Green Party Window Dressing Undermines Working Class Power

Electoral politics for socialists has always been tricky. Eugene Debbs, the firebrand organizer and SP candidate for President fought a huge uphill battle based on his forward facing confrontation with capital, while always clearly identifying class lines. Of course, I expect nothing less from Todd. However, the Green Party whose banner he heralds, holds a fundamentally anti-class view of society and is openly a-historical , and barely rooted in the earth sciences in which its name is founded. Today, Democratic Party cast-aways, seeking the means to pressure the Dems (like Medea Benjamin and her ilk), “deep ecologists” better known as misanthropes and basic free-market Greens a la Peter Camejo, dominate an ever more anti-democratic and bourgeois Party.

Can the Green Party offer the space or resources to at least pick-up where Debbs left off? No. The Green Party, unlike the ISO, is solely an electoral presence and is absent from most social movement that have reared their head since the GP founding. Of course small bands of Greens have sprung up around toxic sites and other more local issues. With relatively few exceptions, these Green movements are largely middle or upper class dominated NIMBY efforts with no desire for cross-cultural or working class advancement or focus.

Will Chretien try and create a left current in the Green Party…of course. Such efforts are not new….Howie Hawkins, Walt Sheasby (RIP), Joel Kovel, the “eco-socialist” who endorsed Dean in 2004 and the non-movement “Green Alliance” all tried to carve out a leftist orientation within the Greens. I myself was deeply involved with Howie, Joel and Walt, following the dissolution of the formerly dominant left-leaning Green Party USA into the “Democratic Party renegades” Association of State Green Parties (now Green Party US –you know, today’s GREEN PARTY) which won the factional fight 5 years or so ago.

Basic Marxism, socialism and labor-based social democracy calls for the creation of at LEAST a party opposed to capital rooted in the working class. Even the Labor Party of the United States, founded in 1996, is founded on a class understanding of society. The Green Party Platform opposes such politics by abdicating basic working class independence and power and instead supports “community-based economics” and “Ten Key values”, a fuzzy-liberal conception that supposedly challenges corporate power while maintaining a softer and kinder localized "Green" capitalism.

Of course Todd will speak from a socialist perspective and in all truth; he is likely to challenge such basic flaws in GP politics. However, how useful is such a trajectory? How powerful will be his rallying point when he not only takes on the Democrats and Republicans, but the majority of Green Party members and the tenants of their platform? How wise of a decision, as a socialist, is it to work your politics in a party that fundamentally opposes your own framework while ALSO being blind to the material realties of capital and labor?

For sure, Chreitns sinking into the swamp of Green Party Politics could simply be a first step towards embracing the ever popular social democratic “muddle” handed to him by Camjeo. Running as an independent or as a Peace and Freedom candidate and calling for the creation mass party rooted in class independence, absent of the Green Party’s liberal and myopic stink is the first and most rudimentary step required for the liberation of working people. Such a movement must be started and perhaps will over the coming months. We have witnessed labor acting in its own name more now than has occured in the past 5 years. From the Labor Party's (US) call for ballot status in South Carolina to the Million Worker March on Washington last October 2004 to the current rise in Worker power and parties in South America. Working people are on the move and shall not be sidelined by flase promises from liberals: Democrats or Greens.

-Douglas MacDonald
Former member and co-founder Solano County, Ca Green Party
Former National Secretary Treasurer Green Alliance