Nearly a thousand people turned out June 6 at Town Hall Seattle for the re-election campaign launch of Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant. Sawant, originally from Mumbai, India, and a former software engineer, rose to prominence as an outspoken teacher and organizer at Occupy Seattle. She has since electrified the city – and the U.S. labor movement more broadly – by leading Seattle to adopt a $15 minimum wage, inspiring San Francisco, Los Angeles and other cities to follow suite.

A fierce populist and member of the Socialist Alternative, Sawant has now set her sights on the housing justice movement, challenging powerfully backed real estate and corporate interests as she vows to tackle inequality and "make Seattle affordable for all." Occupy.com caught up with Sawant, who talked about the growing legacy of Occupy, the need for future movements to issue concrete demands, and why working people protesting en masse can change the world.

Michael Levitin: The Occupy movement elevated the issue of inequality. In the years since, how would you say the inequality debate not only shifted the national conversation – but provoked actual policy changes and had tangible impacts?

Kshama Sawant: After a long period of demise of the labor movement – with attacks on living standards for working people, with the debt of the middle class lifestyle, with skyrocketing poverty and homelessness nationwide, and with the spectacular failure of this economy which presides over the wealthiest people in the history of humanity yet sees all social problems increasing – in the middle of all this, it was the Occupy movement that for the first time in decades ended the silence. And not just on economic inequality and racial injustice. It really gave voice to what the majority of people think and feel but often are not able to articulate, which is that life is intolerable even in the wealthiest country in the history of humanity.

If we want to talk about tangible legislative outcomes, first we have to go to the source [of] where it all began. Because in a system which we live in, global capitalism – a system that is fundamentally, inherently going to be unequal, deeply unequal, and tends towards greater inequality – in such a system, for the most part unless there is something unusual going on, unless the working class is fighting back, legislative outcomes are what the 1% wants. They are outcomes desired by the holders of the biggest amounts of wealth. So when people say, “Do you like government?” or “Do you not like government?” I think that’s the wrong question. The right question is: “Whose interest is the government serving?" And whose interest the government serves depends on who has power.

ML: You say legislative impacts are something the people in power want. But aren't those impacts also some of the few signs or reflections to everyday people that there is actual movement – actual political changes they can see?

KS: I’m saying that what this thing we call government does depends on who’s in control. Under capitalism, unless the working class organizes to fight back, most of the time legislative outcomes reflect the greed of the 1% – they reflect what the dominating class wants. So if you look at impacts with legislative outcome, yes, there are. But deregulation of the financial sector – that's also a legislative outcome. If you look at the legislative outcomes in U.S. Congress for the last five decades, they have been almost singularly legislative outcomes that have benefited Wall Street. So my point is, if you want to see different kinds of policy outcomes that benefit the people who are oppressed, then those who are oppressed have to make it happen.

That is why I’m talking about Occupy, because that was a starting point. It’s like salmon swimming against the stream: the stream goes towards benefiting the wealthy, so if you want to do something different you have to go against the stream. And to go against the stream you need courage, you need inspiration, you need a collective voice, you need a feeling of solidarity. You need a feeling of, “Hey, I’m not in this alone, there’s lots of people with me, we can change something.” That’s what Occupy gave – it gave a sense of solidarity because people were there together and realizing, "Oh, I’m not alone in thinking that this world is messed up."

And flowing from that, a lot of changes have happened. The nationwide Fight for $15 really came from Occupy. The progress that was made and the victories that were won against Obama on the Keystone XL pipeline – that was a direct outcome of the energy from Occupy. Idle No More and lots of the Native American struggles have drawn strength from Occupy. As far as examples, I think the Fight for $15 is the biggest and most powerful example of what’s come from what we’ve done.

ML: When we look at Spain now with the Podemos party, and Greece with Syriza, those countries have turned their social movements into political ones by winning at the ballot box. What would you like to see in the next U.S. movement – an evolution of Occupy, one that's able to sustain itself and take it to the next level to become a political movement like in Spain or Greece?

KS: There are a few things we need to do if we don’t want to see our movement tapering off, and instead grow and really become so powerful that it not only wins reforms like wage increases, but also raises the banner of a fundamental shift away from capitalism. This is what we really want, this is what we really need – and what the planet needs. The answer to the climate crisis is a shift away from capitalism because [the investment in] renewable energy is not happening under capitalism. One of the things we need to understand is how movements come into existence, take on life, and grow to the point that they sweep everyone up in their energy, their current.

One thing we can see from the Fight for $15 is that it’s not something that one person decides – it’s something that a mass of people need to feel. It’s like a feeling in the air. But most important about the Fight for $15, as opposed to when Occupy started winding down, was the acknowledgment that you need a concrete political demand around which to organize all these people who are angry and frustrated and want to do something. It is not enough just to go to the square and set up camps. That’s a first step, and that was fantastic. But beyond that, the next step of that movement is, “Okay, so what are we going to fight on?” Also, one important lesson from Occupy is to avoid thinking that it has to be one way – that there’s only one single way the movement can go and that’s the only way it can be done.

When Occupy Seattle moved the encampment from Westlake Park downtown to the campus of my college, Seattle Central Community College, I was a teacher and also a union member, so I had this dual role of Occupy and union activist, and I was able to play a role there which was unique. We [moved the camp] to avoid the police harassment at Westlake Park, and the union fought against the administration to give Occupy the right to be there because it’s public space. It was a brilliant example of solidarity, and Socialist Alternative was urging people to build on this moment of victory and moment of solidarity; teachers were there, students were there, occupiers were there, exactly what we needed. But to have taken that movement to the next step, we needed political demands. The political demands that made the most sense would have been related to budget cuts, tuition hikes, cuts to public education, adjunctification of faculty. It's an example of how demands can rise to the surface, but they don’t automatically get fought on and build the movement – you need a conscious force that says, "We need to do this collectively.” Because had we done that, Occupy wouldn’t have wound down when it did. Instead it would have morphed itself into a major fight for public education.

ML: You believe a singular issue, like tuition hikes or cuts to education, could have kept Occupy going and strengthened the movement?

KS: I’m glad you used the word singular because at the end of the day there will be many singular issues people are fighting on. Right now you see workers primarily fighting on the $15 banner. You see a lot of workers and people of color fighting against police brutality in the Black Lives Matter movement. You see Native American people fighting for their land here in Bellingham against the Cherry Point [coal] terminal and against water pollution. You see women fighting for reproductive rights, and so on. But it’s not a problem that there are these individual movements. In fact, what we see from history is that the historical moments when movements posed the biggest challenge to the elites was when these movements coalesced. Actually it’s a great thing there are many movements that are fighting.

ML: What would you say makes an activist – and more broadly, what finally makes a movement?

KS: Think of movements as organized collective struggles. Think of them as unusual events happening in people’s lives – because human beings are not in movements all the time, you know, we don’t come out of our mothers’ wombs fighting a movement. We just live an ordinary life, and our evolutionary process for the survival of the species pushes us to make the best of the circumstances we are given. But that doesn’t mean that people are docile or stupid or not understanding that they’re facing injustice. It’s just the evolutionary process: you’re trying to do the best you can for your daily life, you’re trying to put food on the table for your kids, you’re trying to pick them up from school. All of those people are latent activists. But to make them into activists they need to feel something deep in their hearts – in their gut. They need to feel they're not just attending a meeting every week that goes nowhere, or attending a talk-shop where people are speaking and reading books. (We should do that too, of course, because a critical study of history and analysis is extremely necessary for us to know what mistakes not to repeat.)

However, at the end of the day it is tangible struggles that masses of people come out to fight. And it’s not a question of being condescending to workers. It’s a question of understanding that the movement’s obligation, the movement’s responsibility, is to present [the struggle] in a compelling manner. What is it that will allow people to feel so inspired, to feel so driven, that even though their lives are so hard they will make themselves do that extra thing which is a beautiful thing – which is activism, and which is the only way any social change has ever been possible. All of history overwhelmingly shows that mass numbers of people are capable of doing this and will do this, but it’s the responsibility of the left to show them, to organize, and then they will also become organizers.

ML: How much can marching and protesting accomplish? It seems we learned some of the limits of that at Occupy, where so many people who didn't march remained untapped as activists. How does the left mobilize the 80% of people who are potential activists, who aren’t necessarily going to be on the frontline – but for whom it’s too little to tell them to just write letters and emails to their congressmen, which is what they’ve been doing through MoveOn and other outlets?

KS: That’s not ordinary people’s fault. MoveOn is a giant democratic party establishment organ that channels everybody’s anger and hunger for change into writing letters to senators and congress members. If you see ineffective and inept ways of organizing, that is because there is a purpose behind it. It acts as a corralling of anger. You feel angry and frustrated about the fact that you don’t get paid enough and you’re stuck in a dead-end job, you have tens of thousands of dollars of student debt, you have no healthcare… what do you do? Write letters to senators. We shouldn’t blame ordinary working people for the failures of ineffective tactics.

Instead, collectively recognize those ineffective tactics as something that is intentionally foisted on them by those who would appear progressive, but whose real agenda is to drive everything back to the Democratic Party establishment. That is why we, the left, have to provide an avenue that takes people away from that. And that can’t be done in the abstract; we have to actually demonstrate it. I often hear people say, “You know, what does protesting change?” I will say that this is something that people have learned unconsciously through corporate media because corporate media tells you protesting doesn’t work. Like hell it doesn’t! Look at where we are. How did we get $15? You think we got $15 in Seattle because of the largesse of big business and the elite politicians who support them? Hell no. We got it because we had our own voice in City Hall and we had the momentum on the streets. And what do you think we did? We protested, we rallied, we marched.

We should rejects – we should boldly reject, not timidly but boldly reject – this corporate idea that protesting doesn’t work, because it’s not about any individual protest. The protest actions have two purposes: one is to build your own self esteem as an activist, your own feeling of capability, your own sense of collective power. But it’s also to urge people who are not in the movement yet to join [it]. And that happens all the time. Otherwise, as an immigrant brown-skinned woman of color, I wouldn’t be here talking to you – because other people in the past marched, put their personal lives aside, made enormous financial and personal sacrifices to win rights for people of color, for immigrants, for women. So we are all walking examples that organized struggle works, and protesting is part of organized struggle. Corporate media looks at this in a very reductionist way: "What are you doing protesting? Go get a job." No, we’re protesting as part of building a massive fightback.

ML: After huge wins on the West Coast – in Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles – where are we on the trajectory of the minimum wage battle, in terms of where we go from here?

KS: There’s tremendous momentum around $15 an hour. I would say that it is critical that we don’t take our eye off the ball, that we don’t become complacent. We should go for one win after another; we've got L.A., now we need to win in every other major city, and smaller cities as well. And we should remember, next year is a presidential election year: again we’re going to have another year where they’re going to be talking about something on their own planet and not touching any of the reality that we want to talk about. So our movement should provide a counter to their nonsense, to their Wall Street hegemony, by escalating the Fight for $15. We should fight our own battle independently – we should not show up for them actually, we should reject them and instead put all the energy into a fight for $15 and demand a federal $15 an hour minimum wage. We have the momentum. The critical thing to do is not lose that momentum and think that, “Oh, we have great victories, now we can stop.” No, New York has to be next. Cities like Cleveland, and cities in the South, have to be next. We need to keep fighting. And the beauty about winning victories is not only does it actually bring about a tangible improvement in people’s standard of living, but it also energizes people for the next struggle.

ML: Speaking of next struggles: rent control and affordable housing. This isn't a single city issue or even an American issue. It's a global issue, one that everyone, everywhere, is now feeling. How do we create a universal movement that taps into that anger to produce real change?

KS: In terms of housing justice, a lot of what we’re going to be able to do in Seattle, if anything, is going to be thanks to the energy and momentum from $15 an hour. It’s because we’ve had the experience of winning that people have a surge of confidence. If you were talking to me in January 2013 when we launched our City Council campaign, a lot of people were skeptical, because we don’t have a living memory of a victory – we haven’t had a victory in decades for the working class. So many of our generations have grown up never having seen a victory. The massive victories that were won through enormous sacrifice by the labor movement are a distant memory. So that is why it is important to generate that example. And now in Seattle, I have no doubt that tens of thousands of people are looking to harness their new-found energy and confidence into a movement for housing justice.

As you said, the question of housing justice is not just Seattle specific, it’s not even national – it’s global. We are struggling: we are struggling with unaffordable cities, we are struggling with economies that have been completely dismantled, where we have paid the price for their greed, for the greed of the financial oligarchy, and they are sitting pretty while we are suffering. So whether it is Seattle or another city, the only way we will win demands like rent control, or [building] thousands of units of city-owned quality housing that is affordable, is if our movement builds. And I would say that right now, just like with the $15 struggle, but perhaps even more, we have lined up against big real estate corporations. The entire real estate industry is going to be fighting. They are right now amassing their forces in the form of money and a nationwide network of billionaires and executives who are going to put all of their energy into Seattle.

Seattle is ground zero right now for the movement for rent control and housing justice of any kind. They are dead set against it. That is why we had 900 people here tonight – because we all know that on the surface my election is about Seattle, and yes that’s true, we are fighting in Seattle. But we will have forces against us from all over the country, we will have multinational real estate corporations stacked against us, and the only way we’ll win is if we do what we did in $15, which is amass our own movement. We’re not going to be able to beat them at their billions because we don’t have billions. But we do have people – people who are angry and frustrated and hungry for change.

But I’ll say this in closing: more than anything else, above all, what we need is to be clear about who’s on our side and who’s not. If we have illusions that the corporate politicians of the Democratic Party establishment and the Republican Party are on our side – if we have illusions that we are going to win an improvement of our standard of living by asking big business and the Gates Foundation to get funding – the movement will be a failure. More than anything else we have to be clear what we are up against and we have to look to each other to build our strength – meaning go to working people, knock on their doors, urge them to join the movement. Don’t have any illusions in big business and their representatives and their politicians. They’re not on our side. If they do something for us, it will be because they realize that they have no choice. But they are not our allies.

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