Will Zohran Mamdani Empower or Betray the Working Class? (w/ Kshama Sawant) | The Chris Hedges Report

Jul 2, 2025

Kshama Sawant, a prominent former Seattle City Councilmember and advocate for workers' rights, discusses Zohran Mamdani's bold rise in NYC's Democratic primaries as a democratic socialist. She celebrates Mamdani's challenge to the billionaire class and discusses the backlash from powerful interests, emphasizing that his victory signals a shift in American politics. Sawant warns about the perils of careerism in politics and calls for unwavering commitment to worker empowerment, highlighting the crucial need for concrete actions to uphold promises and defend against elite agendas.

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INSIGHT

Victory Against Zionist Lobby

Mamdani's mayoral victory is a blow to the Zionist lobby that seemed invincible in NYC politics.
It proves working class demands and opposition to genocide can unite voters effectively.

ADVICE

Adversarial Strategy Needed

Winning working class reforms requires a fighting strategy against billionaires and capitalist parties.
Politicians must build mass movements that threaten electoral defeat to succeed.

INSIGHT

Capitalism's Zero-Sum Nature

Capitalism is a zero-sum game where gains for workers come at the expense of billionaires.
Politicians must not blur class lines by trying to represent the interests of both workers and billionaires.

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Zohran Mamdani’s emphatic victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary has shaken the core of American politics. A self-described democratic socialist, Mamdani ran a campaign centered around affordability as well as relentless denunciation of the genocide in Gaza. Mamdani drew the ire of Zionists, right-wingers and the billionaire class not only in New York City but across the country, including calls for his deportation by Congressman Andy Ogles and subsequent slander by President Donald Trump.

Former Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant, who is now running for Washington state's 9th congressional district, weighs in on her fellow democratic socialist’s journey on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report.

Sawant has been a standout figure for working class representation, winning a $15 an hour minimum wage in Seattle during her city council tenure as well as the Amazon Tax, which helped fund affordable housing. She says Mamdani’s victory should be celebrated, especially because it shows the Zionist lobby can be defeated not just in the U.S. but in a state home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.

Despite this encouraging repudiation of the billionaire class in the wealthiest city in America, Sawant emphasizes the need to continue the fight and make sure Mamdani sticks to his original promises.

“If you don't understand that careerism is one of the death knells of winning anything substantial for the working class, then you will sell out even with those good intentions because you will make it about yourself and you will immediately get the memo that in order to fight for working people, you will need to be in battle mode every single day when you enter City Hall,” she says.

Mamdani’s alignment with the Democratic Party is concerning, according to Sawant, pointing to a pattern in which groundbreaking campaigns, like those of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, have fallen short of delivering promises for working class people once in office.

“At the end of the day, the Democratic Party is a party of capitalism itself,” Sawant asserts. “The working class loses out more and more and is subjected to more and more misery with every passing decade that you're not going to stand up for working people.”

So far, Mamdani’s campaign has made strides to inspire the American working class. “It's a real boost of confidence for working class people nationally to see that yes, working people will fight alongside you if you put forward demands that make a huge difference in their lives and which reflect their anger, their just anger at the Wall Street billionaires,” Sawant says.