Kshama Sawant

Trump and Netanyahu carried out a massive joint military attack on Iran last night. This is a horrific escalation that once again threatens to engulf the entire Middle East in a disastrous and protracted war. 

Our campaign completely opposes and condemns this bipartisan assault on Iran by U.S. imperialism. Conflict with Iran has been provoked for decades by both the Republicans and Democrats, including my opponent, warmongering Democratic Congressmember Adam Smith, who has also supported the genocide in Gaza. Both parties have carried out decades of devastating sanctions on Iranian working and poor people.  

We stand with the working and oppressed people of Iran, in the Middle East region, and everywhere. We need a global antiwar movement and independent struggle, including general strikes, of the American, Iranian, and international working class in order to defeat U.S. and Western imperialism and to bring down capitalism and its ruling classes everywhere. 

As living standards and conditions for working people everywhere are declining, hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent on these bloody conflicts. Millions of working people will be badly impacted, especially if there is a drawn-out war. We need political and labor leadership that will organize against imperialist war and unambiguously fight for working people. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of American labor leadership is tied to the Democratic Party, and has failed to carry out strike actions against Trump’s ICE terror and the repeated bipartisan attacks on working people. 

Our campaign will be organizing nationally against the war on Iran. We will be fighting alongside Workers Strike Back, the organization I helped launch to build on the fighting strategy we used to win historic working-class victories in Seattle through my socialist City Council office.

We oppose the Republican and Democratic parties of U.S. imperialism that have built the war machine and spread violence across the world. Both support this brutal attack on Iran. Trump’s attempts at “regime change” in Iran are really about wanting to install a government loyal to U.S. imperialism, a goal shared by the Democratic Party. The 1953-1979 despotic regime of the Shah of Iran was also strongly supported by both parties. 

At the same time, we completely oppose the right-wing, Islamist, anti-worker Iranian regime, which has just carried out a horrific crackdown of the historic protest movement there, and massacred thousands of Iranian working people at the protests. Neither U.S. imperialism nor the Iranian ruling class in any way stand for the interests of working and oppressed people, and we cannot support either. We need a global working-class antiwar movement and mass strike actions by the labor movement.

We need to fight for an alternative to capitalism’s future of war and catastrophe. The fight against capitalism must include independent revolutionary socialist campaigns, like our Congressional campaign this year, that can present a real threat to both parties of U.S. capitalism. 

• Stop the war on Iran, the genocide in Gaza, and all U.S. military funding to Israel! NO support for imperialist war! 
• Money for housing and healthcare, not war! Build a global antiwar movement, including mass protests, civil disobedience, and general strikes.
• Shut down ICE and the detention centers, and stop the deportations!