Jonathan Rosenblum w/ Kshama Sawant

Organizer and writer Jonathan Rosenblum visits the store to discuss his new book We're Coming For You and Your Rotten System: How Socialists Beat Amazon and Upended Big-City Politics, a blueprint for 21st-century socialists, a counterpoint to the strategies favored by The Squad and other progressive activists. He is joined by former Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant.

From inside Kshama Sawant's historic tenure in Seattle City Hall comes a blueprint for 21st-century socialists, a counterpoint to the strategies favored by The Squad and other progressive activists.

Seattle was the first major city to mandate a $15 minimum wage; the first to implement a payroll tax on Amazon to build affordable housing; the first to secure a bevy of renters’ rights laws, making good on the slogan, “Housing is a human right.”

Behind these remarkable breakthroughs in the 2010s stood a small but feisty Marxist movement, Socialist Alternative, and the City Council member they helped to elect, Kshama Sawant. In a municipal government dominated by pro-business Democrats, Sawant and the popular street movements she led against major corporations headquartered in the region—including Amazon, Boeing, Microsoft, and Starbucks—won battles that would transform the city’s trajectory for years to come.

We’re Coming for You and Your Rotten System tells this extraordinary story from the inside. Rosenblum, who worked in Sawant’s office and alongside community activists throughout this dynamic decade, weaves together intimate story-telling and political analysis to show how and why the movement succeeded where other progressive outsiders—such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—have failed. For political activists searching desperately to make sense of the world after the reelection of Donald Trump, the Seattle experience offers a vital framework for fighting our way out of the despairing miasma of 21st-century capitalism.

Jonathan Rosenblum has caused trouble for the rich and powerful for over forty years. He’s helped workers throughout North America organize, bargain, and strike in a wide range of industries—warehousing and logistics, higher education, healthcare, and public service. A member of the National Writers Union and veteran newspaper reporter, he has published dozens of articles about organizing, and is the author of Beyond $15: Immigrant Workers, Faith Activists, and the Revival of the Labor Movement, on his experience leading the first Fight for $15 campaign in SeaTac, Washington. During Kshama Sawant’s decade on the Seattle City Council, he worked on her council staff and as an election campaigner. In 2018, he served as strategic advisor to COPE- Vancouver during their historic Rent Freeze campaign in British Columbia, which led to the election of anti-poverty activist Jean Swanson to Vancouver City Council. In 2022, he served as an organizer and strategist for University of California graduate student and postdoctoral workers in the largest academic strike in US history. He’s been an invited speaker in the US, Canada, and Europe. Beginning in early 2025, as Activist in Residence at Arizona State University’s Center for Work and Democracy, he has expanded his prior work helping Amazon workers organize in the US and internationally. He lives with his family in Seattle, Washington, and has worked at various times as an Amazon delivery driver and a stagehand.

Kshama Sawant was the first socialist elected in Seattle in nearly a hundred years in 2013, and she won three subsequent elections over the following decade. With her socialist City Council office she led movements into battle against the Democratic Party establishment and the city’s oligarchs. Sawant led the movement to win the first big-city $15 minimum wage in the nation which then spread to other cities and states after that breakthrough victory. She built movements to win landmark renters’ rights protections, and in 2020, following a three-year struggle against Amazon, Starbucks, Microsoft, billionaire developers, and the political establishment, she and her movement won the historic Amazon Tax to build social housing and fund Green New Deal projects. Earlier this year, Sawant announced her socialist candidacy for US Congress against Rep. Adam Smith, on a platform of ending the US-backed genocide in Gaza, stopping deportations, free healthcare for all, tax the rich, and rent control. Sawant is a founding member of Workers Strike Back and Revolutionary Workers, and the story of her socialist council office and the movements she helped lead is the subject of We’re Coming for You and Your Rotten System.

Pre-order your copy of We're Coming For You and Your Rotten System here.

Host or Publisher Elliott Bay Book Company