Longtime Green Howie Hawkins, now running for Governor of New York on a multi-candidate Green ticket, wrote this piece in 2017 about the Working Families Party. WFP is one of several groups that claim they can make progressive change from within the Democratic Party.
Stephanie Luce asks [in this piece for the web magazine Solidarity] why did [NY Gov.] Cuomo shift leftward after the 2014 gubernatorial election in New York? Her answer is that progressives working inside the Democratic Party – Working Families Party, Zephyr Teachout, Bernie Sanders, Fight for $15 demos organized by Democratic Party-oriented unions – changed the political landscape and forced Cuomo to move left to recover the left wing of his electoral base.
What is missing in Luce’s analysis is the role of the independent left and the votes Cuomo lost to the Green Party in 2014. In 2014 I ran for Governor of New York with the teacher and socialist activist, Brian Jones, as my Lt. Governor running mate. Our ticket received 5% of the vote in the general election (185,419), which was about the same number of votes (192,210) as Zephyr Teachout’s 33% vote in the Democratic primary. The Green vote jumped the Green Party past the Working Families and Independence parties on all state ballots, which list parties in order of their votes for the gubernatorial ticket.
The votes for the left of Cuomo in both the primary and general elections mattered to him. The 5% Green vote was the most for an independent left party ticket for Governor/Lt. Governor in New York history except for the 6% received by the Socialist tickets in 1918 and 1920. It was widely reported when Cuomo started his 2014 campaign that he hoped to surpass his father Mario’s best win of 66% in 1986 and use that result as a launching pad for a presidential bid. Instead, Cuomo’s 54% in 2014 was way down from his 63% in 2010 and well below all winning Democrats in modern New York history. He knows he lost most of those votes to his left.
The Greens don’t claim sole credit for Cuomo adopting policies that he opposed, or would not commit to, when the Green ticket campaigned for them in both 2010 and 2014. Those policies include not only the fracking ban, $15 minimum wage, tuition-free public universities, and paid family leave that Luce mentions, but also funding a state plan for 100% renewable energy by 2030, Raise the Age (i.e., end the prosecution 16 and 17 year olds as adults), a ban on solitary for incarcerated minors, and making New York a sanctuary state.
Greens give the reform Democrats their due. We acknowledge that Cuomo felt and feels their pressure. But they should give also the independent left its due as well, especially when Luce claims the WFP is trying to rebuild trust with progressives who were so dismayed at WFP’s nomination of Cuomo. That trust-building has certainly not been extended to the Greens. Consistent with the WFP narrative, the Green Party is absent in Luce’s analysis. WFP is making no attempt to build positive working relationships with the left that is independent of the corporate-financed Democrats. Rather, they work to keep the independent left out of the decision-making and the speakers platforms in coalitions they influence.
As the 2014 gubernatorial campaign got under way, many WFP supporters, including state committee members, urged me to seek the WFP as well as Green nominations. They could not stand the thought of WFP endorsing Cuomo again. Fusion – being nominated and appearing on the ballot of more than one party – is legal and common in New York State. It takes 50,000 votes for the gubernatorial ticket to create a ballot line party for the next four years. Of the eight parties now with ballot status, only the Green Party line was created by running a candidate who was not also the candidate of the Democrats or Republicans. The other five “minor” parties routinely cross-endorse the “major” party with which they are aligned.
Green Party rules in New York preclude fusion with the corporate parties and their satellites like WFP. But given the many appeals from WFP supporters in 2014, I wrote a letter to the WFP co-chairs in April asking for a meeting discuss how to we might work together to oppose Cuomo and his conservative economic agenda in the 2014 elections. In the meantime, I drafted a Green Party rules change that if adopted would have allowed fusion with WFP on a case-by-case basis for a two-year trial period if WFP was willing to run a joint ticket against Cuomo and run more progressive independents against corporate Democrats. I never received a response to my letter and the rule change was not proposed at the Green nominating convention.
The rule change I drafted was certainly controversial within the Green Party because of bad experiences with WFP and its endorsed Democrats. In my own case in 2011 and 2013 in two-way city council races where I was running against a Democrat, WFP brought in their upstate and downstate political directors to coordinate paid campaign workers to canvass and get out the vote in order to defeat me. In 2011, I received 48% of the vote, losing by just 96 votes. In office, this Democrat, Khalid Bey, was known for spearheading tax breaks for developers, slow walking and weakening ordinances to Ban the Box and hire more city residents on city contracts, towing Cuomo’s line against increased state revenue sharing for high-poverty fiscally-strapped cities like Syracuse, and being the only city councilor to vote against extending non-discrimination protection to transgender people in the wake of a hate crime murder of a transgender woman.
My opponent had more donations from developers, landlords, and construction companies than any candidate in the city. When I made an issue of his donations in the second campaign in 2013, he resorted to inviting those donors to $99 contribution events. $100 is the threshold for itemizing contributions by name in state campaign finance reports. To this day, however, he has not filed those reports for the 2013 campaign. It is not possible to tell from the campaign finance reports by WFP accounts how much they spent on these elections.
In 2013, WFP’s second invasion of my council district – there is no WFP organization in the district or the city – prompted a petition by labor and socialist activists around the state to the WFP to stop campaigning against me in favor of a centrist Democrat. That became the topic of a discussion on Doug Henwood’s Facebook page the night before the election. While I was at my job unloading trucks at UPS, WFP’s upstate political director, Jesse Lenney, wrote on Facebook that “a victory for Hawkins tomorrow would be worse for the progressive cause than any other victory for a Right Winger.” The day after the election, an analysis in the daily Syracuse Post-Standard noted that “the Working Families Party has shown it can parachute in to influence Syracuse elections.” Asked why WFP focused solely on a Green/Democratic race to the neglect of other close Democratic/Republican contests in our city and county, Lenney said, “Paid canvassing is very expensive. We have to marshal our resources.” Apparently, it was a more important priority for WFP to defeat a left independent than Republicans.
The usual WFP line accuses Greens of not just being unwitting dupes of Republicans by supposedly splitting the progressive vote, but also of being conscious supporters of Republicans. Lenney wrote on Henwood’s blog that night, “Isn’t Ann Marie Burkle [a former conservative member of Congress from the Syracuse region] and the Tea Party funding your campaigns against us?” What was exceptional in that statement was only that he wrote it down in a public forum. Those kind of statements about the Greens by WFP staff and canvassers are frequently passed on to us by activists and ordinary voters canvassed by WFP.
The watering down of campaign finance reform demands by WFP and progressive Democrats generally illustrates how sectarian WFP can be toward its rivals to their left as well as what happens when progressives play “real politics” inside the Democratic Party. On Henwood’s Facebook page that night, Lenney wrote, “The last I saw of Howie was when he rudely disrupted a public event in support of public financing of fair elections.” I did protest the format of the event, which did not permit discussion of their partial public funding proposal from the floor. I only agreed to attend the event after an insistent call from a well-meaning woman from the League of Women Voters who assured me that I would be able to speak from the floor on the issue. The previous public campaign finance event also sponsored by WFP, Citizen Action, and other liberal groups had a format where only questions on cards would be read and responded to by their panel. No comments from the floor. Another Green had asked about Move To Amend’s proposed amendment to the U.S Constitution to affirm that money is not speech and corporations do not have the same rights as natural persons in order to have effective regulation of campaign financing and the economy. The event’s moderator read the question and dramatically threw it over his shoulder as he dismissed the question without responding to its substance. I objected to the having the same format at the second event and urged them to let us have a real discussion. When I was told to sit down and shut up, I called the format “bullshit” and walked out.
The substantive issue was the retreat of WFP and Citizen Action from their previous position in support of full public campaign funding, where all candidates who opt in and qualify get equal public campaign grants and cannot take private campaign donations. The partial public funding proposal they were now backing added a dollop of public matching funds on top of unlimited private funding. It was, in my opinion, a reform that would not reform. It would leave the big private donors dominating campaign finance.
Public campaign financing really matters in New York where 40 state elected officials have been driven from office for public corruption since 2000. Pay-to-play campaign contributions were central to many of those cases and to the whole culture of corruption in Albany. The two WFP-endorsed Democrats who sponsored the partial public funding bill in 2014 – former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and former chair of the Democratic Conference of the state Senate, John Sampson – are today felons convicted for public corruption and sentenced to federal penitentiaries for 12 years and 5 years respectively.
Progressives who enter the Democratic Party coalition are junior partners subordinate to the big donors. Progressives face enormous pressure to water down their demands in order to stay in the good graces of Democratic leaders and the corporate funders behind them. In this case, the progressive Democrats’ retreat from full public campaign funding to partial public funding followed the lead of a coalition of high-donor capitalists, elected Democrats, and liberal pro-Democratic organizations like Citizen Action and WFP that launched this campaign for watered-down campaign finance reform in 2012. The New York campaign for partial public campaign financing was touted by corporate-funded liberals as the first step in a national campaign for a partial public funding matching funds system at the state and congressional levels. The campaign was well-financed by corporate liberals, including David Rockefeller, Sr.; Jonathan Soros, scion of the multi-billionaire currency warrior, George Soros; media mogul Barry Diller (Paramount, Fox, USA); Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and his husband, Sean Eldridge, an unsuccessful Hudson Valley congressional candidate in 2014; the Committee for Economic Development, a big business lobby; and Organizing for Action, the Obama post-campaign dark money conduit.
The demand for matching funds partial public funding had replaced the demand for full public funding that progressives had been pushing since the 1990s and had won in Arizona, Connecticut, and Maine (though the Connecticut version was deeply flawed by making access for third party candidates effectively impossible). To the Greens, this looked like a campaign by the corporate Democrats to pre-empt full public campaign financing as well as the growing Move To Amend movement for a U.S. constitutional amendment to reverse the Supreme Court contrived doctrines that money is speech and corporations are people.
WFP defenders often dismisses the Green Party as more interested in political posturing than political power. It is not only WFP that works with the legislature we’ve got to get what we can at this time. Although Greens are critical of the strategies of reform Democrats, Greens do work with progressive Democrats for policy reforms that we share in coalitions were decision-making and speaking platforms are shared across the party divide. While WFP has not been a willing ally of the Greens, we have many Democratic allies we work with on issue campaigns. My campaign manager in 2014, Ursula Rozum, is currently working as the upstate field organizer for the Campaign to Pass the New York Health Act, the single-payer health care bill that has passed the Assembly and needs one more vote in the Senate. The Campaign works closely with the bill’s principal sponsor, Democratic Senator Richard Gottfried, and receives its principal funding from the nurses and service employees unions that generally back Democrats in elections. A veteran Green who was a policy advisor to my campaign, Mark Dunlea, leads a trans-partisan Campaign for 100% Clean Energy by 2030 that has shepherded funding for planning a transition to 100% clean energy by 2030 into Assembly’s proposed state budget. Cuomo subsequently affirmed his support for a study to plan a “as fast as possible” transition. By contrast, NY Renews, led by WFP and its affiliates, campaigns for 100% by 2050. NY Renews is absent from the grassroots campaigns in which Greens participate to stop new fossil fuel infrastructure – pipelines for fracked gas, oil “bomb” trains and ports for fracked and tar sand oil, gas storage in salt mines – as well as the campaign to stop a Cuomo-brokered $8 billion subsidy to Exelon to keep four aging and economically failing upstate nuclear power plants running. The Greens also initiated the campaign for a fee on plastic bags in New York City that passed the city council only to be pre-empted at the state level by the “Big Bag” lobby that succeeded in getting bipartisan legislation passed and signed by Cuomo.
By remaining independent and raising movement demands without dilution, Greens have been able to lever the political landscape to the left, including WFP positions, on some issues. It was the elected Greens of New Paltz, Mayor Jason West and Deputy Mayor Rebecca Rotzler, who got the marriage equality movement going in New York in 2005 by performing two dozen gay marriages in defiance of objections from Democratic-oriented LGBT groups and until a court injunction secured by the Democratic state Attorney General, Elliot Spitzer. By 2011, the marriage equality was New York law. In my 2010 gubernatorial campaign, I called for a state bank, which got a good response in the wake of the 2008 financial crash and foreclosure crisis. After the election, WFP’s policy shop, the Center for Working Families, produced policy papers on public banking and sought state legislative sponsors for a state bank bill. In 2009 and 2010 the Green Party campaigned for a ban on fracking while the environmental movement was debating whether natural gas was a “bridge to renewables” or whether a moratorium on fracking while it was studied was in order. The demand for an immediate ban came from the grassroots movement, from Greens, other environmentalists, home owners, farmers – Democratic, Republican, and independent – in the southern tier of New York, which was ground zero for potential fracking wells. One of the grassroots leaders was a Green elected to the town board of Afton, Mary Jo Long. I took that demand into the 2010 gubernatorial campaign and it caught fire. The environmental movement in New York abandoned the natural gas “bridge” and the ban replaced the moratorium demand. WFP, which had been circulating moratorium petitions before the election, began circulating ban petitions after the election.
WFP, through the Working Families Organization, the 501c4 organizational and money power behind the party organization shell, and other liberal Democratic groups and funders, moved in to create the New Yorkers Against Fracking that Luce mentions. Unfortunately, NYAF too often gave Greens the usual run arounds when it came to seats at the decision-making tables and speakers at demonstrations and news conferences. “The Greens are political and it will jeopardize our non-profit status.” When a Democratic politician was scheduled to speak, we were told, “That’s different. They’re elected.” When we offered our own elected officials, we were told our electeds were “only” municipal officials. The grassroots movements in the southern tier were similarly marginalized as the funded and staffed group grabbed the media spotlight. NYAF’s constant activities and dogging of Cuomo were no doubt important in the governor ultimately accepting the ban recommendation from his health commissioner. But NYAF’s organizing style did not always build trust with organizers in the grassroots movement.
Cuomo’s gestures to his left have not changed his core conservative program. Luce identifies areas where he remains terrible, from inadequate and inequitable school funding and the test-punish-and-privatize school reform agenda to corporate tax cuts and his New Year’s Eve veto of full funding for public defenders. To this we must add and emphasize the Wall Street- and real estate-friendly reactionary core Cuomo’s policy agenda: tax and budget policies that impose austerity on upstate cities, counties, and towns while doling out tax breaks and grants as a corporate patronage system. In addition, Cuomo proposes to disempower struggling upstate inner cities and rural towns by consolidating them into county governments. Cuomo touts his consolidation proposal as a way to lower upstate New York’s extremely high property taxes. New York’s property taxes are high because 15% of regressive local property and sales taxes pay for mandated state programs instead of by more progressive state personal and business income taxes. Eliminating local government won’t lower property taxes. Cuomo’s plan is a “soft” version of Michigan emergency manager law that politically disenfranchised cities and school districts in Detroit, Flint, Benton Harbor, and several other municipalities in order to concentrate money and power in the governor’s office.
We must also note that WFP, and reform Democrats like Teachout and Sanders generally, avoid raising anti-imperialist foreign and military policy demands, which has such enormous consequences for domestic policies that affect working people. During the 2014 gubernatorial campaign, as Cuomo was receiving much criticism for shutting down an anti-corruption commission he had formed as its inquiries were coming closer to his office and his associates, Cuomo changed the headlines and campaign narrative by focusing on foreign policy. He supported Israel’s bombing and invasion of the Gaza Strip in July and August and in September focused on potential terrorist attacks in the wake of the Obama administration’s announcement of increased U.S. bombing in Iraq and Syria. Cuomo traveled to Jerusalem in August to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and declare his support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. In September, Cuomo held multiple joint news conferences on terrorism with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. As Cuomo’s primary opponent, Teachout refused in several media queries to take a position on Israel’s Gaza campaign or Cuomo’s Israel visit. She did say she opposed BDS and that she wanted the U.S. to maintain its “special relationship” with Israel. The Hawkins-Jones campaign denounced the Israel’s military campaign in Gaza when it started and then Cuomo’s trip to Israel to support it.
We need an independent left that can raise these kinds of perspectives that those inside the Democratic Party cannot without being marginalized in that power structure. That power structure is organized around entrepreneurial candidate organizations that seek investments from big donors. The big donors call the shots in the end.
While I urge progressives inside the Democratic Party to leave and help build a powerful independent left, I also urge those that remain to see the independent left as their allies, not their competitors. The stronger the independent left is, the more leverage inside the Democratic Party they have. Their votes will not be taken for granted because progressives will have another option. Unfortunately, the WFP exemplifies a sectarian trend among many progressive Democrats whose narratives simply erase the independent left and whose practice often fights that independent left more than it fights the right.
The guns at Sumter [that began the American Civil War], the marching armies, the fugitive slaves, the fugitives as “contrabands,” spies, servants and laborers; the Negro as soldier, as citizen, as voter—these steps came from 1861 to 1868 with regular beat that was almost rhythmic. It was the price of the disaster of war, and it was a price that few Americans at first dreamed of paying or wanted to pay. The North was not Abolitionist. It was overwhelmingly in favor of Negro slavery, so long as this did not interfere with Northern moneymaking. But, on the other hand, there was a minority of the North who hated slavery with perfect hatred; who wanted no union with slaveholders; who fought for freedom and treated Negroes as men. As the Abolition-democracy gained in prestige and in power, they appeared as prophets, and led by statesmen, they began to guide the nation out of the morass into which it had fallen. They and their black friends and the new freedmen became gradually the leaders of a Reconstruction of Democracy in the United States, while marching millions sang the noblest war-song of the ages to the tune of “John Brown’s Body”: Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord/He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored/He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword/His Truth is marching on! -W.E.B. Du Bois
We…see the Negroes as foremost among those who will struggle against the crimes and barbarities of the capitalist system. The reason for this lies in the very nature of the Negro’s position in capitalist society. The most exploited, the most oppressed, the most discriminated against, Negroes are the ones who experience most acutely and most unbearably the overwhelming burdens which capitalism places upon the masses in every country. Negroes haven’t to read in books about the fraud of capitalist democracy. Karl Marx and Lenin have little to teach them about the fact.This conception of the role of the Negro has hitherto been obscured by the racial prejudices instilled into the different sections of the working class by American capitalism. The revolutionary party therefore is faced with the tremendous difficulty of overcoming this division. Yet difficult as this task is, it is a difficulty of tactics and not of strategy. The important question is not so much that of winning the Negroes for the revolution, but of instilling the Negro masses with the conviction that they can place their trust and confidence in a revolutionary party composed largely of white workers, as is inevitable in American society. -C.L.R. James
Why We Need a Reader
In any moment of heightened political contradictions, it proves necessary to develop a firm set of ideological coordinates from which praxis can materialize. This is particularly true in the matter of trying to build a mass-membership organization that goes outside the confines of the petit bourgeoisie and into the grassroots where the working class is to be found simultaneous with the growing alarmism around reborn fascist politics.
Table of Contents
Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis
The Communalist Project by Murray Bookchin
Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology: A Challenge for the Ecology Movement by Murray Bookchin
Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience by Peter Staudenmaier and Janet Biehl
We currently are seeing in the mainstream and even psuedo-progressive left media a large-scale meta-narrative that promotes a definite and clear political agenda. With these contradictions creating such serious and confusing times, it is important for Greens to move outside the realm of petty electoralism and into the street. The Green Party can become a mass-membership movement that opposes imperialism, settler-colonist white supremacy, misogyny (including when it appears as corporate neoliberal feminism), and austerity while defending the commons.
These readings are not programmatic or agenda-based.
Such times require something much bolder.
We open this reader with an analysis of mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex by Angela Davis. This is the human rights issue of our epoch and It must be understood as a central location of struggle. It is impossible to subsume the matter under the heading of simplistic ecology or relegate it to a lower position on a roster of priorities. Rather, it is the true liberation politics of genuine socialism that can inform the struggle for livable ecology.
Murray Bookchin’s The Communalist Project is a vision of a Green future that goes well beyond Keynesian welfare state politics and into the realm of actual political democracy. He writes:
Communalism seeks to recapture the meaning of politics in its broadest, most emancipatory sense, indeed, to fulfill the historic potential of the municipality as the developmental arena of mind and discourse. It conceptualizes the municipality, potentially at least, as a transformative development beyond organic evolution into the domain of social evolution.
The city is the domain where the archaic blood-tie that was once limited to the unification of families and tribes, to the exclusion of outsiders, was – juridically, at least – dissolved. It became the domain where hierarchies based on parochial and sociobiological attributes of kinship, gender, and age could be eliminated and replaced by a free society based on a shared common humanity.
Potentially, it remains the domain where the once-feared stranger can be fully absorbed into the community – initially as a protected resident of a common territory and eventually as a citizen, engaged in making policy decisions in the public arena. It is above all the domain where institutions and values have their roots not in zoology but in civil human activity.
This is how Greens can show that another world is possible, one where every cook can govern.
From here, we include two further writings on the topic of fascism. For too long, Greens have been rebuked, sometimes rightfully so, for refusing to acknowledge their privilege and role within white supremacy. Many suburban Greens have awful politics on race, gender, sexuality, and the role of the welfare state in the lives of the working class. Participation in the Green Party is seen as a petit bourgeois hobby that fails to acknowledge the needs and wants of the working class, a kind of meek protest politics for white people who wish to ‘Green Keynes’ and little more.
However, it is from within the earliest writings of American Greens like Janet Biehl, Peter Staudenmaier, and Bookchin that we find a tradition of ecological anti-fascism that can provide useful praxis moving forward. These writings go beyond the realm of spontaneity and demonstrations to provide an ideological rebuke to a fascist current Americans can expect to see more and more of in the coming years. While Donald Trump may be a passing political actor, the politics he has tapped into will be with us for a long time and will require action that goes well beyond the consensus of even a retro New Dealer like Bernie Sanders.
It is our hope that this strand of the Green tradition, a socialist praxis rooted in values of liberté, égalité, fraternité and harkening back to the emancipatory ideals of the Haitian Revolution, might take root in our wider American Green Party and help build our base into a viable force for taking power.
In 2016, Greens unanimously declared the party an ecosocialist party, and Howie Hawkins is discussing this promise and how democracy cannot truly play out under capitalism (click play on the audio feed at the end of this post).
The Green Party platform on economic justice reads:
The Green Party seeks to build an alternative economic system based on ecology and decentralization of power, an alternative that rejects both the capitalist system that maintains private ownership over almost all production as well as the state-socialist system that assumes control over industries without democratic, local decision making. We believe the old models of capitalism (private ownership of production) and state socialism (state ownership of production) are not ecologically sound, socially just, or democratic and that both contain built-in structures that advance injustices.
Instead we will build an economy based on large-scale green public works, municipalization, and workplace and community democracy. Some call this decentralized system ‘ecological socialism,’ ‘communalism,’ or the ‘cooperative commonwealth,’ but whatever the terminology, we believe it will help end labor exploitation, environmental exploitation, and racial, gender, and wealth inequality and bring about economic and social justice due to the positive effects of democratic decision making.
Production is best for people and planet when democratically owned and operated by those who do the work and those most affected by production decisions. This model of worker and community empowerment will ensure that decisions that greatly affect our lives are made in the interests of our communities, not at the whim of centralized power structures of state administrators or of capitalist CEOs and distant boards of directors. Small, democratically run enterprises, when embedded in and accountable to our communities, will make more ecologically sound decisions in materials sourcing, waste disposal, recycling, reuse, and more. Democratic, diverse ownership of production would decentralize power in the workplace, which would in turn decentralize economic power more broadly.
An ongoing issue within the Green Party is the attempt to characterize differences of opinion as “factionalism.” This phenomenon is a posture some “old guard Greens” take when confronting change.
You may not realize that one of our core organizers, Dr. Margaret Flowers, is running for a seat on the Green Party of the United States’ national steering committee. In her campaign, she has had to face opposition that accuses her of “factionalism,” and in response, she wrote the following commentary to the GP National Committee. We’ve posted it here with her permission.
Dear Delegates,
Margaret Flowers protesting the Dominion Energy Cove Point Terminal in Maryland.
First, I want to thank all of you who are supporting my run for steering committee. I appreciate your positive comments on and off this list. I hope that I am elected and have the opportunity to serve in this time of great potential for transformative change.
I am writing to acknowledge the struggles that are going on within our party, and that have existed throughout the party’s history. Yes, while we are united as Greens in our support for our platform, there are differences in opinion about how we achieve our goals. This is to be expected in any organization and it ought to be welcomed as an opportunity for deliberation and debate and to grow stronger in our positions and resolve.
We are all Greens. We who support the Green Party platform are all Greens. Nobody, even if you were a Green from the beginning of the party, gets to claim that only they are Greens and that people who disagree with them are “the other.” That type of thinking will stifle and probably is stifling the party.
While some would degenerate into accusations of factionalism and calling some Greens “the opposition,” these differences in opinion are normal. We can disagree with each other, even publicly. However, what is not healthy is name calling, finger pointing and other immature behaviors. I hope we can strive for principled and constructive discussions rather than tearing each other down. Let’s model the world we are striving to create.
Margaret relaxes with family and friends. Her medical practice was as a pediatrician.
One of my areas of expertise is social movements (others are pediatrics, single payer health care and gardening). Like biological organisms, social movements (and parties) thrive when they are diverse.
The Green Party will also thrive if it is diverse, but only if we are ready to accept that diversity. We have work to do if we want to be a strong and diverse party because there are issues within the party of racism, white supremacy and patriarchy. Our societal structure is racist, white supremacist and patriarchal, so it is no surprise that it exists in the party. The good news is that our values are anti-racist, anti-white supremacist and anti-patriarchal. With some work, we can learn to recognize how these play out in society and in the party and change our behaviors, and if we do that, we will grow because we will stop losing people who come to the party and leave because they were offended.
As there have been questions on various Green Party lists about my positions and motivations, I would like to clarify them here on the national list where all can read and discuss them. I encourage other steering committee candidates to do the same.
Independence – I believe that in order to effect transformational change we need to be a party that challenges the duopoly parties. I work with people from the duopoly parties on specific issues, but a third party that effects change must challenge those parties because they work to maintain the status quo.
Broad social movement – I believe that we need to be a party that lives its full platform and connects to a broad range of social movements, rather than seeing ourselves as being restricted to being environmentalists. These issues are all deeply interconnected and we can’t actually solve any of them without solving all of them. Our base is the people who are directly impacted by injustice and oppression and we need to make stronger alliances with impacted communities, build trust with people, welcome new people and nurture new leaders.
Economic Democracy – As far as economic systems go, a capitalist economy is incompatible with the GP platform. But I’m not a purist. One of my mentors is Gar Alperovitz and he says that the new economy is still emerging. It will likely have features of both capitalism and socialism. I prefer the term Economic Democracy. We cover this in more depth on our project, It’s Our Economy. Read our core issues here. Kevin Zeese and I wrote a number of articles about this in 2013 for TruthOut.
I sincerely believe that the next decade is full of potential for real transformative changes as outlined in the GP platform and that achieving those transformative changes will require a movement of movements that understands how power works and how to be effective and a political party that represents the values and principles of that movement of movements.
To that end, we created Popular Resistance – to raise awareness of the social movements in the US and around the world, to provide tools, to run issue campaigns that connect movements and to educate people about strategy and social movement theory. That’s why we just completed our first online free school on “How Social Transformation Occurs.”
And I am involved in the Green Party because I believe we can be the major party of the rising social movements. I was a strong supporter during Jill Stein’s past two campaigns. I was asked to be her vice president both times, but I declined because I did not think I was the right person for the ticket. I helped to create the Green Shadow Cabinet in 2013. I am active in my local and state parties and we are having a lot of success in growing, running strong candidates and challenging the duopoly parties. I want to share what we are doing and what we have learned with others.
So, my basic points are:
Differences in position will always exist in the party.
We are all Greens.
Disagreements and debate are healthy when they are done in a principled way.
Let’s try to stop the infighting and work together.
We have a lot of work to do.
I hope we can focus on the work ahead and that I have the opportunity to share my experience, talents and wisdom on the GPUS steering committee.
Margaret Flowers
She/her
MD delegate
Candidate GPUS steering committee
In the 2000’s, the environmental movement faced an internal crisis. In some quarters, it had failed to maintain an explicit and open opposition to white supremacy, sex/gender/orientation oppression, and other forms of bigotry. As a result, the notorious white supremacist publisher and activist John Tanton infiltrated and co-opted the vocabulary and platform of struggle for livable ecology so to promote his own noxious brand of hatred towards our Latinx brothers and sisters. This video from the period detailed the matter (please note any shortcomings of its analysis should be acknowledged in part to its age as a documentary from a specific time period).
Tanton was not an aberration or one-off. Indeed, the Green movement in other countries has also encountered this.
In Germany, where the Green Party political movement originated in the 1970s, neo-Nazis began to enter the party in the 1980s, a matter documented and analyzed for American audiences by Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier in their 1992 volume Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience.
That challenge has remained on the periphery of environmentalist politics for decades. This is because there is a convergence of values between the Green philosophy in some quarters and Fascism as a historical socio-political project. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger is considered one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century and his Being and Time is ranked one of the most important philosophical texts in the Continental tradition. His high esteem for the natural world and rebuke of modern industrial society in the name of the natural, bucolic landscape does anticipate many of the themes that emerged when the environmental movement began to form in the 1960s and ’70s. However, Heidegger was also a convert to the Nazi Party and its high estimation of “blood and soil”, a development that scandalized his pupils and caused Hannah Arendt to break with her old professor and mentor.
The late Murray Bookchin saw the shadow of Heidegger within the coordinates of Deep Ecology, a philosophy that vied with his Social Ecology project for the ideological heart and soul of the environmental movement. He wrote in 1987
Deep ecology has parachuted into our midst quite recently from the Sunbelt’s bizarre mix of Hollywood and Disneyland, spiced with homilies from Taoism, Buddhism, spiritualism, reborn Christianity, and in some cases eco-fascism, while social ecology draws its inspiration from such outstanding radical decentralist thinkers as Peter Kropotkin, William Morris, and Paul Goodman, among many others who have advanced a serious challenge to the present society with its vast hierarchical, sexist, class-ruled, statist apparatus and militaristic history.
Let us face these differences bluntly: deep ecology, despite all its social rhetoric, has virtually no real sense that our ecological problems have their ultimate roots in society and in social problems. It preaches a gospel of a kind of “original sin” that accurses a vague species called humanity — as though people of color were equatable with whites, women with men, the Third World with the First, the poor with the rich, and the exploited with their exploiters. Deep ecologists see this vague and undifferentiated humanity essentially as an ugly “anthropocentric” thing…that is “overpopulating” the planet, “devouring” its resources, and destroying its wildlife and the biosphere… Deep ecology, formulated largely by privileged male white academics, has managed to bring sincere naturalists like Paul Shepard into the same company as patently antihumanist and macho mountain men like David Foreman of Earth First! who preach a gospel that humanity is some kind of cancer in the world of life.
It was out of this kind of crude eco-brutalism that Hitler, in the name of “population control,” with a racial orientation, fashioned theories of blood and soil that led to the transport of millions of people to murder camps like Auschwitz. The same eco-brutalism now reappears a half-century later among self-professed deep ecologists who believe that Third World peoples should be permitted to starve to death and that desperate Indian immigrants from Latin America should be exclude by the border cops from the United States lest they burden “our” ecological resources.
It is for these reasons that a Green Party local must explicitly and intentionally from the outset state its opposition to white supremacy, xenophobia, sex/gender/orientation oppression, and other forms of bigotry that can and do emerge among American voters. If we honestly desire to see the Green Party of the United States become a mass membership party of working class people, it must embrace a class-based intersectional feminism whose foundational coordinates are based in internal and external anti-oppression struggle. It must oppose bigotry both in our wider communities and amongst its own membership so to create the Beloved Community that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. promoted in his philosophy.
The great W.E.B. Du Bois proposed this explanation for the logic of white supremacy in his classic Black Reconstruction in America:
Most persons do not realize how far [building Black-white unity] failed to work in the South, and it failed to work because the theory of race was supplemented by a carefully planned and slowly evolved method, which drove such a wedge between the white and black workers that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests who hate and fear each other so deeply and persistently and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest.
It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule.
Here is an interview taken from Black Agenda Radio featuring Jeffrey B. Perry, an independent activist/scholar whose work focuses upon fighting white supremacy within the ranks of workers in America by promoting the study of Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen. “This is a white supremacist capitalist country. White supremacy has been central to how the ruling class has maintained control since the 17th century.”
The preceding views expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily imply explicitly or implicitly those of the wider Green Party Power Project membership.
