The following guest post was written by Kshama Sawant in response to the article The Rise and Fall of Chris Smalls by Annie Levin, published in Jacobin on June 4. Although guest posts do not necessarily reflect the ideas or opinion of Left Voice, we believe this is an important debate for U.S. labor and the Left.
Jacobin magazine, the principal publication associated with the leadership of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), released a hit piece earlier this week on Amazon labor leader Chris Smalls.
Brother Smalls was one of the main leaders of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), which won the first-ever union in an Amazon warehouse in the United States, at the JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island, in 2022. Smalls has also been a prominent activist fighting against the genocide in Gaza and in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Jacobin’s article is a hatchet job against a leading labor activist who has refused to toe the line of the DSA and the business unionist labor leaders. They have turned on Smalls as they will turn on anyone who gets in the way of their efforts to give cover to the so-called progressive Democrats and to the Democratic Party as a whole, which they do despite endless betrayals by Democrats against working people.
The crux of the real reason why Jacobin went after Smalls is contained in this sentence: “[Smalls] blames the two-party system for the state of the American labor movement…”
Smalls is spot on about this and the need to break from the Democratic and Republican parties. We urgently need a new party of the working class.
The DSA leadership, on the other hand, sees giving cover to the Democratic Party as job number one. The Democratic Party is the party under whom the genocide in Gaza began, with Democrat Joe Biden in the White House. The overwhelming majority of Congressional Democrats voted to fund Israel’s genocide as well as to block U.N. food aid to Gaza, including 56 members of the so-called Cogressional Progressive Caucus. Biden and the Democrats also engineered the breaking of the railroad workers’ strike. ALL Democrats in the House, including DSA star AOC voted to break the strike.
The Democratic Party is not a “lesser evil”, but one of the two most powerful capitalist parties in the world, and in no way represents working people or the oppressed.
Business unionist labor leaders are those who have made peace with the capitalist system and the bosses and oppose any kind of class struggle methods. They are driven by protecting their careers, which means placating the bosses and their political servants, not organizing the rank and file against the bosses to win substantive working-class victories. Refusing to fight the bosses also means not only aligning with, but being in lockstep with the parties of the bosses, like the Democratic Party.
The overwhelming majority of the labor leadership today is business unionist, with some crucial exceptions like Smalls. This also means that they are mostly aligned with the Democratic Party, with a few prominent figures like Teamster President Sean O’Brien shamefully making public overtures to Trump and the Republicans.
It says a lot that DSA leaders carried out such a brutal attack on Smalls, who led the historic victory at what is still the only successful Amazon union election in the U.S., while having so little critique (and often high praise) of the labor leaders selling out working people. Jacobin and the DSA leadership had nothing to say about UAW President Shawn Fain when he loudly championed Kamala Harris for President at the Chicago Democratic National Convention in 2024. Fain declared in his speech that Harris had “stood shoulder to shoulder with the working class,” that she “is one of us,” and “she’s a fighter for the working class.”
Straightforward facts and Jacobin’s own analysis prove Fain’s remarks to be gravely false and misleading. Harris was the Vice President in an administration that presided over the funding of the genocide in Gaza and the breaking of the railroad workers’ strike. On top of that, by Jacobin’s own admission, Harris ran a Presidential election campaign in which she completely refused to make any concession to any of the many “wildly popular” working-class demands such as Medicare for All or universal, paid family leave. Jacobin also reported that as a District Attorney in California, Harris targeted working-class and poor people, prosecuting “cases of elementary school truancy and marijuana, opposing its legalization. Cannabis arrests increased through most of her time in office, along with the percentage of black cannabis arrestees. The conviction rate for those offenses increased, too.”
It wasn’t just Fain, of course. Virtually the entire labor leadership uncritically cheered Harris on despite her refusal to express support of even minimal demands like a national $15/hour minimum wage, let alone publicly come out against the genocide in Gaza. The DNC’s own autopsy of the Harris loss reveals that the party’s contempt for the majority of working people angry about the genocide and the cost-of-living crisis cost them the election.
I am running as a pro-worker antiwar socialist against Adam Smith, a 29-year warmongering incumbent Democrat who has voted for tens of billions of dollars for the genocide in Gaza, to slash hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare and Medicaid, to create and fund ICE, to break the railroad workers’ strike, and to bail out the super-rich after the 2008 Great Recession.
Yet, the leadership of the Washington State Labor Council and the Washington Education Association recently endorsed Adam Smith, without even inviting our campaign to speak to their membership.
The labor leadership’s refusal to break from the genocidal parties of the capitalist bosses, and their eagerness to actively promote them, is one of the biggest obstacles to any victories for the antiwar movement or the working class. We need a reckoning in the labor movement.
The article on Smalls is purportedly to critique him for not focusing on the battle to win a contract at JFK8 after the historic union election, instead “traveling the country, ostensibly to help other Amazon warehouses unionize.” There are legitimate and necessary debates to be had about strategy and tactics. But furnishing this as the excuse for a vitriolic hit piece is completely disingenuous. For this reason, the article has earned a public and resounding rebuke from working people and union members.
In fact, the 2022 ALU union election campaign at JFK8 was a departure from the business unionist strategy we’ve seen over the past several decades under much of the labor leadership. The campaign was organized around a set of clear and material demands. Thirty dollars an hour starting pay for tier 1 workers, real paid time off, longer breaks, an end to broad mandatory overtime. These demands were not picked out of thin air. They were born out of conversations among co-workers on the shop floor, in the break rooms, and on the bus. The demands were at the front and center of the campaign and relentlessly brought up in speeches and plastered on campaign leaflets, not merely listed on the union website somewhere. The campaign based itself on tireless shop-floor organizing and mobilizing rank-and-file workers. The campaign leaders made clear to their fellow workers from day one that the fight for a union would put them in direct conflict with Amazon executives. That there would be no peaceful partnership between the workers and executives, that the interests of the bosses are at complete odds with ours. That workers would need to fight in large numbers.
The approach ALU leaders used to win the union election at JFK8 are what I would call class struggle methods. It is no coincidence that this is the only successful union election at an Amazon warehouse in America to date. For instance, attempts by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, failed precisely because the union leadership refused to use similar class struggle methods. Instead, they built a campaign that did not mobilize the warehouse workforce in large numbers. The leadership also refused to raise concrete demands, and instead put forward vague sentiments like “respect at work.” All of this meant that the union drive was twice crushed by the vicious union busting by Amazon bosses. Jacobin conveniently leaves out any mention of the two failed attempts in Bessemer by the business unionist RWDSU leaders. This only further exposes that the real purpose of the article is not to draw lessons for the labor movement but rather to exact retribution for Small’s criticisms of the so-called “progressive” Democrats.
The refusal to build union campaigns around concrete and bold demands that can ignite a fire among the rank and file to activate them as an organized force is a common mistake by business unionist leaders. It is a mistake, however, that flows from their desire not to antagonize the bosses. Class struggle unionist leaders understand that a campaign to unionize a workplace or for a union to fight for a decent contract WILL antagonize the bosses. The only way to win is to embrace a militant fightback, which requires leaders who are not looking to make their own personal careers.
It is preposterous to suggest, as the Jacobin article does, that Amazon bosses would just concede to a union contract at one of their warehouses, regardless of any amount of “deep organizing” at that warehouse. The example of a successful contract at Amazon is dangerous for the capitalist class. They will sooner shut down JFK8 than concede to a contract, as they did in Quebec. The corporation closed down all its seven facilities in the Canadian province, laying off 1,700 employees, in retaliation against unionization. Another illustration is Starbucks corporation, where 700 stores have unionized since late 2021, but not a single contract has been won yet by the leadership of Starbucks Workers United. Smalls is correct that it’s crucial to expand Amazon organizing to other facilities.
Unionizing a behemoth like Amazon will require organizing on a scale proportionate to the task of taking on the might of the billionaire class. It will need a strategy that launches unionizing drives simultaneously at multiple warehouses, with strike preparations on a colossal scale. Further union victories, much less a winning union contract, are only possible at Amazon on the basis of an all-out militant fightback like the one led by revolutionary socialists in the 1934 Minneapolis General Strike and the subsequent, militant sit-down strikes that unionized the auto industry. It’s ironic for Jacobin to single out Smalls because unionizing Amazon will need precisely the class struggle unionism that has been missing in the labor leadership that Jacobin has defended, or given cover to, for years.
Class struggle unionist leaders understand that what workers can win will come only from a determined, organized, and relentless fightback against the bosses. Class struggle unionists fight to prevent scab workers from being able to break the strike by organizing community-wide working-class solidarity campaigns. They urge members of other unions to stand with the strike and also carry out solidarity strikes. Crucially, class struggle unionist leaders also recognize that the political parties of capitalism represent the capitalist state and exist to defend the interests of the capitalist class. In the United States, that means understanding that both the Democratic and Republican parties are hostile to the interests of workers. It means having a strategy to defeat the repression and even violence that the Democrats and Republicans will use, and have historically used again and again, in order to break strikes.
Class struggle unionism means recognizing that the actual purpose of “progressives” in the Democratic Party is to try to whitewash the party’s pro-capitalist agenda. New York City hospital bosses spent upwards of $100 million in hiring out-of-state scab nurses in an attempt to undercut the historic strike of nurses at the start of this year. New York’s Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul signed, and repeatedly renewed, an executive order making it easier for the bosses to hire the scabs. NYC’s Democratic Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is a prominent DSA leader, visited the picket line of the nurses but also shamefully endorsed Hochul for her re-election bid during the strike.
Brother Smalls has put his life on the line for the antiwar movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people against the Israeli state’s genocide bankrolled by both the Democratic and Republican parties. Smalls went on a Gaza aid flotilla carrying food, baby formula, diapers, and medicine in the context of catastrophic levels of mass starvation in Gaza. The flotilla was attacked by the Israeli military, who physically assaulted Smalls, and kicked and choked him.
In contrast, AOC has voted for the Iron Dome which is a key part of the Israeli state’s genocidal apparatus. At the 2024 Democratic National Convention, AOC blatantly lied, saying Democratic candidate Kamala Harris was working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza.
Jacobin and much of the DSA leadership have regularly shielded AOC from the legitimate anger at her betrayals of working people and the antiwar movement. Shamefully, AOC still has the endorsement of New York City DSA. In the article, Jacobin accuses Smalls of using his platform “to lash out at labor’s allies,” clearly referring to his criticisms of AOC and other “progressive” Democrats.
Because Smalls has the temerity to expose AOC and other self-described “progressive” politicians, Jacobin calls him “narcissistic.” The magazine’s editors were apparently forced to retract this term, changing their article title, after they got huge amounts of flak on all social media for their article on Smalls.
Personal attacks and character assassination like in this case are often used by the political establishment’s spokespeople as a proxy for their real objection: any leader openly calling out the actual role of the so-called progressive Democrats and of the Democratic Party as a whole.
There is huge anger among the American working class at both the Democratic and Republican parties. Any idea that the Democratic Party is a friend of working people has been disproven a thousand times over. Working people aren’t being fooled.
Poll after poll has shown that tens of millions of working and young people are furious at the wars, the cost-of-living crisis, and at both parties of the billionaires. A New York Times/Siena poll released last month shows that “political disillusionment seems only to be deepening.” The survey estimates that only 26 percent of voters are happy with the Democratic Party and only 33 percent with the Republican Party. Nearly two-thirds of respondents under the age of 30 are angry with both parties.
Yet, Democrats and Republicans keep getting re-elected. Democrats and Republicans, led by my main opponent, Democrat Adam Smith, just put forward a bill for a trillion new dollars for war. Working people are still struggling to get their most basic needs met.
How does one explain the chasm between what most of us working people want and what we end up getting? It is the lack of virtually any principled leaders who unambiguously fight for working people and pose a direct challenge to the Democratic Party and the billionaires and multimillionaires they represent.
A big reason it is extremely difficult to build this type of independent leadership is that working people immediately come up against gatekeepers the moment they try to fight for their interests.
Who are the gatekeepers? They are individuals who pose as being on the side of working people but whose actual role is to block working-class movements and to defend the political establishment and the billionaires they represent. Business unionist leaders themselves and the so-called progressive Democrats they give cover to are both playing the role of gatekeepers. Their main goal is to give an illusion of debate with Trump and the Republicans in order to keep working people straitjacketed inside the two parties of capitalism.
I have seen gatekeepers in action first hand over and over during my decade as the sole socialist on the Seattle City Council. My office won the nation’s highest minimum wage, the Amazon Tax, free abortion in Seattle, unprecedented renters’ rights, and much more. But I was only able to win these because I used my office and built mass movements, despite the opposition from the gatekeepers, including business unionists, NGO leaders, and progressive Democrats.
Overcoming gatekeepers is also the only avenue of rebuilding a militant labor movement and actually defeating the billionaires and multimillionaires. It’s also the only way to build movements powerful enough to end the Gaza genocide and the forever imperialist wars, stop the data center juggernaut, shut down ICE and the detention centers, and end the AI-related mass layoffs. All of this will require a historic political clash against the capitalist class, who are absolutely determined to continue and escalate all these evils. Defeating them will require mass strike actions, especially at munitions factories, at Big Tech corporations, and at the choke points of trains and ports. People like Smalls and myself are targeted by gatekeepers because we are among the all too rare leaders who have called out the business unionist labor leadership for their refusal to organize such strike actions, or indeed, to pose any threat to the warmongering billionaires or their parties.
Posing a concrete threat to both the Democratic and Republican parties requires a challenge to the business unionist labor leadership. In other words, the tasks of overcoming the gatekeepers and defeating capitalism’s two parties are inseparable.
That is why I am now running as an independent revolutionary socialist against genocidal Democrat Adam Smith, because we desperately need a fighter in Congress. I am the only candidate in this race calling for an end to all military aid to Israel and an end to all weapons and tech for genocide and imperialist war. I am also fighting for free healthcare for all funded by taxing the rich, to shut down ICE, for a moratorium on data centers, and for a public-sector living-wage jobs guarantee.
I’m the only candidate prepared to go to class war against the billionaires and their two parties.
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Kshama Sawant is a revolutionary socialist, a founding member of Workers Strike Back, and a former Seattle City Councilmember who led the movement to win the nation’s highest minimum wage and the Amazon Tax on wealthy corporations to fund affordable housing. Kshama is now running for the U.S. Congress as an independent antiwar socialist.
The post Kshama Sawant Responds to Jacobin’s Hit Piece on Chris Smalls appeared first on Left Voice.
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