Why I’m running for U.S. Congress
And building the strongest antiwar, anti-genocide election campaign in the nation
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.
These victories sent corporate landlords into an uproar. One of the city’s real estate lobbyists, brother of recent mayor Jenny Durkan, complained that “every dollar” spent on lobbying the Seattle City Council was being wasted because of “Sawant’s army.” Sometimes your enemies give the best compliments.
We won because we didn’t put faith in the utterly failed strategy of trying to reform the Democratic (or Republican) Party or winning over these politicians through moral persuasion. The problem is that, with rare exceptions, they have no morals. Even if a given politician started out with good intentions, the leadership of their party ensures they don’t last long — either the morals go or the politician does.
After I left the City Council undefeated in four elections to launch Workers Strike Back, Seattle’s Democrats have dedicated themselves to trying to undermine or overturn our working-class victories in Seattle.
Workers Strike Back has been able to defeat both their efforts so far — last year when they attacked our historic minimum wage victory, and just last week, when we forced them to back off on their attempt to attack renters’ rights by first undermining the city’s ethics laws.
Our fighting strategy is urgently needed nationally, including in the U.S. Congress. Progressive Democrats like AOC and Bernie Sanders have long since capitulated to the corporate and warmongering agenda of their party. Working people need elected representatives willing to use their positions to help build mass movements in order to end the genocide and all U.S. military funding to the Israeli state, defeat the attacks on public funds for our basic needs, and win offensive demands like Medicare for All and a $25 an hour federal minimum wage.
This is why I launched Workers Strike Back. That is also why I am running for Congress against Democrat Adam Smith. Just as I used my City Council election campaigns to build momentum for the $15 minimum wage and the Amazon Tax, I will use my Congressional election campaign to help build the antiwar movement and to launch a historic fight for Medicare for All.
And just as I did in my decade as a representative of working people in Seattle, if I’m elected to Congress, I will accept only the average worker’s wage and donate the rest of my six-figure salary to workers’ and social justice movements.
Democrats, Republicans, and the Genocide
Contrary to the shocking and systematic under-reporting in mainstream media, estimates from The Lancet indicate the Gaza death toll was likely over 335,000 by September last year, and has likely since surpassed 400,000. At least a hundred Gazan children are being injured or killed daily since Israel resumed its genocidal offensive in March. Gaza has been reduced to rubble.
Neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party has a shred of moral credibility after having backed the Israeli state to the hilt. Both are fully responsible for what is in reality a new holocaust, because it would not have been possible without the billions of dollars they approved in funding from the U.S. state.
But we should not be surprised. Both Democrats and Republicans have been purveyors of endless brutal wars throughout their history.
According to a Brown University study, the Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress spent more than $14 trillion on war since 9/11. A third to one half of this money is pocketed by military contractors, who in turn fund the campaigns of their favorite Democrats and Republicans.
Adam Smith Has Blood On His Hands
One such weapons industry treasure is my opponent in Washington’s 9th Congressional District, Democrat Adam Smith, who has held this office since 1997 and who has blood all over his hands.
Smith has never met a war that he didn’t like. He has fully backed the genocide in Gaza. He has demonized anti-genocide activists as “extremists” and “left-wing fascists,” called for them to be arrested, and likening their actions to the far-right attack on the U.S. Capitol. He holds the shameful distinction of being one of only five sitting Democratic Congressmembers who voted for the Iraq War in 2002. He supported the wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and the current bloody inter-imperialist proxy war in Ukraine.
For nearly three decades, Smith has been bankrolled by weapons industry profiteers such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Palantir, General Atomics, and Kymeta.
In 2016, he was one of only 16 Democrats who voted against an amendment to block the transfer of cluster bombs (horrific weapons used for mass indiscriminate killing) to Saudi Arabia for use against the people of Yemen, something for which he has been handsomely rewarded by Textron, the leading manufacturer of cluster bombs.
In 2021, as Chair of the House Armed Services Committee, Smith proudly championed a grotesque $768-billion budget for the Pentagon, making it the largest military budget in U.S. history at the time, and $25 billion over even what President Biden was calling for.
Far from being a foot soldier, Smith is a general among the war hawks. He has helped lead the financing of the ongoing genocide in Gaza as one of the most influential members of the House Armed Services Committee.
Smith is a darling of AIPAC and the Zionist lobby, the weapons industry, and the billionaire class. AIPAC was his biggest funder last year and he has received nearly half a million dollars from the Zionist lobby to date.
In the summer of 2014, I used my City Council office not only to attend protests against Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment on Gaza at the time, but also to draft a public letter calling for an end to all U.S. military aid for Israel, the illegal settlements in the Palestinian territories, and Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands. During the same time, Smith was enthusiastically backing Israel’s Iron Dome system, a key component enabling the Israeli state’s slaughter apparatus against the Palestinian people.
I used the final days of my decade in City Hall in October and November of 2023 to win the second and the strongest City Council resolution at the time calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to all military aid to Israel. At that moment, Smith was part of Biden’s cabal that was monstrously insisting on over $100 billion military funding for not just Israel, but also the inter-imperialist proxy war in Ukraine, instead of funding the needs of working people struggling with the severe cost-of-living crisis.
Adam Smith and the Corporate Status Quo
Adam Smith stands out as one of the most thoroughly pro-corporate politicians out of all the Democrats in the U.S. Congress and Senate. This is no easy task.
Smith has shown longstanding and unwavering loyalty to Wall Street. He was part of the aggressively pro-corporate, neoliberal offensive of the Democratic Party in the 1990s. The Democratic Party was never a party of the working class, but under Bill Clinton, the party began to more overtly and viciously attack the working class and the labor movement. The initial shift toward neoliberalism and the assault on unions and working people’s living standards actually began even earlier, under Jimmy Carter, as a response by the U.S. ruling class to the end of the postwar boom.
During the George W. Bush presidency, Smith worked to push the Democratic Party further rightward. He expressed concerns that “Too many Democrats want to say, Vote for me because Exxon is screwing you, Chase Manhattan’s screwing you.” His advice to Democrats was to reduce the contrast of Democrats from Bush and the Republicans. He thought the Democratic Party should consider privatizing Medicare, and was anxious that some Democrats would be “reflexively hostile” to attempts by Bush and the Republicans to do so.
Today, with Medicare for All having widespread support, Smith sometimes claims to support it. But this is straight from the Democratic Party’s playbook of performatively expressing support for popular progressive demands that they have no intention of allowing to see the light of day.
Smith has certainly inspired the confidence of the health insurance CEOs. Notorious health insurance corporations like Humana and Cigna, who ferociously oppose Medicare for All, have donated to Smith’s campaigns. Also among his donors is the America’s Health Insurance Plans PAC, which gave over $100 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for a 2009-2010 lobbying campaign to try and derail even meager improvements in healthcare under Obama.
Smith voted in favor of the shameful bailout of big banks in October 2008 while ordinary people were left to rot. He then supported continuing the funding for Wall Street under Obama, again at the expense of working people.
Smith’s position that the Democratic Party needs to move further rightward and become more friendly to big business has only hardened over time. In November of last year, after the Democratic Party’s embarrassing defeat to Trump, he said on Fox News, “If you want to stand up to Trump, I suggest you don’t ever mention him.” In December, appearing with a Seattle-based Trump-supporting podcast host, he railed against what he called “extreme left policies” of the Democratic Party, claiming that’s what handed the election to Trump. This was at a time when, in fact, Biden and Harris were trying to out-Trump Trump. “He sounds more like a Republican than a lot of Republicans,” one right-wing commenter remarked. Smith has even received campaign donations from Elon Musk’s SpaceX PAC, not once or twice, but in every election cycle since 2010.
It is exactly this lurch to the right by the Democratic Party that has allowed Republicans to increasingly attack workers, immigrants, the antiwar movement, trans people, the poor, and other oppressed people.
We aren’t going to stop right-wing attacks and defeat Trump by staying silent and allowing Democrats like Adam Smith to remain in power. We need to use every tool available to us: mass protests, strike action, civil disobedience, and independent election campaigns like the one I’m announcing to defeat warmongers and corporate politicians like Adam Smith.
Importantly, the labor movement also needs to break from the billionaire-backed parties. Most of the labor leadership has spent over three decades giving no-strings-attached endorsements and campaign funds to Democrats (and sometimes even Republicans). In return, most of these Democrats have stabbed workers in the back. Smith is no exception. Having received well over half a million dollars from labor unions since he first went to the U.S. Congress, Smith has sold out workers again and again, including by voting to break the strike of railroad workers in 2022. Labor leaders have allowed Smith to engage in occasional performative gestures while being one of the key Democratic Party enforcers against any substantive progressive gains for working people.
Free Healthcare Now — Tax the Rich!
Support for Medicare for All is at historic highs. “Progressive” Democrats have been talking about “single-payer healthcare” or “Medicare for All” for decades, but every time there is potential to win it, they pull the plug.
This is no accident. It’s a cheap and easy talking point for “progressive” politicians like Pramila Jayapal to raise the flag for Medicare for All when the Republicans are in power, as right now — precisely because they know it won’t go anywhere. In reality, this kind of empty lip service is a mechanism to deceive working people and try to keep them inside the party.
My campaign for Congress will not only be committing to fight all-out for Medicare for All in Washington DC, but I will also simultaneously build momentum for free healthcare through a Seattle ballot initiative.
Workers Strike Back, has just launched a national campaign called Free Healthcare Now, with the model of bypassing both political parties and fighting for free public healthcare, paid for by taxing the rich, through local ballot initiatives.
In Seattle, we are preparing to file a ballot initiative in 2026 which would tax the city’s wealthiest businesses approximately $5 billion a year to fund free healthcare for everyone in the city. This would expand the Amazon Tax that my City Council office won in 2020 alongside working people and the Black Lives Matter movement.
This is a fighting strategy to break through the current impasse. If we can win in one or more cities and states, it can act as a battering ram to win Medicare for All nationally. This is similar to the way Canada won its healthcare system, by starting in a single province, Saskatchewan, before winning nationally. That fight also went hand-in-hand with the struggle for a new party of working people, called the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation.
There is huge support for Medicare for All — as there is for most progressive policies — but year after year it goes nowhere. Why? Because as everyone knows, the Democrats (like Smith) and Republicans are both owned lock, stock and barrel by the health insurance industry, Big Pharma, and the billionaire class.
To win, we need to turn the tables on the parties of the billionaires. We need to build a militant, independent, all-out fight as we prepare the ground for a new party for working people. Working people are fed up with both parties of the billionaires. A plurality of Americans believe neither major party represents them. Going into last year’s election, two-thirds of people believed the country was “moving in the wrong direction,” and now Trump’s “honeymoon” has been the shortest on record. The approval ratings of both Trump in the White House and Democrats in the U.S. Congress are in the gutter, and appropriately so.
Fight the Rich
We need to build an organized, unified movement of working people to systematically take on the ultra rich who run society. Our goal must be to both fight for radical change in the present and to bring down the billionaires and their system.
There is no other path to avoid total disaster for human civilization and the planet. The alternative under capitalism is a hellscape on earth, including the looming threats of both climate disaster and World War III.
We need to fight for Medicare for All, a $25 an hour minimum wage, an end to mass deportations, good union jobs for all, strong national rent control, and a massive expansion of high quality social housing, paid for by taxing the rich. We need to take big energy corporations into democratic public ownership and carry out a lighting-fast transition to renewable energy.
If we’re going to change anything, working people need to be clear about who our enemies are. They are the billionaires and the bosses, the capitalist class, their institutions, their political parties, and also their more deceptive spokespeople, who sometimes appear and sound like they support workers, but really act as pressure release valves and gatekeepers.
We also need to be clear about who our enemies are not. They are not other working-class or middle-class or poor people. They are not immigrants, trans people, ordinary Republican or Democratic voters, nor independent voters or nonvoters.
We Need Militant Fighting Movements
Under capitalism, it should be no surprise that those who own the vast majority of the planet’s wealth also own the politicians.
That’s why I’m a socialist. Because we need a fundamentally different kind of society, run by and for working people, not the billionaires.
There is no reason, in the wealthiest country on earth, that everyone cannot have free healthcare. There is no reason that college should not be free. There is no reason that high quality affordable housing should not be available to all.
But working people won’t win free healthcare, a seat in the U.S. Congress, or anything else without organizing in the millions. Our experience in Seattle shows that we can defeat the rich and their political servants. As we said throughout our decade-long fight with Amazon and Seattle’s corporate elite, “when we fight, we can win.“
I hope you’ll join us.
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Peace.