The Most Dangerous Woman
in America
By Chris Hedges
March 16, 2015 "ICH"
- "Truthdig"
- SEATTLE—Kshama Sawant, the socialist on
the City Council, is up for re-election this
year. Since joining the council in January
of 2014 she has helped push through a
gradual raising of the minimum wage to $15
an hour in Seattle. She has expanded funding
for social services and blocked, along with
housing advocates, an attempt by the Seattle
Housing Authority to allow a rent increase
of up to 400 percent. She has successfully
lobbied for city money to support tent
encampments and is fighting for an excise
tax on millionaires. And for this she has
become the bête noire of the Establishment,
especially the Democratic Party.
The corporate powers, from
Seattle’s mayor to the Chamber of Commerce
and the area’s Democratic Party, are
determined she be defeated, and these local
corporate elites have the national elites
behind them. This will be one of the most
important elections in the country this
year. It will pit a socialist, who refuses
all corporate donations—not that she would
get many—and who has fearlessly championed
the rights of workingmen and workingwomen,
rights that are being eviscerated by the
corporate machine. The elites cannot let the
Sawants of the world proliferate. Corporate
power is throwing everything at its
disposal—including sponsorship of a rival
woman candidate of color—into this election
in the city’s 3rd District.
Sawant’s fight is our
own.
I met Sawant in a
restaurant a block from City Hall in
Seattle. She is as intense as she is
articulate. Sawant, born in India, is a
leader of the
Socialist Alternative Party. She holds a
doctorate in economics from North Carolina
State University and before her election to
the City Council was a professor at a
community college. She knows that there will
be no genuine reforms, let alone systemic
change, without the building of radical mass
movements and a viable third party. She is
as familiar at Seattle street
demonstrations, where she has been arrested,
as she is in City Council hearings. If there
is any hope left for the absurdist political
theater that characterizes election
campaigns it is in renegades such as Sawant.
“The idea that things have
to get a lot worse to have some sort of
awakening and bring about an alternative to
this corrupt and defunct corporate political
system is inaccurate,” she said to me. “What
we need is a big surge for an independent
working-class political alternative while
people are experiencing a sense of
confidence, after decades of bitter defeat.
The
$15-an-hour victory in Seattle is going
nationwide. And while unions are under
massive attack,
as you see in Wisconsin with Scott
Walker, there are also successful labor
initiatives getting onto the ballot. Four
states—two of them Republican states—increased
the minimum wage last year. Occupy and
the Black Lives Matter movement have
radically shaken U.S. consciousness. Now is
the time for us to strike.”
Sawant said it is
incumbent upon socialists and the entire
U.S. left to swiftly begin the task of
building working-class political campaigns
independent of the Democratic Party in order
to create the space for a viable national
party. Efforts to reform the Democratic
Party, whose leaders are in the service of
the corporate oligarchy, amount to pouring
energy into “a black hole,” she said. The
Democratic elite dominate Seattle
government, and the Democratic elite, as
they did with Ralph Nader, have declared war
against Sawant. As long as she remains in
office she will expose the leaders in the
Democratic Party for who they are—corporate
puppets.
Sawant believes that
because of the presidency of Barack
Obama—who has served corporate power,
expanded imperial wars, carried out a
massive assault on civil liberties and
failed to address the needs of the mounting
numbers who are unemployed or
underemployed—many people, especially young
people, are hungry for political
alternatives to “the two big business
parties.” Poll after poll, she pointed out,
shows the American majority to be disgusted
with the Congress. And she cited the
problems of Chicago Democratic Mayor Rahm
Emanuel in
seeking re-election as evidence that
even the very beginnings of movements by
working people and communities of color can
shake and weaken the Democratic Party
establishment. “He was considered
undefeatable,” she said of Emanuel. “But
look now at his vulnerability. Look at the
campaign ad he just put out saying, yes, I
made mistakes, but I am a human being. Who
could have imagined that kind of false
humility from him? Even spending $15 million
on a mayoral race and having President Obama
come and campaign wasn’t enough to buy him
an easy victory. This demonstrates the wide
opening for the U.S. left to present a
principled working-class alternative. This
is why we need to begin that project now. It
won’t be easy. But this moment is
qualitatively different from the period when
Ralph Nader ran. The consciousness of the
American people has changed. Uprising is in
the air.”
Sawant emphasized that the
process of building a radical alternative
will be long and difficult. The obstacles
the Establishment will throw up to prevent
such a movement will be numerous, costly and
unscrupulous.
“We cannot have
illusions,” Sawant said. “We want to win.
But we also know that in one year we are not
going to vanquish the money machine of the
Democratic establishment. The goal of this
campaign should be to launch a massive
grass-roots effort nationwide, and to build
on it after the election, something that
Ralph Nader failed to do. We have to provide
a place for people looking for something
different, especially the younger
generation. Any presidential campaign cannot
be run as an end in itself. That will
dishearten people. People know what is going
to happen in 2016. It is going to be Hillary
Clinton or some Republican. Our campaign
needs to be a launching pad for something
bigger. It needs to be about building a mass
movement, a viable radical alternative. This
is what is happening in Greece and Spain.”
Sawant proposed that the
left prepare the ground for a new party that
will be “broad-based, organized around
democratic principles and have as its
fundamental goal the mission of working with
the labor movement, nonunionized workers and
young activists of color.”
“It has to be 100 percent
grass roots,” she said. It must be willing
to “use the platform of the presidential
campaign and other electoral campaigns to
push the message of mass movements.” And,
she stressed, it must never accept corporate
money. This last condition, she said, “has
to be non-negotiable.” The party, she added,
“must not bow down to the pressure to
endorse Democratic candidates against
Republicans, which would completely
undermine its independence and ultimately
relegate it to the role of an enforcer for
the Democrats, as the
Working Families Party has become.”
Might there be a role for
the Green Party in such a change? Sawant
offered this assessment:
The Green Party and
its activists need to be part of the
effort towards a nationwide party for
the working class.
The Green Party has
made some important contributions to the
struggle against the Democrats’
lesser-evil politics. It has raised
demands in the interests of workers,
against corporate domination, against
the war, and against climate change. One
outstanding example is
Gayle McLaughlin, who as Green Party
mayor of the California city of
Richmond, invited the fury of Wall
Street banks with her valiant fight on
behalf of ‘underwater’ homeowners.
But the party for the
left, for the American working class,
needs to go beyond the electoral arena
and lead struggles and movements of
low-wage workers, people of color and
women. The Green Party has not often
sought to do that. The problem is that
if a party does not do that, it leaves
the various social movements open to
misleaders who channel the energy back
towards the Democratic Party.
“In Socialist
Alternative,” Sawant said, “any elected
representative who runs has to pledge to
only take the average worker’s wage. The
City Council pays me nearly $120,000. I take
home $40,000 after taxes. The rest goes into
a solidarity fund. This idea should also be
taken up in some form by the new party.”
“A campaign cannot be an
end in itself,” she said. “If you take
office you have to be accountable to the
members of the party. You have to have
actual meetings. People say they are
Democrats, but when was the last time they
were invited to a meeting and asked to vote
on the policies to be taken up by the
Democratic Party? The Democratic Party is
utterly undemocratic—the party members and
activists have essentially zero say over
what their elected officials do once in
power.”
A new party, she said, is
essential if the corporate coup is to be
reversed. And it needs to be formed soon.
“While young radicals
correctly see the need for mass action, some
have not yet made the vital link between
mass movements and the need for alternative
political structures,” she said. “We cannot
get rid of capitalism without building a
mass political organization as a tool to do
that.”
“If a genuine alternative
is not built,” Sawant said, “the Democratic
establishment will continue to co-opt
generation after generation of young people
who are concerned about the need to fight
the Republicans. Even the most radical
youths end up implicitly defending
capitalism when they accept the parameters
of lesser evilism, as so many did with
supporting Obama in 2008 and 2012.”
She contends that the end
of the Cold War has left younger generations
freer to explore and hear radical
alternatives.
“Something important has
changed,” she said. “The hostility to
socialist ideas is not present now because
we have a majority of young Americans who
are experiencing the deep failures of
capitalism. Red-baiting does not work on
them. As a socialist, I have never
experienced any hostility, except from the
Establishment. This does not necessarily
mean all those people who support us are
socialist. But it means people are
infuriated about income inequality, about
the pillaging by the big banks. They are
burning at the entrenched racial injustice
in America. They want a solution to climate
change. They are looking for something
radically different.”
The call for a national
party is, in the end, a call to educate. It
is a call to put forth a program that offers
an alternative to global capitalism. And it
is a call to empower the citizenry to break
the corporate stranglehold to make this
alternative possible.
“We must convince people
that we need an alternative and we must
convince them about what that alternative
is,” Sawant said. “We need to stand up for
the hundreds of millions of lives devastated
by global capitalism. The abuses we saw in
2008 will happen over and over again as long
as capitalism survives. And it is our job to
break the cycle of capitalist exploitation
of people and the ecosystem and save
ourselves. This will only come about if we
organize mass movements, if we build a
radical political party and if we refuse to
accept a system designed to subject the
immense majority to misery so that a
minority can pile up untold wealth.”
Chris Hedges previously
spent nearly two decades as a foreign
correspondent in Central America, the Middle
East, Africa and the Balkans. He has
reported from more than 50 countries and has
worked for The Christian Science Monitor,
National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning
News and The New York Times, for which he
was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.