HubMP2012

Scaling up Seattle

OCTOBER 7, 2025

Jonathan Rosenblum introduces his new book, published today.

Anyone with a shred of humanity and a degree of political engagement must be wondering today, “What’s the way forward? How do we fight in the political arena?”

In my country, Trump and the billionaires control the levers of power, our neighbors are being kidnapped, imprisoned, and deported, and bosses are gleefully busting unions while Elon Musk and his confederates loot the public treasury. In your country, the head of government, leader of a putative working-class party, is doubling down on Farage’s racism and xenophobia, criminalising anti-genocide activists, and demanding yet more austerity from working people. Labour’s leadership is driving the country straight into the arms of your own Trump.

Socialists everywhere need to chart a new political path forward: Break free of the establishment parties that have brought us to this parlous crossroads, and build new political movements, ones that fight for our interests and are democratically accountable to working people.

I live and work in Seattle, Washington, a city of 800,000 residents in the continental northwest. I am a union organiser and writer, and I drive part-time for Amazon delivering packages. I’ve just published a new book about our socialist struggles in Seattle. We’re Coming for You and Your Rotten System: How Socialists Beat Amazon and Upended Big-City Politics (OR Books, October 2025) is remarkably timely as it answers that urgent question, “What’s the way forward?”

Over the course of a full decade, on the strength of a single socialist seat in our City Council, we won transformative victories – a first-ever tax on Amazon to build social housing; the first big city to win a $15 an hour minimum wage; breakthrough renters’ rights; abortion and mental health funding; a ban on caste discrimination; funding for LGBTQ youth services; and more.

We did not win by trying to change mainstream political parties from within; we built our own independent political movements, outside of the parties and in direct opposition to them.

Our movement was led by Kshama Sawant, a Marxist, and the political organization she belonged to, Socialist Alternative (SA). In recent years we’ve had a number of self-identified socialists win political office in the US. But Sawant and SA stand as a sharp counterpoint to reformist socialists like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Bernie Sanders. Those politicians sought to work within the Democratic Party, our rough equivalent of Labour, hoping that they could reform it to meet the needs of working people: a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, a rise in the pathetic national minimum wage, strengthened labour laws.

They failed – not because they are bad people, but because they did not appreciate that the party they were trying to work within was implacably opposed to the sort of change they were proposing. It was not built to accommodate socialist politics. As Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, our own Keir Starmer, famously said eight years ago: “We’re capitalist. And that’s just the way it is.”

Sawant was elected to the nine-member City Council in 2013, beating a long-term incumbent with a clarion call for a $15 an hour minimum wage. On the council dais, she sat alongside eight Democrats, a few of whom billed themselves as left-leaning reformers, but all very much a part of the political establishment. We organized and waged legislative fights over the course of a decade and won three re-election battles against the combined forces of the political establishment, Amazon, Starbucks and other major corporations that call Seattle home. Though never a member of SA, I worked for several of those years in Sawant’s council office and organized alongside the movements we built.

We approached political struggle differently from how reformist socialists worked. In the book I describe the three pillars of what I call Marxist insurgent struggle.

First, we recognized that political struggle is class struggle and that our main responsibility therefore was to use the City Council office to build mass street movements to press demands and thereby force the politicians to make concessions. What we won, and where we fell short, would be entirely determined by the balance of power between us and our opponents, not by our ability on the dais to enlighten and persuade the other City Council members.

We recognized that in advancing our bold demands – a 58 percent rise in the minimum wage, breakthrough renters’ rights, the tax on Amazon to build social housing, bans on police weapons – we would be putting ourselves in direct conflict not just with big business, but also with the modern state. By “state” I mean the full range of institutions that establish, maintain, and enforce capitalist order – the executive and legislative branches of governments, the bureaucracy, the courts and the police, along with adjacent institutions such as the media and both mainstream political parties, the Democrats and Republicans.

That movement that Sawant and Socialist Alternative led was guided by the foundational recognition that the political arena in capitalist society – yours and mine – is not an open ground for the freewheeling contest of ideas. Rather, political institutions and the rules they establish for conducting legislative and other affairs are specifically designed to uphold and reinforce the capitalist status quo. So in taking on these fights, we would be going up against all of the institutions of state power. We saw ourselves – and were seen by our opponents – as a socialist beachhead within the enemy’s camp.

This basic power analysis has eluded most progressive movements, including reform-minded socialist movements that have foundered on the naïve belief that they can bend to popular will an institution of state power – such as a mainstream political party – when in fact that institution exists to uphold the capitalist status quo.

Our second principle of Marxist insurgent politics was advancing bold material demands that are explicitly connected to the call for broader societal change. We know that working people alienated by mainstream politics will get engaged when they see a movement that speaks to their material needs, explains the underlying systemic problem, and provides a course of action. Conversely, you can’t build a movement if the demands are vague or modest.

We also advanced bold demands to demonstrate capitalism’s inability to meet our most basic needs and, therefore, why we must build movements for systemic change. This is essential if we are to build a truly socialist political movement.

Too many reformists on the left move from one campaign to another, taking aim at the maladies of capitalism without parsing why these problems persist. But you can’t properly treat a cancer without first having a correct diagnosis. Without that root-cause analysis, bold policy proposals begin with lofty slogans but – once they enter the political battlefield – crumble into modest change that only attenuates injustice and fails to meet the basic needs of working people. We’ve seen this in both of our countries on myriad issues in the last generation, including minimum wage, climate and racial justice and basic labour rights.

The third principle of Marxist political insurgency that we practiced was popular movement democracy – the ongoing engagement of community members in setting demands and in deciding strategies for how to wage the struggle.

Popular movement democracy as practiced by Sawant and Seattle movement activists, with a particular focus on involving people from marginalized communities, is much broader than the customary definition of “democracy” in capitalist society. Sawant invited community members into forums where they would discuss and decide what demands to place before City Council and how to wage the fights. The $15 minimum wage strategy was developed through neighborhood and citywide meetings. The decision to push for a ballot initiative as a backstop to the legislative fight – a tactic that proved decisive – was debated and approved at a mass meeting of hundreds of workers.

This participatory democracy became a feature of our approach to movement work in the subsequent battles for tenants’ rights, the tax on Amazon to build social housing, and in the annual city budget. Time and again during Sawant’s tenure I would hear community members marvel about how wonderful it felt to be able to express their views, how for the first time, they felt like genuine participants in the political arena, rather than just subjects.

One might understandably think: “That’s all well and good. But Seattle is a single municipality of less than a million people. It’s not a country.”

That is true. But the region is also home to some of the largest global corporations – Amazon, Microsoft, Starbucks, Boeing, Weyerhaeuser – making it an excellent laboratory for testing out the clash between a socialist-led movement and the commanding heights of capital.

Certainly scaling up the Seattle experience represents an enormously daunting challenge. But what is the alternative today? The present course of affairs – in your country, and also mine – lead us straight to fascism. It is a trajectory driven not just by Trump and Farage, but also by the Democratic and Labour Party leaderships. Both parties are absolutely committed, in their symbiotic relationship of contesting-yet-colluding with their nominal political opponents, to the policies of genocide, xenophobia and austerity. They are implacably committed to uphold capitalism. These political establishments screw workers, kill the human spirit and, unchecked, will snuff out life on this planet.

It is not easy to break from the political institutions that capitalism has given us. It is not easy for political activists to break years of habits and relationships. But in 2025, it is necessary if we hope to advance the socialist project.

Seattle has shown on a municipal scale that we can effectively take on and beat some of capital’s most powerful adversaries. Seattle offers not a formula or a recipe, but a set of principles and methods, ideologically grounded and diligently applied, that point to a hopeful outcome, a different path from our present disastrous trajectory.

Jonathan Rosenblum is Activist in Residence at the Center for Work and Democracy (Arizona State University). He is a member of the National Writers Union, the author of We’re Coming For You And Your Rotten System: How Socialists Beat Amazon and Upended Big-City Politics (OR Books, October 2025), and a part-time delivery driver for Amazon.