'A mood of resistance has opened up': an interview with Kshama Sawant.

• Author: Nichols, John
• Position: Seattle City Council member, Occupy movement veteran - Interview

Kshama Sawant may well be the best-known city council member in America. There are reasons for this. She is outspoken, and she has no fear of stirring controversy. But the veteran of the Occupy movement who was elected to the Seattle City Council two years ago is something else: She is a proud socialist who makes no apologies for her ideology. She rejects the constrained language and the constrained strategies peddled by political and media elites, declaring that "calling myself as a candidate a socialist has never been a barrier."

Sawant has garnered attention far beyond Seattle, especially as she has worked to make the movement politics of the streets a basis for public policy, including Seattle's groundbreaking $i5-an-hour minimum wage ordinance and a fight for rent control in one of America's costliest metropolitan areas. Once dismissed as an outsider who could not drive the agenda, she is now praised by veteran progressives, including Seattle council member Nick Licata, who says, "Kshama has made things happen that never would have happened before." Sawant, who is seeking re-election on November 3, spoke with The Progressive about her activism, her frustration with the Democratic and Republican parties, the presidential campaign of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, and her sense that a new movement-based electoral politics is spreading in the United States and around the world.

Q: Jeremy Corbyn has won the leadership of the British Labour Party, Syriza just won again in Greece, Podemos is rising in Spain, Ireland is seeing mass protests, we have all sorts of radical politics developing in Latin America and South Africa, Bernie Sanders is shaking up the presidential race, and a socialist is a member of the city council in a major American city. It seems as if socialist and social-democratic movements are kicking up all over. Why is this happening now?

Kshama Sawant: I think what's happening right now globally is that a mood of resistance has opened up. The persistent conditions of misery and economic deprivation, social inequality, racial injustice (or, if you're in India, caste injustice): These are ills that extend from a class system like capitalism.

Human beings have an amazing resilience, an amazing capacity to absorb harsh conditions. But then there are certain factors that come together, that catalyze conditions for people to move into struggle. In the sixties and seventies, you saw a period of struggle. In the thirties and forties, you saw the labor movement really coming into its own and winning a lot of the social reforms that we might have taken for granted until a little while ago.

What we see happening now is a good example of what I'm talking about. The severe economic recession, the great recession that started unfolding in 2008, was such a huge setback for working families everywhere. There was just utter devastation...