Analysis of the U.S. Greens

["Jay Moore" <research@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

FYI.  Here is an article on the U.S. Greens from the World Socialists.  Some
personal observations of my own: I was present myself, along with some other
Vermonters, at the first meeting in 1984 of the U.S. Greens which was held
at Hampshire College in Massachusetts.  Already at that time, it was clear
that people were coming together from two or three different, and ultimately
not very compatible, places.  There were people with a leftist,
anti-capitalist background and sensibility -- Bookchinite ecoanarchists,
nontheoretical direct actionists from the anti-nuclear movement, some
Marxists and "post-Marxists", etc.  There were also people who came out of
liberal Democratic politics, like Rensenbrink mentioned below.  (I remember
him quite well with his pipe in mouth and university manners from that early
meeting and thinking what a pompous ass.)  Finally, there were the New Agers
who resonated with Charlene Spretnak's ecofeminist spirituality or something
similar (and most of whom also had strictly reformist politics, if any at
all).  For many years, the leftists in the U.S. Greens were organized as a
caucus called the "Left Green Network".  That, however, fell apart some
years ago.  You still have some leftists among the Greens, like Joel Kovel
and Howie Hawkins (both of whom I know).  But as far as I can tell -- I left
direct contact with the scene some time ago -- they are pretty much lone
voices crying in the wilderness.  (Brian Tokar, another principal Left
Green, seems to have dropped out of that scene, too, to focus on
anti-biotech writing and organizing.) I'll probably vote for Ralph Nader --
David McReynolds is not on the ballot here -- but I think Green politics
today are pretty pathetic and are characterized pretty accurately, if a bit
dogmatically, by the WSWS article below.  The concept of "Natural
Capitalism" makes my stomach turn.

Jay
http://www.neravt.com/left/


**********

Extolling the politics of expediency: an interview with US Green Party
leaders
By Jerry White
World Socialist Web Site
2 September 2000

On June 23-25, the US Green Party held its national convention in Denver,
Colorado and chose Ralph Nader as its presidential candidate for the 2000
elections. This reporter covered the convention for the World Socialist Web
Site.

The Nader campaign has received considerable media publicity. Polls indicate
that it could have a significant impact on the vote for Democratic candidate
Al Gore in certain states, possibly affecting the outcome of the
presidential race.

But to what extent do the Greens represent a genuine break from the big
business-dominated two-party system? The interviews below shed some light on
this question.

Among those with whom I spoke at the convention, two delegates were
particularly well-placed in the organization. They were John Resenbrink, one
of the principal founders of the Greens in the US, and Scott McLarty, a
media coordinator and adviser in Nader's 1996 Green Party presidential
campaign. McLarty is also the party's candidate for city council in
Washington, DC.

Resenbrink, a retired political science professor, helped launch the US
Greens at a meeting in Augusta, Maine in January 1984. He is the author of
the 1999 book Against All Odds: the Green Transformation of American
Politics.

Like many of those who helped found the US Greens, Resenbrink was involved
in liberal protest movements in the 1960s and 1970s against racial
discrimination, poverty and the Vietnam War. Like many of those who would go
on to found the Greens, Resenbrink was active in Democratic Party politics.

It is significant that Resenbrink and other founders of the Greens did not
break with the Democratic Party over the Vietnam War. Despite their
opposition to the war, they did not draw the conclusion that the Democratic
Party, as well as the Republican Party, was an instrument of a definite
class-the American capitalist class-and represented in essence the interests
of US imperialism. Their eventual departure from the Democrats had far more
the character of a pragmatic and tactical move, rather than a principled
political break.

When they left the Democrats in the early 1980s, it was not from a
theoretically clarified standpoint, based on an historical assessment of the
class character of the Democratic Party. Instead their estrangement
developed largely because they found it increasingly difficult to influence
the party on such issues as women's rights, environmental protection and
nuclear power.

In the 1970s Resenbrink had been a leader of the Reform Democrats of Maine,
a short-lived faction that sought to pressure the state party. As the
Democratic Party in the early 1980s adapted itself to the right-wing
politics of Ronald Reagan, Resenbrink supported Jesse Jackson, in the hope
that the party could be returned to its liberal past. Resenbrink only quit
the Democrats when Jackson's 1983-84 bid for the party's presidential
nomination was rejected.

As he told this reporter, "In 1984 activists from the anti-nuclear, tenants'
rights and back-to-the-land movements came together in the first organized
meeting of the Greens in the US. A number of us had been active in the
Democratic Party, and some would later go back to the Democrats. I had been
very excited about Jesse Jackson's campaign and was very angry by the way he
was treated by the Democratic leadership."
Resenbrink said the founding members of the US Greens were galvanized by the
election victory of the West German Greens in 1983. "They won six percent of
the vote in the West German elections and had 27 members of parliament
elected. At our second meeting in St. Paul, Minnesota later in 1984, we
discussed a book, written by Charlene Spretnak, that focused on what lessons
we could take from the success of the West Germans for the US movement."

For Resenbrink and other founders of the US Greens, the predominant measure
of "success" was the number of seats gained in a bourgeois election and the
extent to which their West German counterparts obtained a foothold in the
institutions of the state. Success was not measured from the standpoint of
effecting a fundamental change in economic and social relations, or
advancing the political consciousness of the masses to fight for such a
change. Having failed to influence the Democratic Party from within,
Resenbrink and his co-thinkers looked to the example of the West German
Greens as a model for influencing the US political establishment through
electoral activities.

I asked Resenbrink for his assessment of the political record of the German
Greens, particularly their role as partners in the ruling coalition headed
by the Social Democrats, which has slashed social spending and taxes on big
business, and participated in NATO's war against Yugoslavia. Resenbrink did
not attempt any explanation for the Greens' embrace of German imperialist
interests, and only said that the Kosovo War had "caused a big conflict in
the party, with many supporting the position of [Green Party leader and
German Foreign Minister] Jokscha Fischer, and many who didn't."

Significantly, in Resenbrink's book, published on the eve of the 1999 Balkan
War, he condemns various European and Latin American Social Democratic
parties for being co-opted by the powers-that-be, but says nothing about the
German Greens.

Like many of the ideological forebears of the Greens, Resenbrink regards the
conception of the class struggle to be outmoded, arguing it has been
superceded by an impending ecological disaster which has drawn all social
classes into a common struggle for survival. "For Greens," he writes,
"ecology is a central factor in all of the issues...especially, the
structure and operations of the economy and its allocation and treatment of
resources. It's not enough to contest and try to overcome the dominance of
megacorporations, or to separate them from the pockets of politicians, or
even to seek to make them, internally, compatible with democracy." He
continues: "For Greens, it is a blazing necessity that businesses of all
kinds, from small to very large, develop a new relationship with nature, one
that radically reduces waste, eliminates pollution and ecological
degradation, and ends the mindless depletion of natural resources."

In the course of our discussion, Resenbrink made it clear that the Greens'
proposals were not anti-capitalist. "What we propose is not necessarily bad
for profits," he said. He praised Richard Grossman, the author of a recent
book entitled Natural Capitalism, which argues that the profit system is not
inherently hostile to the environment, and that corporate executives can be
good environmentalists and successful capitalists at the same time. "We can
influence capital and show them how environmentally sound decisions can be
good for profits too," Resenbrink said.

Scott McLarty, 42, began his political activity in the 1980s. After many
years in and around the Democratic Party, including working with Jesse
Jackson's Rainbow Coalition and Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone, McLarty
left the Democrats in 1995 and soon after went to work for Nader's 1996
campaign.

In our discussion, he described the Green Party as the defender of "small,
independent entrepreneurs" against "global corporations." McLarty
elaborated: "We would say it is no longer a question of socialism versus
capitalism, because capitalism has split into two directions now. There is
the level of the local entrepreneur-let me call that entrepreneurial
capitalism. Family farms, mom- and pop-owned shops, family businesses, small
businesses. On the other hand, we face this increasing rule by global
corporations, and that is a much different kind of capitalism from
low-level, entrepreneurial capitalism."

In this way McLarty spelled out the Greens' basic class standpoint-that of
the petty proprietor who is being crushed by big capital. In reality, the
"free competition" stage of American capitalism was superseded by monopoly
capitalism well over a century ago. And contrary to McLarty's rose-colored
portrayal of what he calls "agrarian capitalism," the days of subsistence
farming and rural backwardness were far from a paradise for the masses of
working people.

What McLarty and the Greens are arguing for, in the name of
anti-globalization, is a retrogression to a more primitive stage in the
development of man's productive forces. Their ideal is a reactionary utopia.
There is no question that the transnational corporations and organizations
such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) contribute to the further
impoverishment and exploitation of the world's working people. That,
however, is the product not of the global integration of economic life per
se, but rather the fact that this essentially progressive development
remains within the reactionary framework of the capitalist market and the
system of competing nation states.

The technological and scientific progress associated with globalization
presents man with unprecedented means to raise his material and cultural
level. This, however, requires that the working class liberate the
productive forces from the control of capital, which subordinates all
advances in technology to its drive for private profit. The Greens, however,
explicitly reject such a struggle by the working class.

Their backward-looking perspective is linked to their calls for economic
nationalism and their defense of the nation state. Nader and the Greens
denounce the "subversion" of US sovereignty by transnational corporations
and institutions like the WTO, and call for trade restrictions to protect
"locally-based industries" against global competition. This nationalist
perspective aligns the Greens with the AFL-CIO trade union bureaucracy. The
logic of this standpoint-and the social forces whose outlook it
articulates-inevitably bring the Greens into political proximity to extreme
right-wing forces, including the fascistic tendency headed by Patrick
Buchanan.
This was underscored by McLarty's response to a question about Nader's
common front with the AFL-CIO and Buchanan against trade agreements with
Mexico and China. He said, "The tension between socialism and capitalism,
which drove a large part of the twentieth century, is no longer quite so
clear. What we have now is more of a conflict between global corporate power
and whatever resists that."

I asked, "Whatever resists that? Is Pat Buchanan resisting?" McLarty
replied, "Yes, he is part of the resistance."

"Is Le Pen in France?" I asked. "Yes," McLarty said.

Clearly uncomfortable with such an admission, McLarty added, "Actually I
divide the resistance into two groups. There are the neo-theocrats, which
include Le Pen, Pat Buchanan, the Islamic and Christian fundamentalist
movements-who speak about blood or soil or the supernatural. The other kind
of resistance is a democratic resistance that stresses human rights,
economic justice and the environment. Between these two groups, there is a
certain amount of overlap."

Notwithstanding McLarty's misgivings, the reality remains that the Greens'
promotion of economic nationalism and its alliance with the AFL-CIO
bureaucracy help create a political climate for ultra-nationalist and
fascistic forces to grow. But this is not a consequence about which the
Greens seem to concern themselves. In fact, they tend not to think beyond
the most immediate, pragmatic level, and are generally consumed with whether
or not a given tactic will gain them votes.

For example, McLarty acknowledged that the United Auto Workers and Teamsters
bureaucracies had "long ago sold out their members," and that the union
officialdom's xenophobic campaigns served to block the international unity
of workers. But, he said, "they are also throwing a certain kind of
credibility to Nader and the Greens at the same time."

Nader's appeal to the Teamsters leadership, McLarty admitted was a
"political maneuver" but, he said, "In spite of the fact that they [the
labor bureaucracy] are a hierarchical power, they still have influence." He
continued, "I have no idea how things will play out in the long run, but for
right now they are effective in pushing the Green Party forward."

Underlying this type of crude political opportunism is a lack of any firm
foundation in theory or program. McLarty himself described the Greens as
practicing a "kind of catch-as-catch-can political strategy." But he added,
"I don't think that any kind of pure theory is effective anyway."

Pragmatism, opportunism, eclecticism are held up as positive goods. In
McLarty's words: "I think what is going on right now is that the Green Party
is getting stronger, and it is getting stronger through Nader's
campaign...We are doing a lot of things without a very clear theory behind
it. I think just the emergence of a strong third party throws politics into
a chaos, in which we are not sure how things are going to sort out."

Such an unprincipled and eclectic approach to politics is characteristic of
the social layers upon which the Greens are based. The middle layers of
society exercise no real independence from the two main classes-the working
class and the capitalist class-and swing, sometimes wildly, between the two.
A party based upon such variegated and heterogeneous elements of the
population is incapable of a consistent and scientific approach to politics.

The Greens may ignore the class struggle, but the class struggle does not
ignore them. The right-wing evolution of the German Greens demonstrates the
bankruptcy of such petty-bourgeois politics. In the fire of war and class
conflict, the German Greens dutifully defended the interests of their ruling
class. If given the chance, their American counterparts would do likewise.