And KIRO reported her "radical idea":

On Monday night, she spoke to supporters of Boeing Machinists, six days after they rejected a contract guaranteeing jobs in Everett building the new 777X airliner for eight years, in exchange for new workers giving up their guaranteed company pensions.

Now Boeing is threatening to take those jobs to other states. “That will be nothing short of economic terrorism because it's going to devastate the state's economy,” she said.

Sawant is calling for machinists to literally take-possession of the Everett airplane-building factory, if Boeing moves out. She calls that "democratic ownership."


No one but a socialist would have the guts to inject such an idea (the democratic ownership of a major American corporation) right into mainstream political discourse.

Boeing, however, is actually faced with a problem that first confronted the US's manufacturing sector in the early 70s—the knowledge of production has been generalized. Indeed, the Italian Marxist economist Carlo Vercellone argues in his brilliant paper "The Crisis of the Law of Value and the Becoming-Rent of Profit" that the reason why the rich abandoned production (Detroit) and flew to finance (Manhattan) in this period (the early 70s) is precisely because "the knowledge informing industrial capitalism" had been absorbed by the commons—or what he calls "general intellect." Finance offered a moat that could not be easily crossed by the rest of society. It's impossible to contain or control cultural knowledge, police social learning. Information is our air. But money as only money can be checked, concentrated, protected. The dispute between managers and workers at Boeing does not have money at its heart but knowledge. What is radical is to expose this fact.