This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.
Zohran Mamdani’s emphatic victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary has shaken the core of American politics. A self-described democratic socialist, Mamdani ran a campaign centered around affordability as well as relentless denunciation of the genocide in Gaza. Mamdani drew the ire of Zionists, right-wingers and the billionaire class not only in New York City but across the country, including calls for his deportation by Congressman Andy Ogles and subsequent slander by President Donald Trump.
Former Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant, who is now running for Washington state’s 9th congressional district, weighs in on her fellow democratic socialist’s journey on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report.
Sawant has been a standout figure for working class representation, winning a $15 an hour minimum wage in Seattle during her city council tenure as well as the Amazon Tax, which helped fund affordable housing. She says Mamdani’s victory should be celebrated, especially because it shows the Zionist lobby can be defeated not just in the U.S. but in a state home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.
Despite this encouraging repudiation of the billionaire class in the wealthiest city in America, Sawant emphasizes the need to continue the fight and make sure Mamdani sticks to his original promises.
“If you don’t understand that careerism is one of the death knells of winning anything substantial for the working class, then you will sell out even with those good intentions because you will make it about yourself and you will immediately get the memo that in order to fight for working people, you will need to be in battle mode every single day when you enter City Hall,” she says.
Mamdani’s alignment with the Democratic Party is concerning, according to Sawant, pointing to a pattern in which groundbreaking campaigns, like those of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, have fallen short of delivering promises for working class people once in office.
“At the end of the day, the Democratic Party is a party of capitalism itself,” Sawant asserts. “The working class loses out more and more and is subjected to more and more misery with every passing decade that you’re not going to stand up for working people.”
So far, Mamdani’s campaign has made strides to inspire the American working class. “It’s a real boost of confidence for working class people nationally to see that yes, working people will fight alongside you if you put forward demands that make a huge difference in their lives and which reflect their anger, their just anger at the Wall Street billionaires,” Sawant says.
Host
Chris Hedges
Producer:
Max Jones
Intro:
Diego Ramos
Crew:
Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges
Transcript:
Diego Ramos
Transcript
Chris Hedges
Hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman, enraged by Zohran Mamdani’s securing an overwhelming majority to become the Democratic Party’s nominee to run for mayor of New York City, said he and his wealthy associates will pour “hundreds of millions of dollars” into the candidacy of anyone willing to run against Mamdani in the general election. Ackman, who supports Donald Trump, added that he has an unnamed candidate he is ready to bankroll.
Major Democratic donors — who poured tens of millions of dollars into a Super PAC to support former governor Andrew Cuomo in his run for mayor — are also meeting to decide if they will fund an independent run by Cuomo in November, or back the unpopular incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who is running as an independent.
Mamdani’s grassroots campaign – Cuomo’s campaign outspent him 20 to 1 – centered around raising the minimum wage, tax hikes on businesses and the rich, creating city-owned grocery stores, making city bus service free and imposing a rent freeze for stabilized tenants.
The victory by the self-described Democratic socialist, who was mercilessly smeared for his denunciation of the genocide in Gaza and promise to honor the arrest warrant issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he appeared in New York City, has sent shock waves through the ruling billionaire class and the Democratic Party establishment that supported Cuomo. While Mamdani was endorsed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nydia Velázquez who serve in the state’s congressional delegation, as well as Bernie Sanders, they were the singular exceptions. The hierarchy of the party has either remained silent since Mamdani’s victory or been openly antagonistic.
New York Senator Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leaders of the Senate and the House, refuse to back Mamdani’s candidacy. New York Rep. Laura Gillen, speaking for many in the party, called Mamdani the “absolute wrong choice for New York.”
Democrats, along with their major donors, can be counted on to attempt to sabotage Mamdani’s campaign, just as it did the campaign of Bernie Sanders when he sought the presidential nomination. It remains, it seems, impervious to reform.
What does this election portend? What does it mean for the future of the Democratic Party? Is Mamdani’s victory a sign that there are growing cracks in the edifice of the party? Or will it drive the party further to the right and see it destroy the candidacies of those who seek to address the domination of our political system by the billionaire class and the punishing social inequality?
Joining me to discuss Mamdani’s victory and what it portends, as well as her own campaign to be elected as a democratic socialist to Congress in Washington state, is Kshama Sawant. Kshama is a leader for Workers Strike Back and Revolutionary Workers. And as a city council member, she battled against the established Democratic Party leadership and the city’s oligarchs who poured millions into campaigns to defeat her including an unsuccessful effort to oust her in a recall vote. Amazon alone spent over $3 million to defeat her run for office in 2019.
Sawant helped lead the fight in 2014 that made Seattle the first major American city to mandate a $15 dollar an hour minimum wage. Following a three-year struggle against one of the richest men in the world – Jeff Bezos – and his political establishment, she and her allies pushed through a tax on big business that increased city revenues by an estimated $210 to $240 million a year.
She was part of the movement that led to Seattle’s successful ban on school-year evictions of schoolchildren, their families and school employees. She was one of sponsors of a bill that protects tenants from being evicted at the end of their “term leases,” requiring landlords to provide tenants with the right to renew their leases and prohibiting landlords from evicting tenants for non-payment of rent if the rent was due during the COVID civil emergency and the renter could not pay due to financial hardship. You can find her at KshamaSawant.org.
Okay, so let’s begin with Mamdani’s victory, what you think it means, and the Democratic Party’s response. And I just want to add, you yourself, when you were on the city council, spent most of your time battling the Democratic Party establishment, or much of the time.
Kshama Sawant
All the time, actually. The Democrats on the city council here in Seattle opposed every single progressive measure that my office fought for. But yeah, Mamdani’s primary election victory in the Democratic Party in New York City for the mayoral election is first and foremost a stinging rebuke of the Zionist lobby.
It shows that it is possible to defeat the Zionist lobby and it is possible to win. In fact, you mentioned in your introduction that I’m running for Congress right now against, and I’m running against this genocidal warmongering Democrat, Adam Smith, who has voted for the genocide repeatedly to send tens of billions of dollars to the Israeli state for the genocide. He also voted for the war in Iraq back in 2002, and he also voted to create ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement].
And he was bankrolled by the Zionist lobby. In last year’s election, AIPAC was his top contributor. He’s also backed by dystopian corporations like Palantir, which profit from war and mass slaughter. And so this primary victory of Mamdani actually has injected huge confidence in the thousands of people who are supporting our campaign here.
So many people have messaged me personally saying, I’m so excited about this victory because it shows that you can defeat the Zionist lobby. So I think, first and foremost, we have to recognize what a huge victory that is. It’s also, given how relentlessly Mamdani has campaigned using his working class demands, it’s also a real boost of confidence for working class people nationally to see that yes, working people will fight alongside you if you put forward demands that make a huge difference in their lives and which reflect their anger, their just anger at the Wall Street billionaires.
I mean, Mamdani’s campaign has called for a $30 an hour minimum wage, for a rent freeze, for free transit, for fully funded childcare. And so these are things that working people need. And so if a campaign can succeed on that basis, it shows that working people are willing to push forward on those demands.
And it’s also, I have to say, a resounding rebuke to the union leaders, not the rank and file, but the union leaders who endorsed Cuomo in the primary. I mean, can you imagine what kind of union leader do you have to be to endorse somebody who’s so discredited that he’s even too much of a hot potato for most of the Democrats to maintain their own credibility? They don’t want to touch him because he has 15,000 COVID deaths on his hands.
He has all kinds of other corruption charges. He also has been accused by at least a dozen, probably 13 women of sexual harassment. And so it’s just mind boggling, although not surprising. It’s just incredible that the leaders of UFCW [United Food and Commercial Workers], of RWDSU [Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union], of the Teamsters, of SEIU [Service Employees International Union], all these major unions, the Carpenters, all of them supporting Cuomo.
So I think they have really been put to shame. And it is important to see that, for example, SEIU leaders have already now said they’re endorsing Mamdani. But it really exposes the unholy ties of the labor leadership with the Democratic establishment. And so I think the question is not, is this a real confirmation of the kind of political demands we need to put forward and that the opposition to the genocide and the demand to end the genocide, should that be front and center of election campaigns in the coming year?
No, that’s not the question. This has shown that it actually, that’s exactly what we should be doing. The outstanding question here is what will it take to win any of these demands? And that’s where I think we have to conduct a lot of examination. I mean, I think the experience that we had on the Seattle City Council, we, my fellow socialists and we, I had the city council office for a decade in Seattle.
And what it took for us to win the historic victories, many of which you enumerated, it took what I would call a fighting strategy. And what does a fighting strategy mean? A fighting strategy, first and foremost, means that you understand that capitalism is a zero-sum game and that you cannot hope to win any substantial victories. I’m not talking about crumbs, but substantial reforms in the interest of the working class by thinking that you are going to sweet talk the billionaires into agreement with you.
It also requires understanding that the Democrats and Republicans, despite their differences, they both represent the interests of the billionaires of capitalism. And so you’re not going to sweet talk them either. And you don’t go into the halls of office by thinking that they are your colleagues and that you’re going to have good conversations with them and reach some sort of agreement with them. No, you have to understand that this is posed as an adversarial task by definition. Working people didn’t make it adversarial, capitalism is adversarial towards the working class. The only question is, are we gonna fight back or are we going to roll over and die?
And so, again and again and again, what we saw in Seattle was a Democratic Party carrying water for the big business entities, for big corporations like Amazon and Starbucks, for the Chamber of Commerce, for corporate landlords. And for us to win any of these victories that we won, I, first and foremost, had to be clear, and all working people alongside me had to be clear that this is class war and that the way we win is by using my office to build mass movements and mass movements not just to come to city hall and beg the Democrats to do the right thing, but mass movements that are defiant in character, that demand that unless you do this, we are going to vote you out of office. We’re going to throw you out of office.
So that adversarial character is fundamental to winning something big. Like, for example, the victory that we won on minimum wage, that is the highest wage in the nation because part of the battle we waged when we fought for $15 an hour was to win inflation increases. The Democrats fought us viciously on that. We were still able to prevail. Why? Because I launched the 15 Now Movement in Seattle and it mobilized Seattle’s working class in the thousands and so many of them were involved in our action conferences.
It was a democratically organized movement where the rank and file of the movement had the say in strategic decisions. We literally had debates and voting. It took that strength of the mass of the working class to win not only the nation’s first $15 an hour minimum wage, but also inflation increases. And that’s why today Seattle’s minimum wage is the highest in the nation at $20.76. So I would just say that for the working class to win in New York City will take this similar approach.
The question is not can Mamdani win through a strategy of playing nice with the billionaires? No, that’s not the question because you can’t win that way. All of history shows that. The question is, will he do what we did in Seattle, in order to win similar victories in New York City?
Chris Hedges
Well, that is a break with you. I mean, there’s one strong similarity between the campaigns that you ran and the campaigns that he ran. And that is that you appealed to disaffected voters on the right or people who just didn’t vote at all on these basic economic issues. I find that a kind of parallel.
But I think the difference, which you just enunciated, is that you always took an adversarial position and he has talked about making New York a wonderful place for everybody, including billionaires. And I think you’re saying that’s a big mistake.
Kshama Sawant
Yes, because in a deeply divided situation like capitalism is, you cannot lose sight of the fact of, as I said earlier, that capitalism is a zero sum game. What does that mean? It means that when we won the $15 minimum wage, for example, and now that it’s gone even higher because of inflation increases being built into it, that money is making the lives of the least paid workers, the poorest of the working class, much better because even a few dollars extra an hour makes a life difference.
It makes the difference between being able to pay your rent or being evicted and then being forced to couch surf again and again, which many families, in fact, even families with children are forced to do. But that money comes from the profits of the billionaires, the big business entities, the multimillionaires.
And so it is inevitable that if you fight for something substantial, like a major increase in minimum wage, that will create a political clash with big businesses. And that’s it’s no surprise that, what’s his name, Bill Ackman, the Trump supporting billionaire who is apoplectic about Mamdani’s primary victory, that’s no surprise. That is him representing the interests of the billionaire class.
And so the working class cannot afford to blur the class lines. When I was asked repeatedly by reporters, you speak so combatively, but as an elected official, aren’t you running to represent all your constituents? They’d asked me that repeatedly. You would never catch me saying that I am representing everyone.
In fact, I reminded them, you know, one of the constituents of my Seattle city council district when I was on the city council for 10 years was, and it still is, I assume, the billionaire former CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, extremely anti-worker, absolutely viciously anti-union, union-busting CEO billionaire. And I said, Howard Schultz lives in my district. I don’t represent him and he doesn’t agree with me.
I mean, these are class lines and blurring the lines does not help the working class. It actually helps the ruling class. I mean, it sort of signals to the ruling, if you say that you’re going to represent everyone, it signals to the ruling class that you’re open for conversation. You’re open to discussion with them. And that discussion means only one thing, which is that they will push you, put pressure on you, and they will use the carrot and the stick to put pressure on you to sell out.
And I’ve experienced all of that. When I first entered City Hall, I’ve experienced both the carrot and the stick. There were city council members and also others in the Democratic Party who tried to flatter me, make this about me. They said things like, well, you are such a superstar, but you need to dissociate yourself from this socialist ideology because that’s not going to be good for your political career.
Therein lies the problem, is that no matter how well intentioned you are, and let’s assume that new people are well intentioned, no matter how well intentioned you are, if you don’t understand that careerism is one of the death knells of winning anything substantial for the working class, then you will sell out even with those good intentions because you will make it about yourself and you will immediately get the memo that in order to fight for working people, you will need to be in battle mode every single day when you enter City Hall or the halls of Congress because the only other option is for you to sell out because there’s no option that you will convince them into agreeing with you.
Why? Because at the end of the day, the Democratic Party is a party of capitalism itself. And yes, there are differences with the Republican Party, but it’s like Chomsky said, that there’s a smart way to keep people passive and obedient, and that is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.
And so what that means is that in the case of the Democratic and Republican parties is that, there are differences between them, but if you don’t understand that they both represent the billionaire class and they’re there and their differences are there so that the working class can perennially be dangled this, you know, you either support Democrats or Republicans. But at end of the day the working class loses out more and more and is subjected to more and more misery with every passing decade that you’re not going to stand up for working people.
Chris Hedges
I think also the mistake is that you complicate this, the billionaire class, which Mamdani seems, at least rhetorically, to be saying he can do.
Kshama Sawant
Yes, and in fact, he’s saying that in many concrete ways. For example, in his recent MSNBC interview, I think it was just today or yesterday, they played a clip of, you know he’s been calling for taxes on the rich, which of course, I strongly support. I strongly support all the demands that he’s running on in terms of the minimum wage increase, rent freeze, and taxes on the rich, and child care funding, and all of that.
They played a clip of Governor Kathy Hochul, governor of New York, very clearly saying she’s not going to be for taxing the rich. She’s very clearly declaring that that is absolutely not something that she wants to do. But his response to that was again, along those lines of I’m excited to work with her on this. What does that mean? I don’t understand what that means.
I mean, you have to use your interview appearances to speak not to that MSNBC journalist who is representing the ruling class line or Governor Kathy Hochul, who is an arch-corporate Democrat. She represents a billionaire class. Your interview appearances, if you’re a socialist and fighting for working people, has to be to speak to the working class audience that’s not in front of you, but millions who are watching out there. And your message needs to be, first of all, truthful.
And being truthful means you cannot send an illusion to the working class that somehow Kathy Hochul can be talked into taxing the rich, somehow Bill Ackman can be convinced that rent freezes are also in his interest. It will improve his quality of life as well. It’s something that Mamdani has said as well, that, if we do these progressive things, it will improve the quality of life not only of working people, but also of the billionaires.
That’s simply not true in the sense that the billionaires don’t want to part with the billions of dollars that they have. I mean, the $15 minimum wage that we won, that meant $3 billion of profits from big business taken away to fund workers. And you have to declare that proudly in the sense that you don’t represent the billionaire class. As much wealth you can take from them, that’s a good thing. That’s a moral thing. That is a just thing. And that is an honorable thing to fight for.
And it is actually disarming working class movements to send them, as I said, an illusion that somehow the class lines can be blurred, that somehow you can make agreement with the ruling class. And I think that if we want, if Mamdani wants to, I don’t know that he doesn’t, I’ll talk about his previous record, but if he does want to build movements, and you know, I absolutely want him to do it. I absolutely want him to build the movements, and if he’s going to build the movements after he’s elected, if he’s elected, I will personally be there wanting to rally with him.
I will personally help the movement to win a $30 minimum wage in New York City because if they win, that would be an Earth shattering victory. It would be an enormous call to action nationally and it would put a lot of pressure on the Democratic Party to push for a $25 an hour minimum wage federally. All of that would be a fantastic thing. And like I said, I am pledging here and now that I will be right there in New York City pounding the pavement to win any of these victories.
The question is, will he do what is needed in order to actually win this? And in terms of his previous record, the reason I’m expressing skepticism is not that I don’t want him to do it. As I said, I really hope that he does it. But it’s also my responsibility, I am also representing working people. And it is my obligation, my political and moral obligation, to use my platform to speak the truth. Again, not to send out illusions, but speak the truth.
And even if not everybody agrees with me at this moment. But if you look at the record that Mamdani has, Mamdani is not new to politics. He won his first state assembly, New York state assembly election in 2020. And he has been on the New York state legislature for four years and in fact since that time the New York DSA which he’s part of, the Democratic Socialist of America, they’ve had eight elected officials in the New York state legislature and they have certainly won some things but to be honest whatever they have won is far far from commensurate to having eight elected positions.
I mean can you imagine what we would do with eight elected positions? To imagine that, look at what we did with one elected position. You know, we, like I said, we experienced both the carrot and the stick. So I experienced a lot of flattery, but I also experienced a stick. And the stick never goes away. Once the ruling class and their parties, the Democrats and Republicans, are clear that you are not going to be bought, that you are not going to sell out, then come all the vicious attacks, which never relent.
And so for working people to succeed, we need leadership. And it’s not just about elected representatives. It’s also in city hall or Congress. It’s also elected leaders in the labor movement, unelected leaders in social movements. We need leadership in all of these avenues that are clear that that is what it takes, that in order to win for working people, it takes you as the leader to take those body blows.
Because if you don’t, then you’re selling out working class people. That’s what you owe. It’s your duty and you should consider it your honor. It’s an honor to be able to play this role. But as far as what the New York DSA did in the several years that they have had positions, they have not won any victories commensurate with having eight elected positions.
And in fact, it’s really telling that Mamdani himself, he had his two re-elections. He was first elected in 2020, then he had his re-elections in 2022, and then last year, 2024. And he ran unopposed both years, which means neither the Democrats contested him in the primaries, nor did the Republicans run any candidate against him in the general election.
Such a thing does not happen if you are fighting for working class people. Because if you are fighting for working class people, you are going to become enemy number one to the Democrats and Republicans. There is absolutely no universe where you will not have a fight on your hands and let alone run unopposed.
I mean, in our case, I won all of my four elections on the city council, but every subsequent election, the ruling class, Jeff Bezos, Amazon, corporate landlords, the Democratic Party, they fought more viciously than they did against me in the previous election. In 2019, the most prominent progressive, quote unquote, progressive Democrats, they, Latina women, progressive Democrats, they ran, openly ran a candidate against me saying, Oh, we agree with her, but she’s just not nice. We need a nice guy or whatever. And we defeated them. We defeated Amazon that year.
And then again, in 2021, my last election, that was not even a scheduled election. It was a recall attempt against me by corporate landlords, by Trumpian billionaires, and the Democratic Party, and we defeated them also. So it doesn’t reveal everything, but it is a rule of thumb. It’s a barometer.
If your every subsequent election is not a bigger fight than before, then you haven’t become a threat to the ruling class. And if you haven’t become a threat to the ruling class, then you’re not winning for the working class. You may be winning your own elections, but not for the working class.
Chris Hedges
Well, they’re clearly going to go after him. I mean, look what they did to you as a city council member. He’s running for the mayor of New York [City]. And I want to talk about maybe the three entities that will try and take him down. Let’s begin first with the Zionists. They aren’t going to take this lightly. He has been very courageous about standing with the Palestinians.
Then let’s talk about the Democratic Party and then let’s talk about the billionaire class. These are formidable opponents and the money that will pour into any campaign to bring him down will be staggering. It already was, I mean, I think Como got $22 million or $25 million. I think Mamdani raised about a million. But those numbers will, in terms of funding opposition, will jump exponentially.
Let’s first start with the Zionists because I did see his victory as essentially puncturing that monolithic, especially in New York City, that monolithic power that the Zionists have.
Kshama Sawant
Yes, absolutely. I mean, this is a devastating blow actually to the Zionist lobby. And the specific thing, I like the choice of words that you said, you said puncturing. I think that is an important thing to note because for a long time, it has seemed to everyone that it is impossible to defeat the Zionist lobby. We saw what happened with Jamaal Bowman, where it was in the Democratic primary that the Zionist lobby and AIPAC specifically, poured just unprecedented millions and millions of dollars to defeat him.
And there’s been this idea, they’ve sort of fueled this idea that the Zionist lobby and AIPAC and other organizations like that, that they are impervious to any opposition from the anti-war movement and that you just have to accept it. You just have to accept it. And especially in the Democratic and Republican parties, I mean, obviously the Republican party is openly anti-worker, pro-war, they don’t even make any bones about it.
The main challenge as far as working class consciousness is concerned is exposing what the Democratic party actually stands for. And the Democratic party is much more exposed now than it was before. I mean, the approval ratings are in the toilet. The genocide started under Biden. You know, this was a genocidal president with a genocidal vice president. So both the candidates in the Democratic primary last year were, or from the Democratic party were genocidal candidates running against Trump, who’s also warmongering and genocidal.
So that was the choice, false choice between genocidal and genocidal. That’s the kind of realm that we have been operating in. We also saw AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] go to the DNC floor and lie through her teeth saying that Kamala Harris was working tirelessly for a ceasefire, which we know is complete fabrication.
Chris Hedges
I just want to interrupt you when you talked about the disease of careerism. She’s kind of the poster child.
Kshama Sawant
Yes, AOC is a poster child for careerism that’s absolutely accurate and that is why it is important for us to talk about, you know, have a serious conversation about what will it take to win any of these victories in New York City, let alone ending the genocide, which is a far harder thing to do.
Ending the genocide will take ending all US military funding to the Israeli state, which if you think about that demand, this is the demand that we are calling for in our congressional campaign, that demand pits you directly, directly against all of US and Western imperialism. I mean, these are powerful, powerful dystopian forces.
It pits you against multi-billionaires like [Palantir CEO] Alexander Karp, who, if you’ve heard him speak, they delight, they positively delight in the mass slaughter of Palestinians. I mean, this is happening at another level. In fact, what’s happening right now in the Israeli state is at another level.
So there is a feeling that, for ordinary people, I’m against a genocide, but I don’t know what to do because these are just too powerful of an entities, group of entities to go up against. So I think that puncturing that idea has been crucial. And then I think in order to actually push forward on these demands, then it is going to be really that’s where the rubber hits the road, so to say.
Because from now until the general election of the mayoral election, it’s a question, which way will Mamdani move? And I would say that, you know, one thing he has going for him is that the Republican opponent is really weak from what I understand. Curtis Sliwa, I mean, he’s not like, he’s some credible opponent.
Chris Hedges
No, he’s not a credible opponent. They’ll fund Adams, they’ll fund Cuomo, or Ackman says he has an unnamed candidate he wants to fund, although, I wonder if an Ackman puppet is going to do particularly well. I don’t know.
Kshama Sawant
Yeah, I mean, of course, in war and elections, it is foolish to say the last word on predictions, as you and I both know. However, I think it is important to note that one thing that Mamdani has going for him is that both these Democratic Party [candidates] are now, they’re going to run as not Democrats, as whatever, something else.
But regardless, Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo, both figures of the Democratic Party are so deeply discredited that the chances for Mamdani to actually win are pretty strong. The question will be what he does between now and the general election. If he not only does not relent on his demands, which he doesn’t seem to be doing, I mean, even now he’s relentlessly going for his demands, which is actually a very positive thing that I really appreciate that he is making, he’s not shying away from the demands for even a second. And he is relentless about them.
So he needs to keep doing that but in addition to that, I think he needs to, which I don’t expect that he will, but I’m just saying what he needs to do in order to win, not so much to win the election. That’s my point. I’m trying to disentangle the question between winning the election for himself and winning the demands that he’s running on.
Those are two separate questions to some degree because there’s just a favorable electoral calculus right now that he’s facing where he could possibly win even if he started sliding on his demands, maybe, I don’t know. But it’s certainly not the kind of difficult situation that we were facing. But as far as setting the stage, as far as using his election campaign for setting the stage to win any of these demands, that’s the most paramount question.
And for that, I’m strongly convinced that he needs to move away from this talking point of Oh, billionaires will also love a city with a rent freeze and I’m looking forward to working with Kathy Hochul. Moving away from that to saying, look, the Democratic Party establishment itself, the Democratic Party itself is opposed to the things that I’m calling for. And that’s why I need working people to join me, rather than continually bringing up this idea that it’s all about discussions and meetings with the powers that be, and I’ll talk to the governor, and I’ll talk to the billionaire.
All this emphasis on the halls of power, instead his talking point should be, and we’re calling for a rally on such and such date. I want working people to show up. I want Black, white, Latino, Asian, all of you to show up because working class people need to fight together. Let’s call for a march for $30 an hour. Let’s march around city hall, know, that type of thing, or march outside Bill Ackman’s house, I mean, presumably he lives somewhere in Manhattan, something like that. March outside Trump Tower. Let’s call big rallies again in Trump Tower.
And it’s not only that, it’s also for him to say openly, you know, Governor Kathy Hochul, she’s selling out workers. She said she does not want any taxes on the rich. Do you agree? You know, telling working people, don’t put any faith in Kathy Hochul. Don’t put any faith in any of these Democrats.
Chuck Schumer, he has blood on his hands. Chuck Schumer has blood on his hands. Hakeem Jeffries has blood on his hands. Ritchie Torres has blood on his hands. That’s the kind of language, I mean, we don’t use this language as Marxists incidentally just because, Oh emotions are running high. It’s not like that. It’s about clarifying to the working class what is the character of capitalism and its warmongering representatives, warmongering anti-worker, anti-union representatives and how do you fight against them.
Those are two very key tasks for revolutionaries. And I think that’s a difference between how most what I would call reformist candidates or reformist leaders act and how a revolutionary socialist like myself acts where we start by clarifying the nature of capitalism itself that is part of revolutionary politics. But ironically, Chris, revolutionary politics also makes you the best fighter to win the biggest possible reforms because once you understand the class nature of capitalism and you understand how working people need to be mobilized, that is what empowers your side to go up against all of these forces.
And that’s what will be needed. For example, like you said, we started with the Zionists. You correctly said the Zionists are not going to rest on this. They’re not going to say, we give up, he won the primary. No, they’re going to do everything in their power to try and defeat him. It’s important that he doesn’t waffle on the things that he has already said, Mamdani, and also he needs to go much farther along the lines of whatever’s saying.
Chris Hedges
Well, he needs to take a lesson from Jeremy Corbyn. These are not people who, number one, can be placated or, number two, will not, no matter what you say, viciously attempt to bring you down. I want you to talk about what he can expect. You experienced constant campaigns to deceit you from the city council.
He’s running for a much more powerful position. What can he expect from the Zionists? What can he expect from the Democratic Party hierarchy and what can you expect from the billionaire class? They’ve already announced war, in essence.
Kshama Sawant
Yes, they have declared war against him, and that is why he needs to declare war back at them, not try to hug them to death. Part of what we experienced here was obviously, if you look at the talking points that big business had against our 15 Now movement and against the Amazon tax movement, which also you mentioned, which raises hundreds of millions of dollars every year for affordable housing, including a specific chunk of that money reserved for Black working class and poor housing in this historically black neighborhood, which I live in actually, which has been denuded of its Black population because of the skyrocketing rents.
One of the things that they did to discredit all of these demands was to just pound the working class on network TV with all kinds of economic falsehoods like, like this is just going to be economic apocalypse, you know, $15 an hour will shut down all businesses, all of that. So I think the first thing we had to do to combat that was relentless political education about how all of this is absolutely false.
What we said was two things. One is we said that all of the studies on minimum wage increases have shown and even big minimum wage increases have shown is that there’s no business that has actually been shut down because of that. Small businesses shut down because of other reasons, the pattern reason being that commercial rent is so high that most storefront businesses can’t afford in big cities like Seattle and New York City.
But we also said that if indeed that were true, if indeed they were right, that the system is so fragile that by lifting 100,000 workers in Seattle out of poverty, just lifting them above, it’s nothing lavish, it’s lifting them above absolute dire conditions, is going to collapse the system, then why on Earth are we even defending the system in the first place? See, that’s how we posed it. And that really helped people understand that, one, that they are completely lying to you, but also secondly, even if they weren’t, we still need to fight for better conditions because why on Earth are we defending a system that can’t let us have even a modicum of dignity in our living standards?
I mean, that’s part of what they will face. The other thing that will come very likely is the kind of red baiting and identity politics that we experienced here. So a very, very important example of this is when we were fighting for the Amazon tax. We launched the Tax Amazon movement alongside my inauguration after my 2019 reelection. And it was really important strategic timing because like I said before, the 2019 election was a complete pushback against Jeff Bezos and Amazon because Amazon specifically and very openly spent millions of dollars trying to defeat me and also other progressives, but mainly me because they knew our office was the driving force of the whole left wing and working class political agenda.
And they knew that if I was out, the Democrats wouldn’t do crap for the working class. And so in 2020, January, when I was being inaugurated, I turned my inauguration into the launch of the Tax Amazon movement. And then you remember that was 2020. So a few months later, COVID happened, and then the George Floyd rebellion began. At that time, the Democratic Party unleashed this whole group of Black what I would call misleaders, Black misleaders, to go around at these protests saying, you should not support Kshama Sawant, you should not support the Amazon tax because that’s not a Black issue.
They tried to disrupt many of the rallies that we were holding in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement saying, you should be talking about Black issues and furthermore, you’re not Black so you don’t get to have this platform. And we refused to accept that gatekeeping.
There were many other leaders in who were supporting the tax Amazon movement, who immediately barked at that and said, we should not even have our table here at this protest because we’re just white allies, we don’t have the right to speak, only Black people have the right to speak.
We absolutely refused to bend to this just corrosiveness of identity politics. And we insisted on looking at things from a class lens. And we said that actually, these Black misleaders should be utterly ashamed of themselves because by obstructing the tax Amazon movement, they are actually hostile to the interests of Black working class and poor people because if there’s anybody who needs affordable housing the most, it is the Black working class. And the Amazon tax has disproportionately benefited the Black working class and poor people.
So rather than accepting their just destructive gatekeeping, we said, we’re going to go directly to Black working people at the protest. And it was phenomenal. The support we got for the Amazon tax demand was sky high. The clipboards were practically flying out of our hands with people saying, fuck yeah, I want to tax Amazon. I’m going to sign that. And it’s hundreds, thousands of people showing up to our democratically organized Tax Amazon action conferences. That is what put pressure on the Democratic party.
You know, first they were vicious towards it. And then I suddenly started getting friendly phone calls from these progressive Latina Democrats saying you know that thing you were talking about you know I’m very interested in that and then we won. That is what it takes. I think that in terms of how it plays out in New York City, I think it will very much depend on what kind of approach Mamdani takes. I mean how much they attack his demands will depend on how much he’s willing to fight for it and being willing to fight for it means mobilizing working class people. So I think that will be crucial.
Chris Hedges
What does this mean in the age of Trump? Trump, of course, immediately went after him. I think you and I, for many, many years, have argued that a party or a political movement that is focused on social inequality and the betrayal of the working class by the Democratic Party could succeed. Is this the rise of a kind of counterweight to Trumpian authoritarianism and proto-fascism or not?
Kshama Sawant
I think the, and as you said, you alluded to our past discussions, we’ve talked about what it will take to defeat Trumpism and right-wing populism, and it’s not only Trump, it’s the Trumpism phenomenon. And it will take working class solidarity around class-based demands to defeat the ideas of the right-wing, and it will take us to recognizing where the origin of any traction, any credence to right-wing ideas.
And that comes from the complete failure of and betrayals by the Democratic Party. But it’s not only the Democratic Party. We have to talk about the labor leadership as well, which has betrayed the interests of the working class, obviously their own members, by being tied at the hip to the Democratic Party, even in the face of a genocide. That needs to be mentioned as well.
The question is if genocide is not a line you’re not willing to cross as a working-class leader, then there is no line you’re not willing to cross as a working-class leader. I think that point needs to be made. So many of these unions, their leaderships have passed ceasefire resolutions, but those ceasefire resolutions mean little if then the leaderships turn around and support the parties of genocide themselves.
I mean, Shawn Fain famously went on the DNC floor, Shawn Fain being the president of UAW [United Auto Workers], which is one of the unions that has supported Mamdani to its credit and also has passed a ceasefire resolution. But at the end of the day, how much does that amount to if you’re then turning around and still supporting the candidates and the parties of genocide? And I think that it is also revealing who Mamdani holds as his role models. I think you talked about how AOC is the poster child for careerism. I think that’s very important to note because, and Bernie Sanders was not exactly like her, I think he’s well-intentioned, it’s just his political analysis is extremely flawed.
And he thinks that now completely capitulating to the Democratic Party and to the genocide and to attacks on workers like the Democrats blocking and breaking the railroad workers strike in 2022, which AOC was part of, that that’s the best that the working class can get.
But regardless of their individual differences, the truth about AOC and Bernie Sanders is that both of them have campaigned, I mean, Bernie Sanders much more relentlessly, but AOC did initially campaign on Medicare for All, $15 an hour minimum wage and a Green New Deal.
And like I said, I commend Mamdani for being relentless about those demands. But Bernie Sanders has also been relentless about those demands. He still is talking about, I mean, he’s less relentless than before because he doesn’t want to embarrass the Democrats, which is itself rotten. However, the point is that they both have campaigned on these demands. And not a thing, not a thing has been won for the working class.
The metric cannot be, are they talking about those demands? The metric has to be, what have they won? In the last five, six years, what have they done? And what has happened to working class agendas in that interim? Bernie Sanders’ two campaigns were completely destroyed by the Democratic Party.
And last year, the Democratic Party showed that they would much rather allow somebody who they call a fascist and an existential threat, allow that person to be elected than allow even a shadow of working-class agenda to enter their purview. Like they did not even want Kamala Harris to even lie. I mean just fucking lie that okay I’m going to do something about the genocide or maybe I’ll talk about 15 [dollars minimum wage]. If she had done a little bit of murmuring towards the working class and she would have tipped the scales very likely. They were not even willing to do that. Why?
Because they don’t want to create expectations among working class people that they will do anything at all for them. Because they want to hold the line. They are the billionaire class representatives, just like the Republicans are. And they don’t want to create any such idea that, Oh, the working class can expect anything from them. So what they want to do is they want the working class to be permanently attached to them and keep voting them in.
But they want to do it on the basis of not doing anything for the working class. And that contradiction, that conundrum is what has led them to this sorry state where they have the lowest approval ratings historically. But at the same time, if we don’t provide an alternative to them, then they’re probably going to make gains in the midterm elections because people are also angry at Trump. And Trump is no alternative either.
And so for defeating the right wing, we will need a break from the Democratic Party. And that might sound like a contradiction in terms of that. That’s precisely what we need because it is the Democratic Party that has given you Donald Trump. The Democratic Party are the best builders of Trumpism. And in order to destroy Trumpism, you need to destroy the Democratic Party. And that comes first with breaking your ties with the Democratic Party.
And here’s what I have to say whom Mamdani has listed as his role models is a very telling story to me. Mamdani has said that he is very inspired by, I mean, I’m not quoting him. I’m paraphrasing what he said. He’s very inspired by Boston governor Michelle Wu. Michelle Wu ran on housing demands. She also brought them up relentlessly. She talked about rent control relentlessly. What has she done after she got into office? Completely betray working class renters. I mean, just completely.
He has also said that former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio was the best in his, Mamdani’s, lifetime. You know what? Among other attacks on unions and workers, Mayor de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo together in 2018 upheld the Taylor Law of New York, which has a draconian strike ban on public sector unions. According to an article in DSA-aligned publication, Jacobin, this New York strike ban, this is a quote, makes red state anti-strike laws look like pieces of fluff.
And keep in mind, 2018 was the year of the historic public school teacher strikes in red states, starting with West Virginia. The Jacobin article also says, the next time a new Republican governor works up the nerve to enforce anti-strike laws against public workers, they’ll have the satisfaction of piggybacking on those Democratic friends of labor — Cuomo and de Blasio.
So, I mean, so he has stated AOC, Bernie Sanders, Michelle Wu, and de Blasio all as his inspirations, and they all have a record of selling out working class people. One last thing that he has said, he has also repeatedly cited and effusively praised former New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who was a Republican mayor who was supported at the time in 1941, during the war, he was running for reelection and he was supported by the rotten Stalinists.
And they supported him against Trotskyist James Cannon. He was a Trotskyist at the time, who ran on a pro-worker anti-war platform. And one of the things LaGuardia did was brutally go after striking transport workers, basically telling them that the country is at war. So municipal workers don’t have the right to go on strike. So your viewers can reach their own conclusions about what it means when somebody ties themselves so closely to a whole string of people who have a track record of having sold out workers.
Chris Hedges
Let’s just close by talking about your own campaign. Where are you? What are you up against? You mentioned at the beginning of the interview a little bit about who you’re running against.
Kshama Sawant
Yes, we’re running for US Congress from Washington state’s ninth congressional district, which includes a part of Seattle and also many other neighboring cities where there are lots of rich people. There’s lots of billionaires, but there’s also lots of working class people, lots of refugees. It’s a majority minority district. The district has a lot of people who have personally faced losses, family losses in Gaza through the genocide.
There are many East African and East Asian and South Asian working class people who live here, many of whom are struggling to get by. And we are running against Adam Smith, who has been in Congress for nearly 30 years. And he, as I said before, has repeatedly voted to send tens of billions of dollars of funding to the Israeli military throughout the genocide.
That’s not the first time, he has voted to send money to Israel over and over during his nearly 30 year career. But especially notable is that he has repeatedly voted to fund the genocide. And he is, not surprisingly, he is a favorite of the military contractors. We know that both Democratic and Republican parties are warmongering parties. They have been purveyors of endless brutal war throughout their history and Adam Smith is one of the generals among the warhawks.
He is not a foot soldier. He has never met a war that he didn’t like. He has demonized anti-genocide activists as totalitarian, as extremists, as left-wing fascists. He has called for them to be arrested. He also holds the shameful distinction of being one of only five sitting Democratic Congress members who voted for the Iraq war, as I said, in 2002.
He supported the wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and the current bloody inter-imperialist proxy war in Ukraine. He has been bankrolled for three decades by weapons industry profiteers, such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Palantir, as I mentioned earlier. And he’s a darling of AIPAC and the Zionist lobby.
As I said, AIPAC was his biggest funder last year. Just to contrast between our campaign and him, in the summer of 2014, that was my second year on the city council, I used my city council position not only to attend protests against Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment of Gaza at the time, but also to draft a public letter calling for an end to all US military aid to Israel and the brutal settlements in Palestinian territories and the occupation.
During that same time that I was doing that, Adam Smith was enthusiastically backing Israel’s Iron Dome system, which as we know is one of the key components in enabling the Israeli state slaughter apparatus against the Palestinian people. And in the final days of my decade in City Hall in October and November of 2023, I was fighting to win.
And we did win, despite the opposition of the Democrats, the second at the time and the strongest city council resolution calling for a ceasefire and an end to all US military aid to Israel. At that same moment, Smith was part of Biden’s cabal that was monstrously insisting on over $100 billion of military funding for not just Israel, but also for Ukraine, instead of funding the needs of the cost of living crisis here, faced by working people here.
And he’s also just one of the most thoroughly corporate, pro-corporate politicians. And in fact, our race against Adam Smith goes to your other question as well, is what will it take to defeat the right wing? It will take destroying the Democratic Party, and that begins also, as I said, defeating Congress members like Adam Smith because during the George W. Bush presidency, when the nation was, of course, going rightward because of the rightward push by the Bush presidency, Smith, instead of advising that the Democrats should be more pro-working class, less pro-war, his advice to Democrats was to reduce the contrast between themselves and the Republicans.
And at that time, he said the Democratic Party should consider privatizing Medicare. So it’s no surprise there that notorious corporations like UnitedHealthcare, which ferociously oppose Medicare for All, have also donated to Smith’s campaign. He also voted in favor of the bailout of big banks in 2008 while ordinary people were left to rot. So this is his track record.
We have our track record from the city council, from the decade on the city council, having won historic victories for the working class. This congressional campaign, just like all of our election campaigns, is not in service of my personal political career. It is a vehicle to build movements and the movements we are specifically focusing on through our congressional campaign is to end the genocide, end the US military funding, end the occupation.
And we’re also calling for stop stopping all the deportations and shutting down the detention centers. And we are also fighting for free health care for all funded by taxing the rich and for rent control nationally. In fact, we are pairing the congressional campaign with a Seattle citywide ballot initiative campaign for free healthcare for all, funded by increasing the Amazon tax that we’ve already won, increasing it to $5 billion.
So this is a campaign for all working people who want to win big victories for ourselves, send a stinging message to the ruling class, to the Zionist lobby. So nationally, whoever is listening, whoever is watching this, you need to get involved in this campaign. We actually, you know something exciting is that we had a target of raising 100,000 working class donations within the first month of our campaign.
We smashed that target in the first three weeks. And within the first month of our campaign, we have more than a thousand separate donors. That is more donors than Adam Smith had last year in his entire election. He needs fewer donors because he has all this warmongering and pro-billionaire PACs that are funding his campaigns.
We are a working-class campaign and as I’ve done every single year of my city council office, if I’m elected to Congress, I will take home only the average workers wage and donate the rest after taxes to building strike actions for the union movement and for building the anti-war movement.
Chris Hedges
Great, thank you Kshama. And I want to thank Diego [Ramos], Victor [Padilla], Sofia [Menemenlis], Thomas [Hedges], and Max [Jones], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.
Photos
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TOPSHOT – United Automobile Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain speaks on the first day of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois, on August 19, 2024. Vice President Kamala Harris will formally accept the party’s nomination for president at the DNC which runs from August 19-22 in Chicago. (Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP) (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
US-politics-ECONOMY-BIDEN-RAILWAY-STRIKE
US President Joe Biden signs a resolution to avert a nationwide rail shutdown, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on December 2, 2022. – Biden signed into law Friday a rare intervention by Congress forcing freight rail unions to accept a salary deal, avoiding a possibly devastating strike. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Bernie Sanders And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Hold A Rally In Denver
DENVER, COLORADO – MARCH 21: U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) share a moment onstage during a rally on March 21, 2025 at Civic Center Park in Denver, Colorado. Sanders And Ocasio-Cortez are holding a series of rallies they are calling the “Fight Oligachy” tour and will include stops in Tucson and Tempe, Arizona. (Photo by Chet Strange/Getty Images)
South Station Redevelopment Project
BOSTON, MA – September 20: Mayor Michelle Wu and Representative Aaron Michlewitz share a laugh as Governor Charlie Baker continues to cut the ribbon during a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the South Station redevelopment project on September 20, 2022 in Boston, Massachusetts. (Photo by Matt Stone/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald via Getty Images)
NYC Mayor De Blasio Visits Local Businesses Manufacturing Protective Gear
NEW YORK, NY – MARCH 26: New York Mayor Bill de Blasio holds a face shield as he speaks to the media during a visit to the Brooklyn Navy Yard where local industrial firms have begun manufacturing Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) on March 26, 2020 in New York CIty. Across the country, schools, businesses, and places of work have either been shut down or are restricting hours of operation as health officials try to slow the spread of COVID-19. (Photo by Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images)
Statewide Teachers Strike In West Virginia Continues For 7th Day
MORGANTOWN, WV – MARCH 02: West Virginia teachers, students and supporters hold signs on a Morgantown street as they continue their strike on March 2, 2018 in Morgantown, West Virginia. Despite a tentative deal reached Tuesday with the state’s governor, teachers across West Virginia continued to strike on Friday as the Republican-controlled state legislature debated the governor’s deal. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Mayor Of New York
circa 1935: New York City mayor Fiorello Henry La Guardia (1882 – 1947) sits in the studios of WHOM radio, delivering an address, in Italian, to the people of New York. During the New York newspaper strike, La Guardia read the Sunday newspaper comics to the public each week. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Protestors Rally At Federal Detention Center-SeaTac Holding Migrant Women
SEATAC, WA – JUNE 09: Congressman Adam Smith speaks at a press conference outside a Federal Detention Center holding migrant women as Governor Jay Inslee (L) of Washington state listens on June 9, 2018 in SeaTac, Washington. Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal visited the Federal Detention Center-SeaTac to meet with more than 100 asylum seekers, many of whom are women. (Photo by Karen Ducey/Getty Images)
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TOPSHOT – A salvo of rockets is fired by Palestinian militants from Gaza as an Israeli missile launched from the Iron Dome defence missile system attempts to intercept the rockets, fired from the Gaza Strip, over the city of Netivot in southern Israel on October 8, 2023. Israel, reeling from the deadliest attack on its territory in half a century, formally declared war on Hamas Sunday as the conflict’s death toll surged close to 1,000 after the Palestinian militant group launched a massive surprise assault from Gaza. (Photo by MAHMUD HAMS / AFP) (Photo by MAHMUD HAMS/AFP via Getty Images)
This post has been syndicated from The Chris Hedges Report, where it was published under this address.