Movement for Kshama@movement4kshama
Kshama Sawant has issued a statement calling our organization "reckless" & "damaging."
Kshama is pretending she doesn’t know who we are: DNC wreckers? Agents of @RepAdamSmith?
Kshama knows exactly who we are. Her statement is a dishonest political attack on our organization & on revolutionary socialists.
The Democrats are busy taking an axe to public services in Seattle, including the cancellation of the Ballard light rail extension and threatening cuts to healthcare, housing & education. @MayorofSeattle Katie Wilson has dropped her campaign promise to fight for free childcare & shut down surveillance cameras. Democrats have failed to take action against ICE or protect victims of police brutality. In the last 5 years, they have INCREASED the Seattle police budget by $123 million.
Kshama should be using her campaign to fight against these attacks by the Seattle & King County Democratic Party, including Mayor Katie Wilson. Activists and socialist organizations have urged Kshama to use her campaign to mobilize against these attacks, but she has not.
Instead of fighting to stop the Democrats’ cuts, Kshama is using her $500,000 war chest to make social media posts, create Instagram graphics, and send emails to her national list attacking other socialists with @movement4kshama.
Unfortunately, Kshama has a pattern of sectarianism, which HAS done damage to her campaign. But it’s not just her: there is a crisis of both sectarianism and opportunism on the left.
Most of the left has refused to support Kshama’s campaign. There has been total silence from self-described socialist organizations like @DemSocialists, @SocialistAlt, @revcommunists, and @pslnational.
A whole wing of the “socialist” movement has chained itself to the Democratic Party.
Last month, @SeattleDSA voted against even having a debate about endorsing Kshama’s campaign, while voting happily to endorse Democrat Jaelynn Scott. @CentralINDSA has refused to support the new Socialist Party of Indiana, while endorsing Democrat Jackson Franklin. New York DSA won’t support @AndreEastonBX, but endorsed strikebreaking Democrat AOC again.
Even the “left wing” of DSA like @dsarandr have refused to support Kshama’s campaign. Yet their members argue for “critical support” for sellouts like @AOC. Only the @labormilitant and @cleanbreaknow caucuses in DSA have taken a principled stance.
Labor Notes, the supposed “left” of the labor movement, has banned a member of the left caucus @Teamsters_Mblz from attending this year’s @labornotes conference. But Labor Notes had no problem inviting @ChicagosMayor Democrat Brandon Johnson to deliver a keynote address in 2024, right as he was preparing a crackdown on anti-genocide protesters ahead of the DNC.
Socialist Alternative, Kshama’s former organization, endorsed DSA Democrat Zohran Mamdani (who hired Zionist police chief Jessica Tisch and endorsed Hakeem Jeffries), but has yet to say anything about Kshama’s campaign.
The Revolutionary Communists of America are sticking their heads in the sand until the revolution comes to them.
Other organizations like @SEP_US are just hopelessly sectarian. They have not been silent (give them credit!), but they have been hostile to any working-class campaign not run by the SEP/@WSWS_Updates.
Kshama’s recent statement is also sectarian: it is an attack on the only revolutionary socialists who ARE supporting her campaign: @labormilitant, @WorkersVanguard, and @SEASocialists, all of whom have been involved with Movement for Kshama.
So why is Kshama attacking us?
Movement for Kshama was launched by 5 former members of @cmkshama’s organization, including her former campaign manager @socialistem and 3 former campaign staff. We launched it after Kshama & the leadership fired these staff members and suspended two of them from her organizations @revworkers & @wrkrsstrikeback.
These members were suspended and fired after raising political disagreements with the campaign leadership, including objections to a months-long campaign against a dedicated member that was characterized by a series of ugly personalized attacks. These personal attacks were a substitute for much-needed political debate within the organization.
Kshama and the @revworkers leadership carried out a series of undemocratic maneuvers to suppress debate inside the organization, including bureaucratic and draconian suspensions. Several elected leaders quit the organization in protest, and founded @labormilitant.
We think that the members of Workers Strike Back (WSB) should demand answers, and fight to reverse these suspensions, including the undemocratic suspension of an elected member of the National Coordinating Committee (NCC).
Unfortunately, most WSB members aren’t even aware that the suspensions happened. The suspension of an elected leader was carried out during a 30-minute meeting of the NCC, and was never communicated to the members. Rank-and-file WSB members have been kept in the dark for almost 3 months.
We have many political disagreements with Kshama, @revworkers, and the leadership of @wrkrsstrikeback. But despite our disagreements, we urged them at the time to work together to build Kshama’s campaign.
Instead, Kshama and her campaign told us to get lost. They explicitly banned us from attending campaign events. They told us that if we wanted to support the campaign, we would have to do so independently.
So we did. We launched Movement for Kshama.
Since launching our Super PAC, we have had no communication with the campaign whatsoever. All of our work has been done independently, and is 100% legal.
This is a *working-class* Super PAC (a fact Kshama withheld in her statement). We have received donations from more than 400 working people, overwhelmingly from Washington state. Our median donation is $5.
Kshama’s campaign didn’t release this statement because they don’t want us collecting signatures, or because they’re concerned about legal consequences for the campaign. If that was all, they wouldn’t have needed social media graphics and a national email campaign. They released this statement because they don’t want us to support the campaign at all, with or without a Super PAC. This is an attempt to smear us and undermine support for our efforts.
The left cannot respond to every disagreement with dishonest attacks and refusing to work together. This is how we got here, where the left is splintered into 1,000 organizations that act like competing small businesses.
Kshama’s sectarian attacks have not helped her win support from the rest of the left. She has alienated thousands of would-be supporters. But we can’t fight sectarianism with yet more sectarianism. Workers and the left need to unite to elect Kshama. We need to support EVERY working-class effort to break with the capitalist Democratic Party and build a party of our own.
Kshama’s campaign announced a target of 5,000 ballot signatures. We hope she reaches that goal. We are forced to suspend our signature collection, since Kshama’s campaign will not accept them. We refuse to mislead working people. But we will not suspend our support for the campaign.
Our work has expanded far beyond campaigning for one election, so we will also be voting at an upcoming meeting on whether to legally dissolve our working-class Super PAC (which was launched at a time when Kshama’s campaign was the organization’s primary purpose), and continue building a broader movement through United Front for a Workers’ Party (@4aworkersparty). We hope Kshama will end her sectarian attacks, and work to build a unified movement.
Kshama calls herself a revolutionary socialist. A revolutionary socialist would use her campaign to fight against the brutal attacks on working people from both parties, including the attacks currently being carried out by the Democrats in Seattle and King County.
We have many disagreements with Kshama, and we have no problem saying so. Socialists need to be willing to accept criticism, especially those who want to lead the movement. And we need to be open and honest when we disagree.
At the same time, we can’t allow disagreements to get in the way of taking steps forward for the workers’ movement, and a victory for Kshama would be a massive step forward. Our enemies are Adam Smith, the Democratic and Republican parties, and the opportunist leaders of the socialist & labor movement.
We urge all working people to organize support for Kshama’s campaign. Socialists should demand support from their organizations. Rank-and-file union members should organize for endorsements in their unions, and expose sellout union leaders in @LIUNA, @AFSCME, @IAM_Union, @AFGENational who are supporting Kshama’s strikebreaking opponent, genocidal Democrat Adam Smith.
We need a united front to elect @cmkshama and other independent socialists, and build a workers’ party that can take on both capitalist and imperialist parties.
We urge all socialists and working people to join us. Reach out at movementforkshama@gmail.com or movementforkshama.org.
