The Strongest Revolutionary Socialist Campaign in U.S. History
By Kshama Sawant
Our campaign was by far the strongest ever by an openly Marxist candidate for the U.S. Congress.
We've so far won a historic 16.9 percent of the vote in a five-way race, in Washington’s sprawling Ninth Congressional District, which spans suburban areas with a significant proportion of Republican voters in addition to large parts of the major urban areas of Seattle and Bellevue.
We ran on electrifying demands like free healthcare for all funded by taxing the rich, ending all military aid to Israel and a permanent arms embargo on Israel, and national rent control. All of these are extremely popular among the working class in this district and nationally.
We achieved this result despite the many obstacles we faced.
Both the Republican and Democratic parties maneuvered by running candidates specifically to block our campaign from getting into the November election, which would have resulted in a head-to-head battle between our campaign and genocidal Democrat Adam Smith.
We faced a corporate media blackout and hostility and outright attacks from DSA leaders and many "progressive" podcasters.
Many labor leaders shamelessly endorsed Adam Smith, while others remained silent, effectively supporting Smith.
All of these obstacles were predictable. Our decade on the Seattle City Council showed what a threat we are to the political establishment and those who give them cover. We used our decade on the Seattle City Council to relentlessly build working-class movements, winning four elections and unparalleled victories such as the nation's highest minimum wage, which also led to substantive raises for tens of millions of workers across the United States, defeating Jeff Bezos to win the Amazon Tax, and repeatedly beating corporate landlords to win unprecedented renters' rights.
Despite not making it into the November election, we've provided a powerful example of what's possible by running an openly Marxist independent campaign based on class struggle rather than making peace with the political establishment or its legions of gatekeepers.
The DSA strategy of appeasing and, worse, rehabilitating the discredited Democratic leadership and their rotten party is a dead end. In this age of imperialist war and climate catastrophe, we simply have no time to fuck around.
We urgently need militant movements of the working class and a new mass party that can defeat the billionaires and both their parties. And we need revolutionary socialist campaigns like mine that don’t try to join the establishment and help administer the capitalist system, but are fighting to overthrow it.