In 2016, I was running for National Co-Chair of the Green Party of the United States (GPUS). We had just passed Proposal 835, also known as the ecosocialist platform amendment, through the Green Party National Committee by a healthy margin with a vote of 76 yes, 22 no, and 9 abstain. We had a reinvigorated Youth Caucus, soon to officially change their name to the Young Ecosocialists. We had a left formation, GreenLeft USA, organizing with
in the party. We had a left-wing slate running for GPUS Steering Committee. It was an important time for socialists in the Green Party. It was a time when the left flank of the party felt united and gaining momentum. It was a time that is responsible for my long-term involvement with the Green Party on the national, state, and local level. Without this embracing of multi-tendency, anti-capitalist ideals and policies, I would likely not have engaged with the Green Party at the level I have, as I have no interest in voting against my interests by joining a capitalist party.
As I mentioned, I was running for a seat on the GPUS Steering Committee as part of the left-wing slate. I was running as an intersectional socialist, educator, and former community organizer, who had come up in the Occupy movement. I had first become involved in the party in 2013, when I attended my first Illinois Green Party meeting with a comrade I met through Occupy. In 2015 and 2016, I was the co-host of a left-wing podcast (All That’s Left), active in Green and Green-adjacent social media spaces, and developing relationships with fellow socialist Greens around the country. One of those comrades, a sitting GPUS Co-Chair, encouraged me to run for GPUS Steering Committee.
With the passage of Proposal 835 and related debates throughout the party, ecosocialism was a hot and often poorly defined topic. As a Steering Committee candidate and active socialist organizer in national Green circles, I was active in that conversation. A couple of weeks before I was eventually elected as a Green Party National Co-Chair, I made a post on Facebook after an online debate in which my self-identification as a communist was called out in a Green space. The post sought to reject orthodoxy and express the wide range of ideas, thinkers, and movements that I took inspiration from in response to sectarianism within the party.
I’m a communist because I believe in community sovereignty, democracy, and horizontal power. I’m a Marxist because I agree with much of his critiques. I’m an anarchist because I believe power corrupts. I’m a situationist because I believe there are times when we have to give the system a good kick. I’m an environmentalist because I believe that we have to prioritize sustainability. I’m an activist because I believe in actions over words. I’m intersectional over interest group oriented because I don’t believe that there are single causes or solutions, but an interconnected web of systems, institutions, and norms. I’m a feminist because fuck patriarchy. I’m an anti-racist because black lives matter. I’m for queer liberation because love is love. I’m a teacher because I can’t change the generations in power now, but I can elevate the bar for future generations. I’m a Green because I can proudly stand by every one of the 10 Key Values and 4 Pillars. Gramsci taught me about hegemony. Debord taught me about the Spectacle. Richard Gilman-Opalsky br ought precarity into my worldview. Foucault made me think about power. Goldman and Bakunin gave me fire. Camatte introduced analogue hegemony. Adorno and Horkheimer, the culture industry. Luxemburg about revolution. BlackLivesMatter, Occupy, the Arab Spring, fractivists, kyaktivists, the ELZN, SNCC, the Yippies, the BPP, antifa movements across the globe. These are just a few of the many movements that inspire me. That let me know that there are comrades out there fighting to make this world a better place. Even when the deck’s stacked against them. We cannot search for the perfect program. The perfect party, The perfect leader. We have to take the ideas and values from the thinkers, activists, and movements that inspire us. We have to be fluid and broad in our analysis and policies. If we aren’t intersectional, we’re just fucking around.
While the debate over the place of ecosocialism in the party has tamed, with the acceptance of our role as the only major left-wing electoral party in the country, I have watched the left flank of the party fall into well-trodded patterns of sectarianism that have plagued the left since its inception.
One of my longstanding critiques of the Green Party is that it does not have a clear ideological stance. Membership is reliant on self-identification with a vague set of broad ideals (the 4 Pillars and 10 Key Values) that can be interpreted in many ways. For US Greens, we exist in a repressive political system in which most of mainstream politics exists entirely in the top right quadrant (right-wing authoritarian) of the political compass.These conditions lead to Green values being attractive to people from much of the political spectrum, not just the anti-capitalist left. From social democrats and progressive liberal capitalists to marxists to libertarian socialists, social ecologists, anarchists to right-wing American libertarians. The Green Party may be smaller, but represent an even bigger tent than the major parties that have bunched themselves up in the top right of the political spectrum. This wide appeal can be beneficial in some ways, but it has made it difficult for Greens to articulate a clear program and politics, while balancing the views of such a wide-ranging base. That lack of political clarity and the ideologically divergent base it created has unsurprisingly led to a culture of sectarianism and factionalization.
While I believe we need to become clearer in our program, at the same time we cannot spend our very limited resources firing across our own lines. While we need to clarify our political positions, we need to do so in a way that does not adopt one dogma over another, that does not establish one orthodoxy as primary. We need to embrace our position as an intersectional, multi-tendency left-wing party/movement. Our system has a void and we need to stand together, in solidarity and camaraderie together to claim it.
I want Marxism to be part of the Green Party, because Marxists have been part of the party’s core from day one. I want social ecology and anarchism to be part of the Green Party’s ecosocialist DNA. I want libertarian socialism to be part of the Green Party’s ideology. We need to pull from a breadth of sources and strategies. We need to work with allies, develop a culture of comradely debate and collaboration across ideological lines. We need solidarity and multi-tendency organizing, not sectarianism and orthodoxy, as the foundation upon which this party grows, from the bottom up. This balance is not easy, but just as we cannot become just another capitalist party, we also cannot fall into familiar sectarian flame wars.
