Last year, Kshama Sawant shocked the continent by winning a seat on Seattle’s City Council. Sawant defeated an incumbent Democrat to become the first openly socialist city councillor in Seattle in a century. Sawant, an immigrant from India with a background as a software engineer and an economics professor, is a militant organizer who played a major role in the 2011 Occupy protests. She is not your typical politician, to say the least.

Sawant’s surprise electoral win in Seattle has sparked discussion across North America. Last week, she made her first speaking appearance in Canada, addressing a fundraising event organized by the Coalition of Progressive Electors in Vancouver. Ricochet’s Michal Rozworski sat down with her before the event for a wide-ranging discussion.

You’re the first open socialist elected as a city councillor in any major US city in a very long time and have now spent almost a year in local government. What is your appraisal of your time in office so far?

We’ve learned several lessons. One of the lessons we’ve learned is that it is actually possible to make headway on concrete issues on an extremely principled basis. So never buy into people who tell you, “Well, yes, I’m also a socialist at heart, but if you don’t do a little wheeling and dealing, you don’t get things done.” Do they use this phrase in Canada, “to get things done”? Well, we got things done. We won $15 an hour. We had a historic class battle and won $15 an hour, the highest minimum wage, in a matter of months. You can get things done. It’s a question of where you go for your strength.

The basics of compromise, the basics of coalition-building are true. A lot of the corporate press ask me, “Don’t you believe in coalition-building?” Of course we believe in coalition-building. We launched the $15 an hour grassroots campaign mere days, weeks after we got on city council. And 15 Now is a wonderful coalition of labour unions, community organizations, socialists, individual activists, housing advocates, all kinds of people who fought for fifteen together, who don’t agree on everything but who came together on this one thing. That’s coalition-building.

It’s interesting you mention compromise. As you say, $15 has been adopted; your major campaign promise is on the books, but it is being implemented over a relatively long time period. The first workers will get $15 in three years, 2017, but for some workers at small businesses it might take until 2021 or, if you adjust for inflation, 2025. What’s your reaction to the way this has been implemented and is this the best possible compromise in the present?

We should recognize that while the successes in Seattle hold general political lessons for any political situation, the specifics will differ. I’m a Marxist, an internationalist: I want the best for the working class everywhere. So if we are able to win a better deal than $15 an hour in Vancouver, then I am going to be in absolute solidarity with you all. We fought tooth and nail against the corporate loopholes, but the fact that we weren’t able to stop them shows a couple of things. One, big business will find corporate politicians to do its bidding no matter whether it’s Republicans or Democrats. I’m sure Canadians know the Democrats as the liberal party but, in reality, they are the agents of big business. To make it concrete: in Seattle there are no Republicans to speak of.

The second thing is outcomes of social struggles are determined by how strong your side is. There is no alternative but to build really powerful movements. We built a strong movement in Seattle. We need even more powerful movements in other cities to win a stronger $15 an hour.

In preparing for this interview, I listened to your speech at the Climate Convergence that just took place in New York City and other speeches where you’ve called, most dramatically, for a nationalization of fossil fuel industry in addition to public investment in renewable resources and mass transit. More locally, you’ve called for nationalization of Boeing and reorienting its production towards something more socially-useful. What is the relationship between these demands that focus on the private sector and more traditional social democratic calls for an expansion of the public sector? How do these demands fit in with bread and butter social welfare demands of social democracy, where even these latter demands have been on the defensive under neoliberalism?

The approach we use is the same, which is what we call a transitional approach. We start with something that may be on the horizon of a larger mass of people, but we present it in such a way that it does not exist in a vacuum by itself. It’s presented as if it’s a stepping stone to a society that most everybody will have a vision for. If you ask people, “What kind of society do you want?”, most people will have some sort of an idea of what they want the world to look like. Most often, it’ll be based on alleviating the miseries that they themselves suffer. They would like a world with healthcare, education, all of that. We connect those social democratic demands to larger demands.

[Editor’s note: this language is noticeably similar to that used by the Quebec student movement in 2012 to contextualize opposition to tuition hikes as part of a broader social struggle].

We need massive investments in renewable energy, in mass transit. All of those are what you would call transitional, social democratic demands. This can be done, potentially, under capitalism. Then we raised the question. In the speech if you saw, there was a sequence. We said, “OK then, that sounds rational, so why isn’t that happening under capitalism?” It isn’t happening because the capitalists who own all these resources don’t have any incentive to do it. That is why the question of the ownership — democratic ownership — of these resources is posed. That is the next step we come to.

How do these broader proposals, these big picture items, fit in with your stated aim, on the other hand, of fighting for the day-to-day demands that correspond to the real needs of workers that you’ve mentioned so many times?

If we went into city council talking about taking corporations into democratic, public ownership, it wouldn’t make sense to people. We pose it when we can logically arrive at it — just like we arrived at it in that speech in New York City.

As a kind of aspirational…

Yes, it’s an aspirational thing but for the environmental movement in many ways, for climate change, we do need to raise that because from that flow the more immediate demands of what we do about investments in mass transit. There’s a link between the two things. These various demands play various roles. $15 an hour, for example, was an achievable demand and yet an ambitious enough goal. Making political demands and hitting the right note is not something you can find in a textbook.

How do you reconcile the kinds of broad populist demands you’ve made your hallmark with the fact that your political home is a small party like Socialist Alternative that emerges from a left-wing politics long characterized by sectarianism. How do you reconcile this tension? Is there one?

There’s been a checkered history. But at the same time, I would draw attention towards the greater consciousness, the mass consciousness in the United States. If you look at the younger generations – and I don’t just mean the 18- or 25-year-olds, even the people in their 30s and 40s. These are not people who have so much of the Cold War era rubbed off on them … They arrive at political activism purely from a standpoint of the status quo: what do we have today and what am I fighting for?

What we need most of all on the left is leadership in order to bring the younger, radicalizing people into comprehensive, cohesive political movements. Movements that will be fighting together on concrete political demands. Not just meeting in rooms and endlessly debating. We need debate, but we need action. So what we need is that kind of broad left. What we are calling for more than anything else in the United States is a national formation for the working class, which will be like an umbrella organization for various groups on the left, which are honest about their differences, but agree on some basic ideas. One is running campaigns that are completely in defiance of corporations. Not taking any money from corporations. Running working class candidates. Fighting campaigns whose manifestos look like our [$15 an hour] campaign last year, where you’re fighting for working class issues, fighting to deal with climate change or fighting to deal with corporate politics. All of that.

Is local politics the biggest entry point for a left resurgence right now?

I wouldn’t necessarily demarcate the left by local versus national. A lot of people, from our success in Seattle, have drawn the conclusion that you shouldn’t engage in national politics … First of all, yes, local campaigns are great but given the vacuum, the opening that exists, they are few and far between… It doesn’t mean we should stop ourselves at local politics. The reason we are calling for a real left presidential campaign in 2016 is because if it is run on a genuine basis — run against corporate politics, tax the millionaires and billionaires, stop funding the military contracts, $15 an hour minimum wage nationwide, full funding for public education, support for teachers’ union, against climate change — if we ran on such a platform, it would be a huge force on the left.