To: Detroit/Seattle
Workers' Voice mailing list
November 4, 2021
by Eric Gordon, Seattle Workers’ Voice
The elections in Seattle this fall are instructive in showing how mainstream liberals are vicious opponents of very mild reforms. In races for three offices, left liberals challenged mainstream ones, and the centrist ones howled their outrage at being challenged in this way. The results are in now, and in the current climate, the left-liberal candidates all lost.
Left-liberal Lorena Gonzalez ran for Seattle Mayor. Gonzalez opposed the go-to “solution” for dealing with homeless people sleeping in parks which the city has relied on for decades: homeless encampment sweeps, in which the residents are often brutalized, and their belongings – including IDs and other important documents – are often thrown away. She opposed “Compassion Seattle”, a proposed amendment to the city charter enshrining homeless sweeps into the city charter. Gonzalez fell short in putting forward proposals for ending homelessness, but even so the reforms she did call for are needed.
The PAC behind Bruce Harrell, Gonzalez's opponent, sent near-daily
shrieking denunciations saying that “Gonzalez has no plan to move the
encampments” and crying “We need our parks back”. Pretty much every
progressive person and every expert on homelessness in Seattle has
concluded that “moving encampments” harms the most downtrodden people,
costs lots of money, and of course does nothing to provide housing for
the poor.
Nikkita Oliver ran for one of two at-large City Council positions. One of the main positions she took heat for was proposed reforms to the police and justice system: reducing police positions, reducing funding for prosecutions of petty crimes. She also called for a Seattle version of Green New Deal, housing for all, food support for the poor, support for vulnerable trans national minorities, a “participatory budgeting” process, and so on.
In response the PAC behind Nikkita Oliver's opponent, Sara Nelson, screamed that Oliver would “Immediately defund police, courts and prosecutors” and called her “extreme” and “reckless”. The police's bloated budget and militarized departments are wreaking havoc on the masses, and the systematic prosecution of petty crimes does nothing to make the average person “safe”, but woe betide you if you say anything about reducing funding and prosecutions.
In Nicole Thomas-Kennedy's bid for City Attorney, she called for drastically reducing prosecution of misdemeanors, calling out that on the one hand, wage theft is never prosecuted, while crimes arising out of poverty like shoplifting food and sleeping under a shop awning are, and argued that prosecution of these crimes is very expensive and only exacerbates poverty. Thomas-Kennedy seems to be drawn to extreme statements: during the BLM protests she called cops “serial killers”, said the person who broke a small hole in the boards covering the Seattle precinct building was a “hero”, called property destruction a “moral imperative” – but these statements don't make her proposed program radical. No, her program consisted of relatively mild and much needed reforms.
Re Thomas-Kennedy's opponent, Ann Davison: on the one hand, her
website positions her as a liberal Democrat, emphasizing support for
unions, women's right to choose, anti-racism, marriage equality. On the
other hand, multiple news outlets describe her as a Republican, and
she's run as a Republican in the past. So let's call her a moderate,
and perhaps an opportunist when applying labels to herself. The PAC
behind her threw around extreme denunciations on Thomas-Kennedy:
“unfit”, “chaos”, “unconscionable”, and turned Thomas-Kennedy's pledge
to not prosecute misdemeanor poverty crimes into a refusal to prosecute
“most crimes”, claiming she wouldn't prosecute assault for example.
It would be a big task to analyze the reform proposals of each of these left-liberal candidates. For the purposes of this article it's enough to note that some of these reforms are undoubtedly positive, others would depend on the details of implementation. Regardless, it was positive that they made these calls. Reforms along the lines of what they called for would be steps in the right direction, and the calls for these reforms originated among the masses. There are some lessons that can be gleaned without knowing more about their proposals:
First,
these races made clear that the centrist liberals of the Democratic
Party are dead-set against popular reforms – for example of the police,
the justice system, the approach to homelessness – that are proposed by
their left-liberal opponents. These centrist liberals may pose and
pretend that they're on the side of the working class, but when
challenged to take actual action to benefit the working class, like
taking away a small measure of the power police have as an oppressive
force, or eliminating the gratuitous attacks on the poor who have no
homes, they double down and try to stampede the electorate to the
right. They whine and wring their hands when in office: “oh, we can't
get anything progressive done because of those dirty Republicans” – or
on the national scene today, “...because of those dirty rightist
Democrats”. But these centrist liberals had no such excuse in these
races.
Second, we had these left-liberal candidates making these proposals to reduce police budgets, reduce prosecution of poverty-driven crime, and adopt a more humane and effective policy toward homelessness, because the masses have demanded these reforms. In particular, the calls to defund the police arose out of the anti-police brutality demonstrations. That we saw these candidates even make it through the primaries is due to the mass discontent and fight of the last years.
Third,
although the their candidacies did arise from the recent mass
movements, at the time of the election these movements had gone into a
lull. Without the backing of an active, militant mass movement at the
time of the general election, these candidates lost. Not that they
would definitely have won if the movements had remained at their
height, but without the support of the mass movements which brought
them into their respective races, they were left out on a limb alone,
running against mainstream candidates backed by an organized and
determined ruling class.
Fourth,
even when a reform candidate does win, to make sure that needed reforms
actually become policy requires more sustained fight from the masses.
Here, another Seattle politician is a good example. Kshama Sawant has
been on the City Council since 2014. She became a known voice in
Seattle during the Occupy Wall Street movement, and rode that movement
wave into office. I have differences with Sawant, but she has used her
office to press for certain needed reforms, such as $15 Now minimum
wage (she negotiated down from “Now” to 5 years out, she declared
victory rather than carrying the battle forward to an actual livable
wage, and so on), and pressing a head tax on Amazon and other mega
employers in the area (passed unanimously by the City Council, and then
repealed when they got pushback). This last primary, Sawant won a
close-fought battle by a challenger who was blatantly in the pocket of
Amazon and other capitalist forces in Seattle. And now Sawant is facing
a recall election in a month, with part of the justification being her
participation in mass demonstrations. The ruling class thinks it can
get away with getting rid of her – and they might be able to do so –
precisely because the mass motion that carried her into office has
waned in the years since. <>
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