Kshama Sawant on the Real Reason for Jacobin Magazine’s “Hatchet Job” on Chris Smalls

I’m currently reading Chris Smalls’s recently released memoir, When the Revolution Comes: A Fight for the Future of the Working Class. It just so happens that within days of the book’s release, Jacobin magazine published what many people consider a hit piece on Smalls.

I appreciate Kshama Sawant’s response . . .

Jacobin magazine, the principal mouthpiece of the leadership of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), released a hit piece on Amazon labor leader Chris Smalls.

It could be legit if Jacobin had had an honest critique of Smalls to clarify what class struggle unionist leaders should be doing. But the article is not that at all.

It’s a hatchet job against a leading labor activist who has refused to toe the line of the DSA and the business unionist labor leaders who give cover to the so-called progressive Democrats and to the Democratic Party as a whole, despite shocking betrayals by them against working people.

The crux of the real reason why Jacobin went after Smalls is contained in this sentence: “[Smalls] blames the two-party system for the state of the American labor movement . . .”

Smalls is spot on about this and the need to break from the Democratic and Republican parties. We need a new party of the working class.

The DSA leadership, on the other hand, sees giving cover to the Democratic Party as job number one. The Democratic Party is the party under whom the genocide in Gaza began and which engineered the breaking of the railroad workers’ strike — both under President Joe Biden. ALL Democrats in the House, including DSA star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) voted to break the strike. The Democratic Party is one of the two most powerful capitalist parties in the world, and in no way represents working people or the oppressed.

Business unionist labor leaders are those who have made peace with the capitalist system and are driven by protecting their careers, which means placating the bosses, not organizing the rank and file against the bosses to win substantive working-class victories. Refusing to fight the bosses also means aligning with the parties of the bosses, like the Democratic Party.

The overwhelming majority of the labor leadership today is business unionist, with some crucial exceptions like Smalls. We need a reckoning in the labor movement.

Brother Smalls has put his life on the line for the anti-war movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people against the Israeli state’s genocide bankrolled by both the Democratic and Republican parties. Smalls went on a Gaza aid flotilla carrying food, baby formula, diapers and medicine in the context of catastrophic levels of mass starvation in Gaza. The flotilla was attacked by the Israeli military, who physically assaulted Smalls, and kicked and choked him.

In contrast, AOC has voted for the Iron Dome which is part of the Israeli state’s genocidal apparatus.

For having the temerity to expose AOC and other self-described “progressive” politicians, Smalls is called “narcissistic” by Jacobin [left], a term the magazine’s editors were apparently forced to retract after they got huge amounts of flak on all social media.

Personal attacks and character assassination like in this case are often used by the political establishment’s spokespeople as proxy for their real objections – in this case, the threat they feel from Smalls openly calling out the Democratic Party’s actual role.

The only way of rebuilding a militant labor movement is to pose a concrete threat to both the Democratic and Republican parties, which in turn requires a challenge to the business unionist labor leadership. That is the basis on which I won the nation’s highest minimum wage and the Amazon Tax during the decade I was the sole socialist on the Seattle City Council.

I am now running as an independent revolutionary socialist against genocidal Democrat Adam Smith. I am calling for an end to all military aid to Israel and an end to all weapons and tech for genocide and imperialist war.

– Kshama Sawant
via social media
June 5, 2026

Related Off-site Links:
Chris Smalls Is Still Fighting the Bosses – Alex Skopic (Current Affairs, June 2, 2026).
“Amazon Is the New Slavery”: Chris Smalls on the Labor Fight of a Lifetime – Sara Franklin (The Nation, June 2, 2026).
A Better World: An Interview with Chris Smalls – Annika Bratton (Publishers Weekly, April 3, 2026).
My Interview with Chris Smalls – Marianne Williamson (Transform, July 31, 2022).


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Chris Smalls: We Need to Escape the “Two-Party Plantation”
• Quote of the Day – August 5, 2025
• U.S. Labor Leader Chris Smalls Joins the Crew of the Handala