11.03.2004

New Greens pose left

Party notes

Another election, another rebranding. Following the successful examples of Tony Blair’s New Labour and Michael Howard’s New Tories comes the New Greens.

Darren Johnson and Jean Lambert are giving the Green Party a “new look” in the run-up to the ‘super Thursday’ elections on June 10. No longer do they want to be seen as a single-issue party, obsessed with bottle banks and wind farms. Instead the idea is to promote themselves as “the progressive force in British politics” by stressing the “connection between the environment and social justice” (original emphasis).

The strategy is to outflank the Liberal Democrats to the left and capture a mass of traditional Labour supporters who have been alienated by the Iraq war and the failure to transform public services. Charles Kennedy is accused of being an “opportunist” - lukewarm against the war and soft on anti-pollution measures such as an air fuel tax.

Meeting at their spring conference - Hove March 11-14 - Green Party delegates are promised a breakthrough. They already have Caroline Lucas and Jean Lambert in the European parliament, three seats on the 25-member Greater London Authority - not least deputy mayor Jenny Jones - and 53 councillors. Their hope is for six MEPs, “more” assembly members and a “20%” increase in councillors. Motions tabled for debate at Hove included asylum-seekers, human rights, cannabis, gay rights and Iraq. And in a further effort to boost radical credentials Bob Crow, Howard Marks and Peter Tatchell feature as guest speakers.

Obviously the Greens not only present a challenge to Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Respect has marked out and is therefore competing on exactly the same territory. The main difference between the two organisations being that Respect is newly formed, untried and possesses nothing by way of a programme except a dozen skeletal bullet points.

The less you have to say to electors, the more likely they are to vote for you, reckons the Socialist Workers Party. Insulting, demagogic and doomed to fail. Working class people already get enough empty soundbites and flatulent promises from mainstream parties. What life cries out for is a vehicle for self-liberation: a Communist Party, organised on the principles of democratic centralism, enshrining the right to form permanent factions and guided by a Marxist programme. As a first step, that requires the unity of revolutionary socialists and communists as revolutionary socialists and communists. Not electoralist unity with islamic fundamentalists and vote-chasing.

The SWP’s inspiration is supposed to be the revolutionary tradition of Marxism and in particular the Bolshevik Party in 1917. According to the comrades, all the Bolsheviks needed to lead the October Revolution was one simple slogan: ‘Land, bread and peace’. Self-serving nonsense, of course.

Marxists have always taken the greatest care with every aspect of their programme. Look at the many months of exhausting work put into the Manifesto of the Communist Party by the Karl Marx-Fredrick Engels team (which in March 1848 gave birth to the much shorter immediate programme - the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany). Nor should we forget the thoroughgoing critiques written by Marx and Engels of first the Gotha and then the Erfurt programme of German social democracy.

What of Russia? Over 1902-3 Georgi Plekhanov and Vladimir Lenin fired off rival draft programmes. And the Bolsheviks organically developed their own programme through intensive debate. Incidentally, a debate carried out openly in front of the working class and the entire reading public. Their press routinely carried page after page of argument and counter-argument.

The period from February to October 1917 was, for example, not only characterised by dual power, soviets, general strikes, workers’ control and armed demonstrations. For the Bolsheviks and the working class, especially in Petrograd and Moscow, it was eight months of heated programmatic debate and clarification. Lenin’s ‘April thesis’ put flesh on the ‘revolutionary dictatorship of the workers and peasants’ and reorientated the Bolshevik Party towards peacefully winning a soviet majority, achieving hegemony over the peasants and making a second revolution - a process culminating in their wholesale adoption of the entire agrarian programme of the Socialist Revolutionaries.

In contrast to Respect and its programmatic minimalism, the Green Party has a 30-year history, a well oiled democratic structure of branches, districts and international links, proven popular support and detailed agreed policies covering everything from global warming to road bumps. Eg, the Greens have a 27-point programme for population and a 33-point programme covering migration.

Unmistakably the Greens are an anti-establishment party. Current laws on cannabis, immigration and the trade unions are rejected. The Greens are also anti-racist, anti-homophobic and celebrate what they call “diversity”. Ethical notions of justice and equality are vigorously promoted. Women occupy an impressive number of positions in their hierarchy. They rail against the consequences of uncontrolled profit-making - poverty, waste and ecological degradation. George Bush’s invasion of Iraq is condemned as a neo-imperialism and climate change is declared to be a much bigger threat than terrorism.

In the long term the world envisaged by the Greens is organised into unspecified zones - the nation-state dissolves - and each zone is self-sustaining and in balance with nature. Meanwhile those in the advanced areas consume less and less of the planet’s precious resources - achieved through technology, energy-saving, public transport, etc. Those in backward areas are uplifted through education and substantial material transfers. Mass migration thereby ceases and population growth is slowed, halted and eventually put into reverse. The Greens no longer specify population targets - a few years ago, though, it was 20 million for Britain. Numbers above that are said to be unsustainable.

The Greens’ programme is an undoubted source of strength. But there are severe limitations and hidden dangers. Limitations and hidden dangers which could easily be exposed by Respect - if it did not itself stand on a miniature version of the same thing, but instead adopted a full-blooded Marxist programme.

Let us highlight two areas in particular.

l The Greens put nature, not human beings, first. They view people as a problem. We are akin to a plague: there are too many of us. In the final analysis that leads to gas chambers. Communists disagree with all such neo-Malthusianism. There is no reason why the planet could not support two, five, ten times the present population. Fundamentally it depends on social organisation. Human beings rely on nature, true, but nature has become thoroughly humanised. There is no nature nowadays without human beings. Environmental destruction must be stopped for the sake of humanity.

l The Greens want people to live in harmony with nature. Today that sees them pose left; however, tomorrow they could just as easily flip to the right. They have no viable agency for change apart from the existing state. The working class and its struggle for socialism and communism are rejected in favour of a downsized capitalism. Solace for the middle classes and besieged petty bourgeoisie, but pure utopianism. Without the working class there can be no progressive social change. Nor can the wheel of history be turned backwards. The future relies on the working class taking over from where capitalism has left off: ie, an integrated world market and world economy.

John Rees - SWP leader and Respect’s national secretary - has put on a touching display of making overtures to the Greens. Overtures that are, presumably, simultaneously designed to appear reasonable and guaranteed to be rejected. Basically the Greens were told to stand on Respect’s list for the European and London elections. Not surprisingly this invitation to leave behind 30 years of slowly accumulated popular support for the uncertainties of Respect was flatly turned down. Spencer Fitz-Gibbon, a member of the Greens’ executive, described the offer, from what he contemptuously calls the “Galloway-SWP party”, as “not very appealing”. He also mocks Respect’s politics as “a pale imitation of Green Party policy”.

The Greens appear supremely confident that their track record, string of elected representatives and “joined-up, thought-through, comprehensive policy base” will allow them to press ahead and easily see off Respect on June 10. Unfortunately they could be right; and, if that proves to be the case, the SWP bears the main responsibility.

Control-freakery, exclusion of critical voices, programmatic minimalism and lack of patience disarms and disempowers. Moreover, the probability is that, if Respect fails to make a significant impact on June 10, the SWP will simply cut and run and ditch yet more “shibboleths” - as it did with the Socialist Alliance. The SWP’s leadership is desperate to “make a difference” and get themselves elected. A well-trodden, slippery slope.