03.10.2024

No illusions in greens

Under the leadership of Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay, the Green Party has moved considerably to the right. Despite that there are some on the left who want to sign up. Carla Roberts is unconvinced

The attraction of the Green Party has been growing in direct proportion to the disorganisation of the left. The failure of Jeremy Corbyn and Corbynism to, firstly, wage a fight against the right when he was running the Labour Party and, secondly, to organise any kind of coherent opposition to the rightward march of Starmer, has led to many people on the left to look at the Green Party as a possible alternative. There are even some disorientated folk in our periphery who look kindly upon Greens - clearly they have not grasped the ABCs of communist politics.

The dire state of forces to the left of Labour, with its tiny confessional sects and sometimes deranged political outlook, is partially to blame. The newly (mis)named Revolutionary Communist Party with its hysteric prediction that there is going to be a “British revolution” within “the next five or 10 years” (so better sleep with your boots on) is just one, particular, example (as an aside, its revolving door is spitting out many disillusioned, older activists who cut their political teeth in Socialist Appeal). Many of these groups have almost indistinguishable versions of the ‘transitional programme’ - and yet insist on maintaining their group existence, all the while pretending that other groups do not exist or are not worth talking to. This kind of behaviour makes pretty much the whole left appear strange, if not totally crazy, to the wider working class population.

Perhaps most importantly, the Greens present a national alternative to Labour and the Tories - unlike the localist, deeply uninspiring nonsense that Jeremy Corbyn, Andrew Feinstein, Jamie Driscoll et al are currently taking up their time with. It does not look as if Collective will become a ‘party’ in any meaningful way any time soon, despite former Unite general secretary Len McCluskey trying to push things along.¹

So we cannot really blame the unorganised Corbynistas and soft lefts who are currently drawn to the Greens, especially considering the imminent danger to the continued existence of human life on earth that the climate catastrophe poses. Further, the formation last month of ‘Greens Organise’, which includes many former soft Labour lefties, including Corbyn’s advisor, Matt Zarb-Cousin, has given the impression that perhaps socialists could do some useful work in the Green Party and ‘win over’ some of the membership to “mobilise a diverse working class, and secure a broad mandate for an internationalist, anti-capitalist, and ecologically transformative agenda”, as this new platform proposes to do.²

Current programme

That would be an uphill struggle, to put it mildly. Under the leadership of Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay (in charge since 2021), the Green Party has moved considerably to the right - as a quick comparison between the election manifestos of 2017 and 2024 shows. While there is no trace to be found of the 2017 programme on their website, Jack Conrad noted in the Little red climate book that it called for the “abolition of the standing armed forces”; “replacing the monarchy with a republic”; and “withdrawal from Nato”.³

Perhaps this is now so embarrassing to the leadership that it has decided to do some Stalin-like airbrushing. We are under no illusion that the party was ever going to try and implement those radical-democratic demands. In any case, they have certainly been ditched in the 2024 manifesto, in favour of more ‘reasonable’ policies such as “replacing the House of Lords with an elected second chamber”. But there is no mention of the monarchy (or the army, for that matter).

The manifesto does, however, feature the party’s new pro-imperialist line on Nato, adopted at its spring conference 2023: “Nato has an important role in ensuring the ability of its member-states to respond to threats to their security” and the party “would work within Nato to achieve a greater focus on global peace-building”.⁴

This is the sort of “peace-building” where you actually support war, you understand: The Green Party “continues to support Ukraine” and takes a ‘bad apples on both sides’ view, when it comes to Israel-Palestine: “We condemned the appalling murder of hundreds of Israeli civilians by Hamas, and since then have watched in horror as Israeli forces have committed war crimes that have caused the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.”

The Greens have also bought fully into the big lie that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism and the party has adopted the fake definition of anti-Semitism published by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, describing it as “the gold standard definition by most Jewish institutions”, which “should clearly be a pre-eminent source for understanding anti-Semitism”.⁵ Only if you are unaware of the widespread criticism over the ‘working definition’, which is, as many have pointed out, neither a definition nor about anti-Semitism! It is about defending Zionism and preventing criticism of Israel.

In a gushing portrait of Denyer and Ramsay, The Guardian describes their political outlook: “They have brought this relentless, almost ruthless focus on electoral victories.” In other words, the Greens have offered themselves up as willing coalition partners, beginning in city, town and county halls.

As to their internal democratic structures, this is how their 15-person-strong executive committee works, according to a “Green Party official”: “We don’t generally try to make decisions by votes very often. The whole idea is consensus - to talk it through as long as we need. Obviously, that can lead to some really long meetings, and sometimes you just want to get things done.”⁶ The ‘tyranny of structurelessness’ in full flow.

You do not have to be German to be reminded of the victory of the pro-government ‘realo’ wing of Joschka Fischer over the more leftwing ‘fundis’ in the German Green Party. That trajectory has culminated in the German Greens now being the most gung-ho when it comes to sending missiles and tanks to Ukraine for example - an entirely pro-imperialist party. All such major green parties across Europe have gone a similar way and Britain is no different.

When it comes to the economy, the Greens are, yes, “committed to the public ownership of public services, so they are run to serve us all, rather than to increase the wealth of shareholders”. Public ownership here does not mean ‘in the hands of the workers’, we should point out, but the capitalist state. So they want the railways, etc run by Sir Keir Starmer on behalf of the ‘people’. “Community ownership to be encouraged through greater access to government funding in the transition to a zero-carbon economy.” The Green Party “would push for a Green Economic Transformation to include a £40 billion investment per year in the shift to a green economy over the course of the next parliament”, etc, etc. In other words, the whole programme is about administering capitalism, not opposing it.

We can already hear our Green sympathisers shouting, ‘Well, the Labour Party - even under Jeremy Corbyn - did not fight capitalism either and yet you intervened actively with Labour Party Marxists!’

I cannot argue with that. We would still intervene in Labour, in fact, if most of our members had not been thrown out as part of the witch-hunt. We argue, however, that the Labour Party - even today - remains what Lenin dubbed a “bourgeois workers’ party”: at one pole are thoroughly corrupt career politicians, ever eager to serve capitalism and its interests; but it is the other pole, based on the working class through the electoral base and the affiliation of trade unions, which makes the Labour Party a different beast altogether.

Labour presents Marxists with a fertile ground on which to fight for the political independence of the working class. Less fertile than 10 years ago, for sure, but much more fertile than the Green Party, which has no union affiliations - and does not even seek them. There is no talk of socialism, even in the distorted form common in the Labour Party. The ‘working class’ is totally absent in the Green Party as a subject of history.

Popularity

Yes, Marxists should always try to understand why people (especially those on the left) do particular things. We do not ignore the increasing popularity of Green politics among some sections of the working class, be it in the shape of the Green Party or elite direct-action organisations like Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion. Many people are drawn to these politics out of understandable rejection of the political status quo and a desire to do something to fight the climate catastrophe and to make life just a bit less miserable. Many of these are people that should and could be won to our programme for communism and human liberation.

But how? Not by subordinating ourselves to Green politics, we would argue - and not by joining with Greens Organise or setting up a communist platform or faction in the Green Party, as has been suggested. Such a platform might give us a more ‘direct’ route to any radical Greens, but it would come at a serious political cost. We would be propping up a party that is, politically and sociologically, neither of nor for the working class. We would, through our actions, tell the working class that we want them to join, too - when we know that the Green Party is a political dead end and most certainly not the way to get to socialism. That would be criminally stupid.

As we have already outlined, one of the main reasons why the Greens look to some like a good alternative is the pathetic nature of the left today. This is where our main focus should lie: working towards a revolution in the culture of the left and building a principled and democratic Communist Party - a party that actually fights for what is necessary to stop the climate catastrophe: a radical change of system, the overthrow of capitalism, not its greenwashing.

That is precisely our key criticism: the politics of Greenism are based not on the self-liberation of the working class, which is the only realistic strategy to positively end the antagonism between humanity and nature - but are designed to become part of the management team of a system that is the cause of the climate crisis.

Marxists try to intervene with Green politics in a principled way and from the outside, not by propping up the bureaucratic-capitalist election machine of Denyer and Ramsay. Our Little red climate book, for example, was such an attempt. No doubt, we could do more ... but one thing we should not do is lose our strategic bearings.

1. See ‘Corbyn’s maybe party’ Weekly Worker September 19 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1507/corbyns-maybe-party) and ‘Hidden divisions in Collective’, September 26 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1508/hidden-divisions-in-collective).↩︎

2. greensorganise.uk.↩︎

3. J Conrad Little red climate book London 2023, p51.↩︎

4. greenparty.org.uk/about/our-manifesto/a-fairer-greener-world.↩︎

5. members.greenparty.org.uk/sites/default/files/2022-08/Antisemitism-a-guidance 070821.pdf.↩︎

6. The Guardian June 27.↩︎