Is the taboo against socialism in the U.S. ending? What is the significance of the left-wing Democratic primary insurgency? Kshama Sawant on CN Live! With TRANSCRIPT.
Guest: Kshama Sawant. Host: Joe Lauria. Producer: Cathy Vogan.
Both the U.S. Democratic and Republican establishments are reacting strongly to a string of primary victories in New York, Colorado and elsewhere by leftwing insurgents in the Democratic Party.
The Democrats have ignored working Americans ever since Bill Clinton moved the party to the center-right thirty years ago. Both the Democrats and Republicans have backed aggressive U.S. foreign policy including supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Now American voters are saying, enough.
Some commentators think we are witnessing a political earthquake, a rebellion by a managed population against the established order. But are we really experiencing such an historic uprising? Can the taboo against socialism in the U.S. really be breached?
Kshama Sawant, a former member of the Seattle city council, who is running to represent Washington State’s 9th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives, is our guest.
TRANSCRIPT
This is not a verbatim transcript but a condensed version produced by AI that gives the essence of what was discussed. For full details of the discussion, please watch the video.
JOE LAURIA: Welcome to Season Eight, Episode 18 of Seeing Live Socialism in America. I’m Joe Lauria, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News. Both the U.S. Democratic and Republican establishments are reacting strongly to a string of primary victories in New York, Colorado, and elsewhere by left-wing insurgents in the Democratic Party. The Democrats have ignored working Americans ever since Bill Clinton moved the party to the center-right 30 years ago.Both the Democrats and Republicans have backed aggressive U.S. foreign policy, including supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Now American voters are saying “enough.” Some commentators think we are witnessing a political earthquake and a rebellion by a managed population against the established order. But are we really experiencing such a historic uprising? To discuss this question, we welcome Kshama Sawant, a former member of the Seattle City Council who is running to represent Washington’s Ninth Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives.
JOE LAURIA: Kshama, thank you very much for joining CN Live!
KSHAMA SAWANT: Thank you so much for having me.
JOE LAURIA: There’s a lot going on here that is eliciting shock, surprise, ire, and alarm from both the Republican and Democratic establishments. It’s not only in New York but in other parts of the country. There is a movement of non-centrist, non-corporate Democrats that are bubbling up. While they were written off before, Zohran Mamdani’s defeat of the Zionist lobby showed — as you pointed out in your interview with Chris Hedges a few months ago — that it is possible to defeat the Zionist lobby. He proved that. Now these three new Democratic primaries for the House that he backed just last week, and we have elections in Colorado, and of course in Maine.
KSHAMA SAWANT: I’m one of these so-called socialists.
JOE LAURIA: That’s what I want to talk to you about. First, there have been these alarms before, and it never seems to pan out. Is there a real change underway now? Is there a real threat to the establishment? The Republicans, by the way, are happy about it — some of them — because they think that’s going to make it easier to defeat the Democrats if these socialists get in. That’s old Cold War, McCarthyite thinking that persists: that there’s no way the American people would ever vote in a general election for these candidates. What is happening in your view right now? Is this a legitimate political earthquake in the United States, or is it too early to tell?
KSHAMA SAWANT: I think there are a couple of parameters you have to look at. One of them is mass consciousness. If you’re talking about what tens of millions of working people, especially young working people, are feeling, then yes, this is a political earthquake in the sense that most working people in America are fed up and angry with the status quo. They’re absolutely infuriated with both the Democratic and Republican parties, and they’re also angry at Trump.You can see this whole story playing out in approval ratings. Trump’s approval rating is at an all-time low, but so is the approval rating of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
It’s ironic that in the age of Trump, the Democratic Party has a few percentage points lower approval rating than the Republican Party.All of the establishment, all of the ruling class and their politics and institutions, are what ordinary working people are angry about. One of the big indicators of this is the question of Israel and the brutal occupation. Never before in the nearly 80-year history of Israel has there been a situation where the majority of the American working class is opposed to Israel and right now opposed to genocide. There’s huge support for ending military aid to Israel.Alongside that, there is anger at the cost-of-living crisis. If you look at what happened in the 2024 election, nearly 19 million people — Democratic voters who had voted for Biden in 2020 — refused to vote at all.
It’s not that they voted for Trump; they just did not vote because they were angry at the Democratic Party for the cost-of-living crisis and for being perpetrators of the genocide in Gaza. All of the wars in the Middle East are bipartisan wars.If you look at the consciousness of the working class, absolutely, this is an earth-shattering shift that is taking place. But if you look at how this consciousness translates into actual results — ending military aid to Israel, ending the genocide, ending the wars in the Middle East, winning universal public healthcare, winning a $25-an-hour national minimum wage — then it is important to note that none of that is possible unless we build independent mass movements and independent representatives.
By independent, I mean independent of the Democratic and Republican parties, because at the end of the day the differences between them are mostly political theater. They are both representatives of the billionaire class, of the capitalist class, and they want people to be straitjacketed between these two parties. That strategy of simply staying within the Democratic and Republican parties is a dead end.On the one hand, yes, there are absolutely huge, unprecedented shifts happening. But in order for the working class to actually make huge gains, we will need independent politics. That is why I am running as an independent for the U.S. Congress against genocidal Democrat Adam Smith.
JOE LAURIA: We thought maybe this was happening with the Bernie Sanders “revolution” in 2016. He took everybody by surprise in the Democratic Party, including Hillary Clinton, and there was this enormous outpouring of support for him. Then, of course, we know they tampered with the election, as WikiLeaks helped us understand, and he didn’t get the nomination. Where did that go? Is this the same movement on steroids now? Is it basically the same thing we saw ten years ago, but a lot stronger and more credible?
KSHAMA SAWANT: As far as consciousness is concerned — what working people actually want — yes, it is even stronger than what we saw ten years ago. Those were some of the first glimpses of the American working class waking up and demanding something different. The support Bernie Sanders got for his message of a political revolution against the billionaire class, and the concrete demands he ran on in 2016 — universal public healthcare, taxing Wall Street, making universities free, and a $15-an-hour minimum wage — were massively popular across all states.
It wasn’t a red-blue state divide; it was a working-class-versus-billionaire-class divide. That shifting consciousness was also reflected in my own election in 2013, three years before Bernie ran. I ran for the Seattle City Council as an independent socialist, independent of the Democratic and Republican parties. I ran on a $15-an-hour minimum wage as our flagship demand, along with taxing the rich, rent control, and renters’ rights. These demands were hugely popular. Our campaign and the $15 demand took Seattle’s working class by storm, and I was able to win that election despite all the obstacles stacked against us by the most powerful Democrat in the city at the time, Richard Conlin.
We used that momentum to win the $15 minimum wage the next year in 2014.But here is the main story, Joe. With just one socialist in elected office, we were able — as The Seattle Times said — to commandeer the city’s political agenda and win $15 an hour at lightning speed. Meanwhile, the national minimum wage is still stuck at a disgraceful $7.25 an hour, and the tipped minimum wage is $2.13. In Seattle, we not only won $15 but also fought for and won inflation adjustments. We had to fight like hell against Democratic council members who tried to create every possible loophole for billionaires. Because we won that battle, Seattle’s minimum wage is now the nation’s highest at $21.30 an hour.
The $15 movement we built in Seattle using my office transferred nationwide. Tens of millions of American workers won substantive minimum-wage increases that have been a lifeline as they are pummeled by the cost of living.The main difference between our strategy and the strategy of Bernie Sanders, AOC, and others is that their strategy is to capitulate to the Democratic Party establishment.
Bernie endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016, then Joe Biden, then Kamala Harris without attaching any conditions. We cannot keep faith that someday the Democratic Party will become a party of the working class. It has never been a party of the working class. It was the party of slavery, then Jim Crow, and it has always been a party of the capitalist class — as is the Republican Party. We cannot have faith in any parties of the billionaire class.
We need a party of our own.That is why I am running as an independent for Congress. My campaign is calling for an end to all military aid to Israel, free healthcare for all funded by taxing the rich, and a $25-an-hour minimum wage. The only way we can win any of these demands is by building mass movements, and that is what I intend to do: use my office, if elected, to build those mass movements.
JOE LAURIA: You are quite right about the history of the Democratic Party. However, in the postwar era, or even during FDR, the New Deal was a way to stop a burgeoning left-wing, even communist, movement. It preserved capitalism but made important social-democratic changes.
The party of FDR became the party of Bill Clinton in the 1990s when they moved to the center-right and adopted neoliberal policies to destroy what remained of the New Deal. Bernie Sanders was trying to revive that old FDR New Deal, and he failed so far. In 2016, perhaps his biggest mistake — as you pointed out — was endorsing Hillary Clinton.
After losing to Donald Trump, if that wasn’t a wake-up call for the Democratic Party to return to its New Deal roots, nothing was. Donald Trump said one interesting thing in that election: he definitely wanted to run against Hillary rather than Bernie because they were both going after the same voter. That tells me there is a kind of bipartisan consensus in the working class now — that the left-right, Democrat-Republican divide doesn’t matter as much anymore, and they want leaders who will address their issues.
KSHAMA SAWANT: I think these issues can only be assessed accurately through a class analysis. Working-class people across red and blue states are angry at both parties. In that sense, yes, there is agreement. They may not agree on every issue, but they absolutely agree on the big issues of the day: ending the war and the genocide in Gaza, the need for free healthcare, and the need to tax Wall Street billionaires so we can fund healthcare, education, infrastructure, and housing.There is huge agreement on these issues among working-class and poor people.
We don’t have that agreement with the ruling class, and that is why it is crucial to make that class distinction.Look at the evidence: in the 2016 Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders won all 55 counties in West Virginia against Hillary Clinton. But because he refused to run as an independent, Trump won all those counties in November. Working-class people are winnable on a working-class program. What we need is leadership to build solidarity among working people on a class basis, not unity with the ruling class.The wake-up call is for the working class: we need independent leadership.
Opinion polls show 63 percent of working people, especially younger people, say we need a new party.The New Deal was won because of the threat of actual revolution against capitalism, propelled by militant strikes like the 1934 Teamsters general strike in Minneapolis led by Marxists. That is the kind of militant uprising we need to revive.
JOE LAURIA: Exactly. There was a real serious socialist movement then, and unionized workers could pull off that 1934 strike. That doesn’t exist now, does it? How could the U.S. become a country that looked like that in the 1930s again? Do you need a depression to do that?
KSHAMA SAWANT: Things are already really bad for the American working class, and they are likely to get worse with a massive recession coming. Recessions are common under capitalism. Revolutionary upheaval did not happen immediately after the Great Depression; there was a period of stunning effect, then people organized. The same happened after the 2008 Great Recession, leading to Occupy in 2011.
Working people are angry right now. The lack of willingness to fight back is not the problem. What is stopping progress is the lack of leadership.The stumbling block is the labor movement’s leadership. For the last 40 years, business unionism — making peace with the capitalist system, the bosses, and the parties of the bosses — has maintained a stranglehold on militancy.In Seattle, we won victories like the nation’s highest minimum wage and the Amazon tax by building independent movements using my elected office. That required battling not only billionaires but also gatekeepers in the movement — progressive Democrats and business-unionist labor leaders.
When we campaigned for $15 in 2013, many labor leaders told me not to. But the rank and file loved it. That is how we won. AOC is a classic example of a gatekeeper. She just endorsed Hakeem Jeffries, a genocidal Democrat, for Speaker. That is the kind of gatekeeping we have to fight against. The victories in Seattle came only because we had the clarity to defeat the gatekeepers.
JOE LAURIA: What is your strategy for a nationwide revival of the labor movement? It is nothing like it was years ago when CEOs made only four times what shop-floor workers made; now it’s hundreds of times more.
KSHAMA SAWANT: Without rebuilding a militant labor movement, we are not changing the course of history. We are in a national and international emergency — forever wars, inequality, climate catastrophe. Nothing shifts unless masses of people move into action, and that requires leadership.Elections are not the only route, but they are a crucial one. In Seattle we built mass movements and won unparalleled victories against billionaires and the Democratic Party with one elected office. The point of getting elected was not to administer capitalism but to go to war against the capitalist state.
If elected to Congress, I will turn my inauguration into a mass rally of 10,000 people in Washington, D.C., and immediately launch mass campaigns to end all military aid to Israel and win free healthcare for all funded by taxing the rich. That will create the opening for hundreds of thousands or millions of working people to join the action and put pressure on labor leaders. My election will be a referendum on ending military aid to Israel and winning free healthcare. I have no intention of supporting any genocidal Democrat for any position.
JOE LAURIA: I think Jeffries would be your biggest enemy if you made it there. But couldn’t you work on AOC to actually become what she says she is?
KSHAMA SAWANT: If AOC wakes up tomorrow and declares she will not support Hakeem Jeffries or anyone who voted to fund the genocide, she will be an overnight hero. But we haven’t seen that. I welcome anyone willing to fight alongside me on these issues, but I will not bend or sell out to the Democratic establishment. AOC herself admitted she can’t really go against the Democratic establishment because it causes “reputational and relational harm.” They will come after you whether you are inside or outside the party. That is why I am independent. The Democratic Party is absolutely spooked right now by these primaries, but their efforts will be to co-opt anyone who joins them. Those getting elected on working-class, anti-war, pro-Palestinian messages will be put to the test. The primary is on August 4th. It’s a jungle primary — everyone in the same primary, top two go to the general.
JOE LAURIA: Let me ask you about definitions of socialism. The corporate press has muddied the word. There are different types — from the Khmer Rouge to Stalinism to social democracy in postwar Europe. Where do you put yourself? What does socialism mean to you?
KSHAMA SAWANT: As a Marxist, I strongly support all the reforms won in Scandinavia, Western Europe, and Canada — public healthcare, education, transit. But those are reforms under capitalism. Socialism, to me, is a system where the commanding heights of the economy — the big corporations — are owned democratically by workers. You cannot have billionaires and multi-millionaires alongside that. Socialism means delivering a high standard of living for all working people on the planet and a sustainable planet. That is only possible by taking the vast majority of the economy into democratic public ownership.
Capitalism is a zero-sum game. The misery for billions exists because the vast majority of the fruits of our labor are stolen as profit for the capitalist class. To provide a high standard of living for everyone, we must wrest that wealth. This includes nationalizing insurance companies to end profiteering in healthcare, big banks, and fossil fuel companies so we can retool them for clean renewable energy. Some companies need to be run into the ground. This vision is not achievable under capitalism. It will require revolutionary movements to overthrow capitalism and place the economy under democratic public ownership run in the interests of humanity and the planet.
For new generations, capitalism is the dirty word, not socialism. The missing piece is not support for socialist ideas — it is the leadership and clarity to fight and defeat the gatekeepers.
JOE LAURIA: You’re talking about nationalization or municipalization — government running these companies?
KSHAMA SAWANT: I mean democratic public ownership by workers. Under capitalism, the government serves the capitalist class. Socialism means a system without class differentiations where everyone gets a decent life. We are talking about high-quality housing, safe neighborhoods, high-quality public transit, clean energy, free healthcare (including mental health and gender-affirming care), and an explosion of creativity and science because resources will be controlled by working people. Capitalism is a barrier to a decent standard of living. That is why I am a Marxist.
JOE LAURIA: Would you agree with the term “mixed economy” — publicly owned corporations as well as some private industry? Or are you totally against any kind of free market?
KSHAMA SAWANT: The generation at that point will need to discuss details. Right now the most important thing is to take the big corporations — Amazon, fossil fuels, big banks, hospitals — into public ownership. Free healthcare requires eliminating insurance and profits entirely from healthcare. Winning any of this will take an almighty clash against the billionaire class. Capitalism is class war. We need to fight back with class war from below.
JOE LAURIA: I remember Mitterand in France nationalizing the banks. It was not that long ago. Can you imagine Wall Street being nationalized? Given how violent a society the U.S. is, with more guns than people, is this transformation possible peacefully?
KSHAMA SAWANT: The perpetrators of violence under capitalism are the capitalist class and the state that rules on their behalf. They have used violence against worker uprisings repeatedly. The starting point for winning victories is to build maximum political agreement among working-class people and mobilize the largest possible numbers into action. Huge victories were won in the 1970s under Nixon because of massive street movements and strikes. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was largely peaceful because of overwhelming working-class support; most violence came later from foreign intervention. We need movements so powerful they are unstoppable.
JOE LAURIA: Since you were born in India and came as an outsider, you have a perspective many Americans don’t because of indoctrination. Many Americans struggle to see the U.S. as the aggressor in the world, not always the good guys, and that Israel is an aggressor. With the incredible change of attitude toward Palestine reflected in polls, is there an awakening that U.S. foreign policy is fundamentally wrong and must change?
KSHAMA SAWANT: There is absolutely no question. For the first time in nearly 80 years, we are seeing a dramatic shift in public opinion. My opponent Adam Smith has received half a million dollars from pro-Zionist, pro-genocide PACs. He has called anti-war activists “left-wing fascists” and demanded they be arrested. People understand that without U.S. funding and political protection, the genocide and occupation would not be possible. This is rooted in capitalism and imperialism.
Israel was created as a garrison state, a weapon for Western imperialism. American people are going through a never-before-seen awakening. More and more understand there is no defensive part of the Israeli military apparatus; its very existence is to perpetrate violence in the region. There is potential for working-class solidarity across borders. We need general strikes, including port workers refusing to ship weapons. If elected, I intend to disrupt business as usual in Congress to build the kind of anti-war movement that ends military aid to Israel. The election is on August 4th. There’s a Republican, another Democrat, and me in this jungle primary. We need to be one of the top two to face Adam Smith in November.
JOE LAURIA: I want to make it clear that Consortium News does not endorse candidates. We have reached out to Adam Smith and the others for interviews. Finally, on Ukraine: the corporate media presents the story as if it begins with the Russian invasion. What is the role of corporate media in denying historical context for both Palestine and Ukraine?
KSHAMA SAWANT: Corporate media is on the side of the capitalist class. In Gaza they demonize Palestinians and present Israel’s actions as a just war. That narrative is failing.Clarity is also building on Ukraine: these are wars of the billionaires. Ordinary people on neither side gain. My campaign demands slashing the military budget and using those hundreds of billions — or the trillion Adam Smith wants — for housing, healthcare, education, and infrastructure. The war in Ukraine is an inter-imperialist proxy war. I do not support Russian imperialism any more than U.S. imperialism. We need a global anti-war and workers’ movement.
JOE LAURIA: On India and the decline of the Communist parties there — what happened?
KSHAMA SAWANT: This is a cautionary tale. Parties called “communist” joined the neoliberal agenda of the ruling class. It’s not that they were never genuine, but unless the rank and file fight for the correct strategy, breakthroughs are impossible. The same problem exists in the U.S.: absence of genuine fighting leadership. The downfall of supposedly communist parties in India is because they stopped fighting for the working class.
JOE LAURIA: Kshama Sawant, thank you very much for giving us nearly two hours of your time tonight. Thanks again for joining us.
KSHAMA SAWANT: Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation.
JOE LAURIA: That’s our show for tonight. We thank our guest Kshama Sawant, our producer Cathy Vogan, and our audience for watching. Please subscribe to this channel and donate during our summer fund drive by going to consortiumnews.com and hitting the red donate button. For CN Live!, this is Joe Lauria saying goodbye.
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‘We are in a national and international emergency — forever wars, inequality, climate catastrophe. Nothing shifts unless masses of people move into action, and that requires leadership.’
Former Democrat Debs was clear: ‘I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition; as it is now the capitalists use your heads and your hands’ (1908).
A I Iterate how the republic was captured by corporate legal jargon?
The transformation of the American republic into a system heavily influenced by corporate legal jargon happened through a process called corporate personhood, where courts gradually granted A business entities the same constitutional rights as living human citizens.
This did not happen overnight. It was a slow shift over two centuries where lawyers used clever language to turn rules meant to protect human beings into shields for big businesses.
Deport them from whence they came. :-\
What I Q would you give the democratic party how effectively it serves the working class, a realistic Social IQ score for the Democratic Party would be an 85 (Below Average).
What I Q would you give the democratic party how effectively it serves themselves while its Cognitive IQ score would be a 115 (Above Average).
Democratic party basically “intellectually disabled” regarding serving the working class.
At last, a major Solidarity leader telling the truth about the scabs running Labor!
Thank you!
I love Kshama Sawant! Finally, a person with strong ethics to represent the working class. I’m in her district and will vote for her. Yes!
Socialism in the US? Never! Said Fran Lebowitz in an earlier interview. I’m paraphrasing -she said socialism is for kind people, generous people who want to insure no child goes hungry, that people have health insurance, that people have proper housing, etc. Not in this country, she said. And I agree.