When I was first elected in 2013, I was the first socialist to hold office in Seattle in nearly a century. At the time, Senator Bernie Sanders was the only other well-known democratic socialist elected representative in the country.

In Seattle the political establishment was “apoplectic” at the prospect of having to work with an anti-capitalist in city hall who had spearheaded the fight for a $15 minimum wage at a time when the notion was considered radical and impossible.

My first week in office, two longtime establishment politicians came by to inform me they would not allow me to pass any legislation, much less the $15 minimum wage, and that city hall would continue to run “on their terms.”

But they were unable to stop our movement. Six months later, our grassroots 15 Now campaign, working alongside labor unions and community activists, had won a groundbreaking minimum wage ordinance that made Seattle the first major city to pass $15. From here, minimum wage victories spread to more than a dozen cities and several states.

Since then, the establishment still hasn’t had much luck stopping socialist politics. We’ve won historic renters rights laws, tens of millions for affordable housing, and replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day.

None of this was done by me alone. Far from it. What we have been able to win has been based on the power of grassroots struggle.

Now, six years since I was elected (and later reelected in 2015), Amazon executives, billionaire Republicans, the Chamber of Commerce’s political action committee (PAC), and a who’s who of corporate interests are spending unprecedented swaths of corporate cash against my campaign.

The PAC’s donors include $1.5 million from tax-averse Amazon, $235,000 from gentrifying developer Vulcan, tens of thousands from fossil fuel giants like Puget Sound Energy, and almost half a million from the real estate lobby. Scandalously, just three weeks before Election Day, Amazon wrote a $1 million check to the Chamber of Commerce PAC in what seems to many to be the most blatant effort yet to buy city hall.

Many of Amazon’s top executives, including members of the so-called S-Team who report directly to Jeff Bezos, appear to be taking revenge over our Amazon Tax by maxing out directly to my opponent. It’s not every day that an Amazon’s senior VP of global corporate affairs and former White House press secretary (Jay Carney) steps into a city council election.

Sometimes, your enemies give you the best compliments. Being a target of an unprecedented amount of corporate PAC money says a lot about how much the ruling class fears our movement. Seattle real estate lobbyist Jamie Durkan spelled out his view to local media in 2017, in the wake of our landmark move-in-fees law. He complained that Seattle council members “say all the right things in their offices, then they get out of the podium and it all goes south.” Durkan attributed the series of tenants-rights victories loathed by real estate interests to the strength of our movement — a movement he calls “Sawant’s army.”

I wear this is a badge of honor. Because under the bankrupt system of capitalism, in which the billionaires hold the reins of power, the strength of ordinary people has always been derived from collective organizing. As anti-slaverly abolitionist Frederick Douglass once said: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.… Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”