Good evening, current affairs listeners, the following interview with Seattle City Council member Kisholmas- Svant was recorded on Zoom in my living room,

rather than through the usual high-quality audio facilities in Studio H3,

because there had been a case of COVID in the current affairs office building where the fancy

microphones are. So please excuse the poor quality. The following is an interview with Seattle

City Council Member, Kisholm Sivant. Thank you so much for speaking with me, Council Member.

The reason I'd like to talk to you and what I'd like to focus on in this conversation is lessons for the left from what you've been able to do in Seattle since 2013.

So, you know, we have a number of socialists in an elected office in various places in the country now.

Your election to the Seattle City Council was much earlier than that in 2013.

So I was wondering if you could tell me and tell our readers how you were able to win as an open socialist at that, particularly at that point in time when it hadn't been done before.

I think even back then, this was in 2013 when we ran our first campaign for city council

coming on the heels of our involvement, our remaining socialist alternatives,

involvement and really leadership in the Occupy movement in Seattle.

We saw that there really was no resistance

among the vast majority of working people and young people to us openly being socialist.

And in fact, we are openly Marxist. And that was never a barrier. And in fact, that was one of the things we

wanted to test it test out. I mean, I should be perfectly honest as I've been before publicly that

when we launched our campaign in 2013, we had no conception that we would win that year. But what was

important for us was to show a real path forward for the left, for young people.

Because, you know, if you remember, this was 2012.

Come out of the Occupy movement.

Everybody thought, oh, yes, we marched on the streets.

We demanded that workers should get bailed out, not the banks.

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