What if voting for Democrats to confront Trumpism doesn’t work?

I’m sick of constantly being implored to vote harder but nothing seems to change. The Democrats promise reform yet when in office they serve us up the same menu of austerity, banker bail-outs and perpetual war.

Recently, Chris Hedges interviewed former Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant, who has a different idea. “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.” After years of battles against entrenched power Sawant came to understand that the Democrats serve billionaires too, and while slightly different than Republicans, voting for them and expecting change is a losing proposition. Sawant relates– “The Democrats on the City Council here in Seattle opposed every single progressive measure that my office fought for.”

Kshama is a leader for Workers Strike Back and Revolutionary Workers. And as a Seattle 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.

A fierce advocate for reform, Sawant, spearheaded a winning campaign for 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 tell Chris–“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 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.”

Sawant has constantly defied AIPAC in defending the Palestinian people while continuing to object to the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza. She is now running for Washington state’s 9th congressional district, against a genocidal warmongering Democrat, Adam Smith, who has voted repeatedly to send tens of billions of dollars to the Israeli state for the ongoing genocide. He voted for the war in Iraq back in 2002, and he also voted to create ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement].

During the interview with Hedges, Sawant discussed her fellow democratic socialist, Zohran Mamdani’s triumph in the New York City mayoral primary and the obstacles to fulfilling his campaign promises he could face if he gets into office. 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.

Sawant worries that Mamdani will try to accommodate the the Democrat establishment and their billionaire backers. “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.”

Sawant relates how the Democratic establishment used identity politics in an attempt to derail her class-based policies. “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.”

Sawant refused to allow the Democrats to use identity politics against her. “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.”

About her success in raising the minimum wage, Sawant made an important point. “If 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?”

That’s a question I often ask myself. We live in a crazy, mean country that cuts aid to the neediest Americans to fund tax cuts for the wealthy, funds Israeli genocide and is constantly attacking other countries.

Voting mindlessly for Democrats is for suckers. Fredrick Douglas knew the score when he exclaimed–“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will,”

Read the interview with Sawant and spread the word.