No Critical or other support to the Sawant electoral campaign!
Kshama Sawant is calling on the left, socialists and trade unionists to join her campaign for Congress. Revolutionary workers have to ask: Does she provide a pole to unite workers to defeat U.S. led genocidal wars, imperialism and fascism? No! Is her campaign using the electoral system to fight for a workers’ government, exposing the farce of capitalist democracy as the imperialist hegemon? No again!
We answer to our international social class, the working class, the one productive class in modern society. We defend it and class-political independence every day. To do so in the age of imperialism means we must oppose “our” imperialist bourgeoisie and all its projects, and not with political subtlety but by supporting the victory of Iran. To do otherwise is to be unsupportable. This is the case with the Sawant campaign! It has features that would otherwise be supportable, but it fails the acid test.
While Trump and Netanyahu threaten the Iranian masses with elimination as a civilization, Sawant’s campaign calls the Iranian workers to initiate general strikes against the war, implicitly proposing the Iranian workers take a dual defeatist attitude towards the war. This is an abdication of her responsibility as an internationalist.
For revolutionaries the task in the U.S. is to mobilize workers for the revolutionary defeat of our own ruling class; general strike and blockades of arms shipments are what is necessary in the west today! The Iranian working class needs a proletarian military policy that arms the workers through the trade unions to fight off the imperialist aggressors. Armed workers battalions would be an inspiration to unite the masses of South West Asia to fully defeat the U.S. and Zionist aggressors, driving them, the local monarchies and imperialism from the region. Indeed Al Jazeera reports the population is being armed and trained. Iranian workers are not striking, they are building armaments and working to recover life’s necessities from the last round of attacks and to protect themselves from the coming attacks. It would be self-defeating for the Iranian workers to initiate a general strike under these conditions. Every night the masses gather to demand death to the aggressors, not to join a world wide general strike ‘against the war’ as Sawant calls for. Sawant’s is a reformist campaign with a pacifist anti-war program!
Her pacifism extends to the USA, she is not warning the working class that it must form armed self-defense organizations. In the U.S. today such are needed to crush ICE and the racist terrorizing and dismembering of whole neighborhoods. An actual revolutionary workers’ campaign would organize and train Labor-Black-Brown Community Defense Guards! Today, this spring, now!
We popularize a revolutionary transitional program to smash the class enemy power that employs ICE and promotes fascist forces internationally. Reformism has no program to defeat fascism categorically, to reverse mass layoffs, bring down high and mushrooming prices, end homelessness and close the overseas bases! At a moment when the workers need to take power, reformists solutions are non-starter legislative calls to ‘tax the rich.’ We pursue a transitional program of class struggle to bring the working class to power, whether reformism believes our demands and methods are “practicable” or not!
Famine, wider war, world depression and fascist power consolidation are coming at our class on a timetable of months! The SocAlt’s Fight for Fifteen dollars an hour (2012-present) was scarcely a victory and more a collapse into support for a minimum wage, historically a Roosevelt stratification of below-living-wage workers!
This fifteen year long campaign has many workers earning less in wages relative to purchasing power than when it started. That type of reformist abdication to the slave wage system is no threat to pie card domination over wage labor! And wiggling a finger in a booth for a “socialism” of moral suasion in parliamentary dickering does not answer history’s call for a future. Revolution is required!
Can workers trust a ‘socialist candidate’ who calls a stagnated minimum wage in real dollars a ‘win’ to lead the campaign against imperialist wars? We think not!
Any critical support must divide on the question of the unconditional defense of Iran. Sawant does not call for the victory of Iran. She does not say that the defeat of the U.S. is the lesser evil. She calls herself a Leninist but does not state the above. The defeat of the USA in this conflict isl hastening the revolutionary upsurge of the masses internationally.
Sawant says “Neither U.S. imperialism nor the Iranian ruling class in any way stand for the interests of working and oppressed people, and we cannot support either.” (No War on Iran! No War in the Middle East! Mass Civil Disobedience & General Strike Urgently Needed! – Kshama Sawant for Congress“ This is pacifism masquerading as anti-theocratic Trotskyism!
Her position is a pox on both their houses rather than extending military defense of Iran, a semi-colonial nation, against U.S. imperialism which is armed to the teeth. It is up to the Iranian workers to overthrow the reactionary theocratic Iranian regime and establish a secular socialist state. We fight to turn imperialist wars abroad into class war against our own ruling class at home. This will create better conditions for workers internationally to chart their own course.
How can you turn an imperialist war abroad into a class war at home if you can’t support those fighting “our” imperialism and instead echo imperialist calls for uprisings? Massive evidence dumps have leaked linking U.S. and Israeli policy and agents to the killings of Iranian police. When this stratagem failed, and on a high from his Venezuela walkover, Trump had hoped for regime change within days of the U.S./IDF attack!
Trump, Netanyahu and Bessent have taken credit for instigating the December uprisings, retailing them to the world as a follow-on to the “Women, Life, Freedom” protest movement of 2022. Amnesia in the U.S.A. should not be indulged: it is only a few weeks ago that Trump openly stated his war aims include regime change, while bourgeois pundits freely confess the Zionists seek to carry out a “greater Israel” expansion plan across the region. To refrain from declaring support for an Iranian victory is analogous to “3rd Camp” politics which refused to defend the bureaucratized worker’s states from imperialism! Proletarian internationalism demands a U.S. defeat! The workers have no fatherland!
As for the Spartacist League, which has been perpetually backflipping since their founder’s passing, their critical support for Sawant’s campaign fails on multiple counts. One would expect Robertsonites to call for labor self defense organizations and the fight for a labor party to be the basis of their support, but both ideas are absent from their opportunist attempt to find a home among the left they have forever derided. Their criticism of the Sawant history of sharing platforms and organizing with the Greens is not identified as the can opener to the popular front but as mega liberalism. From an outfit whose stock in trade was accusations of popular frontism as a generational excuse for their sectarianism this is an astonishing turn around. WHERE’S THE TRANSITIONAL PROGRAM?
Are there any working class candidates whose campaigns are turning the imperialist war abroad into class war against the capitalist ruling class at home? We are looking for such, rest assured. We want a fighting workers labor party. We want to organize with the militants who want to build it! With the mass abandonment of MAGA and Trump by those who voted for him, now is the time for a class alternative to the Democrats. Any socialist running for office must be using their campaign to organize a Fighting Worker’s Labor Party-one which unites the entire working class, the organized in the unions, the unemployed, the organizations of the oppressed and those workers who are turning towards unionism and organizing the unorganized. A fighting worker’s labor party must be organized on an internationalist program that defends all workers, “Legal” or otherwise, here or abroad!
Are there any working class candidates whose campaigns are organizing working class self defense guards against the anti-worker ICE and fascist goons armed and funded by Trump? Since before Minneapolis it has been clear that spontaneous immigrant defense, blowing whistles and passing out constitutional rights cards is not sufficient. It does not prevent murders, kidnapping, rape and disappearances by ICE. The union’s existing leaderships must be replaced by militants willing to mobilize the ranks in armed mass pickets to defend our class.
Where are the working class candidates using their campaigns to raise up new militant class struggle leaders in the trade unions to replace existing leaderships in order to make a hard break from the Democrats and Republicans? Who will forge the fighting worker’s labor party that organizes labor black and brown self defense guards and builds an international worker’s united front against fascism and imperialism?
If there are, revolutionary workers should join those campaigns, not with illusions in reform via legislation but in order to unite the mass of our class with the vanguard militants building a party dedicated to taking state power with class struggle methods. Without it we cannot expropriate the big capitalists and take the commanding heights of the economy (the means of production) out of the profit system and run them under workers collective ownership, management and planning for human needs!
For the Workers Party:
Today the working class has no class political independence. The working class does not have its own party that organizes for our immediate needs and our ultimate historic program. Revolutionary socialists have no illusions that the capitalist state can be reformed. Yet we must use every crack in the oppressive structures of capitalist rule to organize our class to take power. Were a reformist, mass labor party to come into being in our present terrible international circumstance, we would participate in it and even build it. BUT within it or without, we will in all circumstances defend and take responsibility for OUR OWN PROGRAM, as Trotsky told us to do.
“Trotsky: I will not say that the labor party is a revolutionary party, but that we will do everything to make it possible. At every meeting I will say: I am a representative of the SWP. I consider it the only revolutionary party. But I am not a sectarian. You are trying now to create a big workers’ party. I will help you but I propose that you consider a program for this party. I make such and such propositions. I begin with this. Under these conditions it would be a big step forward. Why not say openly what is? Without any camouflage, without any diplomacy.” Trotsky discussion on the Labor Party
What our social class needs in this epoch is a revolutionary Bolshevik party. We fight at all times for class-political independence, but this feature is not enough! Critically, the Sawant campaign does not build the workers’ self-defense organs that are existentially necessary today. Fascists have the highest courts and the “Justice” Department fortifying their rights to violence. What do workers have, or are we likely to have if “socialist” electoralism does not organize workers’ militias?! We are not pacifists! The day to say so is today!
“Trotsky: Naturally we can conquer power only when we have the majority of the working class, but even in that case the workers’ militia would be a small minority. Even in the October Revolution the militia was a small minority. But the question is how to get this small minority which must be organized and armed with the sympathy of the masses. How can we do it? By preparing the mind of the masses, by propaganda. The crisis, the sharpening of class relations, the creation of a workers’ party, a labor party, signifies immediately, immediately, a terrible sharpening of forces. The reaction will be immediately a fascist movement. That is why we must now connect the idea of the labor party with the consequences – otherwise we will appear only as pacifists with democratic illusions. Then we also have the possibility of spreading the slogans of our transitional program and see the reaction of the masses. We will see what slogans should be selected, what slogans abandoned, but if we give up our slogans before the experience, before seeing the reaction of the masses, then we can never advance.” (Ibid)
The programmatic and organizational requirements of a class-for-itself workers party fighting for all political power and the expropriation of the capitalist bourgeoisie through socialist revolution is missing from Sawant’s electoral campaign!
Sawant claims to understand this and to have a Bolshevik conception of the state and state power. We ask whether she still believes the police are members of the working class? Sawant’s prior organization says…“It (Labor) must demand that police unions reject racist policing policies and agree to support a purge of the police in order to remain in or join labor councils.” – Socialists and the State: How to End Racist Policing | Socialist Alternative This conception is all wrong and fatal! Since splitting with SocAlt we have seen no rejection of its anti-Marxist theory of the state as regards its armed defenders!
Sawant’s record as a Seattle City Council member on the score of who the police are and support for their leading ranks is rotten. She voted to confirm Carmen Best, an FBI training academy graduate, and 26 year police veteran for the top Seattle cop job. And Best was the cop who in 2020 led the violent local police response to the GEORGE FLOYD PROTESTS with full riot gear, blast balls, flash bang grenades and pepper spray! Take a look!
These betrayals are echoes of her CWI days.The CWI/SocAlt told workers and the oppressed that the police are class brothers trapped in a reactionary mindset by their union leaders(!!!) Marxism has always asserted that police are not workers and that their unions are not part of the labor movement! This is objective fact, regardless of the AFL-CIO tops-Democrats’ spin. Adaptation to reformism and a default to pacifism is an electoral reflection of their failure to apply Marxism in their analysis of the class nature of the state.
Her electoral program is a collection of reform proposals, some adequate, others just liberalism, and accommodations of illusions in capitalist progress. Civilian police review boards are a worse than useless bust demand, exactly a concession to a cherished liberal illusion of ‘state class neutrality,’ in an era where masked federal police murder demonstrators who were protesting ICE kidnappings! The police ARE the armed core of the capitalist state, and there is no reforming that state. Police unions OUT OF THE LABOR FEDERATIONS NOW!
For the hard break from the Democrats:
For over a century, the working class via the trade unions and organizations of the oppressed, have been trapped in a cross class coalition which binds our hands, and reduces class struggles for power into mobilizations to elect and re-elect the Democratic Party. A bourgeois popular front party fully committed to the right of capitalism to exploit workers and for U.S. capitalism to rule the world by militarily controlling the resource rich global south, world financial institutions and global trade.
The labor leadership, the union bureaucrats, reinforce this arrangement telling workers that we don’t need our own workers party, as ex SEIU president Andy Stern told us in the early 2000’s, “the Democratic Party is the Labor Party.” Just to Stern’s left are the layers of the bureaucracy who point to the failed campaign of Labor Party Advocates organized primarily by Tony Mazzochi in the 1990’s and say, “a labor party has been tried and failed.”
Fake socialists like the DSA and Jacobin, flanked on their left by the Greens, the Communist Party, FRSO and others like the Avakian led RCP feign to the left with street organizing action but come November they rally alongside the labor lieutenants of capital, pie cards to corral the working class inside the capitalist Democratic Party flaunting ‘progressive’ candidates as the pragmatic choice to win immediate goals. To ‘pie in the sky revolutionaries,’ they say, “sure we’re all socialists, even Jesus was a socialist, but right now we need to fill the potholes, affordable eggs, etc. You are just ultra-left if you refuse to stand with the working class when it stands with the Democrats like Mamdani, Platner, Sanders, AOC…”
“The goals we all agree on!”
We sure don’t all agree on the “Tax the Rich” campaign, nor “the people united will never be defeated” popular front call, nor the failure to identify the capitalist class as the enemy instead targeting only “the billionaires”, not identifying their class dictatorship and the wages system. We are not social-democrats. We don’t propose to preserve any of capitalism. We seek the self-liberation of the producers and their assumption of all political power and their redesign of all social relations!
We do not advance the ubiquitous solution of “Tax the Rich,” rather the socialist program is for the expropriation of the capitalist means of production. We oppose reformist solutions because of their inherent limitations; taxing the rich keeps the capitalist class firmly in power and those pushing such solutions objectively are telling workers their needs can be met by distributional methods which leave the social relations of exploitation at the point of production in place. Such was the case during the rise of capitalism when it was a progressive economic force, but today capitalism is a fetter on the advance of the forces of production. To make more tax revenue available to the regime of the bourgeois class dictatorship is no guarantee of how it will be spent or on whose projects!
With no political power over the spending of that tax revenue the demand is wishful thinking exhausting the masses’ energies in pursuit of no gain whatsoever! When workers are contesting power, in revolutionary days, we will demand the expropriation of the rich capitalists! We’ll be taking their factories, nationalized under workers’ control! We will plan for JOBS FOR ALL by shortening the work week with no pay reduction and opening the books of the entire capitalist class! Let them howl that they can’t afford it! We intend to ensure our class SURVIVES!
Those who attach themselves to either the minimum and or maximum program, avoiding a transitional program of class struggle demands, look for abstractions to avoid being concrete about what is necessary to win! They dream of relief from oppression but have no map with the revolutionary road. All this at a critical turning point in history with the working class struggling internationally to become a class for itself and escape the terminal crisis of capitalism.
Communists, revolutionary socialists, social democrats, anarchists, Greens, and even many liberals claim to agree that a ‘just economy’ would make resources available to the entire population: education, childcare, eldercare, medical care, safe medicine, organic and humanly sourced food, clean energy, housing, transportation, environmental restoration, an end to the drudgery of wage slavery, unsafe, unhealthy work and long exploitative work hours. The list of social necessary improvements ‘we all agree on’ goes on and on! But pacifist parliamentarism collapses on every mass striving when the big money talks, a lesson some will learn shortly. Capital will flimflam you while rejecting every reform on principle. They are in fact in crisis. They are afraid it’s terminal because it is!
Sawant warrants criticism, not critical support! We stand with the masses of every country that can overnight become “enemies” of U.S. imperialism in this terminal crisis. This is the sclerotic demise of the empire! Trump brandishes oil rewards for the bourgeoisie if they will just snuff the Epstein story, which is bedrock female oppression by patriarchy, a survival of the origin of class society itself!
We stand on the historic program of our revolutionary social class. Against the wages system and for workers’ self-defense! Against war and for defeat of imperialism and fascism! For women’s liberation! For A Fighting Workers Labor Party! For A New Revolutionary Workers International, a World Party of Socialist Revolution! For World Socialism!
CWG USA/ILTT May 24 2026
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