Kshama is running as an independent socialist. She is fighting to 

• Permanently end to all U.S. military aid to Israel,
• Win free healthcare for all funded by taxing the rich,
• Stop all deportations and shut down ICE and the detention centers,
• Raise the national minimum wage to $25/hour (it should be $30 in big cities),
• Cancel medical and student debt.

Whether you are a member of Workers Strike Back, the Democratic Socialists of America, another socialist organization, or not part of any organization at all, we need you to join us!

Our campaign is launching “Socialists for Kshama” to get organized to break the socialist movement away from the rotten, pro-genocide, billionaire-owned Democratic Party once and for all!

In 2013, Kshama Sawant stunned the political establishment by defeating a longtime and powerful Democratic Party incumbent to win her first election to the Seattle City Council as an independent socialist, calling for a $15/hour minimum wage, taxing the rich, and rent control. She was the first socialist elected in Seattle in nearly 100 years.

Kshama won her first historic victory — the nation’s first major-city $15/hour minimum wage — just six months later. As the pro-corporate Seattle Times wrote at the time, “Sawant will appropriately get credit for coming out of nowhere to commandeer the city’s political agenda…the political fear of Sawant’s organizing skill has put a radical economic policy on greased rails. In process-loving Seattle, the minimum wage is happening as quickly as a lightning strike.“

Kshama’s $15/hour victory has since spread far beyond Seattle, electrifying tens of millions of workers to win similar minimum wage victories in cities and states across the nation.

Kshama’s first election and her launch of the 15 NOW movement took place more than a year before Bernie Sanders announced his first campaign for President. By the time AOC was elected to Congress in 2018, Kshama had been in office for five years, had won two hard-fought elections and many more historic victories by building powerful movements of working people, not trying to make friends with Democratic Party politicians, corporate lobbyists, or others in the halls of power.

As working people, it’s important for us to learn the lessons of how we can win, if we want to defeat the rotten status quo presided over by both the Democrats and Republicans.

At the same time that Kshama has been going to war against the political establishment, AOC has cozied up to the Democratic Party leadership, and failed to fight for any of the demands she ran on, whether a $15/hour national minimum wage or universal healthcare. AOC voted to break the railroad workers’ strike, voted to fund Israel’s “Iron Dome,” which is a critical part of their genocidal war machine, and lied to working people that Kamala Harris was “working tirelessly for a ceasefire.”

Zohran Mamdani has now been elected as a democratic socialist to be Mayor of New York City, showing the broad support for working-class demands and the huge opening to elect socialist candidates. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has more than 250 elected members around the country, from mayoral offices and the U.S. Congress to state assemblies and city councils.

Unfortunately, all the 250+ DSA elected officials combined have not managed to win anything like the history-making working-class victories that Kshama and her fellow revolutionary socialists won with just one elected position in one city.

Kshama has won unparalleled victories for the working class. The $15/hour minimum wage she won has gone up this year to $20.76/hour because she and the 15 NOW movement fought to win inflation increases. On January 1st of next year, Seattle’s minimum wage will go up again to $21.30/hour. Kshama also won the Amazon Tax for affordable housing, free abortion by taxing the rich, and a long list of landmark renters’ rights laws.

Kshama won again and again, and turned politics upside down in Seattle. Kshama has used her position to expose the Democrats as a party of the billionaires and politically educated working people on the need for a strategy based on militant mass movements not backroom deals. 

How did Kshama win so many historic victories? 

1. Kshama ran not just as a socialist, but as an independent, revolutionary socialist. 

Overwhelmingly, DSA leaders and other “socialist” elected officials have run as members of the billionaire-backed Democratic Party, which puts enormous pressure on them to sell out working people.

2. Kshama’s loyalty was always to working-class people, not to her so-called “colleagues” on the City Council (all Democrats). 

She knew that working people would win nothing if, instead of fighting, she used her office to make moral appeals or try to persuade or “charm” Democratic Party leaders, big business, and corporate landlords. Kshama had to fight against the Democratic Party politicians and the labor and NGO leaders tied to them, who openly or covertly opposed our movements every step of the way.

Zohran Mamdani and AOC, on the other hand, are unfortunately in the business of appeasing corporate politicians like Hakeem Jeffries and New York Governor Kathy Hochul, and even Donald Trump. Just days ago, Mamdani shamefully endorsed Hakeem Jeffries for Speaker of the U.S. House (if the Democrats succeed at winning back the House), even though Jeffries has repeatedly voted to fund the genocide in Gaza. 

Mamdani’s endorsement of Genocide Jeffries came a scant two days after Jeffries voted for a resolution vilifying the ideas of socialism.

Mamdani has also shockingly tried to tell us that Donald Trump will be a “partner” in winning affordability demands like free childcare, free buses, and a rent freeze in New York. 

Mamdani has begun to fill his new mayoral administration with Democratic Party establishment insiders and allies of big business. He announced that he will re-appoint Jessica Tisch as NYPD Commissioner — the same arch-Zionist and billionaire heir Jessica Tisch who sent police to violently break up anti-genocide protests at Columbia University and elsewhere. 

He has filled his transition team with top officials from the administrations of Eric Adams, Bill DeBlasio, and even billionaire Michael Bloomberg. 

Among others, Mamdani has appointed Jed Walentas, multimillionaire real estate developer and the heir to the billionaire real estate dynasty of David Walentas. Jed Walentas is CEO of Two Trees Management, a $4 billion real estate corporation, which illegally jacked up rents, overcharging and impoverishing low-income tenants while raking in over $10 million in tax benefits from the city. Tenants were charged at least $368,000 in excess rent. Ten years later, the company had still not paid back all the illegally-charged tenants.

How is a real estate billionaire heir who has illegally gouged working-class and poor renters on any committee of a self-described socialist? What does it even mean to call oneself a socialist of any stripe and invite billionaires to join your team? In contrast, a revolutionary socialist would instead be demanding that Walentas and his company pay back every penny of tax breaks received from the city, and building a movement to tax rapacious developers like Two Trees to pay for a massive expansion of affordable housing.

Jed Walentas bankrolled both Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams against Mamdani in the NYC Mayoral Democratic Party primary. 

Walentas is also chair of the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY). REBNY is New York state’s most powerful real estate lobby group, which viciously opposes renters’ rights laws. Real estate and pro-landlord lobby groups like REBNY spent nearly $14 million over the last five years to block tenant protections in New York. 

As NY tenant advocates said at a protest last year, “The housing affordability crisis has already pushed everyday New Yorkers to the brink. REBNY’s insatiable greed for profits is unconscionable … we won’t allow [NY Governor] Kathy Hochul to continue prioritizing her wealthy friends and donors over the people who make New York the great state it is.”

Mamdani has also appointed Kathryn Wylde from Partnership for New York City. This organization directly and nakedly represents the interests of the billionaires and multimillionaires of Wall Street, such as Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase & Co., Laurence D. Fink of BlackRock, and James Tisch (the billionaire father of Jessica Tisch and CEO of a hotel, oil, and insurance conglomerate). The BlackRock asset management corporation, with $13.5 trillion in assets, manages the wealth of some of the most shamelessly plundering capitalists.

Yet another of Mamdani’s appointees is Margaret Anadu. Anadu used to be a “partner” at Goldman Sachs, which means she drew a salary of nearly a million dollars per year plus bonuses. Goldman Sachs is the largest investment bank in the world and is ranked 55th on the Fortune 500 list of the largest American corporations by total revenue. 

Anadu is currently heading up the real estate department in The Vistria Group, a private equity investment firm of about $16 billion. 

As ProPublica writes about how private equity firms destroy housing affordability and ravage the lives of working-class and poor renters: “Private equity is now the dominant form of financial backing among the 35 largest owners of multifamily buildings… Private equity firms often act like a corporate version of a house flipper: They seek deals on apartment buildings, slash costs or hike rents to boost income, then unload the buildings at a higher price. The influx of private equity comes during a national affordable housing crisis and has dire consequences, tenants and their advocates say. Such firms use economies of scale to more aggressively squeeze profits from their buildings than traditional landlords usually do, tenant advocates say. The firms’ tactics can include sharply increasing rent or fees and neglecting upkeep. Sometimes landlords force out existing tenants and replace them with those who can pay more. The companies’ size allows them to influence market rates and lobby against reforms that could dilute their power. And their goals — quickly hiking a building’s profits so they can sell it at a premium — are often at odds with those of the tenants who need to live in them.”

It is truly shocking to see a self-described socialist elected official teaming up with billionaires, multimillionaires, and their representatives. People like Jessica Tisch, Jed Walentas, Kathryn Wylde, and Margaret Anadu are not whom you ally with if your goal is to win for working people and renters.

3. Kshama built movements of tens of thousands of workers, renters, and oppressed people to fight for and win historic victories.

She organized mass rallies, marches, neighborhood action groups, and democratic action conferences for the movement to debate and decide on strategy. She mobilized working people to pack City Hall to fight against real estate and corporate landlord lobby groups and expose the lies of corporate politicians, and made clear that if City Council Democrats didn’t vote in the interests of working people, we would organize to throw them out of office. She led ballot initiative campaigns that collected tens of thousands of signatures, to use as a credible threat if Democrats didn’t act. In short: she did everything possible to change the balance of power, and forced the Democratic Party politicians to act. 

On this basis, Kshama won unprecedented renters’ rights such as:

• The first-in-the-nation ban on winter evictions
• The nation’s strongest ban on school-year evictions for children, families, and educators
• A $10/month cap on late rent fees
• Six months’ notice on rent increases
• Capping move-in fees at no more than two months’ rent (including security deposit)
• Allowing tenants to pay security deposit and last month’s rent on a payment plan
• Banning rent increases in buildings with code violations (AKA the “Carl Haglund Law,” named after a notorious corporate landlord)
• Economic evictions assistance for renters: forcing landlords to pay tenants three months’ rent if they raise the rent by 10 percent or more
• Ending predatory junk fees by landlords, like exploitative “notice fees”
• Extending the pandemic eviction moratorium
• Ending the “just cause” evictions loophole, so landlords need justification for refusing to renew a lease
• The right to legal counsel for all renters facing eviction
• Funding for the first public evictions defense attorney in the city’s history
• Requiring landlords to provide voter registration information to new tenants
• Stopping the disastrous “Stepping Forward” attack on public housing, which would have resulted in a 400% rent increase for 4,600 tenants
• Taxing big business to fund hundreds of millions of dollars for affordable housing through our historic Amazon Tax victory, and our annual People’s Budget campaign

Sadly, many DSA leaders believe in the false dichotomy that one can no longer be an “activist” once elected, and one needs to “govern” instead. In reality, “governing” is code for making peace with the establishment and with capitalism, which means selling out. It is only by waging class war BACK on the billionaires that workers are going to win. 

In the name of governing, we are seeing these “socialist” elected officials welcoming billionaires and their representatives into their cabinets. Not doing this is possibly the LOWEST BAR to fulfill in order to call yourself a socialist, yet we are seeing self-described socialist elected officials falling below even that standard. 

Kshama set the standard for what socialist leaders ought to do. Longtime corporate landlord lobbyist Jamie Durkan once said every dollar that corporate landlords had spent over the last decade lobbying the Seattle City Council was wasted because of “Sawant’s army,” by which he meant the rank-and-file renters Kshama and her fellow socialists mobilized to win victories. Such statements from the spokespeople of the ruling class acknowledge that the Democrats in Seattle City Hall were forced to concede to Kshama and working people when they got organized to change the balance of power away from corporate interests. 

Progressive media outlet Mother Jones wrote an article in December 2019, titled “Heroes of the 2010s: Kshama Sawant, the Socialist Who Beat Amazon.” In it, they said, “Sawant isn’t a 2010s hero strictly for wage hikes or tenants’ rights. It’s also HOW she secured those victories—by breaking rules, by embracing confrontation, by picking an “unrealistic” goal and building on it, dragging Seattle’s Democrats around by the nose. Who thought one lonely Trotskyist could so upend, in so little time, the American consensus on a fair wage?”

Of course, far from being lonely, Kshama’s organizing was rooted in the mass solidarity of working people.

Kshama is a rank-and-file member of the Democratic Socialists of America, as well as a co-founder of Workers Strike Back and Revolutionary Workers.

Many of DSA’s 80,000 rank-and-file members want to see the organization’s leaders take a fighting approach. They are furious at the sellouts by Democratic Party politicians, including some of their own members once elected to office, and want more leaders like Kshama. They don’t want to see more socialists in name only, who melt into the Democratic Party blob once elected.

Whether you are a member of Workers Strike Back, the Democratic Socialists of America, another socialist organization, or not part of any organization at all, we need you to join us!