Kshama Sawant

Last week’s electoral victory for Kshama Sawant in Seattle has potentially made history for The United States and beyond. Kshama, an openly revolutionary militant, stood as a candidate for Socialist Alternative and won! The impact has been felt, on this side of the Atlantic, in the ongoing debate in Britain within the ranks of Left Unity. This organisation has grown out of 10,000 signatories to the appeal of film director Ken Loach for the creation of a new party to the left of Labour. Now at 1000 paid memberships LU is on countdown to a Founding Conference on 30 November in London. The supporters of the Socialist Platform of Left Unity– among them our comrades Kathrine Brannan and Henry Nowak ( see our article) have seen in Kshama’s victory a confirmation of their argument for ‘an openly socialist party’ and not just ‘a broad left party.’ The same debate is relevant right now in other countries, including France. Below, you will find our translation of an article from our Australian comrades of Red Flag which combines a lively report of Kshama Sawant’s campaign with an analysis of the reasons for its success and an appeal for unity of revolutionary organisations, too often in sectarian conflict with one another.The support given by the American comrades of ISO to the candidate of CIO is a positive example of a totally different strategy and attitude which we welcome in raising our glasses to the continuing success of Kshama Sawant and her comrades.

 Par Barry Sheppard (Site internet)

Kshama Sawant, an open socialist, won election to the Seattle city council in November’s ballot. One would have to go back to the first half of the twentieth century to find anything similar in the United States. Sawant, who was born in India, moved to the United States and is now a citizen. She first drew attention as part of the local Occupy protests in 2011.

While Occupy has faded, many of those who were inspired by it have organised on other fronts. These include opposition to foreclosures, support to the strikes and demonstrations by fast food workers, and opposition to coal trains coming through the Seattle area.

Sawant has been a vocal champion of these initiatives; activists from them formed the backbone of her campaign.

A few days after her victory was confirmed, the new city council member stood with Boeing workers who were locked in struggle against the company. The employees, organised in the International Association of Machinists, had by a large majority voted down a concessionary contract.

The Los Angeles Times reported: “The rain was cold, dripping down her blue poncho, but the newly elected city councilwoman’s words sizzled.

“Surrounded by union workers gathered to support Boeing’s machinists, Kshama Sawant denounced the two-party political system, corporate greed, military contracts and the leaders of the aerospace giant …

“‘We don’t need the executives!’ cried Seattle’s first elected socialist in living memory, as the damp crowd cheered and rush hour traffic hummed slowly by. ‘We need Boeing to be under democratic public ownership by workers – by the community!’”

Concrete proposals

Sawant’s campaign centred on three demands: raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, instituting controls to curb skyrocketing rents, and taxing millionaires to fund a public transit system and other city projects.

Such demands point in the opposite direction to the austerity pathway the Democrats and Republicans are charting. They struck a chord.

So did her denunciation of the two major parties. The whole country has watched them fail to address the needs of the “99 percent”. Meanwhile, the “1 percent” has been coddled during the Great Recession and its aftermath.

Sawant didn’t hide or downplay her socialist politics. The fact that she won on this basis in a citywide election is important.

It reflects that there is a new openness to socialism, especially among young people. An article in The New York Times quoted Sawant, “I think we have shown the strongest sceptics that the socialist label is not a bad one for a grassroots campaign to succeed.”

Even the man she defeated, 16-year Democratic Party incumbent Richard Conlin, said after the election, “I don’t think socialism makes most people in Seattle afraid.”

Recent polls show that 60 percent of 18-29 year olds favour socialism over capitalism. This should not be overstated. Neither Sawant’s victory nor these polls mean that socialism is well understood, or that large numbers now consider themselves socialists. Socialist organisations have been losing members, and the label is anathema to many, particularly in less progressive areas of the country.

But it does show that socialists can make inroads when they have concrete proposals, and when there is an audience for socialist ideas.

Breaking the Democrat stranglehold

Seattle is a solid Democratic Party city. This meant that Sawant did not face the obstacle of “lesser evilism”, whereby people are cowed into voting Democratic lest a Republican would win. The race here was between a Socialist and a Democrat.

Sawant’s campaign began modestly. She was able to utilise the fact that Seattle is a one-party town to point out that the Democrats serve the interests of the capitalists.

 “The Democratic Party machines … run these cities in the interests of the rich and powerful,” she said, adding that Conlin was a “corporate pandering politician”. As the campaign wore on, this became increasingly obvious.

“Conlin garnered donations from every single corporate real estate interest, downtown law firm, commercial construction magnate, railroad honcho, and so on,” one commentator noted.

Sawant rejected corporate donations. But as her campaign gained steam, her activist base raised a considerable sum of $125,000 (still less than Conlin spent).

Conlin also had the support of the Seattle Times (the major newspaper), the Democratic Party district committees, several unions, the mainstream environmental organisations and the other elected officials.

Sawant is an economics teacher at Seattle Community College. The American Federation of Teachers local endorsed her, as did a local of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). She was also endorsed by the Stranger, a community newspaper that appeals to the young, the radical and LGBTI people.

As her campaign’s momentum grew, there were interesting defections. Some Democratic officials broke ranks to support Sawant. Then the county labour council voted 28 to 21 to endorse the socialist. It wasn’t enough for a formal endorsement, but it made headlines.

Then Conlin came over to support a $15 minimum wage, as did the two Democrats vying for mayor.

Another factor in Sawant’s support was that Conlin was head of the city council’s land use committee, and had a pro-developer record. One activist wrote in a letter to the editor, “When ordinary citizens attended land use meetings in large numbers Conlin ignored our pleas” (to stop the developers riding roughshod over local people’s concerns).

“Council members said our ideas were ‘non-starters’, so we turned to Sawant and discovered that she understood our concerns. She is passionate about empowering people, not corporations.”

Sawant ran as the candidate of Socialist Alternative, an affiliate of the Committee for a Workers International based in Britain. The CWI considers itself Trotskyist.

Her campaign was endorsed by Solidarity and the International Socialist Organization. It is to be hoped that similar efforts can bring together revolutionary socialists of different backgrounds in the United States in common work and discussion.

The most powerful typhoon ever recorded in the Philippines and one of the worst in the world, super typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda slammed the central part of the archipelago and wrought devastation in its wake. The true extent of the damage to lives and property is yet to be known as Haiyan/Yolanda destroyed critical communications and power infrastracture thus limiting access to the worst hit areas.

Partido ng Manggagawa (PM) [Labor Party-Philippines] is appealing for solidarity and assistance to ordinary workers and poor who have suffered from the super typhoon’s impact. PM members among informal drivers and the urban poor in Tacloban, Leyte were among those severely affected and will be among the focus of the relief assistance.

The super typhoon swept through the islands of the central Philippines from Cebu to Panay where PM maintains chapters in the key cities. In Cebu and Bohol, the devastation of the typhoon comes on top of the destruction brought by a magnitude 7.2 earthquake less than a month ago. As in all the disasters brought about by climate change, the urban and rural poor suffer the most.

PM is appealing for assistance so it could offer relief at least to families of workers and poor which it has already organized. Relief assistance would complement the organizing efforts of PM on the basis of urban poor and working class issues.

PM is a political organization of the working class which engages in parliamentary struggle as a extension of the parliament of the streets. Even as PM has a strategic vision of social change, it actively fights for social reform and even involves in relief efforts as means to arouse, organize and mobilize the working people.

To donate online through paypal or via bank wire transfer visit PM solidarity page here

PM’s Facebook page

Charles Darwin

I am a scientist by profession. As a scientist and a socialist I am continually exasperated by those who, whilst applying a strictly evidence based approach to certain aspects of their lives, are happy to abandon empiricism when it comes to politics says Colin Piper.

I think the history of science is full of lessons for us today as we try and build a new left movement and I would like to share some with you now.

I’m sure most comrades are broadly familiar with the story of Copernicus. He was a 16th century Polish monk who realised that the evidence pointed to a Universe that had the Sun at its centre and not the Earth. Copernicus correctly anticipated the reaction this idea would get from the established church and was justifiably scared, he therefore delayed publication of his book until just before his death. His ideas were later taken up by the Italian Galileo who was charged with heresy in 1633 and placed under house arrest for the remainder of his life.

The heliocentric model of the Solar System had in fact been proposed in the 3rd century B.C. but did not become widely accepted until the late 1600’s and not by the church for another hundred years. In short, it took two thousand years for an idea which we now know to be true to be universally acknowledged as the truth.

In 1912 the German meteorologist and polar explorer Alfred Wegener proposed the theory of continental drift. He went to West Africa and Brazil and found compelling evidence that the two had indeed been joined together at one time. He was universally dismissed as “a nutter” (to quote a post on this site describing me and other signatories to the Socialist Platform). Fifty years after his death incontrovertible evidence was found that proved he was correct after all.

Charles Darwin was another scientist who was acutely aware of the opprobrium his ideas would attract and he too delayed publication of his work as a result. As a scientist I find it interesting that, even today, Darwin’s theories remain one of the most contentious of scientific ideas despite actually being based on everyday experience and observation and backed by overwhelming evidence.

Darwin’s theory is essentially based on three observations that are non-controversial to any farmer or grower: 1) organisms produce more offspring than survive 2)  there are differences between individuals and 3) characteristics can be inherited.

Nevertheless the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection continues to attract the most passionate vilification, far more than say Quantum Theory or General Relativity for example, both of which challenge most people’s perceptions of the world in a much more fundamental way.

I think the reason is that Darwin’s ideas grew from the same philosophical stock as Marxism. I don’t think it a coincidence that Engels was one of Darwin’s earliest fans and used Darwin’s ideas in his ‘Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State’ a work of 1884 that modern anthropological evidence shows to have been fundamentally correct.

Darwin showed that tiny imperceptible changes, if given geological time to accumulate, could turn a sponge into a gorilla, or more accurately, could turn some unknown single-celled creature into both a sponge AND a gorilla, not to mention all the other myriad creatures on Earth. This is essentially an example of Hegel’s dialectical materialism, ‘quantity turning into quality’. I think it is this ‘revolutionary’ way of thinking that some people find impossible to accept, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.

So what has all this got to do with Left Unity? If you believe, as some contributors to this site certainly do, that socialism has failed, doesn’t work and needs to be abandoned, that is fine. I urge you to argue your case as fervently and coherently as you can and back up your argument with evidence.

If, on the other hand, you are a socialist but, recognising that socialism is currently an unpopular and marginalised idea, think the way to build a movement is to in some way water it down or put it in the small print, then I think you are making a fundamental mistake.

The lives of the scientific pioneers I have touched on above have two lessons for us today in my view. On the one hand great harm has been done and progress stifled by the burying of ideas in an attempt to be more popular or to gain greater patronage and influence in the short-term. On the other hand great pioneers have been prepared to say what they believe to be true, even at the expense of ridicule and isolation, events proved them right.

Mostly dedicated to Rosa Luxemburg’s concepts of democracy and revolution, the International Conference animated by a wide-range of international scholars – from Germany, Brazil, France, Japan, England, India and Canada – gathered about 200 participants. This success shows how relevant the Rosa Luxemburg’s concepts remain in a time of multi-level crisis.

One of her most important contribution to modern Marxist thought is her refusal to separate the concepts of “democracy” and “revolution”. This approach is developed in her criticism of the limits of bourgeois democracy, her conception of the revolutionary struggle as democratic self-emancipation of the “great masses”, her vision of a socialist democracy, as well as her firm insistence – in discussion with Russian revolutionaries – on the importance of democratic freedoms in the transition towards socialism.

The economic and financial crisis, hitting so hard significant parts of the world and questioning the social model as well as the democratic structures, has led us to a political crisis that drives away from politics more and more citizens afflicted by both center-right and center-left governments. In this respect, Rosa Luxemburg’s questionings on the “masses” relationship with social transformation, parties and unions are more inspiring than ever. To her, a true change can only be assured by a massive people mobilization – beyond a mere “participation”, through forms of auto-organization and self-empowerment modifying the very role of parties and unions. This is the reason why she refuses to separate the concept of revolution from the concept of democracy. One cannot work without the other.

Many concrete examples of the interconnection between revolution and democracy can be seen throughout the world – whether it is in Tunisia, in Brazil, in Spain or in Turkey. At such occasions of spontaneous social demonstrations, people take to the streets and demand more democracy. Several speakers have referred to “Rosa Luxemburg’s moments” to characterize such movements. These recent movements, as well as the critical situation we are in, force us to reconsider or even to reinvent the questions addressed to the emancipatory movement as a whole. In this regard, Rosa Luxemburg’s concepts and the debate on their interpretation can be of considerable importance.

Conference organized and/or supported by:

• International Rosa Luxemburg Society
• University of Paris I Panthéon-La Sorbonne/ Centre d’Histoire des Systèmes de Pensée Moderne (CHSPM)
• Regional Council Ile-de-France
• Espaces Marx
• Rosa Luxemburg Foundation
• Gerda-und-Hermann-Weber-Stiftung
• transform! europe
• Collectif Smolny
• Revue internationale »Actuel Marx«
• Revue critique »Contretemps«