Victory in the Steps Towards a Socialist World: Sawant Wins!
The following three articles cover the tremendous victory of the electoral campaigns for city council of Socialist Alternative candidates in Seattle and Minneapolis. According to an article in Seattlepi.com November 14, 2013, by Joel Connelly, titled “Socialist Sawant wins City Council seat,” “Seattle City Council candidate Kshama Sawant, a ‘Socialist Alternative’ insurgent, has unseated four-term incumbent Richard Conlin, with the latest batch of mail-in ballots nearly tripling Sawant’s lead to 1,148 votes.”
And in Minneapolis, according to a November 10, 2013 article by candidate Ty Moore titled, “This is just the beginning,” from his website, “We came just 229 votes short, a painfully small margin. But even before Election Day, we had already won a tremendous victory for working people in Minneapolis and beyond. Together we demonstrated that it’s possible to stand up and win broad support for an independent left challenge to politics-as-usual and the domination of the two corporate parties. We transformed the debate in Minneapolis and popularized bold socialist demands for working people—issues normally shut out of mainstream political discourse.”
Kshama Sawant’s victory in Seattle and Ty Moore’s very close vote in Minneapolis is a giant victory for independent, revolutionary socialist candidates standing clearly on the side of the working class.
We are in total support of their perspective for the 2014 mid-term elections of building, “Coalitions of fighting union leaders, socialists, Greens and civil rights groups…in every city across the country to organize movements and mount independent candidates.”
In the first article, “Election Victories for Socialist Alternative—Huge Opportunities for Working-Class Politics must be Seized,” by Bryan Koulouris, an analysis of their victory, we have also added from their website their list of what they stand for. The demands listed are both completely reasonable, and revolutionary at the same time. They are what all working people the world over want, need and have a right to.
The second and third are Seattle Times articles, “I Almost Voted for a Socialist,” by Bruce Ramsey; and “Funny How Everything’s Gone Left,” By Danny Westneat. Both of these articles were written by non-socialists. We present them because they reflect the powerful influence not only of the candidates, but of the ideas they put forth. They are having such an impact and resonance with working people that even the bourgeois mass media has to acknowledge both their ideas and their campaigns. And it’s interesting to note, these two articles are absent of redbaiting—actually, they’re friendly.
A giant step forward has been made by these campaigns. We at Socialist Viewpoint would have voted for them with both hands. We offer all the help we can to help them organize a united, democratic, mass, socialist alternative to capitalism and their ruling parties in 2014.