The Freedom Socialist Party's road to nowhere

"Rising joblessness, an epidemic of foreclosures, bailouts for the crooks:
what's the way out for poor and working people? The Freedom Socialist
Party puts forth a plan of action and invites discussion."

You can read the FSP's 10-point program for radical reform here and Socialist feedback below.

>Nationalize the banking and insurance industries, under the control of workers!

There are few places in the world more pointless than a bank. There are few compelled to toil more uselessly than bank employees. In every respect, the function of banks is to facilitate a form of exchange in which nothing is produced and much can be lost. A world without banks would be a wholly better place.

>Redirect war spending into social services.

Although capitalism cannot provide necessary food and medication for our children, it spends more than $350,000 (œ184,000) every twelve seconds on arms (guns, bombs, jet fighters, aircraft carriers, landmines, etcetera). Socialists do not suggest that the arms budget should be used to feed and care for children and the rest of us. As desirable as such diversion may sound, we know that capitalism must spend that money to protect capitalists from other capitalists, and from the working class. Military spending under capitalism is not optional, it is an absolute necessity. Redirecting the money from war, to help the starving, the homeless, and the sick, is impossible. Something is wrong with this picture: capitalism.

>Tax the rich & make corporations pay.

The Tax Justice Network (www.taxjustice.net) [also] thinks that world poverty can be effectively tackled by reforming the international system of taxing profits so as to eliminate tax havens and tax dodging – “profit laundering” as they aptly call it – by capitalist corporations.

Read why such efforts are futile here.

>Guarantee the right to organize...Eliminate all bars to union organizing and the right to strike.

Necessary as they are under capitalism, the unions are strictly limited in what they can achieve for their members within the capitalist system of society out of which unions arose and within which they operate. Capitalist private companies and state capitalist nationalised industries are both operated for the purpose of making a profit and they cannot long survive without it. Trade unions cannot push wages up to a level that prevents profits being made. When companies are marketing their products profitably a union can hope to win concessions by threatening to halt production and interrupt the flow of profits. But against a firm nearing bankruptcy, or during a depression when firms generally are curtailing production, laying off workers or closing down whole businesses, the strike is a blunted weapon.

>Protect homes.

In fact there is no homeless problem, what we have is a poverty problem. Here is a recent press story that shows that there are plenty of empty houses available if you have the money. "The number of properties in Britain lying empty is set to pass 1 million. New figures will show that Britain is on course for a record number of houses and flats lying empty. Some of the rise has been caused by home owners facing repossession. Other empty homes were bought by property developers who have since struggled to raise the money to renovate and furbish them for occupation." (Daily Telegraph, 10 February) Inside this crazy social system fish are dumped back in to the sea, fruit is allowed to rot on the trees while millions of people starve, so it comes as no surprise to learn that people in Britain go homeless while 1 million homes lie empty.

>Provide universal employment.

This demand is shared by Britain's Socialist Labour Party...The SLP is also committed to the discredited view which Labour once held that the effects of capitalism can be overcome by state intervention, if sufficiently resolute and far-reaching. Hence Scargill’s claim that a "British government" could abolish unemployment "even within a capitalist society". This is a fantastic statement from someone who has on occasions given some evidence of some knowledge of Marxian economics (after all, it was Marx who showed how an "industrial reserve army" made up of fluctuating numbers of unemployed workers was necessary, and so inevitable, under capitalism). It is, however, an accurate statement of what all those who campaign for "the right to work", "full employment", "a 4-day working week with no loss of pay" and the like implicitly believe, even if in the case of the SWP and other trotskyists they are not so honest as Scargill as to say so openly.

>Make quality healthcare...nationalizing the healthcare industry.

Although socialists recognise the benefits the NHS [National Health Service] brings to workers who otherwise would not have access to healthcare, they are far from the ardent uncritical supporters that the membership of the Labour Party tend to be. They see that although the NHS suggests possibilities for how a service free at the point of use and based on needs could be organised, fundamentally, it is not free from the market system and a long way from being the fount of joy Labour supporters proclaim it to be.

>Mandate an environmentally sustainable energy policy.

In any consideration of existing social problems, the question of energy supply is of prime importance. It is self-evident that the task of providing decent conditions of life for the whole human population must include providing an adequate supply of energy. To solve the world's housing problem, including provision for heating, cooking and lighting, to expand world transport services, to increase world food production, to provide a sufficient supply of durable goods for all people, plus the expansion of the means of production which these would require, will arguably involve a greatly increased supply of world energy.

>Improve women's & children's lives.

The reformists, who were always wrong, now stand mute before what is to them an inexplicable breakdown in civilised culture. After all, had they not set up a welfare state, with its ever-ready social workers and free schools for the poor? But the kids can't stand the schools and see no point in going when all they must learn is to become unemployed - sorry, "Job Seekers".

>Uphold civil liberties.

Attacks on basic liberties abound, police stop and search powers are increased, the right to silence is removed, the right to trial by jury is decreased, freedom of movement is restricted. The change of government has made no difference. Increasingly the state is trying to shape and control our lives through bureaucracy or through the police. The only solution open to capitalism now, faced with social decay and chaos, is to criminalise the "surplus population", to lock them up, to take control of them and increase discipline throughout society. Capitalism's only solutions are brutal and barbaric, and in 1997 70 inmates of prisons killed themselves.

Socialism offers to end the social conditions that cause that breakdown and necessitate enforced discipline, offering instead self-worth, and freedom of association in production, a strong inclusive social identity. The prison is not a symbol of capitalism. Capitalism is a prison, and it is imperative for us to try and break out of it.
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