Socialist Alternative is a national organization with members across the country fighting in our workplaces, communities, and campuses against the exploitation and injustices people face every day. We are community activists fighting budget cuts in public services, organizing with renters against eviction, and working within our unions to rebuild a fighting labor movement. We are people of all col
ors organizing against racist policing and speaking out against racism and attacks on immigrants, students organizing against tuition hikes and war, people of all genders and sexualities fighting sexism and homophobia. Socialist Alternative is the U.S. section of International Socialist Alternative, an international organization with sections in over 30 countries and on every continent. Socialist Alternative member and Seattle city council member Kshama Sawant has provided a powerful example of what’s possible with an elected Marxist who uses her seat to build movements. Kshama, who takes the average wage of a worker in her district and donates the rest of her council salary to social movements, led a campaign to win a $15 minimum wage in 2013, making Seattle the first major U.S. In 2015 and 2019, Kshama secured re-election without taking a dime of corporate cash, despite Amazon and big business spending millions to unseat her. During the BLM uprising in the summer of 2020, Kshama introduced the first of its kind legislation in the country to ban police use of crowd control weapons and chokeholds, and helped lead a movement to tax Seattle’s biggest corporations to fund affordable housing. We believe the Republicans and Democrats are both parties of big business, and we are campaigning to build an independent, alternative party of workers and young people to fight for the interests of the millions, not the millionaires. We see the global capitalist system as the root cause of the economic crisis, poverty, discrimination, war, and environmental destruction. It has been made clear under COVID-19 that it is workers who are essential to society, while billionaires and their corporate politicians have botched the handling of the crisis. As capitalism moves deeper into crisis, a new generation of workers and youth must join together to take the top 500 corporations into public ownership under democratic control to end the ruling elites’ global competition for profits and power. We fight for a truly democratic society, a socialist society where ordinary people will have control over our daily lives. Join us!
