Benjamin Parkinson

[Benjamin Parkinson @bparks400]

@bbnomula Come to Seattle! Hit it up with Macklemore and have @cmkshama speak! She's 10+year city councilor and revolutionary socialist who ran against Adam Smith who funds the genocide in Congress.

[Benjamin Parkinson @bparks400]

@madnomanattic @DivestSPD In no way does him not announcing it help anything. We should be loudly on the right side, giving people a voice to stand in solidarity. And this is not proof he has not donated previously.

[Kshama Sawant @cmkshama]

I will be visiting the Israeli-occupied West Bank later this month, thanks to the incredible efforts of activists and organizers on the ground in the West Bank and @BeIfrd in Europe.

I will be talking to Palestinians and Palestinian Americans about the holocaust being carried out by the Israeli state and the brutality of the decades of occupation. Our goal will be to help further expose the horrors taking place on Palestinian lands. I will also be visiting Palestinian children in Egypt and Turkey, all of whom are sole survivors of their families and have suffered untold atrocities. All of these children have personally faced Israeli bombardment and have had to undergo limb amputations.

The Israeli state, empowered by U.S. imperialism and war-profiteering billionaires and multimillionaires, has continued the genocide in Gaza for well over a thousand days. At the same time, violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has dramatically escalated, both directly from the Israeli state forces and from state-sanctioned, right-wing settlers. In total, since the genocide began, Israel has killed over a thousand people in the West Bank and inflicted incalculable damage on Palestinian homes and farms.

Nothing short of smashing the apartheid state of Israel will end the indescribable suffering of the Palestinian people.

For that, working-class militant movements in the United States will be crucial because Israel exists as a garrison state for the economic and geopolitical interests of the American capitalist class and other imperialist powers.

This also means that it is a fool’s errand to place any faith in either the Democratic Party or Republican Party, as both are parties of the war-profiteering billionaires and multimillionaires. The strategy of the leadership of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) of supporting careerist Democratic Party politicians is a complete dead end for the Palestinian cause.

Anything other than leadership to build an antiwar movement that unambiguously fights against both the Democratic and Republican parties will lead to further betrayals of the Palestinian people.

[Kshama Sawant @cmkshama]

Our campaign was by far the strongest ever by an openly Marxist candidate for the U.S. Congress.

We've so far won a historic 16.9 percent of the vote in a five-way race, in Washington’s sprawling Ninth Congressional District, which spans suburban areas with a significant proportion of Republican voters in addition to large parts of the major urban areas of Seattle and Bellevue.

We ran on electrifying demands like free healthcare for all funded by taxing the rich, ending all military aid to Israel and a permanent arms embargo on Israel, and national rent control. All of these are extremely popular among the working class in this district and nationally.

We achieved this result despite the many obstacles we faced.

Both the Democratic and Republican parties maneuvered by running candidates specifically to block our campaign from getting into the November election, which would have resulted in a head-to-head battle between our campaign and genocidal Democrat Adam Smith.

We faced a corporate media blackout, and hostility and outright attacks from DSA leaders and many "progressive" podcasters.

Many labor leaders shamelessly endorsed Adam Smith, while others remained silent, effectively supporting Smith.

All of these obstacles were predictable. Our decade on the Seattle City Council showed what a threat we are to the political establishment and those who give them cover. We used our decade on the Seattle City Council to relentlessly build working-class movements, winning four elections and unparalleled victories such as the nation's highest minimum wage, which also led to substantive raises for tens of millions of workers across the United States, defeating Jeff Bezos to win the Amazon Tax, and repeatedly beating corporate landlords to win unprecedented renters' rights.

Despite not making it into the November election, we've provided a powerful example of what's possible by running an openly Marxist independent campaign based on class struggle rather than making peace with the political establishment or its legions of gatekeepers.

The DSA strategy of appeasing and, worse, rehabilitating the discredited Democratic leadership and their rotten party is a dead end. In this age of imperialist war, genocide, and climate catastrophe, we simply have no time to fuck around.

We urgently need militant movements of the working class and a new mass party that can defeat the billionaires and both their parties. And we need revolutionary socialist campaigns like mine that don't try to join the establishment and help administer the capitalist system, but instead fight to overthrow it.

[Benjamin Parkinson @bparks400]

@DintMentalFloss Winning crumbs for the working class without bringing them into movements against the ruling class does not advance us towards revolution. It merely appeases working class anger temporarily before the ruling class steps back in to take what is theirs.

[Benjamin Parkinson @bparks400]

@DintMentalFloss Burgeois elections can be used as a tool primarily to improve the material conditions for the working class but also importantly for exposing the contradictions of the ruling class, elevating the class consciousness. This was done both here and for Bernie's presidential bid.

[Benjamin Parkinson @bparks400]

@chudcrusher @matthew_meloy Your political arguments are stunning. Such great points you make.

[Benjamin Parkinson @bparks400]

@DintMentalFloss You've still yet to state one political disagreement with her. Her being critical of other's strategy when you rather she didn't is not a political disagreement. Where do you actually disagree with her statements?

[Benjamin Parkinson @bparks400]

@DintMentalFloss Coalition building only means ceding working class values when your strategy is run within an imperialist, capitalist party. You think she build NO coalitions in all her organizing in Seattle City Council? The only people she has called out have been elected officials.

[Benjamin Parkinson @bparks400]

@DavidJade27 @shansen614 @briebriejoy @cmkshama Two Rs went to one, consolidating that vote. Chaudry was propped up by Ds to run. Her campaign collapsed after The Stranger interview, she refused to drop out and instead attacked Kshama. And none of that is worth a few percentage points in Kshama's favor?

[Benjamin Parkinson @bparks400]

@DavidJade27 @shansen614 @briebriejoy @cmkshama Republicans aren't voting in the general with no Republicans on offer..She'd have actually gotten on a debate stage with Adam Smith if she was head to head. And are you saying that it's better that maga Doug Basler went through?

[Benjamin Parkinson @bparks400]

@chudcrusher @matthew_meloy What exactly is the point you're making? An independent revolutionary socialist is going to end up a few percentage points away from passing through a primary that was specifically set up to block her. With a media blackout. Sounds incredible honestly.

[Benjamin Parkinson @bparks400]

@chudcrusher @matthew_meloy Wow that's the smallest amount of 4000 people I've ever seen

[Benjamin Parkinson @bparks400]

@DavidJade27 @shansen614 @briebriejoy @cmkshama You seem pretty sure a socialist candidate running on concrete issues in this election cycle would lose head to head with an establishment genocidal war-mongerer. As if people aren't showing around the country theyre ready to toss these suits out of office.

[Benjamin Parkinson @bparks400]

@CounterSignalCO @briebriejoy All these uncompromising socialist candidates need to do is compromise on their values and then they'll get elected! How worth it!

[Benjamin Parkinson @bparks400]

@joewrote @briebriejoy Joe, can you point to one candidate you've enthusiastically supported that has raised the minimum wage, levied large scale taxes on wealthy corporations, or not supported Israel's genocidal machine?

[Benjamin Parkinson @bparks400]

@TonyDiMeo1370 @vanguard_pod @ryangrim Straight up lie