Kshama Sawant Speaks at the ANEW Graduation

Transcript of statement by Kshama Sawant to the graduates of ANEW (Apprenticeship & Nontraditional Employment for Women) on Thursday July 10th, 2025

Dear graduates, students, faculty, family and friends,

It is an honor to share this day with you, a day that will always remain memorable to you, and to those who love you.

Thank you for having me here. As some of you will know, I am a former city councilmember in Seattle, where I served as the lone socialist on the council for 10 years.

Congratulations to you all on your hard work and dedication. Congratulations also to the teachers and instructors of the PACE program, who have guided you in your learning. 

A graduation ceremony is often a time when speakers focus on the future individual career paths for new graduates. Training programs like PACE provide crucial opportunities to young people in marginalized communities, to young people from low-income and working-class families, to women, to immigrant community members, and to LGBTQ people. And I wish you the best of luck in your future career paths, and hope that you are always able to find unionized, well-paying jobs. 

I know for each of you it took a great deal of hard work and individual self sacrifice to get here, and you should be proud of that achievement. 

Because nothing is easy for working people under the system of capitalism. We have to struggle at every step, because this system does not belong to us. And for this reason, our collective struggle is critical also. Because alone we don’t have much power under this system. The only way for us to make real gains as working people, is through solidarity and common action. Through unions, through class struggle, through strike action — which is where our real power lies.

Graduation day is an opportunity for young people to reflect on their role in the world around them. I think that’s especially important at this moment. Because the world is in crisis. We live in an era of massive and growing inequality, climate disaster, social crisis, war, and genocide.  

As tens of millions of young people in the United States struggle to get an education and a decent-paying job, this nation now has 801 billionaires who have a combined wealth totaling $6.22 trillion.

Billionaire wealth rose three times faster in 2024 than 2023.

As working people in the U.S. and around the world are struggling to pay the high costs of food, housing, gas, and other necessities, total billionaire wealth increased by $2 trillion last year, with 204 new billionaires created. 

For the bottom 60% of U.S. households, even a "minimal quality of life" is getting further and further out of reach.

How is this possible? Technology has continued to advance. Working people are more productive than ever before, and they work longer and longer hours, and sacrifice more and more. 

This stunning situation makes sense only if we understand how capitalism actually works.

Billionaire wealth is taken, not earned. The spokespeople of this system portray the capitalists as job creators who earned every dollar of their riches supposedly because of their creativity, business acumen, and hard work. But in reality, all of the profits of the billionaires and multimillionaires come from working people’s labor, whether directly or indirectly, and whether it is a construction worker, a cleaner, a barista, or a tech worker. It comes from the fundamental fact that the capitalists keep most of the wealth that we as workers create. 

I say directly or indirectly because research shows that about 60 percent of billionaire wealth comes from one of three sources: inheritance, cronyism and corruption, or monopoly power. Trillions of dollars are being gifted in inheritance in particular, creating a new aristocratic oligarchy that has immense power in our politics and our economy.

The super-rich, the bosses, they pay us a fraction of what we produce in a given hour or a given day, and keep the rest of it. This is how inequality grows at the same time that technology advances and working people work harder and harder. This is how capitalism functions.

And because they own the economy and the political system and the media, the billionaires and multimillionaires are able to get away with this institutionalized robbery while portraying themselves as geniuses and heroes.

Understanding all of this is important. Because in order for working people to change anything, we need to understand our role in society, and our need for collective struggle.

And change is possible, we do not have to accept the bankrupt status quo, even though the billionaires tell us otherwise.

It’s possible because we make everything run under this system. Nothing moves without us, nothing gets produced without us, nothing happens without us. We have the power to withhold our labor. And we have the power to force change through our collective action.

In my decade as a socialist on the Seattle City Council, we organized working people to fight for far-reaching change.

I did not get into office to join the club of Democratic Party politicians who sometimes say nice things to workers but then attack them and side with big business.

I got into office and built movements to win historic victories. Our movements of working people, union members, and socialists won the nation’s first major-city 15-dollar-an-hour minimum wage, a wage that is now the nation’s highest minimum wage at $20.76 because we also won inflation increases to the wage. We won because of our collective struggle. The Fight for 15 we launched here through my socialist city council office spread throughout the country, and many cities and states have also won. Just last November, the voters of the state of Missouri, who voted for Donald Trump, also voted for a 15-dollar minimum wage.

In 2020, during the historic Black Lives Matter movement, I used my city council office to launch the Tax Amazon movement. Thousands of working and young people got involved, and we won the Amazon Tax, which funds hundreds of millions of dollars for affordable housing every year by taxing the wealthiest businesses, including millions of dollars for affordable housing in Seattle’s Central District specifically for Black working-class and poor people.

We also won free abortion in Seattle, funded by an increase in the Amazon Tax. We won landmark renters rights laws.

I stood with workers in their contract struggles and strikes, forcing the City Council to pass resolutions in support of union strike action.

We did all of these things by building our collective power, not by negotiating with other politicians — almost all of whom serve the interests of the billionaires.

Alongside working people, I launched Workers Strike Back, a nationwide organization of working people and union members using the same fighting strategy we used to win victories through my city council office.

Working people have our work cut out for us.

Because capitalism is in crisis. It’s unable to take forward the living standards of ordinary people. And as part of this crisis, we are seeing social breakdown and war. Increasing military conflict around the world, in which ordinary working people pay the price.

We are seeing the worst genocide of our time taking place in front of our eyes in Gaza. 

Working people everywhere have to oppose the horrors against Palestinian people. Nearly half a million of whom are dead as a result of this genocide, according to independent estimates like those from the British medical journal, The Lancet. Most of them are women and children.

Why am I speaking about the events in Gaza? Because as working people we cannot look away and go about our lives while this new holocaust takes place.

Because an injury to one is an injury to all. And here in the US, we have a particular responsibility to fight back.

You see this genocide would not be possible without U.S. military funding. Israel is heavily reliant on those tens of billions of dollars flowing from the US.

So why is the US sending this money? 

Do American working people here or around the world want them to fund the genocide? The truth is absolutely the opposite.

The shift in polling results in the U.S. alone is stark. In 2017, Democratic Party voters sympathized with Israelis more than Palestinians by a margin of 13 points. According to polling last month, Democrats now sympathize more with the Palestinians by a net 43 points. That is a 56 percentage point swing. Tens of millions of Americans are horrified by the genocide and want it to stop.So why is it not only not stopping, and is instead escalating?

It’s because the billionaires, the capitalists in the United States, want this to happen. Both the Democratic and Republican Parties, despite whatever differences they may have, represent the interests of American capitalism and imperialism. And the Israeli state is a powerful military outpost of U.S. and Western imperialism in the oil-rich Middle East. So the billionaires have a vested interest in the war and brutal occupation of the Palestinian people and their lands.

Both democrats and republicans are complicit in the genocide and have blood on their hands.

My organization, Workers Strike Back, is calling for an end to the genocide, end to all U.S. military funding to the Israeli state. For an end to the brutal occupations of Gaza and the West Bank.

Working people have the power to stop this — through collective action.

As we speak here, protesters in New York City are rallying outside the JFK AirTrain, where a cargo plane with more than 20,000 pounds of ammunition and weapons is set to fly to Israel right now. Protesters are demanding the civilian airport stop allowing Israeli weapons manufacturers to ship weapons weekly.

Unionized dock workers in France and Italy have shut down the ports, preventing weapons and other military aid from being sent to Israel.

Such actions here, on a mass scale, could shut down the flow of aid that is making this genocide possible.

Mass strike action could also stop the current escalation of deportations by the Trump administration. Mass strike action can stop the attacks on Medicaid, on public sector jobs, on trans people.

In 2017, when Trump issued his horrendous Muslim travel ban, tens of thousands of us gathered at SeaTac airport and shut it down in a peaceful civil disobedience action. There were similar actions at airports nationally, and Trump was forced to back off.

Working people have enormous power if we use it. If we organize, if we fight back.

I would encourage you, as you go out into the world, and individually find your way, that you also look for a way to be active in the fight for a better world, in our collective struggle as working people. 

I hope you will consider joining my organization, Workers Strike Back. I and others launched it to build on the work of my ten years on the city council where we won historic victories, to take that work nationally. Workers Strike Back is an independent movement, fighting for what working people need against the bosses and their political servants in both parties. 

In addition to speaking out against the genocide, Workers Strike Back is also demanding a stop to the deportations and the shutting down of th detention centers. We have also  recently launched a campaign to fight for free healthcare for all, funded by taxing the rich.

Thank you for having me here today. I wish you all the best in your new careers and lives going forward.