[lbo-talk] Kshama Sawant op-ed in the Guardian

[Marv Gandall]

Kshama Sawant, the third most successful self-described socialist candidate in the English-speaking world after Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders attributes their unexpected rise to the appearance of a new generation which “did not grow up in the shadow of the Cold War” and now confronts “a low-wage job market, proliferation of student debt and an escalating housing affordability crisis."

Sawant won election to Seattle’s city council in 2013 despite her open affiliation to the far left Socialist Alternative Party. Against the fierce opposition of the Democratic Party leadership and business establishment, she won re-election to the council with an even higher percentage of the vote last month. In both cases, rank-and-file Democrats defied their leaders and threw their support to Sawant rather than the party’s candidates.

"In 2013, many people voted for me in spite of the fact I was a socialist. In this year’s election, many more people voted consciously for socialist politics”, she writes in today’s Guardian. “Since the Occupy movement, the dirty word as far as many millennials are concerned is not socialism, but capitalism.”

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/19/socialism-definition-most-searched-word-of-2015