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In the 2016 primary, Bernie Sanders won Hawaii with a landslide 71.5 percent of the vote, despite endorsements for Hillary Clinton from three of Hawai‘i’s sitting members of Congress, former congressmen, former governors, and many of Hawai‘i’s major political institutions and unions. After the primary, takes on Bernie’s success flooded in from the continental United States Perhaps, in line with the white male “Bernie Bro” thesis, it was due to Hawai’i’s relatively low population of black voters. Or perhaps it was because Hawai’i was one of the bluest states in the nation, with no elected Republicans at the federal or executive level and only a marginalized handful in the State House. Of course Hawai’i would be a bastion of radical, leftist politics, went this argument. Yet Hawai‘i is a blue state in all the worst ways. Despite a rich history of struggle, the dominance of the Democratic Party and decimation of the Republican Party, and a veneer of multiculturalism, Hawai‘i suffers under the weight of neoliberalism and neocolonialism. This status quo is played out on occupied Hawaiian lands and at the expense of Native Hawaiian sovereignty. It’s in this Hawai’i — not the fantasy one concocted by commentators after Sanders’s victory — that Kaniela Ing’s democratic-socialist campaign for Congress is taking place. In advance of the August 11 primary, Ing has made national news as one of the new, young, charismatic champions of democratic socialism, alongside candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Carlos Rosa-Ramirez. Kaniela is running for Congress on a platform that includes a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, housing for all, universal basic income, abolishing ICE, and transforming the war economy into a peace economy. And he’s pushing this program by connecting it to Hawai‘i’s hidden radical past and challenging its contemporary status quo.

A History of Struggle Ing’s campaign should be seen in the context of Native Hawaiian resistance to colonialism, which dates back to 1779. In the nineteenth century, the Hawaiian Kingdom was sovereign, internationally recognized, and employed hybrid forms of economy and governance to resist Western hegemony. Towards the end of the century the Kingdom was universally literate and ‘Iolani Palace was electrified by the mid-1880s, before the White House. Hawai’i had an extensive network of newspapers in‘Ōlelo Hawai’i (a Hawaiian language) and English. During this time, plantation industries gradually arrived. With them came the birth of labor struggles in Hawai‘i. The island’s first recorded labor strike occurred in 1843, when Native Hawaiians walked off the job over pay at the islands’ first sugar plantation in Kauai. The 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, led by the sugar and missionary elite, was protested by Hawaiians from its onset. Native Hawaiians resisted with armed rebellion in the form of the Wilcox Rebellion of 1895. The Kū‘ē Petitions, uncovered at the National Archives by Hawaiian scholar Noenoe Silva in the 1990s, were signed by thousands of Native Hawaiians and sent to President William McKinley in protest of the 1897 annexation of Hawai’i. The overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom coincided with the decline of the sandalwood and whaling industries to make the sugar industry — in partnership with the Republican Party — the oligarchic power in Hawai‘i . This industry drew labor from as far as Japan, China, Korea, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Portugal. The industry concentrated into a handful of corporations known as “the Big Five”: Alexandar & Baldwin, American Factors, Brewer & Co., Castle & Cooke, and Theo H. Davies & Co. Plantation owners tried to head off nascent organization by segregating their workforces along racial, ethnic, and national lines. But organizers within unions like the ILWU, inspired by socialist thought, recognized the need to organize across these lines. For its part, labor in Hawai‘i began to organize, at first mostly along racial lines. By the early twentieth century, Hawai‘i plantation workers were organizing across factions, slowly gaining power and small victories, but also facing heavy repression. In 1924, sixteen Filipino sugar workers on strike in Kauai were murdered by police, with many of the survivors jailed and/or deported. In 1938, union workers and families conducting a sympathy strike in Hilo were openly fired upon by police, resulting in dozens of injuries. Plantation owners tried to head off this nascent organization by segregating their workforces along racial, ethnic, and national lines. But organizers within unions like the ILWU, inspired by socialist thought, recognized the need to organize across these lines. This organizing paid off. In 1946, twenty-six thousand sugar workers went on a historic seventy-nine-day strike, shutting down thirty-three out of Hawai‘i’s thirty-four plantations. Workers set up cooking, gardening, hunting, and fishing committees to feed themselves and their families, morale committees to keep spirits up, and even had to import rice from the mainland after sugar companies made arrangements to block the sale of rice in stores. The strike ended in victory: higher wages, shorter working weeks, an end to the plantation “perquisites” system (subpar company benefits in lieu of fair wages), and a union shop. The victory also translated into electoral power, with thirty-five union-friendly candidates elected to office in Hawai‘i that year, cracking the plantation-friendly Republican Party fortress. Subsequent strikes, like the six-month longshore workers’ strike in 1949, would continue to chip away at this edifice. By midcentury, labor in Hawai‘i had become militant and organized enough to fully challenge sugar’s hegemony. With the backing of working people and soldiers returning from the war, the Democratic Party came to power in the “Democratic Revolution of 1954,” politically replacing the once-hegemonic Republican Party and the sugar elite. Today, Hawai‘i still holds some of the most robust union membership rates in the country, though they’ve suffered the same gradual decline as labor in the rest of the country. Ing draws on this militant, anticolonial history in interviews and campaign videos to powerful effect. He uses it to convey a message that when working people organize across racial, ethnic, and national lines, they can defeat a power as entrenched as the missionary planter class. But he also challenges the updated status quo the Democratic Party brought to Hawai‘i.