Like many on the left, I welcomed the 2010 election of British Green Party leader Caroline Lucas as a Westminster MP. The Green Party has many policies to the left of Labour’s. However, this does not mean there are no longer aspects of the Greens, both nationally and internationally, which socialists should find problematic. This was demonstrated by Lucas’ assertion that nationalist parties and the Greens now represent the true left in the British Parliament.
Certainly, the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens have policies that contain socialist or social democratic elements. They are colonising that section of the political spectrum that Labour has abandoned – gradually under Neil Kinnock’s leadership and then more drastically during the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown years. These small parties have identified large chunks of the British electorate left disenfranchised by Labour’s retreat into social authoritarianism and abandonment of genuine working-class association.
Yet the nationalist vision is a poor surrogate for an internationalist project, as voters in Scotland are beginning to recognise. When capitalism asserts its primacy over nationalist objectives, the result is unlikely to be a genuine, sustained and organised challenge to powerful, vested interests. It is far more likely that foreign scapegoats will be sought and blame assigned over the border. This is an easier game to play than old Labour’s historic and sometimes partially successful mission to harness and control capitalism. But the results are far less impressive.
More disturbing than the latent opportunism of the nationalists and Lucas’ over-generous assessment of the Scottish and Welsh nationalists is that, on the international stage, various Green parties have made common cause with some highly dubious nationalists. These people do not embody the moderate nationalism of Plaid and the SNP. They include extreme, flag-waving and parading reactionaries.
In the Republic of Ireland, the Greens have been instrumental in preserving an unpopular right-wing government in office, in exchange for the chance to run the occasional environmental project. The Greens are propping up a discredited administration which has been attempting to pin the blame for the financial crisis on the public sector and those who rely on social security. For the talk of a “Green new deal”, nothing could be further from the expansive and imaginative plans of Franklin D Roosevelt than the cravenly neo-liberal approach adopted by Ireland’s Green-backed government.
The Czech Republic provides another salutary example. Before losing badly in the recent elections, the Czech Greens had been vocal in their support for George W Bush’s plan to station America’s missile defence on Czech soil. The Czech Greens can be accurately described as a right-wing party, supporting regressive social measures and a largely unfettered free-market.
In Hungary, the leaders of the LMP, a new green party, are aligned with the far right in their exhortations to young people to “return” to an agricultural existence. The LMP can be seen as embodying a political uncertainty that is the mood of many young people in much of Europe. The party argues it is “neither right nor left” and castigates socialism as “a 20th century philosophy’. (It may actually mean the 19th century or even earlier.) Yet there is little consistency or ambition to its agenda, which switches erratically between socially-concerned measures, such as legislation designed to tackle homelessness, and neo-liberal ideas of deregulation.
All this hints at a philosophical hubris at least as intense as that currently being experienced by socialist parties in Europe, although, as yet, it is less severe. In most countries, the Greens are not so new and their distinctive character has largely evolved from various aspects of the hippy culture of the 1960s and ’70s. The problem is that many of the more convincing hippies in Europe have tended to be middle-class dropouts, with parents wealthy enough support their lifestyle of social experimentation. It may be significant that Brighton is the main electoral stronghold of the Greens in Britain.
As capitalism experiences a string of crises, none of which appear to seriously threaten its continued existence, the life chances of more and more young people are diminished. The crucial role of unemployment and the impact it has are often missing from Green analytical perspectives.
Some of the more naive members of the Green movement might regard unemployment as a chance to “do something different”. The truth is that, for the overwhelming majority of people, unemployment is soul-destroying and life-destroying. It is not an opportunity set up an organic juice outlet. The hopelessness of joblessness confirms that capitalist economic rules are paramount. This is extremely painful for all the individuals affected. If whole families and communities are affected, the pain is multiplied accordingly. So a crucial question for the Greens concerns the extent to which they can address this.
Prolonged unemployment reduces someone’s self-worth so that almost any job can become appealing. People are then left insecure and unassertive in the workplace – both less likely to achieve their full potential or stand up for their rights at work. After a spell on the dole, many are forced to make do with work which is deeply unfulfilling. In fact, that is now official British Government policy. But the long-term growth potential of the economy will be adversely affected.
At its best, the Green Party is part of a tradition of English radicalism that includes Tom Paine and William Morris. It is attempting to address many of the important questions, rather than trying to soft-soap its policies in a bid to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Yet already it must confront the big question that has forced the labour movement into its retreat. In a capitalist society, how much scope is there for alleviating the negative effects of war, pollution, social injustice and inequality?
We may talk of a “green revolution”, but it appears to be a revolution which leaves the main bases of capitalism and ownership largely untouched.
Without a comprehensive strategy underpinning an attempt to bring about genuinely transformative change and a plan for a genuine “peaceful revolution”, any piecemeal approach is likely to unravel. Once unravelled, it is very hard to reconstruct. It remains to be seen if the Greens in England and Wales have really got the appetite for serious social change and the conflict with global economic forces that would ensue. On the evidence of what their sister parties in Europe have done, we have to conclude it is unlikely. The great international, financial and political structures of modern capital are not going to come crashing down any time soon.
Carl Rowlands is a member of the steering committee of Labour International’s Central European branch
