Seattle’s Socialist Alternative: a Marxist’s puzzle of what to do when you win an election?

After being a Seattle Councilmember for a decade, Kshama Sawant will retire from public office at the end of December. In January 2023, Sawant announced she would not run again. This came eight months before the 2023 primary to select a new councilmember from Seattle’s District 3, widely seen as the most liberal district.

Something was missing from her announcement. No one, not the media, Councilmember Sawant, and her political party, Socialist Alternative, mentioned it. There was no reference to SA running another candidate for her seat or any seat in the next round of council primaries.

For a decade, Seattle had experienced having a self-declared Marxist on their city council. Not someone accused of being a Marxist, as MAGA folks and like-minded Republicans accuse anyone pursuing a progressive agenda. No, this was someone proudly declaring themself as Marxist.

In this case, a public official who believed, as did her Socialist Alternative party, that Karl Marx’s theories were correct. The entire world would eventually have a stateless socialist society run by the workers, not the owners. There would be no private property accumulating profits.