Kshama Sawant Blew It
Ideological purity remains a dead end for the left.
Earlier this year, I defended the Democratic Socialists of America’s electoral strategy in Left Voice, an ultra-left publication that argues socialists must reject all cooperation with bourgeois parties such as the Democrats. I defended DSA’s strategy of competing on the Democratic Party ballot line by showing how it led to DSA’s rapid rise and made it the torchbearer of socialism within the United States. The editors must have felt my argument was strong, as they held my essay for months until they could publish a same-day rebuttal. In their response, they highlighted Kshama Sawant, an independent socialist of the Trotskyist tendency, as proof that the left can build electoral power while abstaining from the Democratic Party ballot line and remaining ideologically “pure.” They wrote:
“Long before AOC and Mamdani used the Democratic primaries to win their elections, and two years before Sanders chose to run as a so-called democratic socialist, independent socialist candidate Kshama Sawant won a seat on the Seattle City Council. This victory provided her and her tiny party of fewer than 300 members a national platform to promote socialist ideas and advocate for a national $15 minimum wage, which Sawant spearheaded in Seattle. Imagine what could be accomplished with 100,000 dedicated members. Unfortunately, Sawant’s party, Socialist Alternative, which had grown dramatically thanks to her victory, ultimately undermined its own strategy by endorsing Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary. This led to a mass exodus of members and contributed to the party’s eventual decline. Nevertheless, her victory showed that independent socialist campaigns can not only win but can also serve as a banner for socialist ideas, even in the United States.”
The Left Voice thesis was recently put to the test. Last week, Kshama Sawant ran for Congress in Washington’s 9th Congressional District, a left-wing enclave that voted for Kamala Harris by 41 points in 2024. This presidential margin is the exact same as Michigan’s 13th district, where DSA member Donavan McKinney unseated establishment incumbent Shri Thanedar just last week. The incumbent in Washington’s 9th, Adam Smith, is a 30-year Do Nothing Democrat, just like Dianna DeGette, who was recently defeated by DSA member Melat Kiros. Washington’s 9th is the exact type of district where DSA and progressive candidates have been taking the fight to the corporate establishment. It has a progressive electorate, is represented by an out-of-touch Democrat, and the only political activity is the same duopoly figures running again and again, offering voters no change, only the status quo they despise. Besides Sawant, participants in this race included Republican Doug Basler, who has run six times, and Democrat Melissa Chaudhry, who fell to Smith in 2024. To give Sawant even more of an advantage, this district includes Seattle, which elected socialist mayor Katie Wilson just nine months ago. As this is the most favorable environment to insurgent socialist challengers in a generation, if Kshama Sawant’s political project was going to succeed anywhere, this was her chance.
Instead, Kshama Sawant got obliterated. She didn’t lose by a hair, nor was this a result that showed she came close and would be back stronger next cycle. With over 95% of the votes reported, Kshama Sawant sits in a distant third, about seven thousand votes shy of making it through the runoff and into the November general election.1 Currently, fourth-place Melissa Chaudhry is closer to overtaking Sawant than Sawant is to overtaking Basler. To make matters worse, Sawant’s campaign wasn’t the rag-tag, bootstrapped operation that we typically see from insurgent socialists. Sawant reported $607,493 in campaign spending, meaning she outspent Republican Doug Basler by over six-to-one and still lost to him. The Sawant campaign spent $25.33 per vote, the highest for any candidate in the race. Neither AIPAC, crypto, or any other well-funded lobby saw Sawant as a threat to their interests. The only registered PAC that spent on the race was Sawant’s Revolutionary Change PAC, which raised $5,600 through ActBlue and spent it on billboards.
Typically, when insurgent leftists challenge the Democratic and Republican establishment, we see the opposite. The challenger has a lower cost per vote, as their campaigns are driven by grassroots volunteers who easily win over the electorate with a working-class message that resonates with the voters. I’m not surprised Adam Smith has a high cost-per-vote, as he’s flush with establishment cash. The fact that Kshama Sawant had to spend more than Smith to receive substantially fewer votes is a sign that the candidate and her message were a failure. As if that weren’t disappointing enough, outspending a Republican by over 600% and still losing in a dark blue district that just elected a socialist mayor is a disaster for a leftist campaign. Evidently, the independent socialist model of electoralism, what Left Voice referred to as “revolutionary parlimentaryism,” is a dead end.
Part of what leads Sawant’s style of socialism to perpetual failure is its obsessive compulsion with tearing down more successful socialist projects, particularly DSA. This isn’t new. Sawant is a self-described revolutionary Trotskyist. Her theory that “ideological purity” will lead to communist revolution has been attempted for over a century, dating back to the split in the international communist movement between Stalin and Trotsky in the late 1920s. In the U.S., the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party USA expelled Trotsky supporters, who, led by Max Shachtman, bounced between Trotskyist splinter groups, fighting, bickering, and breaking with one another over who was the most “pure” socialist. While Leon Trotsky had valid critiques of Stalinism, his ideological followers forgot you’re actually supposed to do things, not just endlessly criticize other socialists for doing things. This compulsive pursuit of ideological purity remains a core component of Trotskyist, ultra-leftist, and radical liberal politics to this day. As the editors of Left Voice reminded us, Sawant was a member of the ultra-left Trotskyist group Socialist Alternative, which splintered over the irrelevant question of endorsing Bernie Sanders in 2016. And they’re not the only ones. One of the largest active Trotskyist groups, the Party for Socialism & Liberation, also just underwent another split.2 In a scathing resignation letter, the party’s top propagandist accused PSL leadership of “bastardizing Leninism,” along with more sensationalist claims outsiders have no way of validating. This strain of ultra-leftism, which seeks ideological purity over effective political action, is so sectarian that Sawant wasn’t even the only “revolutionary Trotskyist” in the Washington 9th race; Jacob Perasso ran as a revolutionary socialist for the Socialist Workers Party, one of the many aforementioned splinter groups.
The central message of Kshama Sawant’s campaign was that she was the most “pure” socialist. For every criticism Sawant leveled against her opponent Adam Smith, she also threw one at Zohran Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and DSA. Bizarrely, Sawant still asked for an endorsement of Seattle DSA. But rather than show up to the endorsement meeting and argue for their support, she left Washington to attend a California Single Payer rally hosted by Green Party gubernatorial candidate Butch Ware. Before a crowd of maybe two dozen people, Sawant blamed Ocasio-Cortez and Pramila Jayapal as the reason America doesn’t have Medicare for All. As I said, literally the only thing Sawant and her allies can do is criticize and complain. Shockingly, “AOC bad” isn’t a compelling electoral message. Who knew.
Sawant is the most extreme version of this leftist purism. But the tendency is all too common. Sawant has found a home in the Green Party, which serves as a loose collection of various socialists, environmentalists, radical liberals, and left-wingers that oppose running on the Democratic Party ballot line. As I said in my response to Caitlin Johnstone, there’s nothing wrong with a leftist not wanting to associate with Democrats. If you think you can win gains for the working class in a different way, you have my full support! The problem is the pursuit of purity does not deliver gains for workers. Debates about “real socialism” are obscure pursuits of the intelligentsia, not persuasive programs that attract support and build sustainable coalitions by fixing the problems created by capitalism, with the goal of replacing it.
Unable to offer Americans solutions to their ills, the only thing Trotskyists, ultra-leftists, and radical liberals can do is endlessly shit-talk more effective leftists as sellouts, sheepdogs, reformists, and other insults you can probably find in the comment section of this article. As practical socialists succeed, the purists are increasingly threatened, so their attacks grow increasingly vitriolic as they stray further and further from reality, driving them to despise fellow leftists.
During the Cold War, Trotskyists were so high on themselves that they believed their own rhetoric. Misbelieving that the Soviet Union and its Marxist-Leninist allies were the reason their ultra-leftism failed, Trotskyists collaborated with the U.S. government to undermine the U.S.S.R. On the eve of World War II, Trotsky himself agreed to testify before the anti-communist House Un-American Activities Committee, and many Trotskyists were the founding fathers of neoconservatism. In the early 1970s, followers of the aforementioned Trotskyist leader Max Shachtman were so convinced about the need to stop “Stalinism” that they steered the Socialist Party, the iconic vehicle of Eugene Debs, to support Richard Nixon and American imperialism in Vietnam. It’s hard to ignore the parallels between historic ultra-leftism and its modern form. As DSA’s popularity grows, Green Party figures are increasingly sympathetic to fascists such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson. The delusion is so strong that some have begun whitewashing the genocidal crimes of Donald Trump, saying he is a preferable anti-imperialist force than Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. There’s much to critique about the New York congresswoman’s record. But if you’re arguing the President who cut off fuel from Cuba, bombed Iran, and colonized Venezuela is lefitstly* better for the Global South than a House member who strongly opposed those things, you’ve lost the plot.
I’m not surprised Kshama Sawant’s candidacy went down in flames. Nor am I surprised about the excuses the candidate and her sycophants have offered. In her post-election statement, the revolutionary socialist gave herself a participation trophy by stating her campaign was “by far the strongest ever by an openly Marxist candidate for U.S. Congress,” an objective lie given multiple Marxists have been elected to Congress. As expected, Sawant concluded her campaign by attacking DSA and further undercutting her own political theory.
“Despite not making it into the November election, we've provided a powerful example of what's possible by running an openly Marxist independent campaign based on class struggle rather than making peace with the political establishment or its legions of gatekeepers. The DSA strategy of appeasing and, worse, rehabilitating the discredited Democratic leadership and their rotten party is a dead end. In this age of imperialist war, genocide, and climate catastrophe, we simply have no time to fuck around.”
Here, Sawant and I are in total agreement. Palestine is being cleansed. The planet is burning. Capital is accruing more and more wealth, solidifying its control over everything and anything. Every minute and month the left is out of power, more people die, and the possibility of a better world grows narrower. Which is why it’s a waste of resources, time, and political energy to keep running vanity candidates who can’t even beat historically unpopular Republicans in a socialist-voting district despite having a six-to-one funding advantage. Say what you will about DSA, but we have a plan to cut off arms to Israel. Seize power, throw sand in the gears, end weapons sales, and establish an arms embargo. It will be difficult, but it’s a plan, and we’re working towards it. After last week’s election, DSA will have seven members in Congress. Not enough to end the genocide, but it’s a start. Alternatively, I genuinely could not tell you how Kshama Sawant or any other ultra-leftist plans to stop the genocide. As far as I can tell, it seems to be:
Step 1: Get mad at DSA
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Free Palestine/Global Communist Revolution
Aside from its inability to win elections, one problem with ideological purism is that it doesn’t exist. There is no “pure” socialist party, because there is no “pure” socialist, because there is no “pure” human being. Everyone is subjected to countervailing forces that push us to violate our values every day. The phrase “no ethical consumption under capitalism” is not an excuse, but an analysis that simply existing in the modern world forces us to sacrifice our egalitarian values. The clothes we wear, the food we buy, and the cars we drive are produced through exploited labor, just as we ourselves have our labor exploited for others’ profit. If your goal is to achieve a level of self-anointed godliness as the One True Socialist, then you’re in the wrong place. Organized religion would be a better fit than politics.
As I always do, I must reiterate that I’m not saying DSA’s way is the only way to do socialism. There are many avenues to collective power, both within and outside the electoral arena. But as Kshama Sawant’s loss, and the inability of ultra-leftists like her to muster any concrete political activity over the last century shows, the pursuit of ideological purity and stubborn rejection of effective politics shepherds the left into a dead end, where we are unable to save Gaza, the climate, or ourselves.
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In Solidarity — Joe
Washington has jungle primaries, so all candidates compete in one primary and the top two face off in November.
PSL identifies as Marxist-Leninist, the doctrine codified by Stalin and the ideological opponent of Trotskyism. But both its ideology and lineage are Trotskyist. PSL split from Sam Marcy’s World Workers’ Party, which split from the Socialist Workers’ Party, which was the original group of Trotsky supporters that split from the Communist Party USA. As PSL leader Brian Becker articulated in his response to Smolarek’s resignation letter, the party operates under the “socialist consciousness theory,” a modern modification of Trotsky’s permanent revolution theory that the masses themselves will rise up in socialist revolution.
The reason that ideological purists of any political movement hate their more pragmatic counterparts is that by gaining legitimacy and even popularity in the real world, the pragmatists make the proponents of ideological purity less relevant within the broader movement. In other words, pragmatism becomes a threat to the ideologues' power and influence. This is the crux of the issue in my opinion.
“The Left looks for traitors; the Right looks for converts.”