By Jon Hochschartner
Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant is an influential figure on the American left. Running on a platform of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, rent control, and taxing the rich, the Socialist Alternative candidate beat her Democratic opponent in last year’s election to become the first socialist to win a city-wide vote in Seattle since 1916. Since her victory, she has helped win a $15 an hour minimum wage for all of Seattle’s workers. She helped launch the 15 Now campaign, which is currently active in over 20 cities. Sawant recently agreed to an interview with Species and Class in which she discussed her views on non-humans.
Species and Class: Why should those concerned by the treatment of animals support you?
Kshama Sawant: A primary example of cruelty towards animals in our times is the corporate American meat and dairy industry. Every year, billions of animals are raised (or more accurately, confined) in unspeakable conditions and inhumanely slaughtered to feed the insatiable profits of the giants of agribusiness. Four top corporations now dominate 80 percent of the American meat and dairy market. With $48 billion in annual revenue, the U.S. dairy industry generates huge profits for its major shareholders by using cruel production methods, like hooking cows to milking machines all day in an unrelenting assembly line.
Factory farms and meat packaging plants also happen to be places with some of the worst forms of exploitation, and where the suffering of animals and workers alike is intense. Agribusinesses and corporate politicians go to great lengths to keep this suffering hidden from most people, as demonstrated by recent Ag-gag bills criminalizing industry whistleblowers. The workers are some of the most marginalized, often undocumented immigrants or otherwise vulnerable, and subject to intimidation and harassment by their bosses. The agribusiness industry is also notorious for its brutal and systematic union busting and for clamping down on conscientious small farmers.
Food monopolies now effectively control the diets of most Americans, from the farm to the dinner table, with ordinary working people given little choice in the process. Animals on factory farms are kept in unsanitary and often painful conditions, injected with artificial growth hormones and given a diet of poorly regulated feed. The combination of unhealthy food products and lack of access to health care has had deleterious effects on public health outcomes in this, the wealthiest country in the world. Tens of millions of dollars are spent every year by corporate executives buying elected officials of the Democratic and Republican parties, to grease their wheels and expand corporate subsidies.
Yet another impact of agribusiness has been the intensification of air and water pollution. Additionally, fast-paced water depletion in many areas of the South and Midwest, such as the Oglala Aquifer in Texas County, Oklahoma, is directly attributable to agribusiness. No price is paid by the giant corporations for looting our natural resources.
Globally, the increased poaching of animals, and the near extinction of countless species, is inextricably linked to the horrifying levels of poverty and exploitation from global imperialism and the process of neoliberalism that has denuded hundreds of millions of people of their basic livelihoods and forced them to live on the margins.
No single question of exploitation – whether it be of animals, or workers, or the environment – can be analyzed in isolation from the others. No solution to these crises is possible in isolation, either. Every day, working people all over the world are exploited and abused so that corporations can make lavish profits. The billions of animals raised and slaughtered in factory farms so they can be packaged and sold by the ton face the same predicament. As long as big business runs our economy, particularly in the presence of weak regulation, animals will continue to be brutalized and workers’ basic rights will be violated whenever it is profitable to do so.
People concerned about the treatment of animals should support me because we are, and have to be, part of the same movement and need to fight in solidarity with one another.
The crucial question for both animal rights activists and working people is: how can we stop corporations from exploiting us and everything we care about, only to further add to the already overfull coffers of a tiny global super-elite? We should start by recognizing the common ground we share so we can join forces. Labor, social justice and animal rights activists should link up with those who are fed up with corporate domination of the economy and our political system, the obscene gap between the wealthy and the rest of us, the lack of funding for basic services, education, and health, and the pervasive discrimination of people based on race, gender, and sexual identities. We should struggle alongside the millions of people who are outraged by how big business is ravaging the environment, causing mass extinction and threatening life on earth as we know it, just to make a buck.
This unity should be demonstrated in our activism and the movements we build.
As a Seattle City Councilmember, I have directly challenged big business by fighting for a $15 minimum wage for low wage workers in Seattle and for increased funding for basic human services like homeless encampments and women’s shelters. I also supported animal rights activists calling for the closure of an inhumane elephant exhibit at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle.
I recall a recent inspiring example. During the Seattle City budget discussions, I hosted a People’s Budget Town Hall in Council Chambers, to begin a movement for an alternative to a corporate business-as-usual budget. We had activists from human services, economic justice, and animal rights groups gathered there. One of the passionate animal rights activists, who was there to advocate for the elephants at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo, also spoke in solidarity with homeless people.
Expressions of solidarity like this reflect an important step forward, but we have to go further. We need to build a political alternative that reflects our common interests. The United States has a two party system where the Democrats and Republicans are both funded by and thoroughly beholden to big business. People who want to fight against corporate control and provide solutions to the numerous problems it creates – including the cruelty towards animals – are not represented by either party. We urgently need independent candidates and a new political party that gives voice to working people, poor people, environmentalists, and animal rights activists alike, so they have a space to discuss their issues, coordinate struggles, and democratically decide how to take the movement forward.
As a socialist, I use my elected office to fight against injustice wherever it rears its ugly head. At the same time, I work to organize and empower ordinary people to weaken the stranglehold that corporations have over our economy and political system. In this struggle, we open the door to a world where neither workers nor animals are ruthlessly exploited for the sake of profit. For these reasons, I believe people concerned about the mistreatment of animals should support me.
SC: For you, how, if at all, are the fights for socialism and better treatment for animals intertwined?
KS: As a socialist, I don’t believe injustice in any form should be tolerated. I subscribe to the idea that an injury to one is an injury to all. I feel a natural solidarity with those fighting against the mistreatment of animals, especially considering how egregious the brutality is in the corporate animal industry.
There is a direct link between socialism and the animal rights struggle. The animal and food industries are among the most exploitative in the world, not only of animals, but of working people, too. Long hours, low pay, and unsafe, even traumatizing, working conditions are standard fare on factory farms, which employ largely immigrant labor forces that are also oftentimes deprived of their right to organize into unions. Putting an end to the factory farm model that is responsible for so much cruelty to animals also means getting rid of a model that is fundamentally harmful to the workers on those farms. Animal rights activists and socialists should work together on these struggles.
There is also a more fundamental connection. When we try to understand the causes of the problems we see in the world today, whether we are talking about low wages, war, environmental destruction or widespread animal cruelty, it’s clear that they are not simply the product of a handful of bad businesses or industries. The problems are systemic, caused by a capitalist economic model that bases itself on exploitation and greed and puts nearly all of the world’s resources and wealth under the control of a tiny elite.
The decisions of what things to produce, how to produce them, and how society’s wealth is distributed are made by this small group of people, whose only interest is maximizing profit. It is no wonder that working people, animals, and the environment all suffer extreme exploitation and abuse under capitalism.
I am fighting for a global democratic socialist society. In such a world, it will be possible to end exploitation and abuse because under socialism ordinary people will democratically decide what things to produce, how to produce them, and how to distribute society’s wealth. Rather than corporations making these decisions based on profit, people can decide these things based on how to best serve their needs.
Working people will not choose to brutally exploit themselves so that a tiny elite can live in obscene luxury. Similarly, they will not choose to maintain an unsustainable, unhealthy and inhumane animal and food industry, which brutalizes billions of animals every year and creates serious health risks for humanity in the process. Socialism will make it possible to live in a world where animals are treated humanely. Capitalism has proven itself not only incapable of delivering this, but also has been a fundamental perpetrator of animal cruelty.
SC: What public policy proposals, that you can take action on, will you or have you supported for animals while in office?
KS: In recent months a grassroots movement emerged to demand that the elephant exhibit at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle be closed and to call for the elephants to be moved to sanctuary. I have supported this movement, using my position on the City Council to endorse it while also submitting an amendment to the City budget that made funding for the zoo contingent on the closure of the elephant exhibit.
Although the budget amendment failed to garner support from any other Councilmember, zoo officials announced in mid-November that they were closing the elephant exhibit. This was an important victory that would not have been possible without the determined efforts of the activists who forced the City and zoo officials to listen to their demands. That said, the zoo has also said it plans to move the elephants to another zoo and not to sanctuary, which I have opposed and which activists are mobilizing against. That struggle continues and I will keep supporting it.
I invite people from various starting points of social, economic, environmental, and animal justice to join with me to build more powerful movements for real change.
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Species and Class 
Reblogged this on Armory of the Revolution.
Kshama. I support your efforts to try and improve lives, both “human” and the lives of our “non-human” friends. Thank you.
Kshama, you are wonderful. I have the same philosophy regarding capitalism and how it exploits the world. I would add an increase in a plant-based diet, and reduction…preferably total elimination… of animal products if we are going to include our non-human brothers and sisters in this movement for justice.
Kshama, thank you for being the voice or reason, justice and compassion for all living beings in this cruel and troubled world. My feelings are exactly the same when it comes to exploitation of all by a few. How did the world come to this? I would suggest birth control being free and accessible to every woman and man on the globe since the overpopulation of undeveloped countries is its biggest obstacle to achieve independence and progress.