Editor’s Note: This article is part of our From the Archives series, which posts relevant articles from the past, sourced from a wide range of sources. This article by 2020 Green Party and Socialist Party USA presidential nominee Howie Hawkins was originally published in 1988.
HOWARD HAWKINS is a carpenter, active in the Vermont Greens and the Green Committees of Correspondence, a national network of local Green groups.
FOR MANY ON THE LEFT THE GREEN MOVEMENT emerging around the world is a temporary catch basin for an eclectic mixture of causes and constituencies which the old left parties have been reluctant or slow to take up. In this view, the Greens will prove to be a passing phenomenon, an outside pressure group on the old left parties which will be reabsorbed by those parties as they adjust their basically class-oriented Marxian framework to incorporate the ecologist, feminist, anti-militarist, anti-authoritarian, and decentralist themes that animate the Greens.
But for many Greens, their movement is potentially the coalescing of these so-called “new social movements” into a coherent new politics—a new left that is relevant to the new problems and potentialities of a new historical era, a high-tech phase of capitalism[1] that has begun to emerge and may prove as different from its industrial predecessor as industrial capitalism has been from pre-capitalist agrarian societies. In this view, old left red should dissolve into new left green.
In any case, the need for a new politics is clear. The “profound crisis of international socialism”[2] has become the subject of much public hand-wringing by the left internationally in recent years. Its humanistic ideals are completely contradicted by experience: the persistent authoritarianism of the “socialist” East, the austerity programs for restructuring and streamlining capitalism that have been imposed by one social democratic regime after another in Western Europe, the abject surrender of American liberal reform in the face of conservative ascendancy. The old left insurrectionary theories of anarcho-syndicalism, council communism, and Leninism are kept alive by small sects, but have no connection to popular movements. Those currents that can still claim a following operate exclusively within the framework of the nation-state and Cold War allegiances, belying the internationalist ideals of earlier generations. Some Third World nationalist movements take on Leninist garb, but seem little different from those that just as easily take on Islamic or purely nationalistic identities. When these nationalist movements capture state power they show little interest in democracy and little capacity to free their countries from economic domination by global corporations or political domination by one or the other of the Cold War blocs. The electoral reformism of social democracy, Eurocommunism and, in the US, pragmatic progressivism, are at an impasse. They still retain their electoral appeal, but the strategic limitations of electoral reformism are clearer than ever before. It has been unable to advance new reforms in the last two decades when it has held state power, unable to do anything in the face of transnational capitalism except to impose austerity on its own electoral base in an attempt to restructure national capitalisms in the interests of international competitiveness. The old left theories and movements seem exhausted. There is a vacuum on the left.
I would argue that this crisis is beginning to be resolved by a new left already stepping into the vacuum. This new left consists of a populist alliance of co-equal social forces, rather than the old left’s hegemonic working class with “its allies” tagging along. Invoking the connotations of the interconnectedness and life-affirmation associated with an ecological perspective, Green is becoming its integrative metaphor and banner. It is really a more recent phase of the same type of movement that called itself the New Left in the ‘60s, with many of the same activists, constituencies, political themes, and international scope, with manifestations in the East and South as well as the West.[3] It has the same traditionally left aspirations to humanism and universalism—freedom for self-fulfillment, economic and social equality, participatory democracy, and human solidarity and community. But the old left frequently seems to have trouble recognizing its kinship to this new left through the workerist and productivist lenses of its Marxian theoretical framework.
The potential of the Greens to be a new left that can resolve this crisis on the left is best understood as implicit in the emergent praxis of the Greens. The Greens have emerged in practice before they have conceived of themselves in theory.[4] Within the Green movement, there is no hegemonic theory that has the same standing in the new social movements that Marxism came to have in the workers’ movement by the turn of the century. The situation is more like the one Marx faced in 1844 in Paris, where amid discussions with people like Proudhon, Bakunin, and Engels about the emerging workers’ movement and the variety of socialist theories that were circulating, Marx wrote, “It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do.”[5] While I would reject Marx’s implication that historical circumstances compel a social movement to act in certain ways, what he was trying to do was to ground the socialist movement of his day in the real possibilities of its historical context in order for its theories to provide a realistic guide to action. Theoretically, the Green movement needs to do the same. It needs to elicit the potentiality that exists within present actuality in order to have some idea of what issues are emerging which will mobilize people, who is likely to be mobilized for basic social change, and what kinds of activity will have real social leverage. The fact that a movement has emerged and begun to coalesce with Green as its integrative metaphor suggests there is great potential in it. But without a coherent theory to guide its practice, instead of effectively directing its efforts to reach its full potential, it will be reduced to virtually random action, simply reacting to events as they unfold, and vulnerable to reabsorption by the system like much of the US New Left which, after a promising start and despite all its worrying about “co-option,” collapsed into Leninist dogmatism on the one side and reform Democratic liberalism on the other.
RATHER THAN EXAMINE THE GREEN MOVEMENT HERE at the level of the philosophical and ideological currents within it, I want to examine it historically and practically and look at how the programmatic and strategic practice of the Greens is addressing the new problems and possibilities emerging with the high-tech restructuring of capitalism. What I propose to do is sketch an outline of the technological and social restructuring capitalism is now undergoing, rendering many aspects of old left theory obsolete. Then I will suggest how the Greens—at least potentially, if the actuality of their emergent praxis can be brought to full fruition—are addressing (or, particularly on some questions of strategy, should be addressing) the problems and possibilities of the new social and technological situation in a way that can lead to a free, just, and ecological society beyond capitalism. My purpose is not only to challenge socialists with a Green perspective, but more to open a dialogue than to posit definitive answers, because I am also convinced that the US Green movement in particular needs the challenge of socialist perspectives and the experience of left activists.
The old left finds itself in crisis and trying to adjust in great part because capitalism has been changing, too. Marxist theory predicted an increasingly simplified class system, in which a growing class of industrial workers would face a shrinking class of capitalists and would become conscious as a class of its exploitation and act to change the system. But the social structure has instead become more complicated as capitalist development has proceeded. Instead of an increasingly homogenized industrial working class, the industrial proletariat has decreasing social weight in relation to both a growing underclass of unemployed or highly casualized workers, on one side, and a growing, well-paid, highly educated strata of technical and professional but still waged workers, on the other. All may be exploited in Marxian terms, but they have increasing difficulty recognizing each other as class comrades. As capitalist industrialization has advanced, stratification has been congealing around a dizzying, criss-crossing array of non-class identities (racial, sexual, institutional, occupational, educational, international, regional, and so forth).
These identities intersect in complicated ways in individuals, who seem to mobilize politically around almost any identity but their class. The most dynamic social movements today form mostly around transclass issues—peace, the environment, feminism, gay liberation, racial equality, ethnic autonomy, national independence, community control, and a whole array of cultural movements that reject the alienated structure of needs and the compensatory consumption that have grown with the commodification of social relations.
While class-based organizations like unions act more to advance their particular economic interests within a capitalist framework than to challenge that framework on behalf of universal human interests, the new movements tend to adopt a democratic discourse that does challenge capitalism in the name of universal human interests—implicitly at least, but, in the radical wings of these movements, explicitly.
The ruling class has not become any simpler in structure, either. The growing role of the state in managing the economy and fostering accumulation—whether the wealth is ultimately controlled by profit-oriented corporations or power-oriented bureaucracies—has made politicians, generals, and technocratic state and corporate managers as weighty as classic capitalists in ruling circles. The concomitant bureaucratization of the state and economy creates institutional armies (of both the figurative and literal kind) among functionaries in the middle echelons whose fortunes are tied to those of the elites as against the people. In more private enterprise-oriented states, government contracts and projects, and their “multiplier effects,” tie another army of petty entrepreneurs to the state managers.
These trends are not confined to the corporate West, but encompass the bureaucratic East as well, and increasingly the South. Whatever their other differences and for whatever reasons, the East is following the lead of the West technologically and showing the same trends toward commodification and bureaucratization that we see in Western capitalism.[6] The technological, stratificational, and cultural similarities between the industrial countries of both blocs are giving rise to similar social problems and social movements oriented around such issues as ecology, peace, feminism, ethnic autonomy, personal fulfillment, and decentralized forms of democracy and socialism. Some of the organizations in these movements consciously identify with the Western Green movements. As global corporations have been locating their manufacturing operations in the low wage areas of the Third World, the differences between agricultural and raw materials economies of the South and the industrial economies of the North have diminished significantly. The new social movements are growing in the South now as well and Green parties are beginning to be organized there, too. The Brazilian Green Party, initiated by activists with roots in the Brazilian New Left of the ‘60s and the urban guerrilla movement of that period, is now one of the two major parties of the Brazilian left and the strongest Green Party outside Europe.[7] Accelerating this homogenization is the rampant militarization transcending East/West and North/South differences.
Technological changes here have already given capital virtually instant international mobility, enabling it to outflank those sites of social power—the point of production for anarcho-syndicalism and council communism, the nation-state for both Leninism and electoral reformism—that were to be conquered in old left theory in order to have the leverage to transform the system. The so-called “global factory” is rapidly replacing the traditional locally-integrated factory based on one site and a stable, skilled, and community-based workforce. The “global factory” is characterized by globally dispersed networks of versatile and interchangeable modular industrial units, highly automated and robotized, requiring only a limited and interchangeable labor force. This work force is increasingly hired only on a part-time basis and forced to switch from short-term job to short-term job much like migrant farm laborers. Not only does this make it very hard to mobilize around class issues, but when workers do mobilize, global corporations can instantly switch production to an interchangeable unit half-way around the world, making class mobilization a problem of truly international dimensions. Despite much talk in recognition of this need, very little effective international labor organizing has been accomplished.[8]
But these new social and technological conditions are only the beginning. The technological revolutions now emerging in micro-electronics and genetic engineering appear to be leading to a post-industrial arrangement that will be as profound in its social implications as the transformations that came with the agricultural and industrial revolutions. It will be “post-industrial” in terms of what ordinary people do for a living, but it will be super-industrialized in terms of the degree of mechanized production. Robotic manufacturing will eliminate 80 percent, or 20 of 25 million, manual jobs in the US by the year 2000, according to one study done for the United Auto Workers. The tertiary service sector, which has been taking in workers displaced by increases in labor productivity since World War II, is also facing office and retail automation of similar scope which will further reduce the overall number of jobs available.[9]
These high-tech innovations necessitate a radical restructuring of the social paths through which income and wealth circulate. The “Fordist” circuit of accumulation, based on mass production for mass consumption, is giving way before a new regime of accumulation based on luxurious “overconsumption” by privileged upper strata side by side with subsistence or less for an underclass which, if employed at all, works as low-wage temps producing goods and servicing the well-to-do. The barrel-shaped income distribution that has characterized the US in recent decades with its bulge in the middle based on a stable, organized, relatively well-paid working class is giving way to this new hour-glass shaped structure of income stratification. It resembles the class structure of Third World countries more than it does what we have been accustomed to associating with the industrialized countries.[10]
Thus, millions of people are becoming expendable in the technological and social restructuring we are beginning to witness. The massive unemployment, poverty, and social welfare costs of maintaining a population whose labor is no longer needed can only lead to growing criminality and social unrest from below and brutality and repression from above. Bertram Gross’s Friendly Fascism compiles an encyclopedic account of the centralizing and authoritarian measures that are already being instituted or prepared by ruling elites to deal with this emerging situation. Rather than a crude jettisoning of our republican traditions, it paints a picture of a more sophisticated ruling class strategy, a “friendly fascism” that strengthens elite rule by hollowing out the democratic content of our political institutions while maintaining their republican facade.[11]
These traditions could be turned against ruling elites and used in a movement for an anti-capitalist, radical-democratic alternative to the increasingly repressive, militarized, and state-managed capitalism that is emerging. That the new movements already tend to advance their causes in universalizing democratic terms suggests the potential for such a movement if the new movements can find their common ground in a generalized struggle against multiple forms of domination. Transformative struggles would polarize more in populist terms—The People vs. Establishment Elites—than strictly class terms, workers vs. capitalists.
MUCH MORE COULD BE SAID ABOUT THE SOCIAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL restructuring now underway. But enough has been said to draw some conclusions. The most important, I would like to suggest, is that the increasing incompatibility between democracy and capitalism provides the opening for a new left that could unite the new movements into a broad, popular movement for greater political and economic democracy and isolate establishment elites that want to restrict democratic control in order to maintain their privileges, profits, and power. But such a new left would have to recognize the failings of many basic aspects in the Marxian framework of old left theory. Among these on some key questions are:
1. “The Revolutionary Subject”—Capitalism has not rendered the working class a class-for-itself, let alone a class that tends to mobilize itself on behalf of universal human interests. Working people are instead mobilizing around other identities in the new social movements, which tend to justify their particular demands in universal democratic terms.
2. “The Material Basis”—The development of productive forces by capitalism has not laid the basis for a free and just society once the relations of production are transformed. The massive scales of the technologies and the bureaucratic organization and extreme division of labor that go with these technological forms (“megamachines” in Lewis Mumford’s term) are an obstruction to collective appropriation. Moreover, these developments in the productive forces have generated a whole series of new ecological and cultural problems. These problems in turn have spawned, on the one hand, ecology and peace movements oriented not simply toward taking over inherited capitalist technological forms with socialist social forms, but toward radically restructuring technologies or, with some technologies, completely rejecting them, e.g., nuclear power and weapons. On the other hand, these problems with the productive forces have spawned countercultural movements that reject the dehumanizing organization of labor under these technological forms as well as the materialistic and individualistic values of capitalism and the irrational structure of needs as defined by the economic output of capitalism. These movements are not oriented simply toward a just distribution of the social product as developed by capitalism, but toward restructuring it, along with the productive forces, to create meaningful structures of work, community, and needs.
3. “The Revolutionary Institutions”—The state has not proved itself an effective instrument for the left. On the one hand, the nation-state is too weak and small to advance economic justice in an era of transnational corporations. On the other, it is too big and hierarchically structured for economic democracy and collective appropriation. As for the point of production, in the era of the global factory, strike action has less social leverage than ever before, unless it is international, but even the rudiments of effective international labor organization have not been put in place after generations of socialist commitment to that goal. But on the other hand, the community—and its political form, the municipality—linked up with others horizontally, may offer institutional terrain where The People can constitute themselves as a counterpower to The Establishment and ultimately advance to the point where they can transform capitalism.
The problems and possibilities presented by the restructuring of capitalism we are now witnessing need to be addressed by a new left and I believe the Green movement has begun to do this. While the US Green movement as a whole has yet to adopt a common program, the programmatic outline below is consistent in its basic thrust with the programs of Green parties in many countries and those of US Green groups in Vermont, Wisconsin, and New Haven, Connecticut that have adopted programmatic statements.[12] If nothing else, at least they are radical at a time when most of what passes for a left in this country has substituted working for piecemeal liberal reforms from within left-liberal coalitions in the Democratic Party for independently advancing a radical program of its own, a systemic alternative to capitalism. But more than simply staking out a radical position, these principles for a Green alternative hopefully also address the new problems and possibilities emerging with the restructuring of capitalism and provide a basis for a common program around which the new social movements can unite in a viable independent movement:
Grassroots Democracy. One key programmatic element that distinguishes Green politics from electoral reformism is its goal of restructuring political institutions, not simply getting into positions of power in the existing structure of the state. Greens want to bring the people directly into the policy-making process, not leave it to representative elites to make policy for them. They stand on a platform of rewriting city charters and state and federal constitutions to restructure the polity according to the principles of grassroots democracy, the basics of which are that any policy question—regional, national, and international as well as local—may be taken up by face-to-face community assemblies at the base. Confederal control from below is maintained through representation that can be mandated or recalled by the base at any time. The point of this decentralization of power is not to do away with common regional, national, or international policies where these are needed, but to make them at the base in a decentralized manner from below rather than in a centralized manner from the top down.
Ecological Socialism. If the ideal of socialism—the democratic ownership and control of the production, appropriation, and distribution of economic surplus—is no longer a sufficient condition to achieve a free and just (and ecologically balanced) society, it remains a necessary condition. Human needs and ecological balance cannot be satisfied in an economic system structured around growth-for-growth’s-sake rather than democratically chosen social and ecological criteria. The economy needs to be brought under the control of the grassroots-democratic political system. The Greens envision a non-exploitative economic system that is an alternative to both the corporate-market system of the West and the bureaucratic-command system of the East. Transnational corporations and centralized state enterprises would be replaced by individual and household production, cooperatives, and decentralized publicly-owned enterprises. Basic industry and services would be municipalized (not nationalized) in order to create a decentralized political economy under community control, combined with confederations of communities owning certain large-scale facilities regionally and with the regions confederating to coordinate the economy from below at still larger scales.
Social Responsibility. Economic class issues alone may not be sufficient to call forth a movement capable of uprooting the individualistic and materialistic values and institutions of capitalism. But the absence of a left in this country that speaks unapologetically to the material denial and economic insecurities of millions with a clear program for economic justice has left a gaping political vacuum. It is a vacuum that will only grow with the social and technological restructuring of capitalism now underway that is rendering huge sectors of the population a low-wage, casualized workforce and significant numbers a completely redundant group whose labor is no longer needed by the system. Accompanying this growing want is the development of automated technologies and the technical capability not only to end want, but to end the connection between work and income. Communism, in Marx’s sense of distribution according to need, as opposed to socialism, in the sense of distribution according to work, is on the agenda today as far as basic needs are concerned.[13]
The Greens call for the public provision of basic needs to every person as a human right, according to need, not ability to pay. As an immediate measure, Greens call for a guaranteed income, sufficient to support a decent standard of living. Then, progressively, basic goods and services would be decommodified—food, water, clothing, housing, heat and electricity, health care, education at all levels, communication services, public transportation, and so on. They would be provided free, by the same basic principles of public funding and community control by which public education is already provided under the direction of locally elected school boards. Public funds for these programs would be provided through steeply progressive taxation and a massive shift of spending from the military to public needs. Work life would be redesigned to make it an arena of creative expression and service to a meaningful community, rather than the onerous burden it is today. Productivity gains from automation would be used to reduce significantly the standard work week with no loss of income. Sharing available work equitably among all willing and able would be used to reduce further the standard work week and equalize access to the earning of income above the guaranteed income. All work would be democratically self-managed through cooperatives in the private sector and work collectives in the public sector which would manage for themselves how they would fulfill their tasks as set by democratically determined community production plans.
Ecological Technology. In Marxian terms, the Greens are seeking not only to transform the relations of production, but the forces of production as well. An alternative society for the Greens involves not only the end of the exploitation of the capitalist mode of production, but also the transformation of the irrationality, in both human and ecological terms, of the needs, products, and technologies that have developed with capitalism. Therefore central to the Green program is the elimination of many ecologically and humanly destructive technologies (e.g., nuclear and fossil fuels, overdependence on private autos, much of the chemicals industry, chemicalized monocultural agribusiness) and the reconstruction of the productive infrastructure around such alternatives as solar energy; waste recycling; a new “soft” chemical industry based on naturally-occurring materials that are biodegradable; organic agriculture on family and cooperative farms; public transportation on trolleys and railroads; and new eco-communities that reintegrate production with consumption, the economy with its bioregion, civic amenities with natural beauty, and people of all ages. The basic “industrial” techniques would be retained—i.e., power tools and machines and, now, their automation—but re-oriented around decentralist and ecological criteria.[14]
Non-Nuclear, Home-Based, Democratic Defense. Greens reject the Cold War premise that the arms and repression in the East bloc require and justify our own. They oppose the interventionist and nuclear missions of US force structures and call for a systematic alternative defense policy based on defense of our own country rather than the global economic interests of giant corporations. Instead of hacking away at the edges of US imperialism by opposing a particular weapons system here and an intervention there, Greens challenge US military policy in terms of its basic policy premises and global military missions. Greens call for immediate unilateral nuclear disarmament combined with non-provocative, home-based defense by means of both voluntary conventionally armed militia and nonviolent social defense. Such forms of defense would be strictly accountable to civilian authority. They demand the dismantling of all nuclear weapons, the recall of all armed forces from stations abroad, and the use of the 97% of the American military budget now devoted to nuclear blackmail and foreign intervention for social and ecological reconstruction.[15] In conjunction with these demands for unilateral measures by the United States, Greens help to build a grassroots, cross-bloc peace movement, a “detente from below,” aimed at forcing both blocs to disarm and democratize and thus create the conditions for a peace that is durable because it is just and democratic.
Non-Aligned Democratic Internationalism. Greens reject the Cold War assumption that one must ally with one or the other of the superpower blocs. They call for a Third Way that supports human rights according to one universal criterion of freedom, without regard for national boundaries and military blocs, in complete independence from both blocs of the Cold War. They work in active solidarity with non-aligned peace, ecology, democracy, workers, and human rights movements in every country (East bloc, West bloc, Third World). Greens believe in building a “detente from below” that promotes social change and grassroots democracy in both blocs of the Cold War and in the Third World. They envision a world without borders, a world of decentralized regions based on international political and economic equality.
The Greens’ ecological perspectives bring new elements and emphases to an older programmatic quest for a Third Way by the independent socialist left. But the Greens have also posed a third strategic alternative for the left, an alternative to both social democracy and Leninism. In contrast to the statist orientations of both electoral reformism, which has characterized social democratic “mass” parties, and elite-led insurrection, which has been the hope of Leninist “vanguard” parties, the Greens’ call for grassroots democracy implies a new strategy—a popular movement strategy of bringing people directly into the political process without the mediation of separate, professionalized state and party structures, of demassifying societies whose citizens are now subject to manipulation by “mass” and/or “vanguard” party elites competing for state power. The strategy would aim to bring more and more political and economic power under community control and link radicalized municipalities horizontally to build a popular counterpower that could initially resist and ultimately replace the nation-state and global corporation. This strategic alternative would involve a new mutually enhancing synthesis of extra-parliamentary movement and electoral party as well as the populist conception of a “rainbow of opposition” (to use a West German Green phrase) in which no one struggle—e.g., the traditional class struggle of wage-labor and capital—is accorded strategic privilege. And it would offer the social terrain for sustained struggles for radical reforms that begin to transform the system without either completely relying on or foreclosing the possibility of revolutionary moments when the people will overthrow the old forms and constitute new ones.
The Green strategy here is implied in the emergent praxis of Green movements around the world, if not yet in a consensus on strategy within the movement. But it has been indicated in practice if not yet in theory [16] in the emergence of the Greens as the parliamentary expression of the extra-parliamentary new social movements at the grassroots. To the extent the Greens can extend the direct action movements into electoral/legislative arenas without losing their extra-parliamentary character as directly democratic and participatory and therefore educative—they will, to that extent, be engaged in a new political strategy. The objective would be to bring the making of public policy out of the separate, professionalized, elite, and often secretive realms of the state, into new political institutions of participatory democracy. The strategy is not to get into the existing power structure, but to restructure the power and create direct action in its highest form: direct democracy.
It is this new strategy that most distinguishes the Greens from other left currents as a movement with the potential to transform capitalism because the crisis of the left today is more about strategy than program. To the extent the old left finds the ecological, feminist, anti-militarist, anti-authoritarian, and decentralist thrust of the Greens awkward, it seems to be more for strategic reasons (what about the workers? the transitional state?) than for any opposition in principle to these concerns, at least “in the long run.”
THE DEBATE ON STRATEGY WITHIN THE GREEN MOVEMENT has been most intense in West Germany. It revolves around the relation of the electoral party to the social movements and ultimately comes down to questions about the nature of the state. It was the immediate prospect of a parliamentary coalition with the social democrats that crystallized the differences in a debate between those who favored the coalition (the “realos,” for realists) and those who opposed it (the “fundis,” for fundamental oppositionists, most of whom prefer to be called radical ecologists or ecological socialists and often refer to the realos as reformists). But this factional dispute has continued after the prospect of a coalition has faded because underlying these differences is a more fundamental and ongoing question about how Greens should regard the state. For the realos, the state is to be entered because it is seen as an effective if not completely adequate instrument for change. The realos often invoke the severity of the ecological crisis to justify a policy of compromising the Greens’ more radical demands in order to win immediate reforms that can relieve immediate environmental abuses and gain time to build support for more radical measures. For the fundis, the state is an instrument of cooptation and they point to nearly a century of sell-outs by social democrats in power. The realos may be more principled and more attuned to the new social movements than the social democrats are but, given the mobility of capital and the structural roots of the ecological crisis, their electoral reformism is as ineffective for fundamental change. But the fundamental oppositionists have yet to cohere around a transformative strategy that conveys what they are for and how we will get there. Their warnings of cooptation are on the mark—capitalism cannot be transformed from the top down. But their reliance on constantly “unmasking” the evils of the system and the hypocrisy of the social democrats is not adequate. They hope it will raise consciousness and foster a growing radicalization and an eventual revolutionary eruption. But popular cynicism seems to be the result in the absence of a more concrete vision of the alternative society, a local framework through which grassroots people can participate in its creation, and a realistic scenario of how a radical transformation would unfold. The radical Green strategy of fundamental opposition still lacks this concreteness of vision.[17]
Radical municipalism offers a way to combine, on the one hand, winning radical reforms without also taking governmental responsibility for running the system we want to change and, on the other hand, preparing for the revolutionary moment when the growing grassroots power won by the radical reforms clashes with the establishment’s need to maintain the system. Radical municipalism offers a Green strategy of fundamental opposition a way to go beyond simply exposing the system to transforming it.
In US political culture, the pull of pragmatism is much stronger than in West Germany. Though very few Greens advocate even critical support for selected Democrats, tensions have developed and are likely to grow between those who want a conventional independent party seeking to elect Greens into the existing state to enact reforms through it (our realos) and those who want a more direct-action oriented, movement-based party seeking to use the electoral/legislative arena to restructure political institutions at the grassroots level into an alternative power to the central state (our fundis). So, much more so than the programmatic concepts mentioned above, the following conceptual coordinates for a Green strategy represent more my own views that any consensus within the Greens. This is the kind of strategy I think a new left should undertake:
Populist Alliance. The notion of a populist alliance of the new social movements finding common ground for their particular struggles against domination in a common program of generalized struggle against all domination is more suited to the complex structures of contemporary society than the simplistic two-class struggle of old left theory. Green, with its ecological connotations of connectedness and complementary diversity, is potentially the integrative metaphor around which the new social movements can cohere.
The point is not to dispense with an analysis of the power structure and the vested interests of its elites in a naive New Age optimism that thinks the consciousness of the new possibilities for social cooperation and personal fulfillment arising with the new technologies will reach and persuade elites to renounce their privileges, profits, and power without a struggle. The point is that we need a new analysis of the power structure, one which incorporates the Marxian critique of exploitation into a more generalized critique of domination in all its forms, but which does not accord it privilege and see the alternative society, defined economistically as socialism, as immanent in the workers’ movement due to its relation to production.
Nor is the point to say that the “old movement,” the class struggle, is irrelevant. For example, class may acquire greater political significance within the black community in the US where the increasingly accommodating politics of the black middle class and political leadership may protect their interests but are delivering little to the black “underclass.”[18] In classically industrial settings (Poland, South Africa, the Sao Paulo region of Brazil), class-based unions have recently been the vehicle of popular mobilization. The point is that a Marxian class analysis that makes the working class the Archimedes lever of change is inadequate. In terms of a populist alliance, Jeremy Brecher suggested in a recent review of the implications of capitalist restructuring for labor organizing that a convergence of community and labor organizing, “the possibility of making the community rather than an industry the basic unit of the labor movement,” is needed alongside the Wobbly concept of “one big union” where “Wobblies retained their membership rights and their identification with the union as they moved from job to unemployment to next job in highly casualized labor markets.” Labor organizing still needs to be part of Green organizing even if it no longer has the “centrality” it has had in Marxist theory. If popular control over the point of production is not sufficient to establish the alternative society we seek, it still remains necessary.
Independent Politics. A movement for fundamental change needs its own political vehicle and independent identity. Independent politics is not an issue for the new movements in most other countries. But it is crucial in the US where for 50 years, the dominant left strategy has been realignment politics inside the Democratic Party. First the labor movement and then the new movements have entered the Democratic Party, encouraged to do so by the left. The left has hoped that by pushing its program through labor and the new movements it would be able either to take the Democratic Party over, or to split off its popular constituencies from the elites that control it and form a new party. But the result has been the incorporation of these movements into the Party as subordinate members of the coalition. Their programmatic demands are largely ignored by Democratic Party elites and politicians because their votes are taken for granted—they pose no threat of taking their votes elsewhere. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition is currently reproducing this pattern by re-incorporating constituencies, movements, and activists disaffected since the ‘60s back into the Democratic Party.[19] After 50 years of negative lessons, it is time to learn that the social movements need their own independent party. They need to take their program directly to the people, instead of trying to speak through liberal candidates and disappearing from public view as a distinct left as they fight within elitist party structures over personnel appointments and marginal platforms planks to which the candidates are not accountable anyway.[20]
A Movement-Based Anti-Party Party. We need a Green movement/party that is independent of the Democrats, but it needs to be even more independent than that. It needs to be so independent that it acts independently of the elitist and coopting structures of the state. It will still engage the electoral/legislative arenas in a certain way—as a fundamental opposition rather than a loyal opposition—but it will refuse to be contained by these structures. The West German Greens have posed a way to do this with their concept of a movement-based “anti-party party”—a party of a new type, to resurrect an old phrase but give it new content, which is not vying for state power like a conventional party but to restructure political institutions into a grassroots democracy. It aims to extend the grassroots direct action movements into the electoral/legislative arena with the aim of radically decentralizing and democratizing political institutions. The function of a Green anti-party party is not to put a new party into state structures, but to build a social counterpower to the state and corporations, a dual power in society that can resist the old forms and prefigure the new. Electoral action would be but one aspect of a whole array of direct action—alternative institutions, educational and cultural projects, demonstrations, and nonviolent resistance. Greens would enter the electoral arena in a new way—primarily at the municipal level; with candidates strictly accountable to the Green program and membership, not their own would-be careers as professional politicians; standing on the Green program, not their personalities; and running to educate, mobilize, and build the Green movement with no desire for executive branch responsibilities until the majority of people not only support, but are prepared to take direct action to insure the implementation of radical reforms in the face of corporate disinvestment, pre-emptive vetoes by higher jurisdictions of the state, and perhaps open resistance from the military.[21]
Radical Municipalism. If the new social movements are to find their common ground in the struggle against multiple forms of domination and for a non-hierarchical society, then there is a need for a social space where the people can struggle to reconstitute themselves as a palpable and egalitarian body politic. It needs to be human in scale to prevent representative elites from substituting for participatory self-government. Radical municipalism—conceived as a movement to restructure municipalities as town meetings, or in larger cities, as a confederation of community assemblies—meets these needs. A radical municipalism would seek to restructure municipalities as grassroots democracies, link them in municipal confederations coordinated from below through mandated and recallable representatives, and pose these municipal confederations as an alternative power to the centralized rule of the nation-state and global corporations. The municipality would begin to municipalize corporate property by eminent domain to enhance its economic democracy and self-reliance. Radicalized municipalities and municipal confederations would have to resist the preemptive powers that central state structures now have, as well as the economic veto that corporations would try to exercise. But if, as the foregoing analysis has suggested, the increasing incompatibility between democracy and capitalism is the focal issue of an emerging struggle between a populist alliance and establishment elites, then a movement focused on democratizing municipalities provides a local framework through which people at the grassroots can empower themselves and engage the struggle, rather than leaving it to party elites to struggle on their behalf in the structures of the central state. Whether by a more gradual recovery of power by the people through a steady series of radical reforms, or by a more uneven process punctuated by its revolutionary moments, the strategy of radical municipalism offers a strategic alternative that is immediately practicable and avoids the failings of its statist alternatives—electoral reformism and insurrectionary seizure of the central state.
Radical Internationalism. To call for a strategic focus on creating new institutions of political and economic power at the local, grassroots level is not to say that ecological socialism in one city, one region, or even one country could be created and secured for long. At a time when most political currents, left or right, have tied their fortunes to nationalisms and Cold War bloc allegiances, the Greens are calling for the dissolution of the blocs and the devolution of power from nation-states to regions of autonomous communities—in short, they are calling for revolutionary changes that would do away with nation-states. But no revolution that creates a fundamental alternative to the corporate-market system of the West and the bureaucratic-command system of the East can survive for long unless it spreads across national and bloc boundaries. The powers that be in both blocs would be threatened by it. These considerations demand that the Green movement practice an aggressive solidarity that disdains national boundaries and the military blocs.
As much as possible, municipal Green movements should confederate regionally, nationally, and internationally. The main focus of the larger confederations should remain spreading the movement to new communities and the constant expansion of the nuclei of dual power in the form of alternative institutions and radicalized municipalities. But at some point as these counter-institutions acquire more and more political and economic power and legitimacy, the question of people’s allegiance to these new forms or the old ones may come to a head.
Popular revolutions have always erupted spontaneously and at certain “world-historical” moments like 1789, 1848, 1917, and 1968 they have spread internationally.[22] But if a radical municipalist Green movement cannot call forth a revolution at will, it still can help prepare the ground for its spontaneous eruption. This means understanding the process by which it may unfold, articulating this in popular form, and building the nuclei of alternatives at the grassroots level that can help catalyze its eruption. When the eruption occurs, it can pose the next practical steps and oppose ideological currents that seek to channel the movement back into the old forms.[23]
But we are not in a revolutionary period. We are hopefully beginning to come out of a conservative one. The task at hand is to rebuild a left that deserves the name—a new left oriented in its opposition to capitalism to the new problems and possibilities of contemporary society, not of the 19th century world of Marx. What I have suggested here is that the Green movement emerging around the world offers the best hope for a viable new left. Whether it will realize that potential depends on many factors, but I would like to close by pointing to one crucial factor for the future of the US Green movement.
THE US MOVEMENT AT PRESENT IS AT A STAGE of development ideologically and organizationally quite similar to that of the West German Greens in 1979-80. In a number of speeches and essays, Rudolf Bahro urged socialists and ecologists to find a common ground. His message is as relevant to the American situation today as it was to the West German situation then. The gist of it is captured in the following passage:
In the industrially developed countries today there is scarcely any subject that so urgently needs to be tackled as that of “the socialist alternative and ecology,” at least no more important subject for socialists and no more important subject for ecologists or Greens. Socialists and Greens—and by Green here I mean especially those who are not also socialists, for indeed many of us socialists are also Greens—can discuss this subject on a very favorable reciprocal basis. They have long had a certain standpoint in common, which has now become decisive for world history. This common standpoint is a radical critique of capitalist industrialism. Many Greens may initially think not of capitalist industrialism but of the consequences of the industrial system in general. But in this respect they are misled . . . [It] is not just industry—for the ancient Chinese already had industry, so too the Greeks to a certain degree—but industry on a capitalist basis, industry that is driven on by the boundless need to valorise capital, to make value into more value . . .
The entire Green critique of the existing economic order is directed—whether deliberately or not, avowedly or not—at the mechanism that has effected the tremendous technical and scientific progress in Europe since the first industrial revolution. We socialists can and must offer those Greens who are at the moment not socialists our detailed explanation of the connection between capitalist expanded reproduction on the one hand and the anarchic industrial growth, a technology that is alien and hostile to human beings, on the other, and we must do this comprehensively and quite patiently.
To summarize:
The socialists need the Greens, for survival is the precondition for them to attain their traditional goals;
The Greens need the socialists, for survival can only be ensured by disconnecting the motor of monopoly competition.[24]
While the main thrust of this article has been to challenge socialists with a Green perspective, I also believe that the US Greens need the challenge of a socialist critique of capitalism. Where socialists and ecologists have made common cause, in places like Vermont, Wisconsin, and New Haven, the most effective Green movements/parties in the country have formed and are among the very few significant manifestations of independent left politics anywhere in the US today. One of the key factors in determining whether the US Green movement can fulfill its potential to be an effective new left in this country is whether independent socialists will see that potential, have the patience to reach beyond their own circles, have a dialogue with Greens coming out of environmentalist and New Age backgrounds, and contribute their organizational and analytical skills and experience to the movement.
NOTES
1. Given the prevalence on the left of Marxian conceptions of capitalism and socialism, I should define what I mean by these terms. I do not hold the Marxian view of capitalism as one of a succession of several “modes of production” through which society has reproduced itself materially, each mode with its own internal “laws of motion” by which it develops to maturity, a ripening of internal contradictions, crisis, transformation, and a new mode of production. In contrast to this reductionist economistic view of capitalism, I take the view of social ecology which places socio-economic structures in their cultural and ecological contexts without giving any of these spheres a priori causal priority. Hierarchy and domination (old over young, men over women, one social rank over another, and so forth), rather than class defined by a relationship to productive forces, is viewed as a more basic division of humanity against itself, a division historically prior to the emergence of economic classes. It is hierarchy and domination in all its forms, not only class exploitation, which give rise to social conflict and change and which must be healed to establish a free, just, and ecological society.
Thus by denoting the society we must transform as “capitalism,” I refer to the contemporary form of hierarchical society which is characterized by endless accumulation and its thorough economization of society. By “socialism” I want to denote an ethical ideal rather than something immanent in the “laws of motion” of capitalism. By “socialism” I mean an economic system of genuinely collective ownership and control of the production, appropriation, and distribution of economic surplus. A socialist economy thus enables society to be “un-economized,” the relationship between society and its economy under capitalism reversed, and economic activity can be guided by society through democratically determined ethical choices. Because it focuses on changes in economic institutions and does not convey the uprooting of other forms of domination besides class, socialism in the conventional economic sense is not sufficient to define a free, just, and ecological society. But it is still a crucial aspect of that project because it focuses on the absolutely necessary tasks of disconnecting the ecologically disastrous drive toward endless accumulation and reversing the humanly disastrous substitution of market for moral relationships.
For discussions advancing a social ecologist analysis of capitalism and criticizing the limitations of Marxian views, see by Murray Bookchin: “Marxism as Bourgeois Sociology” and “On Neo-Marxism, Bureaucracy, and the Body Politic” in Toward an Ecological Society (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1980); The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (Palo Alto: Cheshire Books, 1982, pp. 133-139, 216-218); “Were We Wrong” in Telos (65, Fall 1985); “Market Economy or Moral Economy?” in The Modern Crisis (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986); and The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1987, pp. 198-202). Discussions that complement these views in many respects concerning endless accumulation and commodification of social life as the defining features of capitalism are Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957); Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967); and Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism (London: Verso, 1983). On the bureaucratization of commodity relations, see also the references in Note 6.
2. The quote here is from the statement of purpose of New Politics, “Why We Publish.”
3. On the “world-historical” nature of the New Left, see George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (Boston: South End Press, 1987). On the Greens as “potentially the New Left come of age,” see Ynestra King, “Coming of Age with the Greens,” Zeta Magazine (February 1988), as well as Katsiaficas, op. cit., pp. 207-212. On Green-oriented movements in the East bloc, see Fred Singleton, “Ecological Crisis in Eastern Europe: Do the Greens Threaten the Reds,” Across Frontiers 2 (1, Summer 1985) and other articles and reports in various issues of Across Frontiers; Bill Keller, “In Soviet, Old Commissars and New Causes Compete,” New York Times (September 27, 1987); and From Below: Independent Peace and Environmental Movements in East Europe and the USSR (New York: Helsinki Watch Committee, October 1987). On Green movements in the Third World, see reports in various issues of Green Letter (P.O. Box 9242, Berkeley, CA 94709) and Greener Times (Green Committees of Correspondence, P.O. Box 30208, Kansas City, MO 64112).
4. This is not to say there have not been theorists who have anticipated the new social problems and potentialities emerging toward which the Green movement is oriented. The point is only that the Greens developed for the most part out of practical experimentation around immediately felt issues rather than out of theoretical reflections. But Green theory is developing, and probably the most developed work in grounding radical social theory in an ecological perspective is Murray Bookchin’s theory of “social ecology.” His “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1987, 2nd ed.) was probably the first document to draw out the revolutionary implications of an ecological perspective and anticipate the kinds of issues out of which the Green movement has emerged. His subsequent writings developing his theory of social ecology and the radical municipalist politics that it yields have had considerable influence on other Green theorists, perhaps most notably on the Hamburg “eco-socialists” Thomas Ebermann and Rainer Trampert in their book, The Future of the Greens (see John Ely, “Marxism and Green Politics in West Germany,” Thesis Eleven [13, 1986]).
In writings developing his theory of “social ecology,” Bookchin has carried forward the traditional ethical ideals of the left and certain of Marxian theoretical preoccupations (the material basis of society, the dialectical development of social forms, the dehumanization of commodity relations, among others) into an ecological perspective that offers radical social theory a fundamental alternative to Marxism. In one crucial respect this ecological perspective “stands Marx on his head” by reversing the traditional relationship between human freedom and natural “necessity” as understood by Marx and indeed all Western social theory since the Greeks. Since Aristotle, Western social theory has seen nature as a stingy “realm of necessity” from which humanity must wrest the material basis for a social “realm of freedom” (Cf. Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, p. 820; New York: International Publishers, 1967). Marx used this idea to defend the notion that the mastery of nature that is necessary to create the material basis for human freedom presupposes the domination of human by human, specifically, the mobilization of human labor to conquer the natural world and create wealth. For Marx. therefore, domination was historically necessary and Marxists have used this to justify repressive (not to mention anti-ecological) transitional stages on the road to socialism. Bookchin has challenged this view of nature with studies showing that human domination is the historical root of the attempt to dominate nature and that nature is bountiful, not stingy, while scarcity is a product of social organization, not the nature of things. It follows that the reharmonization of human with human is the precondition for a balance of humanity with nature. This view also challenges fundamentally, on objective and not only idealistic grounds, Marxism’s claim to have demonstrated the “historical necessity” of transitional stages in which the state, workplace discipline, and other forms of domination would still be required along the road to a libertarian communist society.
Bookchin’s perspectives on social ecology ideas are developed in several essays in Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Toward an Ecological Society, The Ecology of Freedom, and The Modern Crisis; and in “Freedom and Necessity in Nature: A Problem in Ecological Ethics,” Alternatives 13 (4, November 1986) and “Thinking Ecologically: A Dialectical Approach,” Our Generation 18 (2, Spring-Summer 1987). The distinction between radical social ecology and the many liberal-to-conservative environmentalisms that are circulating in and around the Green movement is made in “Open Letter to the Ecology Movement” and “André Gorz Rides Again—or Politics as Environmentalism” in Toward an Ecological Society and in “Deep Ecology vs. Social Ecology” (1988, available from Green Program Project, P.O. Box 111, Burlington, VT 05001).
5. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 47.
6. The nature of the East bloc countries is a long discussion. Analyzing the historical correspondence of commodification, endless accumulation, and bureaucratization can yield a view of East bloc countries as not post-capitalist, but as statist bureaucratic variants of capitalism (a view not to be confused with Marxian theories of state-capitalism still focused on “modes of production” with their “laws of motion”). This view of East bloc countries is not necessary to recognize that the new social movements are arising in response to characteristics shared by both the East and the West. But for non-Marxian analyses that view East bloc countries as bureaucratic state capitalisms, see Murray Bookchin, “Listen, Marxist!” in Post Scarcity-Anarchism; Noam Chomsky, “The Soviet Union vs. Socialism,” Our Generation 17 (2, Spring/Summer 1986); and by Cornelius Castoriadis: From Bolshevism to the Bureaucracy (London: Solidarity, 1964); Modern Capitalism and Revolution (London: Solidarity, 1965); “The Hungarian Source,” Telos (29, Fall 1976); and “The Social Regime in Russia,” Telos (38, Winter 1978-1979). On the (re)integration of East bloc countries into the capitalist world market, see Andre Gunder Frank, “Long Live Transideological Enterprise! The Socialist Economies in the Capitalist International Division of Labor and West-East-South Economic Relations” (1976) in Crisis in the World Economy (New York: Homes & Meier, 1980); Charles Levinson, Vodka-Cola (New York: Gordon & Cremonesi, 1979); and “Vodka-Cola: Who Really Benefits from Detente?—An Interview with Charles Levinson,” Our Generation 13 (4, Fall 1979).
7. On the diminishing differences between the Third World and the First and Second Worlds, see Nigel Harris, The End of the Third World: Newly Industrializing Countries and the Decline of an Ideology (New York: Penguin, 1980). On the Brazilian Greens, see Alan Riding, “Exile, Back in Rio, Agitates for Change on the Left,” New York Times, August 5, 1986 and Alfredo Sirkis, “Brazilian Green Letter,” Green Letter 4 (1, Fall 1987).
8. On the transnationalization of capital in global corporations, their new technologies of communication, transportation. and modular production units that give capital such mobility, and the diminishing policy leverage of nation-states, see Robin Murray, Multinational Companies and Nation States (London: Spokesman, 1975); Stephen Bodington, The Cutting Edge of Socialism: Working People against Transnational Capital (London: Spokesman, 1982); John Cavanagh and Frederick Clairmonte, The Transnational Economy: Transnational Corporations and Global Markets (Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies, 1982); John Cavanagh et al., Meeting the Corporate Challenge: A Handbook of Corporate Campaigns (Amsterdam: Transnationals Information Exchange, 1985); and Annette Fuentes and Barbara Ehrenreich, Women in the Global Factory (Boston: South End Press, 1986). The implications of these new conditions for labor organizing are explored in Jeremy Brecher, “Crisis Economy: Born-Again Labor Movement?” Monthly Review 35 (10, March 1984). The implications for broad political organizing are explored in Murray Bookchin, “The American Crisis,” Comment 1 (4,5 February,August 1980).
9. The figures are cited in André Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism (Boston: South End Press, 1981), p. 130.
10. This new structure of accumulation and its corresponding distribution of income are discussed in Mike Davis, “The Political Economy of Late-Imperial America,” New Left Review 143 (January-February 1984).
11. Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America (Boston: South End Press, 1980).
12. See West German Greens, Federal Program, 1980; Purpose in Work—Solidarity in Life: Economic Policy Statement against Unemployment and Social Decline, 1983; and Think Globally, Act Locally, statement on the European Parliamentary elections, March 1984; Brazilian Green Party, Manifesto and Provisional Program, 1986; Labor-Farm Party, “Wisconsin’s Party of the Rainbow and the Greens” Program for Building the Wisconsin Commonwealth, 1984; New Haven Green Party, Think Globally, Act Locally, 1985; Vermont Greens, Toward a New Politics: A Statement of Principles of the Vermont Greens, 1988. All are available for cost of copying and postage from New England Committees of Correspondence, P.O. Box 703, White River Junction, VT 05001.
13. On contemporary material basis for communism as far as basic needs are concerned, see Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1934), chapter 8; Paul and Percival Goodman, Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life (New York: Vintage, 1947), chapters 6 and 7; and Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism and “On Spontaneity and Organization” in Toward an Ecological Society. On municipalization of the economy, see Murray Bookchin, Municipalization: Community Ownership of the Economy (Burlington: Green Program Project, 1986); Edward M. Kirschner and James I. Morey, Community Ownership in New Towns and Old Cities (Cambridge: Center for Community Economic Development, 1975); and Community Ownership Organizing Project, The Cities Wealth: Programs for Community Economic Control in Berkeley, California (Washington, DC: National Conference on Alternative State and Local Public Policies, 1976).
14. On the decentralist and ecological potential of power tools and machines, see Peter Kropotkin, Fields, Factories, and Workshops Tomorrow ed. by Colin Ward (New York: Harper and Row, 1974); Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, chapter 8; and Paul and Percival Goodman, Communitas, chapter 6. The expansion of this potential with automation is discussed in Murray Bookchin, “Towards a Liberatory Technology” in Post-Scarcity Anarchism; Murray Bookchin, “The Concept of Ecotechnologies and Ecocommunities” in Toward an Ecological Society; and Stephen Bodington, Socialism and Computers (London: Spokesman, 1973). On the relevance of physical decentralization of the economy to democratic control, see Staughton Lynd’s discussion of the International Association of Machinists’ “Let’s Rebuild America” program, “Reindustrializaton from Below: The View from Steel Country,” Democracy 3 (3, Summer 1983).
15. The figure is derived from Howard Morland, A Few Billion for Defense (Washington, DC: Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy, New Policy Papers 1, 1986).
16. Even more than on matters of analysis and program, the Green movement’s strategy of extending direct action movements into electoral/legislative arenas has emerged more out of practical experimentation than any pre-conceived idea of a new strategy.
The municipalist strategy proposed here and the notion of municipal confederations as a potential basis for a dual power to the nation-state and global corporation draws mainly from a number of essays by Murray Bookchin: “The Forms of Freedom” in Post-Scarcity Anarchism; “The American Crisis”; “Anarchism: Past and Present,” Comment 1 (6, 1980); “The Concept of Libertarian Municipalism,” Comment 2 (1, 1980); “Theses on Libertarian Municipalism” in The Limits of the City (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1986); and “The New Municipal Agenda” in The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship.
17. On the fundi/realo debate see Phil Hill, “The Crisis of the Greens,” Socialist Politics (4, Fall/Winter 1985); Phil Hill, “Crisis of the Greens: ‘Fundis,’ ‘Realos,’ and the Future,” Radical America 19 (5, 1985); and Diana Johnstone, “German Greens in the Caucasian Chalk Circle,” Zeta Magazine (March 1988).
18. On the political implications of class differences within the black community, see James Boggs, Racism and the Class Struggle (Monthly Review Press); Robert L. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America (New York: Anchor, 1970); Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (Boston: South End Press, 1983); and Manning Marable, “The Contradictory Contours of Black Political Culture,” The Year Left 2 (London: Verso, 1987). The quote in this paragraph is from Brecher, “Crisis Economy: Born-Again Labor Movement?” p. 13.
19. On the cooptive role of the Jackson campaigns and Rainbow Coalition as long as they remain committed to the Democratic Party, see discussions in Robert Brenner, Warren Montag, and Charlie Post, “The Elections and the Left,” Against the Current 4-5, (September-October 1986); Joanna Misnik, “The Rainbow: Storm Clouds Ahead?” Against the Current 11 (November-December 1987); George Katsiaficas, Imagination of the New Left, pp. 186-188, 207-212; and my “Green Politics Is Independent Politics” (Burlington: Green Program Project, 1988).
20. On the dismal experience of socialists who have entered the Democratic Party for professedly tactical reasons of electoral realignment, see Eric Chester, Socialists and the Ballot Box: A Historical Analysis (New York: Praeger, 1985). On the need for independent politics in the contemporary situation, see Robert Brenner, “The Paradox of Social Democracy: The American Case,” The Year Left 1 (London: Verso, 1985); Steve Leigh, “Elections and Revolutionary Politics,” Against the Current 9 (May-June 1987); and my “Green Politics Is Independent Politics.”
21 . For elaboration on the Greens as an organization oriented toward setting up nuclei of dual power rather than seeking central state power for itself, see “Toward a New Politics: A Statement of Principles of the Vermont Greens”; George Katsiaficas, Imagination of the New Left, pp. 204-212; Murray Bookchin, “On Spontaneity and Organization”; and my “Green Politics Is Independent Politics.” Two other discussions of community-based dual power that Greens are reading are George Lakey, Manifesto for Nonviolent Revolution (London: War Resisters International, 1972) and Manifesto for an American Revolutionary Party (Philadelphia: National Organization for an American Revolution, 1982).
22. The May-June 1968 revolt in France demonstrated that potentially revolutionary upheavals can shake the foundations of contemporary technologically advanced countries. On the implications for organizing, see George Katsiaficas, Imagination of the New Left, and Murray Bookchin, “The May-June Events in France” in Post-Scarcity Anarchism.
23. On the role of a radical organization in a revolutionary situation, see Bookchin, “Listen, Marxist!” and “On Spontaneity and Organization.”
24. Rudolf Bahro, Socialism and Survival (London: Heretic Books, 1982), pp. 24-25, 22. This quotation is from soon after he was released from an East German prison for writing a socialist critique of “actually existing socialism” and had joined the then-forming West German Greens. His writings and interviews that correspond to the years of his evolution from red to green are still very germane to the project of a new left or Green movement, particularly in the American situation. But in recent years, Bahro has taken a spiritual path which has taken him out of the West German Greens and out of any real confrontation with popular consciousness or the power structure. In placing more and more strategic emphasis on dropping out of the system, setting up of self-sufficient communes, and hoping for a quasi-religious conversion of the rest of society to this way of life, Bahro advocates a quietism that only encourages the worst of New Age illusions that have held back Green organizing in many regions in the US. Bahro’s justifiable emphasis on cultural revolution and exemplary “concrete utopias” is a theme throughout his writings, but in some of the essays and interviews of his most recently translated collection, it begins to overwhelm and vitiate his sounder earlier views. See The Alternative in Eastern Europe (London: Verso, 1978); From Red to Green: Interviews with New Left Review (London: Verso, 1984); and Building the Green Movement (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986).
