The Nation: Can Kshama Sawant Build an Actual Socialist City in America?

http://www.thenation.com/article/210201/can-kshama-sawant-build-actual-socialist-city-america

David Goldstein, a former staff writer at The Stranger newspaper who is now helping Sawant write her memoir, points out that most politicians treat their queer constituents as “a one-issue group,” but Sawant realized early in her campaign that her demand for rent control and higher wages resonated with a community that still faces housing and job discrimination. It has been part of her appeal to the working people of Seattle: that she understands their struggles to pay the rent and bills, that she realizes that the oppression faced by immigrants like her or transgender homeless youth intersects with the issues faced by a growing number of people in today’s economy, and that she is unwilling to subscribe to the conventional wisdom about what is politically possible. It is what made a liberal West Coast city already dominated by progressive Democrats vote to elect a socialist from an organization that calls for putting the top 500 corporations under public ownership. And it has helped to keep her popular despite complaints from business owners, mainstream media, and occasionally her own City Council colleagues that she is too divisive.

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In November 2012, shortly before Sawant launched her campaign, the first fast-food workers had gone on strike in New York City, calling for $15 an hour and a union. Fifteen dollars an hour, Sawant says, felt like a number that would make a good political demand, something that came not from the minds of a small group of Seattle socialists but from a growing movement of working-class people. And closer to home, in SeaTac, a town of about 27,000 that surrounds the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, a union-led campaign to organize low-wage airport employees was growing more intense. They too had decided to press for a $15 living wage, in their case through a ballot initiative.

Heather Weiner, a communications consultant on the campaign, remembers the first time Sawant showed up at a hearing at the SeaTac City Council around the ballot initiative. “Here we’ve lined up all these airport workers and all these local residents and all these other people, and Kshama and her crew show up in their red shirts from Seattle and start giving socialist rhetoric,” Weiner says. “I remember as a spokesperson I was just like, ‘What are you doing?’ But the crowd loved her. I thought, I don’t need to control this, I just need to sit back and relax and watch what happens here. You’re making me look moderate!”

Kshama Sawant Supporters- Seattle Pride March!



https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=fsAwJjvWXkA