Socialist Alternative is a growing organization with members across Canada, who punch above our weight. We are a cohesive democratic organization that values both ideas and actions.
You’ll find Socialist Alternative on the streets, on campuses, and in workplaces, at rallies and demos, and online. We campaign for: rent control and affordable housing; stopping climate change and protecting the environment; better pay and conditions for workers; ending all forms of oppression including against women, LGBTQ+ people and against racism. We oppose police violence, war and militarism. We support self-determination of Indigenous peoples and ending colonialism.
We are a diverse group of youth, student, union and community activists, involved in environmental movements, socialist feminism and other campaigns for economic and social justice. Our members were part of the fights across Canada for a $15 minimum wage and paid sick days and continue to campaign for a living wage. We campaign for progressive city councillors, who fight in the interests of the working class, not wealthy developers.
Socialist Alternative is also part of international solidarity and struggle. We work closely with Alternative Socialiste in Québec and with Socialist Alternative, US, that recently won a campaign against the richest man in the world, to win the Amazon Tax that will raise $220 million a year to build social housing in Seattle.
The future under capitalism is bleak: a COVID disaster followed by war and a looming world depression, and the ongoing climate disaster. Capitalism is incapable of solving these ever-worsening crises because the system puts private profit ahead of everything else.
Socialist Alternative builds on the traditions of workers’ struggles that won significant victories. Today the working class needs determined unions and a political voice to fight and win. It is vital that Canadian workers and youth have the political program and strategies necessary for victory — for a socialist Canada and Québec, linked internationally in a socialist world.
While capitalism only offers more misery, if the key sections of the economy were publicly owned and democratically controlled a very different future would open up. Human skill and ingenuity, combined with the bountiful energy of the sun, could ensure a good quality of life for all humanity on a healthy planet.
We work both for necessary reforms now and for a mass democratic socialist transformation of society.
The dictatorships that existed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were not socialist; democracy where we, ordinary people, have control over our daily lives is vital to socialism.
Socialist Alternative is part of International Socialist Alternative, which is active in over 30 countries in all six inhabited continents.
Read more here about What We Stand For.
We encourage you to contact us about joining Socialist Alternative!