End the Genocide in Gaza — No Military Aid, No Occupation!
Kshama is running for Congress to build a movement that can end the Israeli state’s genocide in Gaza and to put a stop to the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent by the U.S. to fund wars around the world. We need an immediate end to all U.S. military funding for the Israeli war machine and to the brutal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. The roots of the crisis are in the Israeli occupation, which has been backed by U.S. imperialism for more than three quarters of a century because of the strategic interests of U.S. billionaires in the oil-rich Middle East. We need to build the strongest possible movement against both Trump and the Democrats’ genocidal plans for Gaza.
We also oppose the inter-imperialist proxy war in Ukraine. We don’t support U.S. imperialism, Russian imperialism, or Chinese imperialism in that bloody conflict, or either bloc in the larger US/China conflict. None of these imperialist powers represent the interests of working people in Ukraine, Russia, or anywhere else. We need money for healthcare, education, jobs, and housing, not for war.
We need to build a global antiwar and workers’ movement made up of workers of all nations and ethnicities fighting against the bosses’ wars and for our common interests. Working-class action has stopped wars in the past. Today, working people and the labor movement need to organize a one-day general strike in the U.S., demanding an end to all military aid to Israel.
As the only elected socialist on the Seattle City Council, Kshama fought for and won the nation’s second and strongest ceasefire resolution in November 2023 for a ceasefire in Gaza. It took a movement of Arab & Muslim community members, socialists, antiwar activists, union members, and other working people to win that resolution, overcoming the opposition of the Democratic Party Councilmembers. It will take an even bigger movement to defeat AIPAC, the weapons manufacturers, and the Democratic and Republican Parties to end U.S. military aid to Israel and the genocide.
Free Healthcare for All — Tax the Rich!
There has never been a clearer opportunity to launch a serious fight to win free healthcare for all funded by taxing the rich, and take down the deeply dysfunctional, for-profit American healthcare system.
We’re dying from unaffordable healthcare as the pharma bosses and for-profit health insurance industry make bank off our sickness. We need to tax the rich hundreds of billions of dollars a year to fund free healthcare for all — a fully public system covering all services, including preventive care, surgeries, vision, hearing, dental, gender-affirming care, free abortion, ambulances, and Emergency Room visits.
We need to go beyond that, and build militant movements to win state-of-the-art, free healthcare for all owned and democratically run by working people. We need to bring big pharma and the hospitals into democratic public ownership, run by healthcare workers, with patients having the right to choose their physicians and specialists. We need to end the private insurance industry — no more denial of care, no more profits from sickness! As part of our free healthcare for all system, we need a major expansion of clinics and hospitals around the country.
Despite being hugely popular with working people, the demand for Medicare for All has been stalled because of the utterly failed strategy of relying on “progressive” Democrats to fight for it. This will never happen, because the Democratic Party is tied at the hip to the insurance industry and Big Pharma. What’s needed instead is an independent, national movement that can harness the resurgent discussion around Medicare for All and growing anger at the health insurance corporations, and go on the offensive to win free healthcare for all by taxing the rich. This should include local and state ballot initiatives.
Alongside her campaign for Congress, Kshama has launched a campaign for a Seattle ballot initiative to expand the Amazon Tax our movement won in 2020 by approximately $5 billion a year to make healthcare free. This can act as a launchpad to push forward the fight for Medicare for All nationally.
We Need Rent Control — Make Corporate Landlords Pay
We face an epidemic of unaffordable housing—the rent is too damn high! We need strong rent control with no rent increases above inflation for all rental properties. We need a massive expansion of publicly owned, high-quality, highly energy-efficient affordable housing by taxing the rich, as our movement won in Seattle when Kshama Sawant led the fight for the Amazon Tax. The Amazon Tax raises hundreds of millions of dollars a year to build affordable housing by taxing the city’s wealthiest corporations.
We also need a movement to organize renters around the country to fight against exploitative corporate landlords and for a National Renters’ Bill of Rights. Kshama built movements to win landmark renters’ protections in Seattle — a $10/month cap on late rent fees, six months’ notice of rent increases, bans on winter and school-year evictions, caps on security deposits and move-in fees, and economic evictions assistance, which requires landlords to pay renters three-months rent if they are forced to move due to a 10%+ rent increase. We need to expand those victories nationally, and fight for more — including strong residential and commercial rent control. Kshama also helped renters to collectively organize to stop rent increases and force landlords to make needed repairs. We need fighting tenants’ unions nationally, and working-class leaders like Kshama who will stand with them.
The private housing market has failed us—we need to take the big real estate corporations and banks into democratic public ownership. We need housing for all! New housing construction should be planned in coordination with free, frequent, and highly convenient mass transit routes. Every unit of new affordable housing should be built with good-paying union labor, like Kshama fought for with Seattle’s Amazon Tax.
Stop the Deportations & Shut Down the Detention Centers
Working people must unite against the deportations being carried out by Trump and both parties of the billionaires, which represent an attack on the entire working class. The bosses’ super-exploitation and marginalization of immigrants is used to undermine the wages and conditions of all workers, both native-born and immigrant, and as a weapon to divide us. Native-born and immigrant workers must stand together to fight for better wages and conditions, and defend the right of all workers to unionize without fear of retaliation, including deportation.
We need mass action, including mass strike action and civil disobedience, to beat back workplace immigration raids and to stop the deportations. We need ICE out of our workplaces, schools and neighborhoods. We need to shut down the detention centers that both parties of the billionaires have been using to carry out their terror campaign against immigrants. We need to put those billions of dollars towards education, housing, and healthcare for all. As a City Councilmember, Kshama fought for and won the “Right to Counsel,” for free legal representation for all renters facing eviction. We need to do the same for immigrants: we need to fund free legal defense for any immigrant facing deportation.
The alternative to the bosses’ attacks on immigrants, and to anti-worker “free trade” agreements like NAFTA, is for the labor movement to launch mass organizing drives and build fighting unions not only in the United States, but also around the world. We must combat the bosses’ race to the bottom which seeks to pit workers in different nations against each other. Instead of corporate globalization, economic nationalism, and imperialism, we need working-class internationalism. We need to build a militant international labor movement to unite all workers in the fight for living wages and good working conditions for all.
Workers Need a Real Raise — $25/Hour Minimum Wage
Democrats and Republicans in Congress keep giving themselves raises but won’t even pass a bare $15/hour federal minimum wage for working people. The federal minimum wage is still at a shocking poverty-level $7.25/hour.
Kshama and our movement are fighting for a $25/hour federal minimum wage — in major cities, this should be at least $30/hour. With prices sky-high on everything from food to housing to transportation, we need to fight for an across-the-board 35% raise for all workers with automatic cost-of-living increases above inflation going forward.
Kshama led the fight to make Seattle the first major city to win a $15/hour minimum wage, in 2014. Immediately after being elected in 2013, she launched the 15 Now movement. She won, despite vicious opposition from big business and the Democratic Party, and even opposition from some labor leaders. Because of the inflation adjustments that Kshama and our movement won as part of that victory, the minimum wage in Seattle is now $20.76 an hour, the highest in the country. This was a historic victory which set off the “Fight for 15” around the country, but after ten years of price-gouging, inflation, and record profits by big business, workers everywhere need a real raise.
Instead of long hours and multiple jobs just to pay the bills, we need to shorten the workweek to 30 hours a week with no loss in pay or benefits. Unionized auto workers with UAW have recently raised a similar demand. A 30-hour work week is possible, but winning it will take a massive fight, including mass strike action and the revival of a fighting labor movement.
Kshama pledges to take only the average worker’s wage, as she did in her decade on the Seattle City Council. Democrats and Republicans in Congress make nearly $200,000 a year and are completely out of touch with regular working people. Kshama will donate the rest of her six-figure salary to support strikes, worker organizing, and social movements.
Good Union Jobs for All
Billionaires and multimillionaires are making obscene profits at the expense of workers. We need guaranteed good union jobs for all. Unions are the key tool workers have to fight the bosses for the things we desperately need. Organize the unorganized—unionize Amazon and every workplace!
We need representatives in Congress who unambiguously fight for working people and actively support unionization and strikes. As a City Councilmember in Seattle, Kshama used her office to build the workers’ movement, including winning historic victories for workers and by donating tens of thousands from her salary to support strike and unionization efforts. Unlike the Democrats who voted to break the railroad workers’ strike in 2022, Kshama will stand unapologetically with union members and all working people.
We need to build a fighting workers’ movement that arms itself with clear, bold demands and is prepared to go on strike to win them. We don’t need more representatives in Congress who pay lip service to workers’ rights and then stab us in the back as the progressive Democrats did with the railroad workers. Instead they need representatives who will go all out to fight for their interests, actively support strikes, and use their platform to help organize and strengthen them. We need to repeal Right to Work and every anti-union law nationwide, and build a movement to win the PRO Act.
We need to restore the traditions on which the American labor movement was built — class struggle not “class snuggle,” bold strike action that shuts down profits, and wide working-class unity against the bosses and billionaires. The labor movement needs to break with the Democrats once and for all and launch a new party for working people.
Stop Climate Catastrophe — Take Big Energy Corporations Into Public Ownership
Time is running out to avoid a climate apocalypse. We need a lightning-fast transition to a clean energy economy and an end to all fossil fuel use, with a just transition and free retraining for all fossil fuel workers. This must include a green unionized living-wage jobs program that employs millions of workers in the move to clean energy.
We need free mass transit, an expansion of buses and high-speed rail, and energy efficiency retrofitting in commercial and residential buildings, paid for by taxing big business and the rich. As part of our Tax Amazon victory in 2020, Kshama fought for and won millions of dollars to go towards Green New Deal programs like retrofitting, weatherization, and energy efficiency for both new and old housing.
To avoid total climate disaster, we need to take the big energy corporations into democratic workers’ ownership and reorient them to 100 percent renewable energy production. This is a vital step, because we can’t control what we don’t own. Capitalism is a myopic, anarchic system which offers no way forward — it’s based on billionaire greed, not the needs of human beings, other animals, or the environment, and is completely incompatible with a sustainable world.
End the War on Black People! Stop Mass Incarceration — Fund Housing, Healthcare, Education & Union Jobs Instead
American capitalism was built on the exploitation of enslaved Black people and the genocide of indigenous peoples. The horrors of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and the ongoing exploitation of Black working people have provided unimaginable wealth for a tiny elite, while impoverishing generations of Black Americans and their communities.
We need to tax the rich to fund massive investment in Black and historically Black communities. We need quality affordable housing in Black communities, and strong federal rent control. We need free public college and university, including a major increase in funding for Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUs) and an expansion of community colleges in Black neighborhoods. We need to build free public healthcare clinics in every Black community as part of a free national healthcare system. We need to expand mass transit and make it free, including by ensuring high-quality, frequent, accessible public transit routes in every Black community. We need to fund a national union jobs program to create hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs for Black workers to do critical work of rebuilding infrastructure, expanding mass transit, and transforming our energy system.
We need to end mass incarceration, ban private prisons, and stop forced, unpaid, and low-wage prison labor. We need to bring an end to racist policing and put police under the control of democratically elected community boards with full power over department policy, hiring, and firing. We need to put an end to the disastrous “war on drugs,” and instead fund healthcare, housing, education, and support for small businesses alongside a major expansion of living-wage union jobs.
As the only socialist on Seattle’s City Council, Kshama Sawant led the fight to win the Amazon Tax, which funds hundreds of millions of dollars of affordable housing every year by taxing big corporations like Amazon. Kshama also helped win the proposal for millions of dollars of that Amazon Tax to go specifically to build housing for the Black community in Seattle’s historically Black Central District. She also helped win $500,000 to fund the Garfield Super Block and community center in the Central District. She helped organize Black and other marginalized-community renters at Chateau Apartments and Rainier Court to successfully fight and win against mass evictions and rent increases. We need to organize millions of people around the country and build a movement to win these kinds of victories on a much larger scale.
The greatest material improvement in the lives of Black American workers came through the mass labor movements of the 1930s and 1940s and the creation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which built fighting multiracial unions and helped to power the Civil Rights movement. We need to rebuild a fighting, anti-racist labor movement.
Fight Racism, Sexism, and All Oppression
Only the bosses profit from divisions among the working class. We need to build a united, multi-racial, multi-gendered movement of working people. We need to fight racism in all its forms, both in the United States and internationally. We must fight sexism and demand full and equal pay and benefits for women, paid parental leave, and free childcare. We need to organize to win legal, safe, free abortions for all who need them, as Kshama Sawant and our movement did in Seattle in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe v. Wade. We need to defend immigrant workers from attacks by ICE and both parties of the billionaires, and organize fighting unions to defend their rights on the job and against workplace raids. We must fight back against anti-trans legislation and all right-wing attacks on LGBTQ+ people, and for free gender-affirming care. We must fight for full and equal rights for people with disabilities and against the brutal attacks on Medicare and disability services.
Kshama has unambiguously fought alongside working, poor, and oppressed people, and helped win historic victories. As the only socialist on the Seattle City Council, she fought to make Seattle the first city in the country to get rid of the racist Columbus Day holiday and replace it with Indigenous People’s Day, and provide funding to the annual celebration organized by indigenous groups. She stood with Black working people both to win historic victories for renters’ rights and affordable housing, and also to fight back against racist policing and killings by the Seattle Police Department. Kshama spoke at the first Trans Pride day in 2013, which not a single Seattle Democrat agreed to attend. She led a movement alongside Indian, Muslim, and Sikh activists to pass a resolution against the racist, anti-Muslim CAA/NRC law being implemented by the right-wing Modi government in India in 2019. In 2023, she led the historic fight to win the first ban on caste-based discrimination anywhere outside of South Asia, a victory we should fight to extend nationally, with a federal law against caste-based discrimination.
We have to fight to end the war on trans people, Black people, indigenous people, immigrants, disabled people, women and other oppressed groups. Movements are how change happens—we need to unite working and oppressed people to fight for our rights. An injury to one is an injury to all!
Bring Down Trump, the Billionaires, and their Two Parties
The Democratic Party not only failed to stop Trump — they prepared the ground for much of his agenda. Now they are standing aside (or even joining in) as he brutally attacks workers, immigrants, Palestinians, trans people, people with disabilities, and antiwar activists.
Many of Trump’s attacks — like major tariffs (causing major inflation), tax cuts for the rich, or undermining workers’ rights and healthcare — will have devastating effects on millions of working people. Regardless of how people voted in the 2024 election, we must unite against Trump’s anti-worker, far-right agenda on the broadest possible basis, independent of the bankrupt Democratic Party. We need joint protests organized by left organizations, labor unions, and regular working people. We need to organize mass civil disobedience, including coordinated national days of action. Labor unions need to use the power of mass coordinated strike action to defend against these attacks, and build toward a nationwide general strike. Rank-and-file union members need to lead efforts to bring their unions into the fight.
Crucially, we need independent working-class representatives who are willing to call for and organize such action, as Kshama did over her decade as a socialist councilmember.
We must consistently connect our fight against Trump to the fight against the wealthy elite who are backing him, expecting to profit from his increasingly dangerous agenda. Elon Musk and a number of other billionaires have directly helped Trump carry out his attacks, regardless of their differences over parts of his agenda or any personal falling out. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has also contributed to Kshama’s opponent, warmongering Democrat Adam Smith, in every election since 2010. And Smith is backed by many other corporations, billionaires, and right-wing interests like AIPAC. We must be clear that both political parties, Democratic and Republican, are weapons wielded by the billionaires against working people.
In an earlier era, Richard Nixon was brought down by the combined strength of the antiwar, civil rights, women’s, and workers’ movements — the Watergate scandal was just the formal basis for his removal. While we can’t know at present exactly how Trump will be defeated, we do know that we need to urgently build the strongest possible movement to bring down this administration, the billionaire class, and their system of capitalism. We completely reject the Democrats’ fake efforts to pose as the “Resistance.” They represent the wing of the capitalist class which fully backed the genocide in Gaza, broke the railroad workers’ strike, and put Trump back in the White House. Throughout its history, the Democratic Party has expanded wars around the world and carried out endless attacks on working and oppressed people in the US. We need a new mass party basing itself on fighting methods of class struggle and working-class power.
No More Sellouts — We Need a New Party!
The Democrats and Republicans both serve the rich; that’s why working people keep getting screwed. The Squad and other progressive Democrats in Congress have completely betrayed working people and offer no solutions. Trump is a dangerous representative of the billionaire class.
We need a new, multiracial, mass working-class party that organizes movements and fights unambiguously for our needs. In such a party, all elected leaders would accept only the average workers’ wage, as Kshama Sawant has done. We need elected leaders to be fully accountable to working people and our demands, or else be removed. We need a party that consistently opposes war and imperialism, and fights unambiguously for working people and the oppressed.
Kshama will use her campaign, and her office if elected, to build the foundations for such a party, alongside her organization Workers Strike Back. We need to begin organizing workers in the tens of thousands — and soon in the millions — to build a truly working-class party that can go up against both billionaire-backed parties and win what workers need.
Under capitalism, the bosses call the shots and have a dictatorship over our workplaces. We need a fundamentally different kind of society — run by and for working people, not the billionaires. We need to fight the rich and bring an end to the billionaire class and their system. We need a socialist society.