Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
Socialist Win in Seattle: Anomaly or Harbinger?
Jonathan Rosenblum
Friday, January 8, 2016
Alternet
When Vanessa Patricelli first heard Kshama Sawant speak, she
thought the socialist was nuts.
It was November 2013. Sawant had just been elected to the Seattle
City Council as a member of the Socialist Alternative party. And Boeing was
threatening to cut thousands of jobs if its machinists didn’t give up their
pensions and Washington State didn’t hand the company $8.7 billion in tax
breaks.
Patricelli, a public hospital nurse active in her union, had
joined a downtown Seattle rally for the Boeing machinists with labor leaders
and allies. When Sawant took the microphone, she declared her solidarity with
Boeing employees, adding that if the aerospace giant wanted to engage in
“economic terrorism,” the workers should take over the factories and place them
under democratic control.
“I come from a conservative background,” Patricelli told me later.
“It was like, I’m with you, I’m with you… but workers running factories? Oh my
god, she’s crazy-pants!”
Yet two years later, on election night 2015, Patricelli was
celebrating Sawant’s reelection along with hundreds of union members, students,
housing rights advocates, LGBTQ activists, and radicals of various stripes at
the campaign’s party.
Patricelli’s journey from Sawant skeptic to Sawant enthusiast
offers an important glimpse into how political action can radicalize. It also
counters the myth that in order to be viable, progressive political candidates
have to tack to the center.
In winning over people like Patricelli and securing reelection,
Sawant hasn’t just demonstrated that ordinary people are receptive to
unapologetic left politics — she’s fostered a citywide discussion about
capitalism and socialism.
However, socialists in Seattle now face a mayor and City Council
majority more united than ever in their desire to marginalize Sawant and the movement
around her. Can Seattle socialists expand their base and advance progressive
reforms like rent control and a tax on the richest residents? And what can left
activists elsewhere take from Seattle to launch their own progressive
candidacies?
~~~
Sawant, an adjunct college professor and leader in Socialist
Alternative, was a failed state legislative candidate in 2013 when she
challenged Richard Conlin, a 16-year incumbent and Seattle City Council
president. Conventional political wisdom held that Conlin would skate to
reelection. Progressive organizations, environmental groups, and most unions
endorsed the incumbent. But Conlin slipped up, notably by being the sole
council vote against a union-backed sick leave ordinance. And he underestimated
the strength of Sawant’s ground campaign, fueled by volunteers — many newly
energized by Occupy — who staged rallies and door-belled aggressively.
Sawant netted 35 percent of the vote in the three-way primary and
advanced to the general election, making the demand for a $15 minimum wage
central to her campaign. In campaign speeches she issued unabashed calls for
worker justice, rent control, and a tax on millionaires and her bright red “$15
Now!” yard signs sported a worker with a raised fist and her socialist party’s
name — hardly the stuff of moderation.
In November 2013, she beat the incumbent by 3,000 votes out of
more than 180,000 cast. Seattle had elected its first socialist in a century.
Once in office, Sawant made it clear that her success inside City
Hall depended on the strength of the popular movement outside. “My voice will
be heard by those in power only if workers themselves shout their demands from
the rooftops and organize en masse,” she declared [1] at
her inauguration.
She also signaled she would operate unconventionally as an
officeholder, accepting only an average Seattle worker’s paycheck — $40,000
after taxes — and donating the remainder of her $117,000 council paycheck to a
solidarity fund to support striking workers, affordable housing, civil rights,
and other causes.
Sawant’s promotion of a $15 minimum wage, the simultaneous
union-led $15 ballot victory in nearby SeaTac, fast-food worker protests, and
the budding grassroots movement pushed Seattle’s newly elected mayor, Ed
Murray, to embrace the $15 wage floor. But rather than yield to the growing
movement in the streets, Murray convened a business-labor committee to hammer
out a wage proposal that would honor his campaign pledge [2] to
“make sure to keep Seattle a place that is good for business.”
Seeking to counter the mayor’s closed-door negotiations, Sawant
and her supporters held demonstrations and prepared to file a citizens
initiative that would extend a $15 wage rate, on pro-worker terms. In late
April, 2014, they turned in the papers — and days later the mayor announced his
own union- and business-backed plan to establish the first $15 minimum wage in
a major American city. “Staving off an initiative battle was, in fact, the
driving force behind Murray’s commitment to getting a deal,” observed local political reporter
Josh Feit. [3]
The mayor’s agreement contained a number of pro-business
concessions, including a prolonged phase-in period and, for the time ever,
a tip penalty – a lower minimum
wagefor tipped workers. In reaching the closed-door deal, the
mayor successfully corralled labor leaders who otherwise might have backed the
socialists’ grassroots effort.
But the precedent had been set. The $15 wage that seemed
impossible just months before had been won in Seattle, and it spurred the $15
movement nationally.
Sawant also has been active on housing issues. When Seattle public
housing officials proposed a 400 percent rent hike, Sawant built an alliance of
tenants and community groups to fight the idea, mobilizing hundreds to protest
at meetings where officials presented the new rent plan. The authorities backed
down.
During the city’s budget process — normally a staid affair of
daytime council meetings and closed-door negotiations — Sawant convened a
People’s Budget forum. Workers, housing and human services advocates, bus
riders, and others took turns spotlighting the deficiencies in the mayor’s
spending plan at a standing-room-only meeting in the city council chambers
(scheduled by Sawant in the evening so working people could attend).
The full council, apparently feeling the pressure, went on to
adopt Sawant amendments to fund a year-round women’s shelter and enact an
immediate $15 minimum wage for city employees. In Sawant’s first two years in
office, the forum became a staple of the councilmember and her party — a new
form of popular democracy.
Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood has seen a surge in hate crimes
against members of the LGBTQ community in recent years. In response Sawant and
other activists organized a forum in early 2014 that drew four hundred. Based
on testimony from forum attendees, organizers crystallized a community demand
for an LGBTQ youth shelter, which Sawant has championed in City Hall.
Sawant also convened a teachers forum as Seattle public school
teachers prepared to strike last September, and earlier in the year filled City
Council chambers for a discussion on rent control and affordable housing
measures.
Following the housing forum, the city’s establishment political
leaders — who for years have been loath to discuss any form of rent control —
pushed through a city council resolution calling on the state legislature to
lift the ban on local rent stabilization laws.
The forums became opportunities to spark a larger conversation —
in the blogosphere, local newspapers, coffee shop gatherings, and within unions
and community groups — about why such problems exist and the idea of socialism,
not in the ethereal sense but at the municipal level. Out of this discourse a
number of proposed initiatives have gained momentum: public broadband; a
city-run, not-for-profit bank; and a millionaire’s tax.
In welcoming people into the forums, Sawant has stressed that they
— not the political establishment — own city hall. Instead of decorous meetings
before a largely empty room, the councilmembers have faced crowds filling every
corner of the chambers, spilling out into the hallways.
And the crowds are not passive: the new citizen activists hold up
signs, cheer speakers on, boo their opponents, and occasionally break into
chanting. One of Sawant’s council colleagues grumbled [4] that
the housing forum, which featured a number of people struggling with or near
homelessness, was “a political rally designed to inflame emotions.”
To political elites, the new crowds are unruly, disruptive, and
disrespectful; to the newly energized activists, they’re an inspiring
expression of participatory democracy.
~~~
In cultivating a new political discourse, Sawant has planted one
foot in city hall and the other firmly in the streets. Take, for instance, her
televised arrest in late 2014 in front of Alaska Airlines headquarters, in
protest of the company’s refusal to honor the voter-approved $15 minimum wage
at SeaTac Airport.
But what transpires outside the glare of klieg lights can be even
more revealing. Last winter, Sawant’s staff got a call from a constituent.
Kathy Heffernan, a hospital chaplain, had just received a notice that her
landlord was raising the rent – from $1,000 a month to $2,300 a month. A
typical elected official might assign staff to look into the situation, perhaps
make an inquiry or two, and offer empathy to the constituent.
Instead, “Kshama came to my apartment to meet with us in my living
room,” Heffernan recalls. “She listened to our stories. She helped us to
strategize a plan to win relocation assistance.” Sawant also urged Heffernan to
channel her frustration into the fight to make housing a human right. The
hospital chaplain took up Sawant’s challenge, and has become a leading advocate
in the local housing justice movement.
Sawant’s organizing approach paid off: Her reelection campaign
drew supporters in record numbers. More than 600 people volunteered for
door-belling, phone calling, and literature distribution; nearly 4,000 people
donated to the campaign for a total of $450,000.
Instead of vying for an at-large seat, as she had in 2013, Sawant
ran in 2015 in one of the city’s seven new districts. Her District 3
encompassed Capitol Hill – home to thousands of renters and the heart of the
LGBTQ community; the Central District, the epicenter of Seattle’s
African-American community; several medical centers; older single-family home
neighborhoods in the process of gentrification; and the wealthier private homes
along the shore of Lake Washington. It’s a diverse district, tilting
left.
Volunteers and staff for Socialist Alternative put together a
comprehensive grassroots effort, knocking on 90,000 doors. The party has six
branches in Seattle — neighborhood committees averaging a couple dozen members
apiece. In addition to the more traditional campaign recruitment of union
members and community activists, each branch was responsible for a quota of
volunteer shifts and for bringing in additional volunteers.
The mayor and his political allies went all out to beat Sawant,
recruiting Pamela Banks, a long-time community liaison for the city and CEO of
the local Urban League. Banks, an African-American, was the perfect liberal
establishment counterpoint to Sawant. While Sawant, an Indian immigrant, has
cultivated relations in communities of color, the active membership of
Socialist Alternative has been disproportionately white and male. Banks
supporters pointed out the racial divide to recruit support in African-American
and Asian communities.
Interestingly, red-baiting did not materialize as a major attack
line; Banks and Democratic Party consultants hinted that early polling showed
it was not an effective tactic in the district. In addition, by fully embracing
the socialist mantle, Sawant insulated herself: voters knew precisely what they
were getting with her, and even decidedly non-socialist political activists
appreciated her forthrightness.
The full spectrum of Seattle’s political establishment —
essentially ranging from pro-business Democrats to social and economic liberals
— endorsed Banks, sponsored fundraisers, and appeared in campaign ads. More
than 100 corporate executives, landlords, private equity principals, and
bankers donated to Banks’ campaign. And in the final two weeks, a Republican
Party–led independent expenditure committee came in with multiple mail pieces
and a robust phone operation.
But Banks faced a daunting headwind, as even her political allies
acknowledged. “This is an extremely tough race for Banks,” political
consultant and pollster Ben Anderstone told the Seattle
Weekly in October [5]. “It is
going to require Banks peeling off votes that are leaning to Sawant. The
negatives she’s using that Sawant is ineffective and doesn’t play well with
others — well, she’s going to have to be more specific, because a lot of people
like the fact that she doesn’t play well with others.”
Anderstone was correct to point out that Sawant had tapped into
voter anger, but like other political consultants he missed the real lesson.
Where pundits saw only frustrated voters, others saw a political leader who
inspired frustrated people into action with an affirming message of hope
through organizing.
In the end, the voters’ verdict — 56 to 44 percent for Sawant —
was as much a message about rising expectations and confidence in collective
struggle as it was about a smackdown of the political insiders. Leticia Parks,
one volunteer door-beller, describes it this way: “Every time there’s a
victory, I want to be a part of that.”
That sentiment helps explain why people like Vanessa Patricelli
were at the Sawant victory party on election night. The nurse recalled how
Sawant had advocated for housekeepers at her medical center who were being
denied a raise. “She’s always right there for us,” she said. As for larger
political questions, Patricelli acknowledged that Sawant had opened a door for
her. “I didn’t know what socialism was except that it’s a dirty word,” she
recalled. “Now I have more feel for it. I find myself drawn further and further
in that direction.”
~~~
But while Sawant has normalized the idea of socialism in Seattle,
it remains unclear whether Sawant’s 2015 win will end up spurring other viable
socialist and left candidacies, or whether it turns out to be a political
anomaly in the upper left-hand corner of the continental US. That will depend
on her party’s agility inside and outside City Hall, as well as the response of
key working-class constituencies, especially unions.
As for Seattle Mayor Ed Murray, when he inevitably doubles down on
efforts to marginalize Sawant in city politics, he’ll do so with the support of
a council majority and knowing full well that in the fight for a $15 minimum
wage, he successfully lured union leaders away from Sawant’s bottom-up strategy
and into a compromise achieved behind closed doors.
Nearly all Seattle unions endorsed Sawant’s reelection; many
turned out members for doorbelling and phone-banking. But when push comes to
shove in the next big fight, will union leaders fall back on familiar
relationships with the political establishment, or be willing to place issues
ahead of loyalty to Democrats? The coming years are a test not just for Sawant
but also for a labor movement – in Seattle and beyond – that historically has
been unwilling to abandon its co-dependence with the Democratic Party and
embrace independent class-based politics.
~~~
Beyond Seattle, what are the lessons for local left politics
across the US?
One is that political activists frequently underestimate popular
alienation from capitalism and openness to alternative politics. Seattle is not
Topeka or Albuquerque or Birmingham, and independent politics will manifest
differently based on local circumstances. But Sawant’s reelection signals that
an independent politics grounded in working-class interests can resonate with
politically disengaged people. The time is ripe for organizing along these lines.
A second, related lesson is that radical political campaigns will
find success to the degree that they focus less on how to win immediately at
the ballot box and more on building a working-class movement. Socialist
Alternative initially ran Sawant not with the primary goal of winning elective
office, but with the aim of engaging workers and students in a range of issue
fights, through which more people would come to recognize how the political
establishment had failed them and the need for independent action.
Ironically, by not caring about winning in 2013, Socialist
Alternative energized a working-class base and improved Sawant’s actual chances
of success.
A third lesson is the indispensability of organization behind any
electoral effort. In Seattle, Socialist Alternative is a relatively small party
— much smaller than local Democratic Party organizations — but it’s organized
in different neighborhoods, and its members are connected to a broader base of
union and community activists.
By rooting the candidacy in the party organization, the 2015
campaign was able to tap institutional memory from 2013 and earlier races.
Campaign strategies and tactics were not directed by a single candidate or
campaign manager, as is typical in most local electoral campaigns, but were
developed through collective, thoughtful discussions.
This would be quite difficult if not impossible for individual
progressive candidates who lack an independent base. Indeed, many progressives
who claim political independence but run by default as Democrats find
themselves drawn inexorably into Democratic Party politics and the party’s
attitude of ambivalence – or worse – when it comes to defending workers against
business interests.
In addition to the prospect of local socialist candidacies –
the Socialist Alternative party almost won a seat on the Minneapolis city
council two years ago [6] and
may try again there or elsewhere – there’s the opportunity for radical
labor-backed candidates to run for office. Unions with active rank-and-file
memberships provide a ready-made organizational foundation. Will they take the
plunge into independent electoral bids?
Doubtless pundits will be looking to see what happens with Sawant
now that she has won reelection, but the bigger question for the US left is
whether similar candidacies sprout up in other cities in the coming years.
Sawant certainly has proven that it’s possible, under the right conditions and
with relentless grassroots organizing, for a socialist to win local office. Now
the question is how broadly that can be replicated.
Jonathan Rosenblum is a union and community organizer living in
Seattle, WA. He was a paid consultant as well as a volunteer on Sawant’s 2015
reelection campaign. He is the author of a forthcoming book on labor organizing
in Seattle and beyond, to be published by Beacon Press in spring 2017.
Links:
[1] http://www.seattleweekly.com/home/950487-129/sawant-ignites-crowd-wins-over-10-year-olds
[2] http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlepolitics/2013/10/03/ed-murrays-vision-meat-potatoes-no-greens/
[3] http://www.seattlemet.com/articles/2014/7/30/history-of-seattles-minimum-wage-law-august-2014
[4] http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/complaints-say-sawants-housing-meeting-was-actually-political-rally/
[5] http://www.seattleweekly.com/home/961010-129/can-anyone-bring-down-seattles-high-flying
[6] https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/12/city-council-socialism/
[2] http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlepolitics/2013/10/03/ed-murrays-vision-meat-potatoes-no-greens/
[3] http://www.seattlemet.com/articles/2014/7/30/history-of-seattles-minimum-wage-law-august-2014
[4] http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/complaints-say-sawants-housing-meeting-was-actually-political-rally/
[5] http://www.seattleweekly.com/home/961010-129/can-anyone-bring-down-seattles-high-flying
[6] https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/12/city-council-socialism/
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