Critical Support for Kshama Sawant: Honest Marxist Accounting of Strengths, Errors, and the Path Forward
Critical support for Kshama Sawant’s independent congressional campaign in Washington’s 9th District is not blank-check cheerleading. Revolutionary socialists have a duty to analyze concrete practice with complete honesty, applying the method of ruthless self-criticism that Marxism demands. Sawant has demonstrated in practice the power of independent class struggle and the superiority of using elected office as a weapon of the working class rather than as a tool for reformism within the capitalist state. At the same time, critical support requires open examination of past political errors and theoretical limitations so that the movement can learn and advance.
Honest Accounting of Past Errors: The 2018 Carmen Best Vote
Critical support demands candor. In 2018 Sawant voted to confirm Carmen Best as Seattle Police Chief — a serious political error that contradicted basic Marxist principles on the capitalist state. Socialist Alternative’s own internal documents acknowledged at the time that the vote violated the organization’s line, yet it was justified on pragmatic grounds: to avoid alienating sections of the Black working class. This was a clear case of tailism — subordinating class principle to short-term image management and liberal pressures.
Marxists have always understood the state, in Lenin’s words, as a special body of armed men whose purpose is to defend bourgeois rule. The police cannot be “reformed” into a progressive force by installing the right leader. The 2020 George Floyd uprising and the mass “defund the police” movement later demonstrated the high political cost of such concessions. Sawant has since stood on the correct side of these struggles, but the earlier error remains as an important lesson: revolutionary socialists must use elected office as a weapon against the capitalist state, never as a tool to legitimize or manage it.
Theoretical Limitation: Beyond the “Billionaire Class” Slogan
We also note a continuing rhetorical and theoretical limitation in Sawant’s public agitation: the heavy reliance on the “billionaire class” slogan popularized by Bernie Sanders. While millions of workers rightly rage against the billionaire class, revolutionaries understand that the fundamental enemy is the entire ruling capitalist class — the bourgeoisie that owns the means of production and controls the state. The slogan, though agitational, risks reducing the problem to a handful of especially greedy individuals rather than the system of capitalist production as a whole.
This limitation is vividly illustrated by the housing crisis. Private equity giants like Blackstone, SX Property Trust, and Progress Residential — often backed by Democratic administrations from Obama onward — have turned rental housing into a profit machine through algorithmic rent-fixing (RealPage), mass evictions, and leaving luxury units vacant. Democratic politicians, including Sawant’s opponent Adam Smith, have taken money from these same real estate billionaires. Taxing the ultra-wealthy is necessary, but the task of revolutionaries is to prepare the working class for the expropriation of the expropriators and the overthrow of bourgeois rule, not merely to redistribute some of its spoils.
Political Evolution: From Dual Membership to Full Independence
Sawant’s break with both DSA and Socialist Alternative in 2024, the founding of Revolutionary Workers, and her fully independent congressional campaign represent a significant positive evolution. In 2021 she had supported a limited tactical dual-membership approach with DSA. Experience has shown the limits of that “inside-outside” strategy. DSA-aligned officials have repeatedly funded imperialist wars and genocide, broken strikes, and accommodated the Democratic establishment. Sawant’s Seattle record proved the superiority of a class-struggle strategy that puts a political price tag on every Democrat — including the so-called progressives — and refuses backroom deals.
Her current campaign rejects the logic that the Democratic Party can be transformed from within. She appeals directly to rank-and-file socialists and workers, pledging to turn a congressional inauguration into a mass rally of 10,000 people and use the office as a weapon to launch national campaigns for free healthcare, national rent control, an end to all U.S. military aid to Israel, no war on Iran, and shutting down ICE. This is the correct method: elected work as a tribune of the class, not a stepping stone inside the capitalist state.
The Path Forward
These strengths, errors, and developments all speak to one central question for revolutionary socialists: how should we relate to a fighter like Kshama Sawant — a leader who has delivered real class-struggle victories but also carries important past political errors and theoretical limitations? The method of critical support answers this question concretely. We support Sawant’s campaign because it represents one of the sharpest breaks with the two-party system and the labor bureaucracy at a moment when the demand for independent working-class politics is at historic highs. At the same time, we insist on open Marxist accounting so the movement can genuinely learn from past mistakes and overcome theoretical limitations.
The new workers’ party will not be built in Congress. It will be built through rank-and-file struggle and the patient but uncompromising work of revolutionary socialists. Sawant’s independent campaign is an important step in that direction. By supporting it critically — with eyes wide open to both its achievements and its shortcomings — we contribute to forging the kind of catalytic revolutionary leadership the working class needs to abolish all classes and liberate humanity.
Socialistas Sin Fronteras
May 25, 2026
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