[Kshama Sawant brought an uncommon passion to a successful stint
on the City Council. It may now be her undoing.]
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CAN SEATTLE’S MINIMUM WAGE CRUSADER SURVIVE HER RECALL ELECTION?  
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Andrew Schwartz
December 3, 2021
The New Republic
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_ Kshama Sawant brought an uncommon passion to a successful stint on
the City Council. It may now be her undoing. _

Sawant at a 2014 rally for Palestine. , Eino Sierpe / Flickr

 

The signature experience of Larry Gossett’s life came in 1966.
Seeking draft deferment, he joined Volunteers in Service to America, a
sort of domestic Peace Corps. He traveled to New York to mentor Harlem
youth. “I began my work just three weeks after Stokely Carmichael
articulated a new concept for Black people in this country. It was
called Black Power.” Gossett devoured the obvious literature, but
staff at the Michaux bookstore on 125th Street told him to expand his
perspective. He’d understood _The Communist Manifesto_ as
“bad,” “evil.” But “the men and women that worked at the
bookstore said, ‘What do you mean, Mr. Gossett? Bad or evil? It’s
just something to read.’” So he read. “As a descendant of
African slaves, oh my God, that made sense to me.”

As he stood in the airport on his return home to Seattle, his mother
and younger brother walked past without recognizing him. “I had a
Big Natural. I had a dashiki. I had African beads.” After his family
finally spotted him, he told them that his name was not Larry. It was
Oba Yoruba.

The name didn’t stick, but the new consciousness did. Gossett, as
one local activist told me, became a “walking institution and
walking library” of activism in the city of Seattle. In the coming
years, he would co-found the Black Student Union at the University of
Washington and become a local spokesman for the Black Panthers. “I
was the leader of the radical politics in the greater Seattle area for
decades before I met Kshama.”

The signature experience of Larry Gossett’s life came in 1966.
Seeking draft deferment, he joined Volunteers in Service to America, a
sort of domestic Peace Corps. He traveled to New York to mentor Harlem
youth. “I began my work just three weeks after Stokely Carmichael
articulated a new concept for Black people in this country. It was
called Black Power.” Gossett devoured the obvious literature, but
staff at the Michaux bookstore on 125th Street told him to expand his
perspective. He’d understood _The Communist Manifesto_ as
“bad,” “evil.” But “the men and women that worked at the
bookstore said, ‘What do you mean, Mr. Gossett? Bad or evil? It’s
just something to read.’” So he read. “As a descendant of
African slaves, oh my God, that made sense to me.”

As he stood in the airport on his return home to Seattle, his mother
and younger brother walked past without recognizing him. “I had a
Big Natural. I had a dashiki. I had African beads.” After his family
finally spotted him, he told them that his name was not Larry. It was
Oba Yoruba.

The name didn’t stick, but the new consciousness did. Gossett, as
one local activist told me, became a “walking institution and
walking library” of activism in the city of Seattle. In the coming
years, he would co-found the Black Student Union at the University of
Washington and become a local spokesman for the Black Panthers. “I
was the leader of the radical politics in the greater Seattle area for
decades before I met Kshama.”

But times have changed. On December 7, Sawant faces the first recall
vote
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a city councilmember in local history.

Technically, the recall is occasioned by three specific alleged
transgressions, which neatly dovetail with claims made by Seattle
Mayor Jenny Durkan in a letter she sent to the City Council president
amid the Black Lives Matter protests, in the summer of 2020.

The mayor asked the council to censure Sawant “for disorderly or
otherwise contemptuous behavior.” (It did not.) As _The Seattle
Times_ reported
[[link removed]],
“Durkan wrote that Sawant should be investigated for several
actions, such as opening City Hall to protesters on the evening of
June 9 and taking part in [a protest] march to Durkan’s home.” In
the letter
[[link removed]],
Durkan claimed that Sawant “and organizers knew that my address was
protected under the state confidentiality program because of threats
against me due largely to my work as U.S. Attorney,” adding that
“Sawant and her followers” acted in “reckless disregard of the
safety of my family and children.” (A third allegation cited by
recall proponents is that Sawant misused city funds during her “Tax
Amazon” campaign, for which she has paid a fine.)

Most politicians take the view that establishing collegial relations
with one another and other powerful community stakeholders is
essential to the political process. Then again, most politicians
aren’t Kshama Sawant.

But the recall is less about any specific actions Sawant has taken
than a deeper disagreement about what it means to be an activist, a
radical, and to serve in elected office in a liberal city. Most
politicians take the view that establishing collegial relations with
one another and other powerful community stakeholders is essential to
the political process. Then again, most politicians aren’t Kshama
Sawant, who sees herself as an electoral vessel for an urgent
working-class movement to overthrow capitalism.

This, of course, only describes Sawant the politician. Gossett and his
wife have dined with her, and he testifies that, in contrast to her
“doctrinaire” public persona, in those social settings Sawant is
“affable” “fun-loving,” and “easy to get along with.” But
he understands this is a rare perspective. “These are not political
issues.”

It can seem, for those inclined to make the distinction (Gossett is
not), that Sawant has far more faith in the power of organizing than
legislating. “Which then, of course, raises the question,” said
Jamie Pedersen, a liberal state senator who likens Sawant to Trump,
“why is she on the City Council?”

Socialist Alternative, or SA, reports
[[link removed]] roughly
1,000 members, against the 92,000 or so boasted
[[link removed]] by the Democratic Socialists of America.
But unlike its well-known counterpart, SA is not a “big-tent”
organization. Prior to admission, prospective members are contacted
[[link removed]] for a “basic political
discussion.” In meetings, the group debates specific political
situations before deciding how to proceed. At this point, members are
expected to act in unity.

Sawant, a community college economics professor from Mumbai, was
selected to represent SA in a 2012 bid
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a state House seat. In 2013, she ran for the Seattle City Council.
Another Trotskyist group, the Socialist Workers Party, had run
candidates for council before but never really campaigned with any
serious intent, said Nick Licata, a former longtime councilmember. You
could “sleepwalk an election and win.”

Sawant was different. She led with important issues that ordinary
people understood, running a robust campaign that deftly tracked the
national mood. In 2012, East Coast fast-food workers were demanding
[[link removed]] a
$15 wage floor. An SEIU local was running a soon-to-be successful
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on the $15 wage in SeaTac, a small city neighboring Seattle.
Seattle’s own leadership sympathized with the movement but “were a
little too academic,” said Licata, and figured the minimum wage
issue was better handled at the statewide level. Sawant disagreed, and
her incumbent opponent, Richard Conlin, was “tone deaf,” said
Licata. He championed “nice middle-class issues” like recycling.
“He refused to take her seriously.”

One might say the rest is history, but the history—at least as it
concerns the role Sawant’s movement would ultimately play in the
historic enactment of Seattle’s phased-in $15 minimum wage—is
still being litigated. In a recent article occasioned by the recall
effort, veteran columnist Joel Connelly noted
[[link removed]] Sawant’s
penchant to “claim credit where credit is not due,” how she
“spiked the football” for Seattle’s phased-in $15-an-hour
minimum wage plan despite her outsiderish role in the final
negotiations.

Testimonials do not favor Connelly’s account. While then-Mayor Ed
Murray put together a working group to concretely enact the idea
she’d helped make politically salient, Sawant gathered signatures
for a ballot initiative with her favored version of the plan. Licata,
who was on the committee
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said that the “ballot initiative threat was seen as very real, and
that did play a major role” in pressuring city officials to
establish a plan on their own terms. David Rolf, a union leader who
spearheaded the pathbreaking SeaTac effort, told
[[link removed]] _The
Seattle Times_ that Mayor Murray was “the consensus builder we
needed to translate rough ideas into actual policy, and Kshama was the
threat from the left who gave us urgency.” Even Pedersen, who
Sawant describes as an “obviously corporate” politician, somewhat
begrudgingly acknowledged to me that Seattle’s $15 wage policy
likely would not have happened without her: Sawant and Murray, he
said, were each “necessary but not sufficient.”

After Sawant was elected, she and her campaign manager met Licata at
the Piroshki café, near City Hall. A former commune dweller
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Licata was uncommonly proficient in the Marxist lexicon, and he asked,
out of curiosity, “So how do you guys deal with Democratic
Centralism?”—a reference to the Leninist governing principle
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which Socialist Alternative is organized
[[link removed]].

Other councilmembers looking to ham it up with Sawant struggled to
find such common ground. Jean Godden recalls
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her welcoming overtures for a get-to-know you lunch were “curtly
rebuffed” and early on noted Sawant’s cliquish association with
Socialist Alternative associates and the “red and white posters,
some likely produced on city copying machines, stacked on desk tops”
in the office the socialist had inherited from her recycling-oriented
predecessor.

As for the other councilmembers, “I don’t think she respected
them, and I don’t think they respected her.”

Licata said he and Sawant respected one another and worked well
together. As for the other councilmembers, “I don’t think she
respected them, and I don’t think they respected her.” From the
outset of her tenure, Sawant had little time for the “Seattle
Way,” the unwritten spirit of decorum and niceness with which local
hum-hawers strive, said Licata, to abide. As _The Seattle Times_ put
it in an endorsement
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the recall, Sawant has disregarded “any civic norm that comes
between her and a microphone.” To colleagues and outside foes,
Sawant’s attacks feel personal, impugning their integrity and good
faith.

“It’s not about being chummy and going and playing golf with
somebody. This is about basic decency in terms of human
interactions,” said Pedersen, who said he has discussed Sawant’s
comportment on the City Council with many of her colleagues. “It’s
that that’s lacking. They have no confidence that she’s not going
to pop off with some statement in the middle of a council meeting that
they’re, like, tools to the business class, selling out their
constituents.”

What does it mean to be “radical?” Gossett, the old Black Panther,
came to appreciate the possibilities of electoral politics amid the
relative success of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, in whose
Washington state branch he participated during the 1980s. In 1993,
Gossett was elected to serve on the King County Council, and he
“learned early on that the art of electoral politics, at least, is
the art of compromise: making agreements with people that you don’t
ordinarily hang out with … in order to get some changes through that
are beneficial.”

Sawant would surely disagree. But what constitutes a compromise
reflects one’s fundamental position, and Sawant’s is that, in the
context of capitalism, no reform is sufficient to ensure acceptable
living standards for all.

“You’d be an idiot to think there is not compromise in elected
office, or that there isn’t compromise in class struggle,” said
Bryan Koulouris, Sawant’s campaign manager in the recall fight.
Compromise is an acknowledgment of the “balance of forces.” It has
its place in activism and elected office, but you don’t want
compromise as your starting point, he said, “because you’re not
going to win anything that way. Your starting point as a socialist
needs to be the needs of ordinary people.”

Sawant has long championed a policy to “Tax Amazon” and other
major companies in the city. She and SA organized around the issue,
and in 2018, the City Council passed the controversial plan, only to
quickly rescind it
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outraged businesses mustered a credible threat for a ballot measure of
their own.

Amazon poured
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than $1 million into 2019 elections and backed Sawant’s challenger,
to his eventual chagrin. “Sawant vs. Amazon,” the story went. As
is her custom, Sawant lagged behind on election night but swept into
the lead on late returns.

In 2020, the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests brought new
political conditions. At the infamous “Capitol Hill Autonomous
Zone,” or CHAZ, encampment in the core of Sawant’s district,
Socialist Alternative and its allies gathered 20,000 signatures on a
new Tax Amazon initiative, Sawant said, over a 20-day span. (Some BLM
protesters grumbled that she was using the energy of the moment to
advance what seemed like a different cause; Sawant points out that
protesters signed the petitions on their own volition.)

For Sawant, the ballot-measure threat was, again, the crucial context
in which a major policy—this time a major payroll tax—was forged.
“They gave it another name,” said Sawant. “JumpStart.”
Nonetheless, Sawant declared victory. This is not about personal
credit, she said. “We take the political analysis of how victories
are won very seriously.”

Sawant and SA can persuasively claim some credit for the passage of
“unparalleled” renter protections during her time as a
councilmember. According to Licata, prior to his retirement, he and
Sawant established an unspoken collaborative regime. She’d work the
public; he’d work the council.

Once, in 2015, they were both advocating for tenants resisting a local
landlord, Carl Haglund, who as _The Seattle Times_ and
others reported
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was jacking the rent on an apartment building in disrepair. Licata
recalls telling Sawant an idea for limiting rent hikes on big
buildings that weren’t up to code. Her eyes lit up, he said, and
soon, without his consultation, she was publicly labeling Haglund a
“slumlord” (prompting an unsuccessful
[[link removed]] defamation
lawsuit) and calling
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the “Carl Haglund law.” Licata feared the personalized attack
would alienate council colleagues. But he said, “I was wrong.” The
law passed.

Larry Gossett’s cousin, Denise Bazemore, lives in a low-income
apartment for the elderly in a fast-gentrifying area of South Seattle.
Though the buildings are not old, she and her neighbors have grown
frustrated with unaddressed maintenance issues, which only deepened
her displeasure at the September notice notifying her city-subsidized
rent would be increasing significantly.

One day, she learned of plans for a rally to push back. Initially
skeptical, she attended and found that Sawant and staffers had brought
signs for her and her neighbors. Disgruntled tenants from another
building in a different part of the city came. The press did, too.

“It’s just nice to know somebody out there is fighting for us and
trying to help us live more comfortably. That’s all. We’re not
asking for a lot.”

Over subsequent meetings and rallies, Bazemore noticed that her
neighbors seemed emboldened in the presence of Sawant and the other
organizers. They seemed to think, “Well, maybe I should come out
there and talk with her about what’s going on with my apartment.”

Sure enough, the landlord, a nonprofit, agreed to delay rent increases
until the beginning of 2022. Sawant declared
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victory and pushed for more concessions. To Bazemore, Sawant seems
“like she genuinely cares about us” and isn’t “snooty,”
despite her high-profile job. Bazemore found her to be “very
approachable, and she listens to what you say. It’s just nice to
know somebody out there is fighting for us and trying to help us live
more comfortably. That’s all. We’re not asking for a lot.”

Despite a conspicuous building boom, Seattle remains well behind
schedule on housing, particularly affordable housing, which can be
built through three main avenues, said Mark, a local landlord:
government, ecumenical groups, and nonprofits. “Seattle has
bloviated about affordable housing for 30 years,” he said. It has
“studied backyard cottages since the ’90s.” He thinks it’s
time for the city to buy up housing itself. “You’re talking to a
guy who has never seen the government do housing well. But I am out of
bullets. I don’t know what else to do.”

The position would imply an affinity with Sawant. Not so. Mark, who
said he currently owns an apartment building in Seattle and several in
Texas, takes pride in fixing up downtrodden old buildings. He finds
places that “haven’t been worked on in 30 years, and I go in and
spend over a million bucks refurbishing these things and turning it
into a great place to live,” he said. “And I’m demonized.”

Mark raised rent after fixing up a roughly 40-unit Seattle building.
He said protesters came and honked horns in front of his house and
spread his name on social media. (He requested that only his first
name be used for this article, out of concern that this would happen
again.)

The problem, he said, is that Seattle—which in his three-plus
decades in town currently has “the worst City Council I’ve ever
seen”—makes it unduly burdensome to be a landlord. For example, he
said he is legally obligated to “rent to the first person with a
pulse,” which leads to perverse outcomes. He has many stories
attesting to this and said he is owed tens of thousands of dollars in
unpaid rent. One time, he had a tenant who filled a five-gallon bucket
with feces and urine, he said. The tenant packed the noxious stew into
plastic shopping bags and threw the bags down on Mark’s workers
below.

“That right there’s a fiction of the left. They think that
landlords are making all this money and they’re doing it on the
backs of their tenants. And that is complete bullshit.”

“I wouldn’t want to be the owner of a fourplex,” he said. If you
get bad tenants, “you’re fucked.” Yet rather than taking time to
understand the exceedingly complicated dynamics of the housing market,
city councilmembers, chief among them Kshama Sawant, lazily cast
aspersions, he said. She “wants to blame Amazon and the landlord.”

Asked whether, bureaucratic challenges notwithstanding, being a
landlord is not still a profitable enterprise, he said, “That right
there’s a fiction of the left. They think that landlords are making
all this money and they’re doing it on the backs of their tenants.
And that is complete bullshit.” He backs the effort to recall
Sawant, “the Trump of the left.” He wants someone who is “going
to do their fucking job.”

In an editorial
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the recall, _The Stranger,_ an alternative newspaper whose
irreverent but thoughtful political endorsements wield much influence
in this city, listed the allegations, and in each case asked, do we
care? On the charge of allowing Black Lives Matter protesters to
occupy City Hall while it was closed to the public during the
pandemic, the paper’s editors answered: “Kinda.” On the matters
of the misuse of city funds and her participation in the protest march
to Mayor Durkan’s home: “No.”

The details of the protest march allegation are in dispute. Katrina
Johnson, who is the cousin of Charleene Lyles, a Black woman killed by
police in her own apartment in June 2017, told me that the mayor’s
claim that Sawant led this march is a “lie.” Johnson said that the
Democratic Socialists of America organized the march, in part to honor
Lyles’s memory, and put together all of the logistics, including
planning the route to the mayor’s house, whose location organizers
apparently already knew on their own.

A few days ago, I awoke from a nap to an email from Sawant. It made me
angry. I’d heard a specific critique of her that we had not
previously discussed, and passed it along, in what felt like a spirit
of fairness, to give her a chance to respond. She did, thoroughly and
thoughtfully, but not before declaring that the questions had a
“clear pro-establishment agenda and spin” and that she wasn’t
sure whether “these are serious questions to be taken at face
value.”

I took her response personally—a clear mistake. But the note stung
because she probably had a point. Sawant’s political analysis—the
way she frames the world as an elected official—surely has its
flaws, but it does tend to expose the day-to-day myopia of the liberal
mind. In a previous interview, she described the technocratic meetings
in which she said her council colleagues pass their days, fiddling on
the margins: “I’m sure they kid themselves to think that they’re
doing good. But in reality, what they’re doing is maintaining peace
in favor of the ruling class,” she said. I suggested this was
ungenerous. Her voice rose in response: “If you want to talk about
anything being ungenerous, that should be the deep inequality in our
city and in our nation as a whole.”

“But when it comes to politics, it’s like another being takes
over.”

In most workplaces, collegiality is a virtue—a basis for solidarity,
said Sawant. “But you cannot apply that lens of worker solidarity to
elected officials, in the halls of power, under capitalism.” She
said she will work with any colleague to advance the interests of
working people. But “if you are fighting for working people, then
you better understand, you’re not there to make friends.”

Despite her affronts to the political culture of the local
“establishment,” Sawant is, somewhat shockingly, the
longest-tenured current member of the Seattle City Council. She
declined to say why her SA comrades selected her, roughly a decade
ago, to fulfill this role: “That is sort of awkward for me to
answer, because there’s no way of answering that without sounding
like I’m engaging in self-praise”—but “I can tell you one
thing,” she said, laughing. “I was not happy.”

Sawant’s role in her movement must be an exhausting one. But it has
been revealing, too. “It is incredible what I have observed,” she
said. “If you put me in a social gathering, it would be really
awkward for me. But when it comes to politics, it’s like another
being takes over.”

_ANDREW SCHWARTZ reports on labor and political movements. He also
co-edits Mangoprism.com [[link removed]]._

_THE NEW REPUBLIC [[link removed]] was founded in 1914 as
an intellectual call to arms for public-minded intellectuals
advocating liberal reform in a new industrial age. Now, two decades
into a new century, TNR remains, if anything, more committed than ever
to its first principles—and most of all, to the need to rethink
outworn assumptions and political superstitions as radically changing
conditions demand._

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