Re: Analysis of US Greens

[Howie Hawkins <hhawkins@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 01:23 PM 09/03/2000 -0400, you wrote:

>
> marxism-digest       Sunday, September 3 2000       Volume 01 : Number 2548
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2000 11:40:37 -0400
> From: "Jay Moore" <research@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Re: Analysis of US Greens
>
> Thanks, Howie, for your comments.  It would be interesting to hear from you
> about what happened to the Left Green Network and what the organizational
> state is today of the Reds to be found among the U.S. Greens.
>
> best wishes,
> jay


Most of the energy that went into the Left Green Network in 1988-1991
subsequently went into GPUSA from 1992 on. LGN still exists as an inactive
network/mailing list of maybe 25 people with an occassional newsletter, but
little energy goes into it.

The left the Greens had won out in the adoption of the Green Program at the
1990 Green Congress and in how to structure the Green Party at the Green
Congress in 1991. In 1991, the pre-party Green Committees of Correspondence
voted overwhelmingly to become The Greens/Green Party USA (GPUSA), with a
democratic structure based on accountable representation elected by active,
dues-paying members, and with the purpose being a movement-based party that
participated in popular social movements and gave them independent electoral
expression. These decisions were defeats for the realos. They objected to the
socialistic economic demands in the Green Program and had thus proposed to
separate a strictly electoral party from the movement-based Green
Committees of
Correspondence and to structure this Green Party like the Democrats and
Republicans, with a "membership" based on state-regulated enrollment lists,
from which mandate for a more moderate program could be concocted by the party
leadership, and which, as an atomized, unorganized mass, could not control the
party oligarchy.

The realos withdrew from GPUSA and began counter-organizing against GPUSA:
smear campaigns, red-baiting, the whole nine yards. They got nowhere until the
1996 Nader campaign when they were able to successfully convince a few of the
existing state Green parties, but mainly the many new people in the Draft
Nader
Committees, that there was no national Green Party and therefore they must
form
an Association of State Green Parties. GPUSA wasn't recognized as a "national
committee" by the Federal Election Commission (FEC), but it certainly was and
is active. Most of the GPUSA affiliated state Green parties have also
affiliated with ASGP and as the ASGP affiliated state parties find more
left-leaning activists coming in, the whole left-right debate on program and
structure is re-emerging inside ASGP.  After four years of ASGP refusing to
negotiate with GPUSA about a unified Green Party, at ASGP's national committee
meeting in Denver just before the convention, the left inside ASGP won a vote
to get ASGP to negotiate with GPUSA.

I think a likely outcome of the negotiations will be a registrant-based Green
Party evolving from ASGP that accommodates state election laws and the FEC,
but
is more democratic than the current ASGP structure, and a Green activist
membership organization, a national network of party clubs, evolving from
GPUSA. The GPUSA successor "clubs" will stand in relation to the ASGP
successor
"party" the way the old Left Green Network stood in relation to the old Green
Committees of Correspondence, or the way the Bolsheviks stood in relation to
the pre-1917 Russion Social Democratic Labor Party (but with no pretense to
democratic centralism). The "Mensheviks" in the Green Party have their
party-within-the-party too, an organization called the Green Network.

GPUSA's membership is about 1300. The Green Network's membership is much
smaller. I would guess 50 to 100 at most. They have a very low, virtually
secretive, profile within the Green Party movement. New members must be
sponsored by current members. There are about 150,000 enrolled/registered
Greens in the state parties, but that will climb rapidly as more states get
ballot status in this election. If Nader's 4-8% poll numbers hold up, about
4-8
million people will vote for the Green presidential candidate.

That's the picture. The left is still there, but organized in GPUSA, not the
Left Green Network. The important thing is that it stay organized and help all
the new people coming in get organized at the base, which is the only antidote
to the old "iron law of oligarchy" in left electoral parties.

--Howie Hawkins