Against the Green Party (archive)
The May Municipal and London Assembly elections were, for all the swaggering of Respect (Galloway) and Left List (SWP) supporters, disastrous for socialists. Livingstone’s defeat confirmed that the vestiges of the Labour left are not able to surmount Brown’s visible decline. One consequence is that some people are looking with interest at the apparently flourishing and left-wing Green Party. It now has 116 local councillors, 2 on the London Assembly, 2 MEPs, and over 7,000 members. In Norwich City the Greens, with 13 to Labour’s 15 seats, are the official Council opposition. Green-Socialists, notably Derek Wall (the joint Party Speaker) and an internal Green Left network, have influence. Radical policies, for workers’ rights, railway renationalisation, the defence of civil liberties, and opposition to the occupation of Iraq, appear to extend the Party’s radical profile beyond traditional green issues. It is free from factional bust-ups. Not only individuals on the left, but magazines such as Red Pepper (long-standing eco-socialists), and organised groups, like Socialist Resistance, are looking with increased interest at the English and Welsh Green Party.
There are, nevertheless, good reasons why the left should be wary of trying to embrace the Green Party (supposing, for the sake of argument, that this would be welcome). They lie in the nature of its political project, its organisation, and its constituency.
The Greens come from a very distinct political tradition. They reject both capitalist and socialist ‘productivism’ in favour of ‘sustainable’ economics. The planet is an interdependent system (sometimes called Gaia) under threat from human activity. In the Manifesto for a Sustainable Society the Party describes its values as, ‘democratic participation’, ‘non-violence’, “personal freedom, social equity, happiness and human fulfilment.” Apart from these principles, which are as clear as Orwell Estuary silt, the Greens focus on issues affecting the global environment: climate change, GM crops, pollution, resource depletion, waste, and nuclear energy. The alternative offered is local production, decentralisation, more green spaces, better public transport, and eco-taxes. Agriculture should become organic and animal welfare is a priority
When one looks closer these policies are fraught with problems: reconciling the world demand for food with pristine organic cultivation, energy conservation with cars and factories, and the fact that the West depends on high levels of consumption that are unlikely to be changed by anything other than a revolution so total that it would make 1917 look like a mild shock to the system. For example, Green social plans include a universal Citizen’s Income, paid regardless of work. As capital flows move freely the Greens demand an end to immigration controls – so, one assumes, everyone will be welcome to come and receive a Basic Income in the UK. The political, economic and social bases of the conditions for such ambitious proposals are barely even sketched.
From the Green left, Derek Wall (Babylon and Beyond. 2005), offers a more developed economic programme. He is for “the rejection of exchange values” to reduce consumption and alienation.” (P 177) He considers that “markets can be embedded in society and state provision decentralised” (P 188) In line with the Green tendency to paint pictures of an ideal world Wall asserts, “While state provision can be humanised and markets tamed by the social, the more fundamental task requires that both the state and the market are rolled back. The commons provides an important alternative to both.”(P 183 – 4) Finally there is a vague call for a self-managed society, “individuals should control the process by which they produce goods and services.” (P 146)
No doubt this has been said before. But nobody, least of all a political party, can choose to ‘reject’ exchange values: capitalism cannot be overcome by asserting that ‘use’ is the guiding principle of the economy. One of the strengths of Marxism is its analysis of how the present economic system produces a range of real contradictions. Between those who create of goods to be used and those who benefit from the surplus wealth they produce. There is a gulf here that no amount of participative democracy, can reconcile. It is hard to see how Wall intends that. Corporations can be controlled, regulated, and embedded to sleep peacefully without the successful conclusion of a conflict over the very root of their power: divesting them of their property… Or does Wall intend to draw up a list of real use-values, which would be used to guide the economy, by decree. The only force that could impose ‘real’ needs has to arise form the economy itself, from the class struggle. That is the agent of change to Marxism, not a force for co-operative harmony, but one that divests the capitalists of their power and property. This is not about increasing the ‘productive forces’ but changing the social relations of production. .
These are, obviously, questions of a over-arching goal. What of the present? The principles of the Green Party lay down extremely ambiguous foundations for their day-to-day politics. The dream is that: all decent people can agree on freedom, equity (notably not the absent equality), saving the environment, and the planet. It is only dark forces, multinationals, states and military blocs, malevolent individuals that prevent them from realising their goals. It seems that conflict itself, the agonistic heart of politics, is at fault. This is not without effects. Anyone who has contact with Greens realises that their culture is marked by an aversion for clashes. We may wish that the aggressive wild things that pullulate on the far-left would end up in the nearest ditch, but is stultifying harmony preferable?
The final objection to the Green Party is its practice. Norwich Greens campaign for an ‘Open Council’, based on community politics (not too remote from the Liberals). They are proud of their record in getting solar panels installed in social housing, their opposition to a new Tesco’s, backing for allotments, cycling, speed limits, and carbon reduction. Regionally they are famous for banning foie gras from the Council Chambers (as if this was ever on offer). They are a mixture of concerned middle-class people, the harmless cranks of the declining ‘Social Forum’ movement, and (I am assured) the usual mavericks who abound in municipal politics. If there is a vision, it is: Norwich as a Shining City on a Hill (relative, naturally, to flat East Anglia). One can detect something in this mindset of Derek Wall’s trumpeting of ‘Italism’ (Rasta localism), and Zazen Buddhism.
With all these difficulties in mind how should we judge the Green party? It may be an ally on specific issues, on many subjects indeed, from War to battling transnational companies. But they are not a serious secular socialist alternative, a way forward for the workers’ movement for the oppressed and exploited of all hues. The Greens are too flawed to fill this role. Or even as a modernsied social democracy with ecological tinges. Let them go their own way.
Summer 2008.
