Is Seattle's Socialist City Council Member Going to Show Us How to Ditch the Two-Party System?

[Joe Shlabotnik]

Good news, comrades: Socialism is in vogue again. Since the financial crisis exposed our national economy as little more than one very large shell corporation, left-wing protest movements—Occupy Wall Street chief among them—have popped up around the country, feeding on public opinion that has been steadily shifting away from capitalism and in favor of the red alternative.

Occupy stubbornly refused to engage the elctoral system, a tactical choice that arguably contributed to its speedy flameout in 2012. But one avowed Marxist who doesn't shy away from getting her hands dirty is Kshama Sawant, an Indian-born economics professor who stormed to a seat in the Seattle City Council as an avowed member of the Socialist Alternative Party last November. She's focused on making tangible changes now even if the endgame is more fundamental upheaval later: Her signature issue these days is a plan to institute a $15 minimum wage, which would quickly make Seattle one of the best places to work in the country. (For frame of reference, President Barack Obama's much weaker $10.10 national minimum wage proposal has divided his own Democratic Party.)

Rather than branding her as a fringe figure, Sawant's loud and proud left-wing views have earned her massive grassroots support—a show of force that has turned heads among local political insiders.

Apparently Change.org, that nefarious repository of pseudo progressive astroturf, is going after Sawant under the guise of a group called Sustainable Wages, which wants to chill out and cut a deal with local business leaders. I called Sawant up to ask about the minimum wage fight, what it's like to be socialist in a country where that used to be a bad word (and kind of still is), where she sees her career going next, and whether it makes sense to vote for Democrats.

Interview with Kshama Sawant: http://www.vice.com/read/we-talked-socialist-city-councilwoman-from-seattle-about-ditching-the-two-party-system?utm_source=vicefbus

And yes, there really is a petition to have her recalled, with 144 signatures.

[Scuba]

1. If we Dems ran on a $15 minimum wage nationally, we'd hold the Senate and take the House.

[TBF]

2. That's for sure -

and it's about time it happened. In fact I think the minimum wage ought to be $20 (and maybe that would force companies to reconsider the obscene salaries they are paying the CEOs).

[socialist_n_TN]

3. SAlt is taking a left turn........

This interview is the first one where I've ever seen her use the word "revolution" rather than some other euphemism. And that's a good thing because the platform she ran on was NOT socialist. It was left-reformist which leads to the danger of left-reformist ideas (which do NOT get to the root of the problem, i.e., capitalism) being mistaken FOR socialism.

It's good to see SAlt publically coming closer to the ideas that Trotsky himself advocated. That's all we've ever asked of Ms Sawant.

[2banon]

4. This has definitely caught my eye in recent weeks..

News Hour actually had a pretty decent segment on this sometime last week.. Considering the news source, it was rather jaw dropping, and very exciting.

Of course, there's going to be blowback from the likes of organizations such as those the Koch brothers head. Their extremely lame and unfathomably-long-standing "argument" against any movement for raising the minimum wage (even to Obama's very weak $10 mim) claims job losses due to closing up shops and moving business elsewhere.

I say, that would be the moment where workers take a page from the workers movements in Spain and South America where workers take ownership of those businesses as a collective.

[Jim Lane]

5. No, she isn't, if she keeps saying stupid things.

From the linked article: "If you look at every single example where the left tries to work within the Democratic Party and push the debate in the interest of the environment or the interest of the working class, it hasn't worked."

With, of course, a few minor exceptions... such as Social Security, the Civil Rights Act, Medicare, the Voting Rights Act, right up through Dodd-Frank (not all it could be but way better than what we had).

Let me give her the correct version of her statement:

If you look at every single example where the left tries to forget about working within the Democratic Party and push the debate in the interest of the environment or the interest of the working class through third-party politics, it hasn't worked.