About Socialist Alternative

Socialist Alternative is one of the fastest-growing socialist parties in the United States and the party of Seattle City Council Member Kshama Sawant. We fight in our workplaces, communities, and campuses against the exploitation and injustices people face every day. We are activists resisting Trump and campaigning for a $15 an hour minimum wage; we are people of all colors fighting against racism and attacks on immigrants, students organizing against debt and war, women and men fighting sexism and homophobia; community activists fighting against budget cuts in public services and for democratic fighting unions.

In 2013, we spearheaded the campaign to elect Kshama Sawant to Seattle City Council, the first independent socialist elected in a major U.S. city in decades. We then helped lead the historic campaign to raise Seattle’s minimum wage to $15/hour, the first in any major city in the U.S. We have since helped win the first $15/hour minimum wage in Minneapolis. We won these campaigns by building movements, not by relying on the rigged political system or by making backroom deals. As Kshama Sawant says, “What can be won inside City Hall depends on the strength of mass movements outside City Hall.”

We campaign for policies that help activate millions of people into struggle for far-reaching change through building mass movements, independent politics, and demanding what working people need, not what the system claims it can afford. We see the global capitalist system as the root cause of poverty, racism, sexism, economic crisis, war, and environmental destruction. We think the Democratic Party is rigged against working people and cannot be reformed. We call for building a new party of the 99% that rejects corporate cash and draws together socialists, radical unions, Black Lives Matter and other social movements, as a powerful tool to mobilize millions into struggle, not just to vote periodically in elections.

As capitalism moves deeper into crisis after COVID-19, a new generation of workers and youth must join together to fight for socialism. As a decisive first step, we call for taking the top 500 corporations into public ownership under democratic control to end the ruling elites’ global competition for profits and power.

We believe the dictatorships that existed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were perversions of what socialism is really about. We are for democratic socialism where ordinary people will have control over our daily lives.

Socialist Alternative is in political solidarity with International Socialist Alternative, a worldwide socialist organization in over 30 countries, on every continent. Join us!

Become a Member

Socialist Alternative is an organization of ideas in action. Our political ideas directly affect how we organize and what we say on both a day-to-day and long-term basis. Joining Socialist Alternative means basic agreement with these ideas and a commitment to putting them into action. Before you’re able to join, a current member of Socialist Alternative will contact you for a basic political discussion before your membership request is processed. Please be patient, as an organization that takes no corporate cash, we have limited resources, but we will contact you as soon as we can. Join Here.