By Jonathan Rosenblum
After a long-fought battle against big business and the Democratic Party establishment in Seattle for a tax on big business — dubbed the Amazon Tax — Council member Kshama Sawant, a Socialist Alternative member in Seattle, declared a “historic victory for working people.”
Sawant said “We are winning because of the determination of workers and socialists to smash all obstacles and to find a path for victory.” This message was a warning to others that “class struggle is what gets the goods.” Further, the private-for-profit housing market has “utterly failed working people, not just here and now but everywhere and always, because capitalism is completely incapable of meeting the most basic needs of working people.”
This is one of several lessons that Jonathan Rosenblum’s book highlights in his narrative on how socialists beat Amazon and upended big-city politics. Socialist Alternative in Seattle won the victories they did — a $15 minimum wage, tenants’ protections and the Amazon tax — while drawing upon class struggle methods gleaned from 175 years of Marxist theory and practice. These lessons are more crucial than ever as capitalism is deepening its reaction, and the rich are richer than they’ve ever been, while working-class people struggle to pay the rent and put food on the table.
An extraordinary political experiment
Rosenblum describes the 10 years of a socialist council member in Seattle as an “extraordinary US political experiment, unmatched in recent history.” He describes victories, challenges, and defeats during this period when Socialist Alternative won
four consecutive victories, while not diluting their program. Key to this success was building a movement that would achieve real gains for the working class. Socialist Alternative member Emerson Johnson reflects: “Getting Kshama elected isn’t enough. She’s there to be a megaphone for the movement and the movement has to continue.” Recently, politicians such as Mamdani in New York and Sean Orr in Vancouver were elected as self-described socialists. It is not possible for a single politician, no matter how skilled or committed, to win against the power and money of the ruling classes. Sawant stressed that none of the victories would have been won without a movement and that Socialist Alternative was the core of movement building. It takes a movement to win the most important victories!
Build our power
Unlike reformists, who try to conciliate and neutralize opponents, Socialist Alternative recognized that achieving their demands would take a powerful movement. One of their key tasks was to help build it. In the initial fight for an Amazon tax that would fund housing, that failed after the Democrats on council backtracked, Sawant challenged political activists to take away three key lessons. One, our movement should not negotiate against ourselves. The original demand of $150 million was reduced to $75 million to compromise with what council members were comfortable with. The second lesson was not to rely on the Democrats. The movement needs its own representatives rooted in the strength of the movements and in the struggle of working-class people. The third lesson was to build greater working-class unity, not by conciliating with construction union leaders (who opposed the tax) but by calling for common struggle around the material needs of working people. Divisions only weaken the power of workers, and the bosses gain from that.
The second time around, Socialist Alternative and the movement around them won against one of the richest men in the world. Kshama remarked after this victory: “I have a message for Jeff Bezos and his class: If you attempt again to overturn the Amazon tax, working people will go all out in the thousands to defeat you. And we will not stop there because… we are fighting for far more than this tax, we are preparing the ground for a different kind of society.” She continued: “And if you, Jeff Bezos, want to drive that process forward by lashing out against us in our modest demands, then so be it. Because we are coming for you and your rotten system. We are coming to dismantle this deeply oppressive, racist, sexist, violent, utterly bankrupt system of capitalism, this police state. We cannot and will not stop until we overthrow it and replace it with a world based on solidarity, genuine democracy, and equality — a socialist world.”
