Jonathan Rosenblum

Revolutionaries in the Halls of Power

Kshama Sawant, the New Insurgent Politics, and the Fight for 21st Century Socialism

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

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.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: OR Books
• Seitenzahl: 300
• Erscheinungstermin: 8. April 2025
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781682196366
• ISBN-10: 1682196364
• Artikelnr.: 71987447

Autorenporträt

Jonathan Rosenblum is an organizer and writer with 40 years of leadership in grassroots union and community work in the US and Canada. He led the first successful Fight for $15 campaign and subsequently wrote the book, Beyond $15: Immigrant Workers, Faith Activists, and the Revival of the Labor Movement (Beacon Press, 2017). Working closely with socialist Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant between 2014 and 2024, he helped organize movements to win the first $15 minimum wage in a major US city; breakthrough renters’ rights legislation; and the historic tax on Amazon to fund affordable housing and Green New Deal projects. Jonathan assisted the UAW in the largest academic worker strike in US history, the 2022 strike by 48,000 University of California graduate student workers and postdocs. Jonathan has worked closely with Amazon workers organizing in the US and abroad, and he consults frequently with unions and political groups in the US and Canada on campaigns to build power for working people. Jonathan is a long-time member of the National Writers Union and in 2024 was elected National Recording Secretary. He is a member and past board president of Kadima (Jewish) Reconstructionist Community in Seattle, where he lives with his amazing wife Carolyn and their equally amazing two daughters, Natalya and Tamar.