressional candidate, Washington state): Yeah, thank you, Todd, for that question. This is something that we also discussed at the Fight The Rich organizing conference alongside Jill (Stein) and Chris Hedges, that it is important, the infrastructure that the Green Party has built, especially with the ballot access.

[00:00:47] And in fact, as I said last year and I’ve also said this year, that it was a terrible mistake and partly out of sectarianism—partly out of complete misunderstanding of what it is to build the left—that the left didn’t coalesce behind Jill’s campaign.

[00:01:01] In our view, the best possible strategy to build the movement last year was for the left to unite around the strongest possible challenger against the Democrats and Republicans, and that was in reality Jill’s campaign.

[00:01:13] So, it was really a pity that there were other left campaigns running also, which didn’t make any headway, but then ended up undermining the unified support for Jill’s campaign.

[00:01:23] That’s why in Workers Strike Back we took a vote and we carried out the substance of the vote, which is putting all our energies into building the Jill Stein campaign as much as possible.

[00:01:32] In fact, we literally sent many of our members, including myself actually, both to the DNC in Chicago for a week and then to Dearborn for many weeks on end because we wanted to build the left vote against Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in Dearborn, which was the heart of the anti-war sentiment.

[00:01:51] So in that sense we think of ourselves, Workers Strike Back, and the Green Party as entities that should come together to build a new mass party. What we’re talking about is not to replace any individual organization, but making the point that in order for the idea of a working-class party to take root in the consciousness of the working class, we need a mass organization and I don’t think any of our organizations is that organization.

[00:02:18] So it’s not about replacing the Green Party, it’s also about creating something much wider, much broader, and much bigger than any of our individual organizations.

[00:02:28] But having said that, I think the people to lead this way is amongst ourselves, because I don’t expect the labor leadership to take the lead on this. We have to get organized ourselves and bring the rank and file of the labor movement to build such a mass party.

[00:02:43] Presenter: In her remarks, she pointed out another reason for a new party. Democrats continue to fund genocide in Gaza. Kshama Sawant:

[00:02:51] Kshama Sawant (Congressional candidate, Washington state): The Israeli state, with the full and unconditional backing of Western imperialism, has transformed Gaza into hell on earth. Now, we’re seeing just unprecedented levels of malnutrition and famine that’s affecting the whole population there.

[00:03:05] And it’s in this context that last week even AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) voted ‘No’ on the amendment to cut $500 million of U.S. funding to the Israeli military. And it’s in the same context in which she and other progressive Democrats have repeatedly said that Israel has a right to defend itself.

[00:03:20] Let’s be clear, this is not defense. This is a holocaust.

[00:03:24] Except for a small number of representatives like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar who voted for that amendment, the same goes for the rest of AOC’s fellow (in my view) rotten self-described progressives in the Democratic Party who have also voted for Israeli military funding, including Pramila Jayapal and Ro Khanna.

[00:03:43] And to be clear, the $500 million would have prevented Iron Dome, Arrow, and David’s Sling funding. This is all part of the genocidal hardware of the Israeli state, which have allowed Israel to carry out slaughter in Gaza with impunity. And they’ve also enabled Israel to brutally attack Lebanon, Iran, Syria, and Yemen.

[00:04:02] These ongoing horrors would be impossible without the hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. military funding and the unconditional political backing from the U.S. ruling class and its two parties, the Democrats and the Republicans. No politician who has voted to fund and is voting to fund this genocide deserves one more working-class vote.

[00:04:23] But ending the genocide and the brutal occupation will require building a powerful anti-war movement to defeat the forces of U.S. imperialism in order to win an end to all U.S. military funding for Israel. Without that, this is not going to stop.

[00:04:39] That is the necessary first step, which means that we’ll need mass strike action, mass protests, and mass civil disobedience. It also means elected leaders in the U.S. Congress who will not only consistently vote against funding the genocide, but also use their office to mobilize an army of hundreds of thousands of working people to fight the Democratic and Republican parties, the Zionist lobby, and the billionaires profiting from war and genocide.

[00:05:06] So, what we are seeing is the Democrats like AOC are doing none of this. Voting the right way is the lowest possible bar, and the progressive Democrats have repeatedly failed to even do that. Why?

[00:05:18] In a few moments of honesty, AOC has revealed why she abandoned the promises she ran on in 2021, when she first failed to vote no on Iron Dome. She said that she backed down because she was subjected to ‘hateful targeting.’

[00:05:32] And then two years ago when she was asked again why progressive Democrats don’t fight the Democratic establishment, she talked frankly about how had she done that, it would have caused her ‘reputational and relational harm’ with the power brokers in her party.

[00:05:46] And it’s true. The Democrats and Republicans will make your daily life hellish if you decide to defy the agenda of the ruling class. But here’s the deal. There is absolutely no way not to sell out working-class people unless you do stand up to the attacks against you. Because you have to understand that the attacks against you are not about you. They are weapons against the working class.

[00:06:10] And it’s not only the Democratic establishment who will use these weapons against you. It will also be, unfortunately, much of the labor leadership who follow the ideas of business unionism, which means that they prefer not to have an all-out fight with the bosses. They prefer to be tied to the Democratic Party which is also one of the parties of the bosses.

[00:06:29] These pressures exist everywhere whether you get elected to a city council or to a state legislature or to the U.S. Congress or if you get elected as a labor leader or if you emerge as a leader of a social movement.

[00:06:42] Wherever there is potential for a mass of the working class to get organized and defeat the billionaires, there will be relentless attempts by the political establishment and their many gatekeepers to force the movement leaders to back down.

[00:06:55] So yes, it is our responsibility, those of us who are elected, to stand up to them and the way you do it is precisely by mobilizing and organizing the mass of working people that is so feared, correctly so, by the ruling class.

Now the progressive Democrats have decided to make their own lives easier by making peace with the democratic establishment. And it’s not only that. They’ve decided to prioritize their own careers over the needs of the working class, the needs of society. And so by extension, they have also made peace with the capitalist class, who are the ones who are really calling the shots.

[00:07:28] The Democrats and Republicans are their political spokespeople.

[00:07:32] And so in this context, in my view what we need urgently is a new mass party for the working class that Workers Strike Back, the Green Party, all of us need to be part of.

This is the discussion that we had at our organizing conference inaugural, our Fight the Rich conference in February this year, which had Chris Hedges and Jill Stein also speaking alongside me there where we all agreed that this is a necessary first step because the Democratic party has never represented us. It has always been a party of the capitalists, but right now with its backing for the horrors in Gaza, it has exposed itself much more so to a whole new generation of young people.

[00:08:09] And so this is a correct moment for us to fight for a new mass party. And we’re seeing the developments in the U.K. where a new party is being, starting to be launched. It’s very early days, but this is very exciting: half a million people in the U.K. signing up to be members of this new party launched by Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn.

[00:08:30] This opening exists everywhere. What’s missing is the leadership to actually achieve it. We need leadership that will talk about how we need to stop supporting the Democratic Party altogether. And what we need is to run independent candidates who are accountable to working people and who can actually build fighting campaigns and especially, you know, fight to win as a step towards that new party.

[00:08:53] That is why I’m running as an anti-war pro-worker candidate for the U.S. Congress. If elected, I will use my congressional office exactly as I used my city council office, Seattle City Council office for a decade: to build mass movements of working and young people to win victories.

[00:09:09] And the way we did that in City Hall is because we understood and I understood that as a Socialist, my role on the Seattle City Council was not to engage in cordial caucusing with the Democrats, accept their pro-big-business parameters and keep peace with them.

[00:09:22] Instead, we understood that our responsibility was to go and disrupt politics as usual, the business as usual, and organize working people in the thousands and fight back and fight back against what otherwise is a one-sided class war against working people.

[00:09:39] And it is on that basis that we were able to win the highest minimum wage in the nation. We won the Amazon tax, which raises hundreds of millions of dollars every year for affordable housing, including dedicated funds to develop affordable housing for the historically Black district here, right here where I live in the Central District.

[00:09:59] And we won unprecedented renters’ rights to make up really what is a ‘Bill of Renters’ Rights,’ which is a lifeline for working-class and poor families. And this is the approach I will use, as I said, if elected to U.S. Congress.

[00:10:12] I am running, as some of you may know, against warmongering Democrat Adam Smith. I am calling for an end to all U.S. military aid to Israel, an end to the occupations of Gaza and the West Bank.

And I’m also calling for free health care for all funded by taxing the rich, and national rent control.

Adam Smith has voted again and again and again to send military aid to Israel during his nearly three-decade tenure. He has fully backed the genocide to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. He has been an absolutely reliable servant of the Zionist lobby. So it’s no coincidence that AIPAC was his number one campaign donor last year.

And he’s also bankrolled by, you know, you name it, whichever war and genocide profiteer you think of, he’s bankrolled by them: Lockheed Martin, Palantir, also Elon Musk, SpaceX, he’s bankrolled by all of these dystopian corporations.

He has the blood on his hands of nearly half a million Palestinians already killed in this genocide.

[00:11:10] He has demonized anti-genocide activists as extremists and left-wing fascists and called for them to be arrested. So it is really really crucial that we take this historic opportunity. It’s actually our responsibility right now to fight to throw Adam Smith out of office. That is the absolute minimum price he should have to pay for his role in backing Israel to the hilt for nearly three decades.

[00:11:34] So I really urge everybody to join us. Join our campaign at KshamaSawant.org. Let’s fight to to win one position in Congress that can actually turn all of the politics in Washington D.C. upside down, because that is exactly what we did here as well.

We ‘commandeered the city’s political agenda,’ in the words of the Seattle Times, with one office. Why? Because we used that office to build mass movements. That is exactly the approach we need in the U.S. Congress as well.

[00:12:04] Presenter: She explained that candidates can support a mass movement with very specific demands. After the election, the movement can support the newly-elected official in pushing for those demands. Kshama Sawant:

[00:12:17] Kshama Sawant (Congressional candidate, Washington state): You know, I first got elected to Seattle City Council in 2013. That was our first city council campaign. And then after that, we won two other reelection campaigns. And then we won, you know, in 2015 and 2019.

[00:12:29] And then again in 2021 we were forced to fight against a recall against, you know, there was a recall attempt from corporate landlords from, you know, literally Trump-supporting corporate landlords, from big business, from Amazon, all of these corporations, and the Democratic Party. They all banded together in an attempt to recall me and we defeated that as well.

[00:12:49] So in other words, when I left the City Council in December 2023, I left undefeated after having won four elections. And what we did each time was we used each election campaign as a vehicle to build support for and momentum around concrete political demands.

[00:13:07] You know, if you look at our campaign page and you compare them to Democrats, even progressive Democrats, you’ll see that most of them, virtually all of them, are wishy-washy. I mean, (Zohran) Mamdani is a bit of an exception where he’s where he’s relentlessly campaigning on specific demands.

[00:13:21] Most Democrats don’t like to campaign on specific demands because they don’t want to be held responsible for anything specific. They just want to talk from both sides of their mouth and get everybody’s every working people to vote for them and then go and sell them out when they are doing the business bidding of big business.

[00:13:35] We don’t do that at all. We run on very concrete demands. So in 2013, for example, we, our campaign was a vehicle to build support for $15 an hour, push back on the lies from big business. And in fact, after we won, the Seattle Times actually said correctly so that our election victory was a referendum on 15 because that’s what people were voting for.

[00:13:56] People were voting for us because they were excited about fighting to win $15 an hour, taxing the rich, and rent control. Those were the three demands we brought forward. And then less than six months after I took office, we had won 15.

[00:14:09] And then we turned our attention to winning other things like the Amazon tax. And then so in 2019, for example, very prominently, we fought against Amazon. It was a pitched battle: Socialists versus Amazon. That was how the battle was seen by everybody on all sides and we defeated Amazon and then in 2020 we won the Amazon tax.

[00:14:27] That’s exactly the approach we’re using here as well, where our campaign itself is a vehicle to build a movement. And absolutely we are going to fight to win, but you know, we are not stupid. We don’t go around giving guarantees that we’re going to win. We’re going to win only if our fight changes the balance of power against the Zionists, big business, the Democratic Party, all of whom are going to be rooting for Adam Smith.

[00:14:49] So we have to fight like hell to win. But the point is that win or lose, we are building this movement both to end the genocide and to build momentum towards ending the occupation, you know, to really build the anti-war movement on a working-class basis. And also to build momentum for the question of free health care for all, funded by taxing the rich and also national rent control.

[00:15:12] So if we win, we’re going to take this fight to the U.S. Congress, but even if we don’t, we’re going to take this fight to the U.S. Congress regardless by building local fights.

[00:15:20] So for example, one of the things that Workers Strike Back has voted for is to carry out a campaign and that will be simultaneously next year, actually, with our congressional campaign next year, to fight for a ballot initiative in Seattle to win free health care for all. Regardless of immigration status, regardless of gender status, everybody gets free health care for every single need that they have funded by taxing the rich.

[00:15:44] And in Seattle we’ve already won the Amazon tax. So we’re talking about increasing the Amazon tax to $5 billion to fund healthcare for everyone.

[00:15:51] So in other words, every campaign for election campaign for us is not an election to elect a person. Obviously we need we want to fight to win the congressional seat, but alongside that we are also building the movement.

[00:16:04] And to be clear and this is the last thing I’ll say to be very clear: If we win the U.S. congressional seat, the only way we are able to, we are going to be able to fulfill our responsibilities and my personal responsibilities as a Congress member, would precisely be to build that movement.

So we don’t see the two things—building the movement and winning the election—we don’t see those two things as separate. They’re actually intricately connected and they go together.

[00:16:30] Presenter: That’s independent Washington state congressional candidate Kshama Sawant, as Todd Boyle reports for KEPW News from the Pacific Green Party convention. For more, see Todd’s YouTube channel.