If you read the platform of the Peace and Freedom Party, you will see that the rights of native peoples are an important part of our socialist platform:

"Native Americans

We support self-determination of indigenous peoples and sovereignty for Native nations. We demand:
· Honor treaty obligations with Native American nations and recognize California tribes.
· Stop the theft of natural resources located on reservation lands.
· Honor Native American water, hunting and fishing rights.
· Free the prisoners of the FBI/BIA war against Native Americans, end all harassment.
· Stop destruction of sacred burial sites."

The Soviet Union did make development in the poorer areas of the former Czarist Empire a priority. The centralized planned economy was able to make this a reality. Guaranteed employment, housing, education, and healthcare were one result. With this also came major advancements in the status of women.

This can be contrasted to Yugoslavia. Tito’s Partisan forces that drove the Nazis out of Yugoslavia were a successful unification of the regions ethnicities at a time when the Nazi’s puppet Ustashi Croat government had been carrying out genocide against Serbs and other nationalities. Yet Tito’s policies of market socialism failed to lift the poorer regions and nationalities at the same rate as improvements were being made for the traditionally better off Serbs and Croats. The regions that were poorer stayed that way relative to the rest of the country because resources for development were not distributed as part of a central plan.

Of course there are many in this advanced industrial nation who will argue that industrialization is the problem and not the solution. Yet people who are poor and hungry generally do not see things the same way.

A great tragedy of history was the plans of de-industrialization carried out from 1975 to 1979 by the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia. Influenced by ideas learned in western universities the Khmer Rouge leadership saw a return to an agricultural economy as the ideal. The horrible consequences included mass population transfers followed by mass starvation and the use of extreme brutality by the Khmer Rouge to maintain control.

The present day large population of the world does not allow us to go back on any large social level to the more primitive societies we come from. Any attempt to do so will be a repeat of the disaster in Cambodia.

Still, for many aware of environmental destruction and impending ecological catastrophes, industry itself does appear to be the problem. Added to this perception is the fact that most of the socialist economies, with the exception Cuba’s, have not been much kinder to the environment than the capitalist economies have been.

It is my argument that a planned socialist economy will give us the opportunity to make much better economic decisions based on human and environmental needs, but that will not necessarily mean that the best decisions will always be made. This is in contrast to capitalism where the best decisions can never be made because the profits of the market and corporate control of the government rule.

Yet to achieve the best decisions of how to run the socialist economy we will have to implement a true worker’s democracy with freedom of press and the right to organize opposition parties. Such democracy has not yet existed in the socialist countries because so far they have all been built on the flawed Stalinist model. In contrast, the Peace and Freedom Party advocates the preservation of the Bill of Rights as a major gain of the American Revolution and we fight to defend it and expand on it now and into the socialist future.

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