Article initially published in Counterpunch
It’s time to declare war on the rich.
We need to build an organized, unified movement of working people to systematically take on the rich who run society and to undermine their ability to rule. Our goal must be to both fight for radical change in the present and to bring down the billionaires and their system, capitalism.
There is no other path to avoid total disaster for human civilization and the planet.
I served as the only socialist on the Seattle City Council for ten years. In that decade, my council office led movements of working people to win historic victories, including the highest minimum wage in the country. I also saw firsthand how every part of the political establishment, led by big business and the Democratic Party, viciously opposed virtually every pro-worker piece of legislation we fought for. I saw how all the cogs of the capitalist machine — the establishment politicians, the courts, the police, the NGO leaders, and sadly many labor leaders — all work in concert together against the interests of workers.
I can tell you from my experience — and it is increasingly evident to working people — that this system is completely irredeemable, as are both U.S. political parties.
We have no choice but to fight for radical change and for an end to the billionaire class, because the alternative is a hellscape on earth. The wildfires in Los Angeles are just the latest demonstration. Another is the fastest-moving genocide of the 21st century still underway in Gaza, and likely to continue in some form even with the ceasefire negotiated by Trump under the pressure of the antiwar movement and significant vote for Jill Stein.
Our Enemies
Working people need to be clear about who our enemies are. They are the billionaires and the bosses, the capitalist class, their institutions, their political parties, and also their more deceptive spokespeople, who sometimes appear and sound like they support workers, but really act as pressure release valves and gatekeepers.
Our enemies are not other working-class or middle-class or poor people. They are not immigrants, trans people, ordinary Republican or Democratic voters, nor independent voters or nonvoters. Our enemies are those who make millions (or billions) of dollars a year, own multiple homes, own the politicians, own the land and resources, and who call the shots in this system. Our enemies are also all those who justify and protect the interests of the rich.
The billionaires themselves are fully responsible for the disasters engulfing us — Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, the healthcare CEOs, the major shareholders on Wall Street. We must completely reject the bullshit liberal narrative that some collective “we” or “human nature” is responsible. It’s not, it’s the decision makers who own everything and who put their profits ahead of everything and everyone. These billionaires are driving us over the cliff of climate disaster, presiding over a dire cost-of-living crisis, and leading us toward World War III.
Amidst our desperate struggle for survival, last year saw the world’s five richest billionaires increase their wealth by $542 billion. Elon Musk’s wealth alone is rapidly approaching half a trillion dollars. Globally, we are seeing the highest levels of inequality in human history.
The rulers and their political representatives are rapidly losing credibility. Kamala Harris’ downfall was part of this — working people rejected the idea that they should swallow more of the status quo, which was all she offered us. Harris was rejected by the majority despite most of the labor leadership, including UAW President Shawn Fain, shamelessly cheerleading her and the Democratic Party that broke the railroad workers’ strike in 2022 and betrayed working people on every issue, from the $15/hour minimum wage to Medicare for All.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Canadian Liberal Party are the latest in a series of global casualties of liberal bourgeois parties, following major ongoing political instability in Western Europe, including France and Germany. According to an annual survey, which tracks ten of the leading industrialized nations, the incumbents in last year’s elections in every single one of the ten countries were either booted out by voters or lost a significant share of the vote. This is the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years of records. Alongside the anger of millions in each of these nations, the most prominent feature is the absence of militant leadership on the Left and in the labor movement that is prepared to break with the political parties of the rich. We need to accelerate the crisis for the billionaires and their servants and build a genuine, independent working-class alternative.
Democrats and the Genocide
During the last election, Workers Strike Back joined Abandon Harris and millions of working people in making Harris and the Democrats pay a price for supporting the genocide in Gaza and for their systematic anti-worker agenda.
Workers Strike Back fought for every vote for Jill Stein as the strongest antiwar, pro-worker candidate, including in the crucial swing state of Michigan.
We won voters who were previously planning to vote for Harris or Trump — or who were planning not to vote at all — to support Stein.
The antiwar vote in the election has already had some effects. While Trump is a warmonger himself, he saw the way the political winds were blowing and moved to pressure the Israeli ruling class into a ceasefire prior to his inauguration. That does not mean in any way that Israel will not look to resume their assault at the earliest opportunity or that the brutal occupation will end. Nonetheless, it is an important concession from the ruling class under pressure from the antiwar movement, and particularly the wing of the movement that took a clear stand against the Democrats for presiding over the genocide.
Workers Strike Back, Abandon Harris, and others were correct not to bend to the considerable “lesser evil” pressures and to instead take an independent working-class position, rejecting both capitalist parties.
In response to our clear position, Workers Strike Back received strong support among many working people, and doubled in size over the last several months of the campaign. We need to build an organization that can lead campaigns like this on a much larger, nationwide scale.
Anger at the Rich
In the absence of mass organized movements by working people, the huge anger at the billionaires and warmongers will still be expressed.
We saw this with the killing of UnitedHealthCare CEO, Brian Thompson.
It’s a well known fact that health insurance corporations systematically deny care to those who desperately need it, with tens of thousands dying every year as a result. This understanding fueled widespread public sympathy for the killing of the UnitedHealthCare CEO. The corporate media and politicians were stunned by the show of support on social media for the man accused of his killing, Luigi Mangione. They were even more shocked when polling came out clarifying this was not some fringe phenomenon, but a strong majority sentiment.
In one poll, 69 percent of respondents placed a “great deal or moderate amount” of blame on healthcare coverage denials by insurance companies like UnitedHealthcare for Thompson’s killing.
At the same time, recent polls also show working people clearly want an alternative to this failed private insurance system. There’s a resurgence of support for Medicare for All, which has long been wildly popular despite being completely abandoned by so-called “progressive” Democrats.
How Do Working People Fight Back?
But the question that looms over everything is: how can we turn broad support for fundamental change into action? How do we raise the minimum wage nationwide to $25/hour and tax Wall Street to fund housing and services? How do we win Medicare for All and eliminate for-profit insurance? How do we end the climate crisis? How do we end massive inequality and the billionaire class?
Killing individual CEOs is no solution. Thompson’s place has already been filled by another blood-sucking corporate executive. In addition, if such killings were to continue, they would be used as pretext to attack mass movements and the Left.
This question of strategy and tactics in relation to the ruling class comes up again and again throughout history. In the late 19th century in Russia, there were similar kinds of attacks on individual members of the nobility, culminating in the killing of a czar, Alexander II. This led not to a surge in working people’s movements, but to a brutal crackdown that undermined the workers’ movement for decades. It was not the ideas of anarchism or methods of terrorism that led to the overthrow of capitalism for the first time in history, in Russia in 1917. It was genuine Marxism, which based itself on building the organized power of the working class to fight for revolutionary change.
What we need is to eliminate the for-profit system — capitalism — altogether.
We disagree with those on the Left who think that all is lost because of Trump’s election. While Trump is absolutely no friend of working people, we need to recognize that a Harris presidency would also have been a disaster for us, and that we can win change and make our political mark as working people regardless of who is in office.
Some of the biggest progressive changes won by American working people came under the administration of Richard Nixon, who was a warmongering, anti-worker, racist, reactionary capitalist politician.
It was not because Nixon woke up one day with a conscience. It was the combined power of the social and workers’ movements of that era that frightened the capitalist class and Nixon himself — fear that if they did not take action, there would be even greater upheaval and a threat to their very system.
The result was the end of the Vietnam War. For the first time, U.S. imperialism was forced by movements to end a war it was hellbent on prosecuting. Other historic victories were also won, such as the pro-abortion Roe v. Wade ruling by a court stacked with Nixon appointees, the creation of the pro-worker Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency.
We can also force change under a Trump administration, but we can only do so if we don’t lose sight of the fact that we don’t just need reforms, we need a new system altogether, and the clock is ticking.
Working people will need to fight back against the right-wing agenda of Trump. But to be most effective, we also must understand that in the U.S., the Democratic Party has been the #1 obstacle to building movements for any significant change. Any remaining illusions in the Democrats will only undermine our fight against the billionaires and the right wing. I single out the Democrats before the Republicans, even with Trump now in the White House, because there are still far greater illusions in the Democrats among workers, and they need to be destroyed if we’re going to get anywhere.
What Doesn’t Work
The recent “fight” for Medicare for All is a good example of what strategies don’t work. There was enormous support for it that was further raised by Bernie Sanders’ campaigns. Under pressure, the Democrats have sometimes said, reluctantly, that they support Medicare for All, including Kamala Harris at an earlier stage. Before that, Obama hinted at supporting single-payer public healthcare.
So what happened? Over and over, the various efforts to win public healthcare were killed, with the Democratic Party wielding the dagger.
Why? Because a public healthcare system like Medicare for All would cost health insurance corporations trillions of dollars and ideally end their existence. Even the billionaires not currently profiting off the health insurance scam system would fear any such example of a major new public program.
The billionaires instead want to destroy public services, both because they cut into their profits and because they provide a measure of equality under capitalism — they hate both.
The Democratic leadership is in complete agreement with the billionaires on both points, no matter what some members of the party have said publicly under pressure.
California Democrats have twice killed efforts for Medicare for All, even with nearly 80 percent majorities in both the Senate and Assembly, and under Democratic Governors (Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom).
Sanders and the “Squad” of course sold us all down the river. Despite the massive popular support, they refused to force the vote on Medicare for All when they had the momentum to do so after Biden’s election. They refused to use their elected offices to organize a public campaign, which could have led to mass rallies for Medicare for All and a powerful impetus to bring the enormous pressure needed on both parties. Instead, they just dropped Medicare for All, the $15 minimum wage, and essentially their whole program to fall in line with the Democratic leadership and provide cover for the Biden-Harris administration.
The utterly false idea that a party representing the interests of capitalism would be our ally against the powerful for-profit health insurance industry is the inevitable outcome of the disastrous logic of lesser evilism — that we should hitch our wagon to the Democrats because the Republicans are worse.
AOC, perhaps accidentally, admitted her own logic, rooted in both careerism and cowardice, when she said in 2023 that using the Squad’s balance of power in the House (which they held from 2020 to 2022) to fight for their program would cause “reputational and relational harm.” This is fundamentally because she sees the rotten leaders of the Democratic Party as her allies, not the millions of working people who need Medicare for All, and who are dying from the lack of it. It’s also because she wants to rise in the Democratic Party apparatus, which would not be allowed if she used her elected position as a fighting platform for the working class.
This is true also of the vast majority of the leadership of political nonprofit organizations. There is an entire edifice in service of capitalism, all the way from local Democratic Party organizations to labor and NGO bureaucracies. We saw how many Black Lives Matter leaders (misleaders, really) sold out the George Floyd rebellion and made careers for themselves. In the case of labor, it has meant that most labor leaders buy into business unionism, wherein their role is to manage the opposing interests of the bosses and the workers, winning small things for workers at best while ensuring that they mostly hold the gates against strikes or rank-and-file uprisings.
What Strategies Do Work?
Our approach with my socialist city council office in Seattle was fundamentally different from both the Squad and most of the labor leadership. We used it as an organizing hub for building working people’s movements. I had no illusions that other Councilmembers — all Democrats — were my allies. I knew my only reliable supporters in fighting for any change of substance for working people would be working people themselves, including rank-and-file union members.
By basing ourselves on movements and not “relationships” with Democratic politicians or the many NGO and labor leaders who gave them cover, we won historic victories — the first $15 minimum wage law in any major city (a wage that has now risen to $20.76 an hour); the Amazon Tax that raised $450 million last year alone for affordable housing and green jobs programs; a raft of landmark renters rights victories; one of the first and strongest resolutions against the genocide in Gaza; and making Seattle an abortion sanctuary with full public funding for abortion needs. One thing all these victories had in common is that we had to fight the self-described progressive Democrats, and that we overcame their opposition by building movements.
One of the first actions I took after my first election was to help launch a movement called 15 Now to fight for the $15 minimum wage against the political establishment and big business. We held mass organizing meetings, rallies, marches, built neighborhood action groups, and filed a ballot initiative to present a credible threat to big business and the Democrats: if they didn’t pass a strong $15, we would take it to the ballot box. That is how we won, despite all the attempts of the Democrats to block or water down the $15 minimum wage law, and that is also how “15 dollars an hour” went from being a slogan to a nationwide movement that won major minimum wage increases around the country.
We used that same movement-based, class struggle method to win everything that we won over my decade in office: from the Amazon Tax to fund affordable housing to a slew of renters rights victories which enraged the landlord lobby.
Now the Democrats in Seattle are working to undo our past victories. Last year, Seattle’s Democratic Party attempted to undermine the $15 minimum wage legislation that our movement won a decade before. The attack was brought by Joy Hollingsworth, a Democrat enthusiastically endorsed by the leadership of the MLK Labor Council and UFCW 3000, among other unions. Workers Strike Back didn’t stand quietly by, but went into battle. We organized a press conference, mobilized working people and union members to City Hall and called out the shameless attack, and threatened to drive Hollingsworth and her fellow Democrats out of office. They were forced to back down (at least for now), and on January 1st, the minimum wage increased to $20.76 for all workers.
The Democratic Party has never been on our side. There will be no reforming it or changing it from within. It is a weapon of the billionaire class, like the Republican Party, and it needs to be destroyed, not collaborated with.
Workers Strike Back
Those lessons from our decade of militant working-class politics in Seattle, and the need to spread them, are why I and others launched Workers Strike Back in January of 2023.
Because it is not enough to build a movement in one city, we need a nationwide (and also global) movement.
The enormous and growing anger at the corporate elite and capitalism itself can be a source of change, if it can be directed in the right way. At present, the progressive Democrats and others are doing their level best to misdirect that anger and divide working people, particularly by trying to blame working class people for Trump’s election. Meanwhile Trump and the MAGA leadership want to redirect anger away from the billionaires and towards immigrants, trans people and other oppressed groups.
We need to reject all this, unite working people, students, the poor, and the oppressed against these false scapegoating attacks, and focus our fire on the billionaires and their system. We should recognize that it’s a step forward that many working people are not falling for the narrative that Trump voters are to blame and that we need to spend the next four years building a bigger Vote Blue machine. That is a total dead end.
And no one is coming to save us. Biden was a disaster for workers, and Trump will be as well. Neither the Squad nor the MAGA populist politicians in any way represent our interests. We need to build a militant movement of working people that steadfastly and consistently rejects both the Democrats and Republicans, that organizes in workplaces and the streets, and has an understanding that this system, capitalism, does not work for us and will never work for us.
Working people have enormous potential power. We build everything, we make everything run, and we outnumber the billionaires a million times over.
The billionaires are only able to get their way because they have succeeded in dividing us: Democrats vs. Republicans, native-born workers vs. immigrants, straight vs. LGBTQ people, men vs. women.
By a relentless focus on this, they distract from by far the most important division in society: the capitalists who are wealthy beyond all reason vs. the immense majority in society who struggle to survive. We must expose this reality to unify the working class in the fight against the rich and to defend workers and oppressed communities against the mounting attacks from Trump, including the attacks on immigrants and trans people.
And the clock is ticking because the planet is burning. There will be no future on the basis of gradual change, of small reforms. We need to end all fossil fuel use as rapidly as possible. This has been known by science for decades, yet here we are, with 2024 officially surpassing the far-too-low goal set by the so-called Paris Agreement a decade ago, with wildfires and floods so far signaling just the early beginnings of the rapidly approaching environmental apocalypse.
To stop climate catastrophe, we urgently need to move at lightning speed toward a fully clean energy-based economy. But we can’t do that with these corporations in the hands of the billionaires, because we can’t control what we don’t own. We need to take the big energy companies, the big banks, and all major corporations, into democratic public ownership and run them ourselves.
We need to take the reins of society away from the capitalists.
The Fight the Rich Campaign
Workers Strike Back is hosting an organizing conference on February 22nd this year, alongside the Green Party, Abandon Harris, and others. Chris Hedges, Jill Stein, and myself will be joined by hundreds of working people in discussing the next steps for our movements. The following day, Workers Strike Back will be holding its first national convention.
At both these events, I and others will be proposing the launch of a Fight the Rich campaign, to help build an organized, ferocious fight against the corporate elite and their political servants.
We will be proposing a campaign organized around several concrete demands, to help focus our work over the coming months:
- + Medicare for All
- + End the Genocide in Gaza
- + Tax Amazon & Big Business — Fund Social Housing
- + Stop Mass Deportations
- + Take Big Corporations Into Democratic Public Ownership
There are of course many issues we need to fight around, but it is a strategic question for our movements what we take on at a given time, because we can’t do everything at once. The foremost question is: what will most help us have the biggest political impact and build movements of working people and our overall strength going forward?
The case for Medicare for All is clear. There is a renewed discussion about it because of well-placed fury toward the health insurance corporations and the related killing of CEO Bryan Thompson. This time, rather than waiting for a lead from the “progressive” misleaders, we need to take the fight to the billionaire CEOs.
We should disrupt business as usual, with mass civil disobedience and mass protests. For example, we should work to make it difficult for healthcare CEOs to hold a major public meeting without us crashing it. The shutting down of the WTO in Seattle in 1999 was a defining event of that time; we need to create such disruption everywhere. We want the disruptions to be mass events as much as possible, but we can also carry them out with smaller groups, which is what we will often need to do at the beginning.
We also need to fight to win change in the present. The goal of any campaign for reforms is to win major gains for working people. But crucially it is also to raise consciousness about the need for systemic change, and to build the organized forces of the working class. To that end, the fights we take up should not be fiddling around the margins, but campaigns for bold, radical change. We’ll know we’re on the right track if Democrats and Republicans oppose us.
One such bold reform would be Medicare for All, single-payer public healthcare, with full coverage for anyone regardless of citizenship status, and including full coverage for abortion and gender-affirming care. I will be proposing at our organizing conference to begin preparing the ground to fight for single-payer health insurance systems whether at city, county or state levels. This could be done through ballot initiatives. We are not going to end capitalism through ballot initiatives, but they can provide a concrete organizing tool to fight back so long as those efforts don’t get channeled behind the Democratic Party. We are looking into working with others on such an effort in Washington State.
It’s clear we cannot lose sight of the horrific events taking place in Gaza, or deprioritize that fight in any way. While it’s positive that the movement forced Trump to see the political price Democrats paid on Gaza, and he took steps toward a ceasefire, we should recognize that the ceasefire is unlikely to be permanent and it will not in itself restrain the Israeli ruling class from their genocidal mission nor end the brutal occupation that is at the center of it.
We need not just a permanent ceasefire, but a permanent end to all military funding for Israel, an end to the brutal occupations of Gaza and the West Bank, the right of self-determination for Palestinians, including their full equality, and a smashing of Israel’s apartheid system. None of this is on Trump or the Democrats’ agenda. We also need to end the billions of dollars being sent by the US to fund the bloody inter-imperialist proxy war in Ukraine.
Like with healthcare CEOs, we need to politically target the elite who have a hand in this policy. This can mean disrupting both foreign policy and political elites, both Republican and Democratic, and going after the weapons manufacturers.
The call to Tax Amazon and big business is connected to a fight currently going on in Seattle, which builds on our past victory of winning our Amazon Tax on the wealthiest corporations to fund affordable housing. We are currently campaigning for Proposition 1A here, which would tax Amazon and big business another $52 million annually. Unfortunately, the NGOs who launched the initiative have not been very successful in either their messaging or in getting out that message, and most people don’t even know about the ballot initiative at present. Meanwhile the Democrats and big business are working to kill it with a counter-initiative, Proposition 1B, which would not tax big business at all, and whose sole purpose is to confuse people and undermine the Amazon Tax.
At the same time, Workers Strike Back has been supporting efforts to unionize Amazon, including an organizing effort called CAUSE (Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment) at the RDU1 facility in Garner, North Carolina.
In every part of this fight, we need to take our work into the unions where possible, because they represent an avenue to exercise working-class power by shutting down the bosses’ profits. For example, in the fight to stop mass deportations, Workers Strike Back members who are union members are already bringing union resolutions to begin organizing in advance of this expected onslaught against immigrant workers by Trump.
But in the Fight the Rich campaign we will need to be flexible, because we can’t anticipate everything that will develop or what attacks Trump, the Republicans, and the Democrats will carry out on working people. We will need to respond to new developments.
One question that is bound to come up is whether we should instead focus on running candidates for office. I don’t believe this is what we should do as a former elected representative of working people myself. In essence, while we do need to fight for our movement to win elected office, we should be clear that this is not the main way change will happen and that we are not yet strong enough yet to run many such campaigns. We need to build a more powerful movement so that we can run independent candidates on a clear working-class basis, ensure they are accountable to us, and be prepared to make an enemy of other elected officials and the political establishment. This can prepare the ground to launch a new party for working people, which is urgently needed.
Join Us
We need to build toward a mass movement of tens of thousands of people if we are going to begin to present a serious challenge to the billionaires.
We need you to get involved.
Sign up right now to become a member of Workers Strike Back on our website.
And register now for our Organizing Conference on February 22nd, which will be held in Seattle, as well as our first Workers Strike Back national convention on February 23rd. If you can’t make it in person, there will be a livestream of the organizing conference you can join.
As Malcom X said, “we’re not outnumbered, we’re just out organized.” It’s time to change that.
Kshama Sawant is a revolutionary socialist, a founding member of Workers Strike Back, and a former Seattle City Councilmember who helped win the first $15/hour minimum wage in a major city and the Amazon Tax on wealthy corporations to fund affordable housing.
