The Demands

The attacks on immigrants are a bipartisan project. The Democrats spent years paving the way for Trump’s deportation machine. Obama still retains the title “Deporter-in-Chief” for having deported more people than any other president, including Trump. Biden also escalated deportations, exceeding Trump’s record for most people deported in one year. Kshama’s opponent, Democrat Adam Smith, voted to create and repeatedly fund ICE. We need to defeat EVERY pro-ICE politician and elect independent socialists who will stand with immigrants.

Just like the rest of the police state apparatus, ICE is a threat to all working people and is a violent tool of the capitalist state. Union members and socialists need to build the movement against ICE. We need coordinated strike action across the country to abolish ICE and shut down the detention centers. This must include illegal strike action that defies “no-strike” clauses in union contracts and bans on public-sector strikes. Rank-and-file union members should demand that their unions un-endorse any politician who voted to create or fund ICE. We need mass civil disobedience to bring ICE operations to a halt, including mass coordinated shutdowns of airports where ICE operates.

Private insurance kills! 200,000 people die every year in the U.S. from lack of health insurance coverage or access to care – a figure that will only rise after Trump’s attacks on Medicare and Medicaid. Private healthcare and big pharma make a killing off of exorbitant prices and denial of care. While their CEOs enjoy million-dollar annual salaries, two-thirds of all bankruptcies in the U.S. are linked to medical debt.

Universal healthcare has never been won anywhere in the world without a serious working-class fight. We will never win it by relying on the billionaire-backed Democratic Party, which has killed single-payer bills over and over in states like California, Washington, and Vermont. The United States is the wealthiest country in world history, but unlike the rest of the industrialized world we don’t have a universal healthcare system. This is because American workers have never had a party of our own.

We should look to the example of Canada, where a workers’ party composed of labor unions, farmers’ cooperatives, and socialist organizers won universal healthcare in the 1960s, beginning in just one province, Saskatchewan. That example was so powerful that it spread throughout the rest of the country and forced a Conservative government to pass it nationwide.

We need to go on the offensive to win free healthcare for all, including with local and state ballot initiatives to win a breakthrough in a major U.S. city or state. We need to elect independent socialists who will lead these fights, as Kshama has pledged to do by leading a free healthcare ballot initiative in Seattle and waging an all-out fight in Washington, D.C.

The brutal occupation of Palestine has persisted for nearly a century due to the backing of U.S. imperialism and its two parties of genocide and war. The billionaire class maintains the Israeli state as their “unsinkable battleship in the Middle East” to secure their domination of the region, including its oil resources. Without U.S. funding and armaments, the genocide and occupation would grind to a halt.

We need an anti-war movement on the scale of the one that ended in the Vietnam War and destroyed the draft. The movement must include rank-and-file union members launching co-ordinated strike action and civil disobedience, following the example of the Italian workers whose general strike scared the billionaires into pressuring Israel to accept the current ceasefire.

We need to throw out every Democrat and Republican who voted to fund the genocide. Those most responsible — including Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and Kshama’s AIPAC-backed opponent Adam Smith — should be put on trial for war crimes.

Student and medical debt are crushing working people. Medical debt is the cause of two-thirds of all bankruptcies. It accounts for 58 percent of all debt collections on credit reports. Medical debt needs to be abolished.

Student loans are a predatory system. Poor and working-class students are promised good-paying jobs in exchange for crippling lifelong debt. Student loans are now estimated to total $1.66 trillion across the U.S. – an unbearable burden on the working class.

The student loan holders are granted extraordinary powers, including the ability to seize money directly from workers’ wages. Trump has stated his intention of expanding these legal powers to go after millions of people who can’t afford to pay.

We need a serious working-class movement to cancel all student and medical debt, and to win free public college for all. We need a nationwide debt strike, with debt cancellation as the central demand. Choking the court system with 44 million cases of non-payers would make enforcing student debt impossible.

Unlike the rest of the industrialized world, the U.S. has no system of universal childcare nor paid parental leave. The billionaire class is able to force millions of new parents every year back into the workforce while also forcing the burden of childcare entirely onto their shoulders. Both burdens fall upon working-class women the hardest.

Parents pay a prohibitive cost for childcare — over $13,000 per year on average. At the same time, U.S. childcare workers are among the lowest-paid workers in the nation. Somali childcare workers have been the target of racist attacks by Donald Trump and the right wing. We need to tax the rich for free universal childcare and paid parental leave, with good-paying union jobs for all childcare workers.

We cannot rely on the Democratic Party, including so-called “progressive” Democrats like Zohran Mamdani, who have failed to fight for universal childcare. Working people and socialists should organize local and state ballot initiatives to make a breakthrough in the fight for free childcare.

The rent is too damn high! Housing prices and rent are the single biggest expense working people face. Half of all renter households are rent-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on rent. 39% of people in the U.S. go without food to make housing payments, and that number is 44% among young people.

We need strong rent control that will prevent rent increases above the rate of inflation. We need to fight in every city for a Renters’ Bill of Rights, like what Kshama and the movement won in Seattle, including caps on move-in costs, a $10/month cap on late rent fees, six-months notice for rent increases, relocation assistance for economic evictions, a ban on winter evictions, and a ban on school-year eviction for families with children.

We need a movement to stop price-gouging by corporate landlords. We need rent strikes against exploitative landlords, and for political demands like an eviction moratorium and rent control. We need fighting tenants’ unions.

Big corporations like Greystar and Equity Residential have engaged in price-fixing using technology like RealPage to raise rents as high as possible. We should nationalize these big landlord corporations and run them democratically so that housing can be provided to meet human need, not to raise billionaire profits!

Millions of working people are being crushed by the cost-of-living crisis. Prices have gone up by over 25 percent since the COVID-19 pandemic began, yet the federal minimum wage has remained at an abysmal $7.25/hr for over two decades.

Biden betrayed his promise to raise the minimum wage to $15/hr. Kshama Sawant was able to win $15 in Seattle more than a decade ago as the lone socialist on the Seattle City Council, by building the 15 NOW movement and by going to war against the Democratic Party. Seattle’s minimum wage is now $21.30.

Workers need to fight for a $30/hour starting wage, following the example of Amazon workers in New York, Kentucky, and beyond. Rank-and-file union members should demand at least $30/hour in all union contracts and go on strike to win it. We need to fight for annual inflation adjustments, like Kshama and the 15 NOW movement won in Seattle.

Workers are more efficient and productive than ever, yet working hours have not decreased. We need a 30-hour work week with no loss in pay. Workers should have more time off to spend time with families, take up political work, and to enjoy their lives.

Highly-paid bureaucratic union leaders throw millions of dollars of union members’ money at Democratic Party politicians year after year, only for those same politicians to slash union jobs, break strikes, and fail to pass basic pro-union legislation like the PRO Act. Rank-and-file union members need to demand that union resources go to build strike funds, launch bold unionization campaigns, and run independent working-class candidates to build the foundations of a new workers’ party.

American capitalism was built on the brutal exploitation of Black people. Following the historic victories against slavery and Jim Crow, the billionaires replaced those systems with mass incarceration and mass impoverishment of Black communities.

There are one hundred descendants of large slaveholding families in the U.S. Congress. These American aristocrats are five times richer than the average member of Congress, who are themselves 12 times richer than the average American. The billionaire class has made incalculable profit off of slavery, Jim Crow, and the modern system of indentured Black prison labor. We need to claw back these profits to fund healthcare, housing, education, and good union jobs in Black communities.

We need amnesty for every political prisoner and non-violent drug offender. We need to ban exploitative prison labor, end cash bail, and abolish for-profit prisons. We need to cut bloated police budgets by at least 50 percent and put that money into things that workers need.

Capitalism steals from Black people every single day. We need to fight for victories that will transfer that wealth back into Black communities every single day and reverse the centuries of capitalism’s destruction.

Workers can’t control what we don’t own. The billionaire owners of big oil and gas have blocked the transition to renewable energy for decades, all to protect their profits. They are continuing to accelerate fossil fuel production even as it wreaks havoc on local ecosystems and the global climate.

Capitalists should get no say in whether we continue to have a livable planet. We need a movement to nationalize the big energy corporations and carry out a rapid transition to 100% renewable energy, with a guarantee of good union jobs for all current fossil fuel workers. If we want to end the climate catastrophe, we must break the billionaires’ stranglehold on energy and bring it under democratic, working-class control!

The Democratic Party’s approval ratings are in the gutter. Trump’s popularity is withering by the day, and Congressional Democrats are even more unpopular than him! Defeating these two rotten parties has never been more necessary nor more possible.

Over the past decade, millions of people in the U.S. have taken to the streets to fight racist policing, right-wing attacks on reproductive rights, ICE terror, and the genocide in Gaza. But every time these movements have been defeated because of the misleadership of the Democratic Party and their apologists. For our movements to succeed, workers need a party of our own.

A workers’ party can’t simply be declared in a conference room or by a committee of activists. It will be built from active struggle.

We need to unite the militant wing of the labor movement, the socialist movement, and the unorganized working class around concrete fights for free healthcare for all, for rent control, to abolish ICE, and against the genocide in Gaza. We need to organize these fights independently of the Democratic and Republican parties.

We need to insist that every union leader and socialist organization support Kshama’s independent campaign for Congress, and fight relentlessly against any misleader who refuses, on the basis of either sectarianism or loyalty to the anti-worker Democratic Party. Rank-and-file members of the Democratic Socialists of America, the Green Party, Workers Strike Back, and the union movement need to get organized together to build this campaign.

Electing Kshama to Congress would be a massive blow to the Democratic and Republican Parties, and it would be a giant step towards a workers’ party.

Read more about our strategy, donate to our working-class Super PAC, and join Movement for Kshama today!