What a Socialist Movement Can be Doing
If one assumes that the Socialist Party is not a "party" in the usual sense - ie., it does not really think it has a chance to become a major national party - and instead sees itself as a few other groups which use the word "party" in their name but don’t run national campaigns (for example, the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party or the Communist Party itself), then what do we do?
I think we should be a political grouping, independent of the Democrats, concerned with finding ways of bringing a socialist analysis into the life of the various social movements around us.
Let me list some of the things we might do.
On foreign policy it seemed to me all through the Vietnam War, now so distant in our memories, that the war stemmed from capitalism. And in that case not because there were actual resources at stake, but because it was part of the US effort to "contain" the social revolutions in the world.
In Iraq the case is even clearer - oil is involved, and oil is the reason. These are not issues that should "occasionally be whispered", they should be a central part of our analysis of US foreign policy. As, might I add, socialists are better able than any other political group to understand the power of the economic groups that benefit from the arms race. Eisenhower said - but today even the peace movement seems to take "defense" spending for granted. We get into wars because we have a military, not because we don’t have one.
And on some issues, such as the Middle East, the Socialist Party is uniquely qualified to be critical of Israel without sounding anti-Semitic, to defend the rights of the Palestinians without sounding as if we thought suicide bombings were a good idea. In the Middle East, so explosive, so tragic, where the Palestinian people are suffering a kind of drawn out cultural genocide at the hands of the Israelis, we are uniquely able to reach out to the democratic and secular forces on all sides who seek a peaceful solution.
On the domestic front, someone should speak up for socialized medicine, even if we call if a single payer tax system. Someone should push it, compare our system to that in Canada, Europe, etc. Ironically the best job on this came from Michael Moore. I’m damn glad he did it, and we aren’t film makers, but the point is that Moore, a non-member of the Socialist Party, made the strongest points thus far for a single payer tax system. His film is the ideal place for a good leaflet to be handed out explaining not only that we support a single-payer system, but urging people to join the Socialist Party to actively fight for it.
We need to wage a struggle against the privatization of our social needs - the roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, and prisons. More funds should go into these - but we do NOT WANT OUR HOSPITALS OR SCHOOLS RUN FOR PROFIT!! We want them run to provide the best medical care to people, and the best education possible. We want to argue that every kid who wants to get into college and can pass reasonable entrance exams can get an education without going bankrupt. Who gains from that? We all do - an educated population will be more productive. (And might even have fewer grown men and women who doubt the reality of global warming, or the truth of evolution).
On prisons, who will speak up for the prisoners if not us? They have no vote, no clout, and while we all know some of those in prison should stay there because we don’t know what else to do with them right now, the massive prison population is a scandal. The prisons are a breeding ground for violence, for training untrained young men and women in how to become trained criminals. Crime is a crime, yes, but we need to point out that prison is also a crime.
On housing, doubly so at this moment as the housing market goes bust and the poor, who were tricked into buying the home of their dreams with unlimited credit, and are now losing them, who else will point out the decent housing is a human right in a society as advanced as ours? And that decent low income housing cannot be built by the private sector, but will require social intervention.
Drug laws may not sound like a radical issue, but again, who else (except perhaps the Libertarians and the Greens) will point out that marijuana is less harmful than tobacco or alcohol, less addictive, but is still criminalized.
Perhaps among the most urgent of our tasks is one which, as a Marxist, I think is too easily overlooked. Capitalism does work, better than we sometimes admit. Karl Marx himself noted that under the dynamics of capitalism "all that is solid melts into air".
But in the process, human beings become commodities. Our most essential human aspects, of love, of community, our sexuality, are turned into a set of commodities. The Libertarians, who are so good on issues of human freedom and diversity, are totally at a loss when it comes to examining the fact human beings are social animals, every bit as much as they are a "collection of unique individuals" , and capitalism destroys the best of our uniqueness, exploits our finest instincts in terms of marketing.
Capitalism turns us against one another - for the "brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity" to exist, it almost has to do so against the current of the free market, which would pay us not only for selling our labor, but in a pinch, would pay us if we were offered the right price for our children.
Finally - and I’ve only sketched some of the host of ways in which a socialist analysis can and should be brought openly into the public discussion - let us look at the environment and realize that capitalism cannot deal with the environmental disasters which have been caused both by capitalism and also by our being overwhelmed by the process of industrialism and technology. (The late Soviet Union, hardly a capitalist state, suffered some true environmental disasters - as does China today - so it is not raw capitalism alone which is at the heart of the problem).
These issues, which at some points can be put forward by independent candidates, running as Greens, as Socialists, or under no label - even, if I may be permitted a heresy - in Democratic Party primaries - would give us a chance to dig into the bland universal consensus that capitalism is in the interests of the people. It isn’t. The great concentrations of power should be abolished by estate taxes, and we should not surrender our hope of seeing the system of production humanized and democratized by the workers being placed in charge of the workplace.
For these things we might do better with a publication than a national ticket. And with strong local organizations.
(David McReynolds joined the Socialist Party in 1951, ran as a write in Socialist Party candidate for Congress in New York in 1958, as the candidate for Congress of the Peace and Freedom Party in the same district, in 1968; as the Socialist Party’s Presidential candidate in 1980 and 2000, and as the Green Party’s candidate for US Senate from New York in 2004. He lost every race).
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