What We Do

The Democratic Socialists of Canada (DSC) are building working-class power by organizing our communities, workplaces, and homes. We’re helping people acquire training, education, resources, and confidence to join forces, win material improvements, and develop class consciousness.

Organizing

The DSC believes that structure-based organizing is one of the keys in building a mass movement. The strengths of organizing are that it focuses on:

  • Structures of people who share—
  • Common experiences such as being a tenant or worker in the same place, which enables—
  • Building consensus within a group of people beyond those who already agree with you
  • Collectively identifying and acting on issues to help each other
  • Strategizing specific tactics the group will use
  • Creating a crisis for a landlord or employer, and disrupting the capitalist order

Our organizing model ultimately understands that ordinary people have power, not only property and business owners.

Cover of book No Shortcuts by Jane McAlevey
“Organizing places the agency for success with a continually expanding base of ordinary people, a mass of people never previously involved, who don’t consider themselves activists at all.”
—Jane McAveley in No Shortcuts

Programs

Tenant Organizing

Tenant organizing is the process of making connections on an individual level at tenants’ homes, discovering issues or grievances that they may have with the property where they live, and bringing them together in solidarity to form a long-term tenant association/union as a counter to the power of their landlord.

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Labour Organizing

As the DSC expands, we are developing our ability and creating programming to take on organizing training and support for people to run workplace campaigns. We are working hard to make this happen in the near future.

Theory and Education

We invest in our members by providing training programs that teach the skills necessary to run successful organizing campaigns. Members learn how to engage their communities, build strong unions, and sustain campaigns for the long term.

We also create socialist education programs to provide to both members and at-large working class people. The aim is to foster a better understanding of capitalism, socialism, and how we must connect our immediate work with our long term goals.

Coalition Building

As we build coalitions among organized tenants and workers, it will enable them to apply their collective power at the regional level to make systemic changes.

This is a self-strengthening theory: once people win a demand they will want to win larger demands and have the momentum to do so.