Will Zohran Mamdani Empower or Betray the Working Class? (w/ Kshama Sawant) | The Chris Hedges Report

Zohran Mamdani’s emphatic victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary has shaken the core of American politics. A self-described democratic socialist, Mamdani ran a campaign centered around affordability as well as relentless denunciation of the genocide in Gaza. Mamdani drew the ire of Zionists, right-wingers and the billionaire class not only in New York City but across the country, including calls for his deportation by Congressman Andy Ogles and subsequent slander by President Donald Trump.

Former Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant, who is now running for Washington state’s 9th congressional district, weighs in on her fellow democratic socialist’s journey on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report.

Sawant has been a standout figure for working class representation, winning a $15 an hour minimum wage in Seattle during her city council tenure as well as the Amazon Tax, which helped fund affordable housing. She says Mamdani’s victory should be celebrated, especially because it shows the Zionist lobby can be defeated not just in the U.S. but in a state home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.

Despite this encouraging repudiation of the billionaire class in the wealthiest city in America, Sawant emphasizes the need to continue the fight and make sure Mamdani sticks to his original promises.

“If you don’t understand that careerism is one of the death knells of winning anything substantial for the working class, then you will sell out even with those good intentions because you will make it about yourself and you will immediately get the memo that in order to fight for working people, you will need to be in battle mode every single day when you enter City Hall,” she says.

Mamdani’s alignment with the Democratic Party is concerning, according to Sawant, pointing to a pattern in which groundbreaking campaigns, like those of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, have fallen short of delivering promises for working class people once in office.

“At the end of the day, the Democratic Party is a party of capitalism itself,” Sawant asserts. “The working class loses out more and more and is subjected to more and more misery with every passing decade that you’re not going to stand up for working people.”

So far, Mamdani’s campaign has made strides to inspire the American working class. “It’s a real boost of confidence for working class people nationally to see that yes, working people will fight alongside you if you put forward demands that make a huge difference in their lives and which reflect their anger, their just anger at the Wall Street billionaires,” Sawant says.

Chris Hedges

Hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman, enraged by Zohran Mamdani’s securing an overwhelming majority to become the Democratic Party’s nominee to run for mayor of New York City, said he and his wealthy associates will pour “hundreds of millions of dollars” into the candidacy of anyone willing to run against Mamdani in the general election. Ackman, who supports Donald Trump, added that he has an unnamed candidate he is ready to bankroll.

Major Democratic donors — who poured tens of millions of dollars into a Super PAC to support former governor Andrew Cuomo in his run for mayor — are also meeting to decide if they will fund an independent run by Cuomo in November, or back the unpopular incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who is running as an independent.

Mamdani’s grassroots campaign – Cuomo’s campaign outspent him 20 to 1 – centered around raising the minimum wage, tax hikes on businesses and the rich, creating city-owned grocery stores, making city bus service free and imposing a rent freeze for stabilized tenants.

The victory by the self-described Democratic socialist, who was mercilessly smeared for his denunciation of the genocide in Gaza and promise to honor the arrest warrant issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he appeared in New York City, has sent shock waves through the ruling billionaire class and the Democratic Party establishment that supported Cuomo. While Mamdani was endorsed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nydia Velázquez who serve in the state’s congressional delegation, as well as Bernie Sanders, they were the singular exceptions. The hierarchy of the party has either remained silent since Mamdani’s victory or been openly antagonistic.

New York Senator Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leaders of the Senate and the House, refuse to back Mamdani’s candidacy. New York Rep. Laura Gillen, speaking for many in the party, called Mamdani the “absolute wrong choice for New York.”

Democrats, along with their major donors, can be counted on to attempt to sabotage Mamdani’s campaign, just as it did the campaign of Bernie Sanders when he sought the presidential nomination. It remains, it seems, impervious to reform.

What does this election portend? What does it mean for the future of the Democratic Party? Is Mamdani’s victory a sign that there are growing cracks in the edifice of the party? Or will it drive the party further to the right and see it destroy the candidacies of those who seek to address the domination of our political system by the billionaire class and the punishing social inequality?

Joining me to discuss Mamdani’s victory and what it portends, as well as her own campaign to be elected as a democratic socialist to Congress in Washington state, is Kshama Sawant. Kshama is a leader for Workers Strike Back and Revolutionary Workers. And as a city council member, she battled against the established Democratic Party leadership and the city’s oligarchs who poured millions into campaigns to defeat her including an unsuccessful effort to oust her in a recall vote. Amazon alone spent over $3 million to defeat her run for office in 2019.

Sawant helped lead the fight in 2014 that made Seattle the first major American city to mandate a $15 dollar an hour minimum wage. Following a three-year struggle against one of the richest men in the world – Jeff Bezos – and his political establishment, she and her allies pushed through a tax on big business that increased city revenues by an estimated $210 to $240 million a year.

She was part of the movement that led to Seattle’s successful ban on school-year evictions of schoolchildren, their families and school employees. She was one of sponsors of a bill that protects tenants from being evicted at the end of their “term leases,” requiring landlords to provide tenants with the right to renew their leases and prohibiting landlords from evicting tenants for non-payment of rent if the rent was due during the COVID civil emergency and the renter could not pay due to financial hardship. You can find her at KshamaSawant.org.

Okay, so let’s begin with Mamdani’s victory, what you think it means, and the Democratic Party’s response. And I just want to add, you yourself, when you were on the city council, spent most of your time battling the Democratic Party establishment, or much of the time.

Kshama Sawant

All the time, actually. The Democrats on the city council here in Seattle opposed every single progressive measure that my office fought for. But yeah, Mamdani’s primary election victory in the Democratic Party in New York City for the mayoral election is first and foremost a stinging rebuke of the Zionist lobby.

It shows that it is possible to defeat the Zionist lobby and it is possible to win. In fact, you mentioned in your introduction that I’m running for Congress right now against, and I’m running against this genocidal warmongering Democrat, Adam Smith, who has voted for the genocide repeatedly to send tens of billions of dollars to the Israeli state for the genocide. He also voted for the war in Iraq back in 2002, and he also voted to create ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement].

And he was bankrolled by the Zionist lobby. In last year’s election, AIPAC was his top contributor. He’s also backed by dystopian corporations like Palantir, which profit from war and mass slaughter. And so this primary victory of Mamdani actually has injected huge confidence in the thousands of people who are supporting our campaign here.

So many people have messaged me personally saying, I’m so excited about this victory because it shows that you can defeat the Zionist lobby. So I think, first and foremost, we have to recognize what a huge victory that is. It’s also, given how relentlessly Mamdani has campaigned using his working class demands, it’s also a real boost of confidence for working class people nationally to see that yes, working people will fight alongside you if you put forward demands that make a huge difference in their lives and which reflect their anger, their just anger at the Wall Street billionaires.

I mean, Mamdani’s campaign has called for a $30 an hour minimum wage, for a rent freeze, for free transit, for fully funded childcare. And so these are things that working people need. And so if a campaign can succeed on that basis, it shows that working people are willing to push forward on those demands.

And it’s also, I have to say, a resounding rebuke to the union leaders, not the rank and file, but the union leaders who endorsed Cuomo in the primary. I mean, can you imagine what kind of union leader do you have to be to endorse somebody who’s so discredited that he’s even too much of a hot potato for most of the Democrats to maintain their own credibility? They don’t want to touch him because he has 15,000 COVID deaths on his hands.

He has all kinds of other corruption charges. He also has been accused by at least a dozen, probably 13 women of sexual harassment. And so it’s just mind boggling, although not surprising. It’s just incredible that the leaders of UFCW [United Food and Commercial Workers], of RWDSU [Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union], of the Teamsters, of SEIU [Service Employees International Union], all these major unions, the Carpenters, all of them supporting Cuomo.

So I think they have really been put to shame. And it is important to see that, for example, SEIU leaders have already now said they’re endorsing Mamdani. But it really exposes the unholy ties of the labor leadership with the Democratic establishment. And so I think the question is not, is this a real confirmation of the kind of political demands we need to put forward and that the opposition to the genocide and the demand to end the genocide, should that be front and center of election campaigns in the coming year?

No, that’s not the question. This has shown that it actually, that’s exactly what we should be doing. The outstanding question here is what will it take to win any of these demands? And that’s where I think we have to conduct a lot of examination. I mean, I think the experience that we had on the Seattle City Council, we, my fellow socialists and we, I had the city council office for a decade in Seattle.

And what it took for us to win the historic victories, many of which you enumerated, it took what I would call a fighting strategy. And what does a fighting strategy mean? A fighting strategy, first and foremost, means that you understand that capitalism is a zero-sum game and that you cannot hope to win any substantial victories. I’m not talking about crumbs, but substantial reforms in the interest of the working class by thinking that you are going to sweet talk the billionaires into agreement with you.

It also requires understanding that the Democrats and Republicans, despite their differences, they both represent the interests of the billionaires of capitalism. And so you’re not going to sweet talk them either. And you don’t go into the halls of office by thinking that they are your colleagues and that you’re going to have good conversations with them and reach some sort of agreement with them. No, you have to understand that this is posed as an adversarial task by definition. Working people didn’t make it adversarial, capitalism is adversarial towards the working class. The only question is, are we gonna fight back or are we going to roll over and die?

And so, again and again and again, what we saw in Seattle was a Democratic Party carrying water for the big business entities, for big corporations like Amazon and Starbucks, for the Chamber of Commerce, for corporate landlords. And for us to win any of these victories that we won, I, first and foremost, had to be clear, and all working people alongside me had to be clear that this is class war and that the way we win is by using my office to build mass movements and mass movements not just to come to city hall and beg the Democrats to do the right thing, but mass movements that are defiant in character, that demand that unless you do this, we are going to vote you out of office. We’re going to throw you out of office.

So that adversarial character is fundamental to winning something big. Like, for example, the victory that we won on minimum wage, that is the highest wage in the nation because part of the battle we waged when we fought for $15 an hour was to win inflation increases. The Democrats fought us viciously on that. We were still able to prevail. Why? Because I launched the 15 Now Movement in Seattle and it mobilized Seattle’s working class in the thousands and so many of them were involved in our action conferences.

It was a democratically organized movement where the rank and file of the movement had the say in strategic decisions. We literally had debates and voting. It took that strength of the mass of the working class to win not only the nation’s first $15 an hour minimum wage, but also inflation increases. And that’s why today Seattle’s minimum wage is the highest in the nation at $20.76. So I would just say that for the working class to win in New York City will take this similar approach.

The question is not can Mamdani win through a strategy of playing nice with the billionaires? No, that’s not the question because you can’t win that way. All of history shows that. The question is, will he do what we did in Seattle, in order to win similar victories in New York City?

Chris Hedges

Well, that is a break with you. I mean, there’s one strong similarity between the campaigns that you ran and the campaigns that he ran. And that is that you appealed to disaffected voters on the right or people who just didn’t vote at all on these basic economic issues. I find that a kind of parallel.

But I think the difference, which you just enunciated, is that you always took an adversarial position and he has talked about making New York a wonderful place for everybody, including billionaires. And I think you’re saying that’s a big mistake.

Kshama Sawant

Yes, because in a deeply divided situation like capitalism is, you cannot lose sight of the fact of, as I said earlier, that capitalism is a zero sum game. What does that mean? It means that when we won the $15 minimum wage, for example, and now that it’s gone even higher because of inflation increases being built into it, that money is making the lives of the least paid workers, the poorest of the working class, much better because even a few dollars extra an hour makes a life difference.

It makes the difference between being able to pay your rent or being evicted and then being forced to couch surf again and again, which many families, in fact, even families with children are forced to do. But that money comes from the profits of the billionaires, the big business entities, the multimillionaires.

And so it is inevitable that if you fight for something substantial, like a major increase in minimum wage, that will create a political clash with big businesses. And that’s it’s no surprise that, what’s his name, Bill Ackman, the Trump supporting billionaire who is apoplectic about Mamdani’s primary victory, that’s no surprise. That is him representing the interests of the billionaire class.

And so the working class cannot afford to blur the class lines. When I was asked repeatedly by reporters, you speak so combatively, but as an elected official, aren’t you running to represent all your constituents? They’d asked me that repeatedly. You would never catch me saying that I am representing everyone.

In fact, I reminded them, you know, one of the constituents of my Seattle city council district when I was on the city council for 10 years was, and it still is, I assume, the billionaire former CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, extremely anti-worker, absolutely viciously anti-union, union-busting CEO billionaire. And I said, Howard Schultz lives in my district. I don’t represent him and he doesn’t agree with me.

I mean, these are class lines and blurring the lines does not help the working class. It actually helps the ruling class. I mean, it sort of signals to the ruling, if you say that you’re going to represent everyone, it signals to the ruling class that you’re open for conversation. You’re open to discussion with them. And that discussion means only one thing, which is that they will push you, put pressure on you, and they will use the carrot and the stick to put pressure on you to sell out.

And I’ve experienced all of that. When I first entered City Hall, I’ve experienced both the carrot and the stick. There were city council members and also others in the Democratic Party who tried to flatter me, make this about me. They said things like, well, you are such a superstar, but you need to dissociate yourself from this socialist ideology because that’s not going to be good for your political career.

Therein lies the problem, is that no matter how well intentioned you are, and let’s assume that new people are well intentioned, no matter how well intentioned you are, if you don’t understand that careerism is one of the death knells of winning anything substantial for the working class, then you will sell out even with those good intentions because you will make it about yourself and you will immediately get the memo that in order to fight for working people, you will need to be in battle mode every single day when you enter City Hall or the halls of Congress because the only other option is for you to sell out because there’s no option that you will convince them into agreeing with you.

Why? Because at the end of the day, the Democratic Party is a party of capitalism itself. And yes, there are differences with the Republican Party, but it’s like Chomsky said, that there’s a smart way to keep people passive and obedient, and that is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.

And so what that means is that in the case of the Democratic and Republican parties is that, there are differences between them, but if you don’t understand that they both represent the billionaire class and they’re there and their differences are there so that the working class can perennially be dangled this, you know, you either support Democrats or Republicans. But at end of the day the working class loses out more and more and is subjected to more and more misery with every passing decade that you’re not going to stand up for working people.

Chris Hedges

I think also the mistake is that you complicate this, the billionaire class, which Mamdani seems, at least rhetorically, to be saying he can do.

Kshama Sawant

Yes, and in fact, he’s saying that in many concrete ways. For example, in his recent MSNBC interview, I think it was just today or yesterday, they played a clip of, you know he’s been calling for taxes on the rich, which of course, I strongly support. I strongly support all the demands that he’s running on in terms of the minimum wage increase, rent freeze, and taxes on the rich, and child care funding, and all of that.

They played a clip of Governor Kathy Hochul, governor of New York, very clearly saying she’s not going to be for taxing the rich. She’s very clearly declaring that that is absolutely not something that she wants to do. But his response to that was again, along those lines of I’m excited to work with her on this. What does that mean? I don’t understand what that means.

I mean, you have to use your interview appearances to speak not to that MSNBC journalist who is representing the ruling class line or Governor Kathy Hochul, who is an arch-corporate Democrat. She represents a billionaire class. Your interview appearances, if you’re a socialist and fighting for working people, has to be to speak to the working class audience that’s not in front of you, but millions who are watching out there. And your message needs to be, first of all, truthful.

And being truthful means you cannot send an illusion to the working class that somehow Kathy Hochul can be talked into taxing the rich, somehow Bill Ackman can be convinced that rent freezes are also in his interest. It will improve his quality of life as well. It’s something that Mamdani has said as well, that, if we do these progressive things, it will improve the quality of life not only of working people, but also of the billionaires.

That’s simply not true in the sense that the billionaires don’t want to part with the billions of dollars that they have. I mean, the $15 minimum wage that we won, that meant $3 billion of profits from big business taken away to fund workers. And you have to declare that proudly in the sense that you don’t represent the billionaire class. As much wealth you can take from them, that’s a good thing. That’s a moral thing. That is a just thing. And that is an honorable thing to fight for.

And it is actually disarming working class movements to send them, as I said, an illusion that somehow the class lines can be blurred, that somehow you can make agreement with the ruling class. And I think that if we want, if Mamdani wants to, I don’t know that he doesn’t, I’ll talk about his previous record, but if he does want to build movements, and you know, I absolutely want him to do it. I absolutely want him to build the movements, and if he’s going to build the movements after he’s elected, if he’s elected, I will personally be there wanting to rally with him.

I will personally help the movement to win a $30 minimum wage in New York City because if they win, that would be an Earth shattering victory. It would be an enormous call to action nationally and it would put a lot of pressure on the Democratic Party to push for a $25 an hour minimum wage federally. All of that would be a fantastic thing. And like I said, I am pledging here and now that I will be right there in New York City pounding the pavement to win any of these victories.

The question is, will he do what is needed in order to actually win this? And in terms of his previous record, the reason I’m expressing skepticism is not that I don’t want him to do it. As I said, I really hope that he does it. But it’s also my responsibility, I am also representing working people. And it is my obligation, my political and moral obligation, to use my platform to speak the truth. Again, not to send out illusions, but speak the truth.

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