If Katie Wilson wants to be like Zohran Mamdani, she should fight for $30/hour, free transit, free childcare, and free Palestine
By Jonathan Rosenblum
In his June 29 op-ed in The Urbanist, my movement colleague John Burbank argues that “Katie Wilson is the Zohran Mamdani of Seattle.”
Uh. . . no.
Mamdani won the New York mayoral primary by building a movement around bold, concrete working-class demands: Freeze the rent; free transit; free childcare; city-owned grocery stores; raise the minimum wage to $30/hour. He also spoke out ardently and consistently for Palestine and against the Israeli genocide. With bold, material demands, he built a volunteer army of 50,000 New Yorkers. (Celebrate, yes, but progressives should hold off on any victory laps — beating the political and financial elites in the general election will be a challenge of another order of magnitude.)
Contrast that with Wilson’s campaign platform. She has no rent freeze or similar demand; instead of free transit she pledges to “improve transit infrastructure” with “smart investments in our public transit” (what do those wonky catchphrases even mean??); she offers nothing close to a free child care proposal, arguing that something must first be done on a state level; she issues no demand to rein in grocery costs (bought eggs recently?) or raise the minimum wage; and she has been silent on the foremost moral justice issue of our generation, Palestine.
What would work in Seattle, Mamdani-like, to make Burbank’s headline accurate? We saw during the decade of Kshama Sawant’s socialist city council office that bold, concrete demands can build a movement and beat the billionaire class: a $15 minimum wage, with annual inflation adjustments; breakthrough renters’ rights; and the Amazon Tax to build affordable housing and Green New Deal projects (which Wilson and the Democrats rebranded as the insipid “Jumpstart” and then erased Sawant and the Tax Amazon movement; a shameful historical revisionism that Burbank unfortunately plays into).
Every one of those socialist-led movements, in which I played a part, began with the pundits and the establishment saying it couldn’t be done, it was not legal, it was unrealistic, unworkable, you-need-to-go-to-Olympia-first, and so on. Every one of those demands electrified working-class community members, built powerful movements, and proved the pundits wrong.
I certainly hope that Wilson and her campaign take a cue from the New York results. It would be a positive development to have someone contest the current mayor, a wretched tool of big business, with an ambitious program that addresses the material needs of Seattle’s working people, students, and retirees. She could start with $30/hour, free transit, and free childcare.
But I don’t see that right now in the Seattle contest. Burbank equating Wilson’s campaign to Mamdani’s comes off as glib. It’s unhelpful analysis, political cheerleading that neither does justice to what our New York siblings in struggle have accomplished so far, nor does it push for the sort of courageous leadership that we urgently need, but have not yet seen, in the Seattle mayoral contest.
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Jonathan Rosenblum is a Seattle-based writer and organizer. His forthcoming book, We’re Coming For You and Your Rotten System: How Socialists Beat Amazon and Upended Big-City Politics, will be published by OR Books on Sept. 23. He is a member of the National Writers Union and Workers Strike Back.
