Revolutionaries in the Halls of Power : Kshama Sawant, the New Insurgent Politics, and the Fight for 21st Century Socialism

From inside Kshama Sawant's historic tenure in Seattle City Hall comes a blueprint for 21st-century socialists, a counterpoint to the strategies favored by The Squad and other progressive activists. Seattle was the first major city to mandate a $15 minimum wage; the first to implement a payroll tax on Amazon to build affordable housing; the first to secure a bevy of renters’ rights laws, making good on the slogan, “Housing is a human right.”Behind these remarkable breakthroughs in the 2010s stood a small but feisty Marxist movement, Socialist Alternative, and the City Council member they helped to elect, Kshama Sawant. In a municipal government dominated by pro-business Democrats, Sawant and the popular street movements she led against major corporations headquartered in the region—including Amazon, Boeing, Microsoft, and Starbucks—won battles that would transform the city’s trajectory for years to come. We’re Coming for You and Your Rotten System tells this extraordinary story from the inside. Rosenblum, who worked in Sawant’s office and alongside community activists throughout this dynamic decade, weaves together intimate story-telling and political analysis to show how and why the movement succeeded where other progressive outsiders—such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—have failed. For political activists searching desperately to make sense of the world after the reelection of Donald Trump, the Seattle experience offers a vital framework for fighting our way out of the despairing miasma of 21st-century capitalism.

In the heart of a modern state, a Marxist movement takes root. What unfolds when such a movement ascends to power, and what insights can today’s political activists glean from this experience? Revolutionaries in the Halls of Power by Jonathan Rosenblum offers a gripping narrative of Seattle’s transformative journey from 2014 to 2024.

For 10 years, the US city of Seattle served as a laboratory for this unusual political experiment, with the election of Kshama Sawant, a member of Socialist Alternative, to Seattle City Council. Despite being vastly outnumbered on the council, Sawant and her organization took on the political establishment and corporate titans like Amazon and Starbucks. They secured historic victories for working people: implementing a $15 minimum wage, imposing a tax on Amazon to fund social housing, and enacting groundbreaking renters'' rights legislation. Sawant’s movement improbably steered the city’s political discourse for a decade through three intense reelection campaigns.

Sawant’s strategy diverged from that of modern-day reform socialists by leaning into the revolutionary lessons and experiences of Marxist theorists and practitioners over the past 175 years. Her approach was grounded in three pillars: a class struggle mindset to navigate an unfriendly political system, bold demands that link core material needs of the working class to the broader quest for socialist change, and a commitment to grassroots democracy to propel legislation forward. These pillars, while not new to socialist thinking, marked a fresh application in the U.S. political context. This book sheds light on how Marxist theory fueled this decade-long movement.

With an insider’s view from working within Sawant’s Council office and alongside core activists, Rosenblum provides a deeply informed perspective. For political activists searching desperately to make sense of the world, the Seattle experience provides a roadmap, a way to fight back, a ray of hope in the despairing miasma of 21st Century capitalism.