WeeklyWorker

18.09.2025
Re, re, revolutionary on demos; re, re, reformist in elections

No popular front with Greens

Though the Green Party has no ‘socialist ideology’, SPEW calls for it to affiliate to Your Party. The SWP calls for election deals and voting for ‘principled leftwing Greens’. Jack Conrad calls for independent, class politics

‘What we think’, The Socialist’s editorial, says the Greens should be “invited to affiliate” by Your Party (otherwise known as the Jeremy Corbyn Party).1 An outrageous suggestion, not because of the sure-fire certainty that, if ever made, any such invitation would be flatly rejected. After all the Greens boast of being on track to get 30 MPs at the next general election and wanting to “replace the Labour Party”.2 No, what is politically outrageous is the suggestion itself.

Class lines are abandoned, forgotten or rejected … and in pursuit of what? A Labour Party mark two, a popular front, cross-class, federal party and the forlorn hope of receiving an official YP invitation to affiliate! Such a thoroughly misconceived strategy - and that is what it is - inevitably culminates in paying no more than lip service to establishing “an independent working class party”.3 That is, sadly, what the much vaunted ‘transitional method’ amounts to in practice. Paradoxically, tactics become all.4

The Socialist’s ‘Polanski wins Green leadership’ editorial must be regarded as an authoritative statement on behalf of the Socialist Party in England and Wales (which, of course, publishes, finances and tightly controls the paper). Perhaps the final edit was done by the six-strong ‘newspaper team’: Josh Asker, Mark Best, Chris Newby, Scott Jones, Ian Pattison and Paula Mitchell (normally all HQ-based full-timers). But, whoever actually wrote the damned piece, while editor Josh Asker carries a particular responsibility, we must place prime blame for what is class treachery on SPEW’s leadership as a whole.5

The editorial comes, needless to say, in the immediate aftermath of Zack Polanski’s stunning victory in the Green Party. He trounced his MP rivals, Adrian Ramsay and Ellie Chowns - running on a joint ticket - by a massive 85% to 15% margin. Membership, note, now stands at around 85,000 and there was a 37% turnout. A figure which includes many recent, thoroughly disorientated, leftwing joiners. Polanski’s leadership bid was also backed by James Meadway in the Morning Star and The Guardian’s house-trained leftwinger, Owen Jones.6

A former Liberal Democrat, Polanski became what he calls an “eco-populist” in the 2020s - a sobriquet which amalgamates standard environmental concerns with asks for a wealth tax, public ownership and criticism of Nato. Polanski thinks that Donald Trump means the Greens’ commitment to Nato is now “out of date” and should be replaced by a European defence pact.7

Of course, taxing the rich and renationalisation hardly amount to socialism. Taxation costs the capitalists, when it comes to their bottom line - but tax revenues maintain the capitalist state, without which the capitalists cannot maintain their rule.8 Nor is renationalisation akin to the expropriation and workers’ control we favour. Wage-slavery continues. As for a European defence pact, it would defend - and advance - the interests of European capitalism in exploiting and robbing the world.

With good reason then, as The Socialist says, the “Greens are not a party rooted in or emanating from the workers’ movement …. The party also - consciously - does not have a socialist ideology, a vision of an alternative system to capitalism.”

History

In fact, the Greens are historically rooted in Young England conservatism and Malthusian overpopulation theories, propounded by the likes of Paul R Ehrlich. In January 1972 Edward Goldsmith published ‘A blueprint for survival’ in his magazine, The Ecologist. Shortly thereafter issued in book form by Penguin, it sold 750,000 copies. Goldsmith and fellow author Robert Allen have, perhaps unfairly, been described as ‘blackshirts with green welly boots’. They argued for cutting the British population by 50%, repatriating immigrants, small-scale farms, tight-knit communities, living in harmony with nature, establishing a social order based on the patriarchal family and something resembling the Indian caste system.9 More than a whiff of Jorian Jenks (farmer, environmental pioneer and genuine 1930s fascist).10

On such foundations, Michael Benfield, Freda Sanders, Tony Whittaker and Lesley Whittaker established the PEOPLE party in November 1972. Goldsmith merged his Movement for Survival with PEOPLE and became one of its leading figures. A year later it morphed into the Ecology Party and, 10 years after that, the Green Party (UK).

Today, the Green Party in England and Wales has moved considerably to the left. Its 2024 general election manifesto, Real hope, real change, contains more than a few worthwhile demands: public ownership of energy, water and railways, build council houses, end the right to buy, abolish all the post-1979 anti-trade union laws, proportional representation, self-determination for Scotland and Wales, brand Israel guilty of genocide.11 Considerably more radical than Sir Keir’s 2024 offer for sure and this duly produced a crop of leftwing ‘big name’ endorsements: eg, Jennie Formby, Jamie Driscoll, George Monbiot, Owen Jones, Grace Blakeley, Laura Parker12 … and in the ‘small name’ league, the blogger Phil Burton-Cartledge, formerly of this parish.13

Hence rightwing accusations that the Greens are a ‘watermelon party’: green on the outside, red on the inside. A tired joke: Green perspectives remain firmly located within the narrow confines of capitalist society.

True, there is an implicit rejection of monopoly capitalism, state hypertrophy and the ecologically destructive logic of production for the sake of production. However, sole traders, local businesses, mutual banks, cooperative enterprises are upheld as the alternative. Towards that end the Bank of England is to be given a mandate to fund the transition to a “fairer”, green capitalism based on small and medium businesses: apparently the “lifeblood of our economy and our communities”.14 Finance capital is, at least in the imagination, reined in, but continues, albeit in responsible form. Essentially the same happens with industrial capital.

Electorally, the Greens are disproportionately young, student, female, well-educated and renting.15 Programmatically, however, the Green Party are unmistakably a petty bourgeois party which wants to reform capitalism in the interests of the petty bourgeoisie … and that, if the need arises, makes it eminently buyable by the big bourgeoisie. Already there are a few biggish donors.16 But, the more MPs and the nearer to coalition politics they come, there will be those “no strings” donations generously provided by billionaires.

Note, in 2021, Germany’s Greens “received more large donations than Angela Merkel’s party”.17 In government from 2021 to 2024 they distinguished themselves from their social democratic and free democrat partners by their militarism, greenwashing and neo-liberalism. They unconditionally supported Israeli war in Gaza. Green foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, and Green vice chancellor, Robert Habeck, even rejected calls for a “humanitarian ceasefire”.18 When it came to Nato’s proxy war in Ukraine the Greens spearheaded demands for the delivery of heavy weapons and escalation.

Federalism

So why on earth does SPEW want the Greens invited to affiliate to YP/JCP?

Psychoanalysis might possibly suggest that the answer lies in a collective desire to return to the comforting womb of Labourism ... and, as the Labour Party itself is now, wrongly, spurned as just another capitalist party, we have the repetitive, obsessive and self-destructive commitment to various Labour Party mark two projects and elevating federalism into a cardinal principle.19 Not that we would propose a course of therapeutic treatment. No, we would urge comrades to study, openly rebel and join us in the struggle for a mass Communist Party.

A mark two Labour Party and federalism as a cardinal principle also sees SPEW calling for YP trade union affiliation, even describing trade unions - and therefore under current conditions the trade union bureaucracy - as not just representing “the interests of their members in the workplace, but the general interests of working class people”.20 A categorical error, which reveals a profound ignorance of the ABCs of Marxism.21

In the absence of communist leadership - and strict accountability - trade unions will, at best, represent the sectional interests of their members in securing better terms in the sale of labour-power. At worst trade unions represent the sectional interests of the trade union bureaucracy itself!

No, it is the Marxist party, the Social Democratic Party, the Communist Party - call it what you will - which alone can represent the general interests of the working class: not just in relation to this or that employer, but in relation to all classes in society. Alone such a party is built around a principled minimum-maximum programme. Alone such a party combines democracy with centralism. Alone such a party imposes collective control over elected officials - in parliament, in the council chamber and in trade union committee rooms.

As an exception, we can advocate federalism at a state level: eg, a federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales. We can also accept as a historic fact the Labour Party as a federal party made up of affiliated trade unions, cooperatives and socialist organisations (and demand an end to the anti-communist bans and proscriptions). But our overriding principle is democratic centralism. Without that we have little chance of overthrowing and superseding capitalism.

James Schneider, an important Corbyn insider, has also argued for a “federated organisation”, albeit in order to lay the “foundations” for some sort of left-populist party.22 With that in mind he proposes to work “constructively” with the Greens, even holding joint primaries to choose candidates.23 Class lines are abandoned, forgotten or rejected once again.

Not that Polanski reciprocates. Asked if the Greens might hypothetically stand down candidates in a pact with the YP/JCP, he said: “It’s not my starting point, because at the moment I’m not quite sure what Zarah Sultana’s and Jeremy Corbyn’s platform is going to be.” However, Polanski said he expected the Green programme to be more radical and would need to be shown “very strong arguments” for any formal pact. A more likely outcome would be cooperation over which seats each party targeted.24

Threefold

Exactly what the SWP proposes. Socialists and Greens will “need to avoid running against each other in some constituencies to boot out Labour. But there should be no blanket policy of standing aside for all Greens - only principled leftwing ones.”25 By the way, this formulation reveals that the SWP argue not just for “standing aside” for so-called “principled leftwing” Greens … but, one presumes, voting for them. Class lines are abandoned, forgotten or rejected.

And what about Labour? It does, after all, remain, no matter how attenuated, a bourgeois workers’ party, crucially through trade union affiliations. What about the Labour left? Should we seek to “boot out” Labour leftwingers? The SWP appears to be just as confused as SPEW.

This can be seen in spades with Socialist Worker editor Tomáš Tengely-Evans. Writing an ‘in-depth’ article, he rightly excoriates Sir Keir Starmer and his government over welfare cuts, the priority given to Britain’s war machine, the blind eye turned to the Gaza genocide, the scapegoating of illegal migrants.26 This, he says, stems from the very DNA of Labourism. It is not simply the result of the centrality given to the election of a Labour government (what might be called electoralism).

Besides treating the Labour Party as a lucrative career ladder, receiving all manner of juicy bribes and fear of falling foul of an omnipresent capitalist mass media, there is, amongst Labourites, a thoroughly internalised commitment to the existing state and its constitution. When it comes down to it, that means subordination to what is commonly called the national interest (ie, the continuation of capitalist exploitation).

Time and again this has seen Labour governments junk even mild-mannered election promises in the name of ‘fiscal responsibility’ and restoring national economic fortunes. So it was with the first two minority governments of Ramsay MacDonald. So it was with Clement Attlee’s majority government and those of Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Sir Keir Starmer that followed.

However, the problem with comrade Tengely-Evans’ account is threefold.

Firstly, he, along with the SWP as a whole, is committed to the YP/JCP being no more than an umbrella. We take that as just another way of presenting ‘federalism’, albeit not as a cardinal principle. Secondly, while comrade Tengely-Evans sees the Labour right as committed to the nation-state, he sees the Labour left as committed to the working class: “the contradiction between class and nation within Labour leads to the party’s left-right divide”. Another categorical error, this time an SWP one, which again reveals a profound ignorance of the ABCs of Marxism.

The Labour left, even in exile, is just as committed to the nation-state as the Labour right. Their ‘socialism’, if you can call it that nowadays, remains very much of the national sort. Jeremy Corbyn’s For the many, not the few (2017) promised and promoted the illusion that the country could be taken back to a future where the social democratic consensus once again reigns. But, while Corbyn peppered his programme with countless references to peace and justice and the occasional reference to class, there can be no doubt about his commitment to the nation-state. Comrade Tengely-Evans either does not understand that salient fact or he wants to flatter, make excuses, provide political cover for YP - crucially Jeremy Corbyn himself. After all, his politics are still 100% Labour left.

Thirdly, comrade Tengely-Evans seems to have turned being organisationally outside the ranks of the Labour Party into a cardinal principle, presumably because today that describes the SWP and Corbyn, Sultana, etc. He seems totally unaware that the first generation of SWP leaders, under the initial guise of the Socialist Review Group, then the International Socialists, were to be found deeply ensconced in the bowels of the Labour Party throughout the 1950s and well into the late 1960s. Supposedly, they were under no “illusion … about transforming the Labour Party into a revolutionary party”. They were there to maintain “regular contact with people in the labour movement” … and “to recruit”, mainly from Labour’s youth section.27

While comrade Tengely-Evans is surely living proof of the SWP’s current philistinism, there can be no doubt about its origins. Tony Cliff - the SWP’s founder leader - prided himself in having “one rule”, a rule he “always followed”: do not read the “sectarian literature” of rival organisations. He took great satisfaction in “never” having read Gerry Healy’s paper, nor that of the Mandelite International Marxist Group (now Anticapitalist Resistance). Instead he “avidly read” the “wider left press”, not least Tribune, which had “significant influence on the left in general”.28 Note, Healy’s Socialist Labour League was then the biggest Trotskyite organisation in Britain and for a time controlled Labour’s youth section, the Young Socialists. Frankly, one cannot imagine a Lenin or a Trotsky adopting such a stupid rule, let alone religiously sticking to it.

It has to be admitted, that the SWP’s third generation of leaders - comrades Tomáš Tengely-Evans, Lewis Nielson and Joseph Choonara - are hardly distinguishable from left Labourism ... certainly when it comes to elections. Look at the platform which their Maxine Bowler stood on as an independent candidate for Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough in July 2024: Palestine, Palestine, Palestine … that and vague opposition to government “anti-migrant racism, attacks on working class people, and all their rotten policies”.29 Recycled left Labourism, in other words.

Real class struggle

Meanwhile, in the pages of Socialist Worker, chosen SWP writers, eg, comrade Tengely-Evans, will, when it suits, pose as r-r-revolutionaries by proclaiming that the “real struggle of the working class” is “more important than winning elections”.30 As if elections cannot be made into a form of the real class struggle. Frankly, such a statement either displays a complete lack self-awareness - that or it reveals out-and-out hypocrisy. The reader can judge.

It’s not just the third generation of SWP leaders. The second generation - John Rees, Lindsey German, Alex Callinicos and Martin Smith - ensured that the Socialist Alliance of the early 2000s limited itself to almost entirely economic demands, when it came to our “priority pledges”. Indeed, whereas we in the CPGB wanted democratic questions - such as a federal republic, self-determination for Scotland and Wales, Irish unity, the abolition of the monarchy, upholding free speech, replacing the standing army with a popular militia and opposing calls for a British withdrawal from the EU - in order to distinguish ourselves from bog-standard left Labourism - the SWP used its majority to present the Socialist Alliance as ‘old Labour’ during election campaigns.

Officially it characterised the Socialist Alliance as a “united front between revolutionary socialists and left Labourites”.31 Suffice to say, there were precious few actual ‘old Labour’ exiles. ‘Independent’ comrades, such as Mike Marqusee, Dave Church, Nick Wrack and Anna Chen, generally self-identified themselves as Marxists of one sort or another. But the largely imaginary ‘old Labour’ exiles set the programmatic limits of the Socialist Alliance.

Worse was to come. In the Respect “united front between revolutionary socialists and Muslim activists” the SWP once again used its majority - this time to vote down motions advocating international socialism, republicanism, replacing the standing army with a popular militia, abortion rights, opposition to migration controls, etc. The electorate must not be put off. Such was the SWP’s almost Blairite argument. This time it was, though, George Galloway, Yvonne Ridley, Salma Yaqoob, the Muslim Association of Britain and various British-Asian businessmen who set the programmatic limits … the result being that Respect stood on a left Labourite platform in elections.

Tribunes

For communists, standing in parliamentary elections and using our MPs as ‘tribunes of the oppressed’ to expose government lies, secrets and intrigues is most definitely a real form of the class struggle. Our forces can thereby be educated, organised … and “multiplied”.32

If we were to rank different forms of the class struggle in terms of their importance, we would place routine economic struggles at the bottom and making revolution at the top, elections coming somewhere in the middle. Meanwhile, Tweedledum-Tweedledee elections, where voters are asked to choose between lesser evils, serve the ruling class to fool most of the people, most of the time.

But, if we can get our act together, if we can form a real, as opposed to a fake, Communist Party, elections can become one of our most effective weapons, especially in non-revolutionary times.33 Hence we “consider it obligatory for the Communist Party” to stand candidates, not least because we want to use “every avenue” to propagate our ideas, in the struggle to form the working class into a class for itself, a class that is ready to take state power.34 Indeed success in elections could quite conceivably be the antechamber for social revolution.

  1. ‘What we think’ The Socialist September 11-17 2025.↩︎

  2. www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd0d0d08jnjo.↩︎

  3. See C Joyce ‘Trotsky’s transitional method: how to win workers and youth for socialism?’ (www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/121337/21-02-2024/trotskys-transitional-method-how-to-win-workers-and-youth-for-socialism).↩︎

  4. For the last of my many critiques of the so-called ‘transitional method’ see ‘Programmatic starting point’ Weekly Worker February 27 2025.↩︎

  5. Gensec Hannah Sell and SPEW’s exec should definitely not escape blame. We are told, after all, that the “editorial team works closely with the executive committee of the Socialist Party and others at the national centre to check the content of articles when necessary” (www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/27528/20-06-2018/how-do-we-produce-the-socialist). One presumes that includes editorials on the Greens and YP.↩︎

  6. Morning Star July 4 2025; The Guardian March 7 2025.↩︎

  7. Byline Times May 8 2025.↩︎

  8. Under capitalist conditions we support the abolition of indirect taxes and a system of progressive taxation on income and wealth. Incidentally, David Harvey claims that Marx on taxation “remains an empty box in his theorising” (D Harvey Marx, Capital and the madness of economic reason Oxford 2017, p15). Not entirely untrue: Marx’s book on The state, as projected in the Grundrisse, proved stillborn, along with the books on Landed property, Wage labour, Foreign trade and the World market. Nonetheless, Marx, Engels and their close collaborator, Willhelm Wolff - whom Marx dedicated Capital Vol 1 to - had a good deal to say on the matter of taxes in their journalism and letters (See D Ireland ‘What Marxist tax policies actually look like’ - brill.com/view/journals/hima/27/2/article-p188_6.xml.↩︎

  9. See E Goldsmith and R Allen A blueprint for survival Harmondsworth 1972.↩︎

  10. See PM Coupland Farming, fascism and ecology: a life of Jorian Jenks London 2017.↩︎

  11. greenparty.org.uk/app/uploads/2024/06/Green-Party-2024-General-Election-Manifesto-Long-version-with-cover.pdf.↩︎

  12. bright-green.org/2024/06/19/who-are-the-high-profile-figures-who-have-endorsed-the-greens.↩︎

  13. averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-green-partys-leftism.html.↩︎

  14. A phrase repeated 69 times in the 2024 Green Party manifesto - greenparty.org.uk/app/uploads/2024/06/Green-Party-2024-General-Election-Manifesto-Long-version-with-cover.pdf.↩︎

  15. yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/49978-how-britain-voted-in-the-2024-general-election.↩︎

  16. donation.watch/en/unitedkingdom/party/GPEW/donors.↩︎

  17. The Guardian September 7 2021.↩︎

  18. www.theleftberlin.com/greens-germany-neoliberal.↩︎

  19. See S Freud Beyond the pleasure principle London 1961.↩︎

  20. ‘What we think’ The Socialist September 3-9 2025.↩︎

  21. Most famously, of course, Lenin’s ‘What is to be done?’, where he describes the “[t]rade unionist politics of the working class” as the “bourgeois politics of the working class” (VI Lenin CW Vol 5 Moscow 1977, p426).↩︎

  22. newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/building-the-party.↩︎

  23. Novara Media, July 25 2025.↩︎

  24. The Guardian September 3 2025.↩︎

  25. Socialist Worker September 10-16 2025.↩︎

  26. T Tengely-Evans ‘Why the left must break from Labourism’ Socialist Worker March 26 2025.↩︎

  27. T Cliff A world to win: life of a revolutionary London 2000, pp59-60.↩︎

  28. T Cliff A world to win: life of a revolutionary London 2000, p62.↩︎

  29. Socialist Worker May 31 2024.↩︎

  30. Revealingly this formulation almost instantly disappeared online. It was changed in the print version from this: “A break from Labourism would mean seeing working class struggle as more important than winning elections. It means subordinating electoral calculations to boosting the real struggles of the working class” (my emphasis - T Tengely-Evans ‘Why the left must break from Labourism’ Socialist Worker March 26 2025). After being up online for no more than a few days, it became this: “A break from Labourism would mean seeing working class struggle as most important in winning change. It means subordinating electoral and parliamentary calculations to boosting the confidence and organisation of the working class to fight” (socialistworker.co.uk/in-depth/labourism-is-holding-us-back-the-left-must-break-with-it). Presumably, some senior comrade(s) saw Tomáš’s screamingly obvious blunder and went ballistic. Humiliatingly, TTE had to agree to the change formulated by the real editor(s).↩︎

  31. See J Conrad Towards a Socialist Alliance party London 2001, p25.↩︎

  32. J Conrad In the enemy camp London 1993, p18.↩︎

  33. Despite the absurd claims of this, that or the other confessional sect, there is, of course, no real Communist Party today (certainly not the Morning Star’s CPB, the Brarite CPGB-ML or the Woods-Sewell RCP).↩︎

  34. J Conrad Which road? London 1991, p97.↩︎