The city of Seattle in 2026 is a consumer’s paradise situated in the midst of an active war zone. Two and a half decades after the militant protests of the 1999 WTO conference were crushed, the brutal dominance of the ruling class over the Puget Sound region has never been more severe. Abject poverty festers alongside opulence while homeless encampments are callously swept by cops who kill with impunity. The economic boom of the last two decades cemented the political influence of big tech capital and brought an army of petty-bourgeois transplants seeking all the tacky pleasures of a coastal metropolis. But the “prosperity bomb” set off by Amazon and Microsoft has already begun to fizzle out while the AI boom threatens to make thousands of those mid-tier tech jobs irrelevant. (source) But the proletariat of the region has paid the price for Seattle’s “prosperity.”
As the cost of living sky-rocketed, Seattle saw a massive displacement of Black Americans–already suffering from decades of malicious redlining and the fallout from the so-called war on drugs–out to the municipalities on the margins of King County and beyond. Where in 1970 Seattle’s Central District was 73.4% Black, by 2014 it was only 18% Black, a trend which has only continued downward in the last decade (source). Back in the city proper, between 2006 and 2024 the percentage of people living on the streets exploded from 25% to 58% of the general homeless population (which itself continues to grow by the thousands each year). (Source, source, source, source) The response to this crisis of homelessness and displacement by the city’s so-called progressives are a handful of milquetoast reforms (source) and $32.5 million spent in 2025 on Seattle’s “Unified Care Team” responsible for nearly 2500 encampment sweeps in 2024 alone (for comparison, only 50 sweeps were conducted in 2021) (source).
All the while the Seattle Police Department (SPD), notorious for its excessive use of force and trigger happy pigs, has been busy “reforming” itself through 13 years of federal oversight. Despite that oversight coming to an end in September of 2025, racial disparities in the violence meted out by the pigs has actually gotten worse: Black people in Seattle are 12.5x more likely to have a gun pulled on them by a cop than white people and Black people are 6.6x more likely to be killed by a pig than white people (source, source). Even when they aren’t outright slaughtering people, they keep themselves busy brutalizing and harassing homeless people, drug users, and queer people who dare to stand up to fascists. Last summer, a reactionary Christian group called May Day USA held a blatantly anti-trans concert in the middle of Capitol Hill, known for its high concentration of LGBT+ residents. Shortly before the cops’ unprovoked attack and arrest of 23 counter-demonstrators, Sargent Matthew Didier can be heard on camera saying “We’re going in with guns blazing. We are past talking. We’re here to fuck people up now.” (source)
The Puget Sound has also hardly been immune to the surge in ICE activity across the country. While we have yet to see a full-scale occupation of the kind Chicago and the Twin Cities have experienced, these jack-booted thugs have been abducting people along the highways and in municipalities north and south of the city center. And increased ICE activity is certainly on its way; Wired reports that DHS has secured a lease for a new office space in Tukwila, also known as “little Africa” and home to many different immigrant communities (source). In a particularly egregious incident, a man named Ivan Guzman was abducted while taking his two-year-old son to daycare in Shoreline. (Source; the family’s gofundme for legal fees) Despite a community ICE-watch group being mobilized to the scene, nothing was done to stop Guzman’s abduction with one activist claiming that “Training kicked in for a lot of us. Keep at a safe distance. Keep filming and taking pictures. Don’t antagonize the agents—ultimately it is the immigrant community members who will pay the price… There were at times sharp words and tense moments from a few passerby/observers. But for the most part, things stayed de-escalated.” (Source)
This bizarre rationalization for not intervening to prevent Guzman’s abduction is evidence of the need for a chapter of Dare to Struggle here in Seattle. Immigrant communities are already paying the price. The presence of masked men given carte blanche to disappear our neighbors is itself an unforgivable escalation that must be met with bold and decisive resistance. With Democratic slime-balls like Governor Bob Ferguson claiming total impotence to curb ICE activity in Washington (source) and left activists content to pat themselves on the back for doing little more than filming and grieving, the closing line from Dare to Struggle’s mission statement cries out louder than ever to be realized: “We know that radical change only happens when people step outside of routine protest or expecting politicians to do it for us and take bold, collective action.”
Those of us who call this place home have an obligation to revitalize the legacy of militant class struggle which has indelibly marked the history of Seattle and the surrounding region. From the 1919 General Strike inspired by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, to the Fishing Wars waged by the Nisqually, Puyallup, and other Coast Salish tribes against state law-enforcement in the ’60s and ’70s, to the building occupation by Chicano activists in 1971 which produced El Centro de la Raza–there is no shortage of historical precedent for those of us serious about not just defending ourselves from the predations of the ruling class, but of actually taking the fight to the enemy and forcing concessions from them. But if we are serious, we need to recognize that there can be no victories without going to the masses of people under the gun of police brutality, white supremacy, displacement, and the vicious deportation machine that has set off a new wave of militant struggle across the country. As articulated in Dare to Struggle’s mission statement: “Our starting point for stopping any of these injustices must be to organize sustained and audacious resistance based among the people under attack and uniting all who can be united. It’s only when we dare to struggle that we can win victories and get a taste of our potential collective power.”
If we are willing to abandon these cowardly, opportunistic politicians as well as the impotent methods and crass misleadership of the activist left, there is tremendous untapped potential among the masses to fight back against the pettiest of tyrants–abusive landlords, hypocritical social-service providers, killer cops–as well as Goliaths like Amazon and Boeing who play critical roles in the imperialist war machine currently wreaking untold devastation across the globe. We cannot continue to sit back and scroll past horror after horror on our phones while doing little more than posting infographics, handing out whistles, or occasionally mobilizing to vanity protests called by groups like 50501, PSL, and FRSO. We cannot wait for news of another protestor executed in the street by ICE or another Black person gunned down by our home-grown pigs before we consider mounting genuine and sustained resistance. Take back your humanity and stand with the masses of the oppressed and dispossessed by joining Dare to Struggle Seattle. Let’s move.
Dare to Struggle 