Within the Green Party of the United States, there’s a tension that a lot of people don’t fully see until they experience it firsthand.
On one side, there are decentralized, grassroots, socialist libertarian currents that emphasize direct democracy, local control, and horizontal organizing. On the other, there are more centralized tendencies, often influenced by Marxist frameworks, that lean toward top-down coordination and national strategy. Alongside that is the ongoing push and pull between electoral strategy and movement-building.
I didn’t come into the party seeing that clearly. I assumed we were already grounded in socialist libertarian values. It took time and direct involvement to realize that this tension shapes how the party actually operates.
It shows up in internal disputes, in how decisions are made, and in why progress often stalls out.
This isn’t new, and it isn’t unique to the Green Party.
Murray Bookchin wrestled with this same problem decades ago. His work in social ecology and libertarian municipalism centered on decentralization, direct democracy, and community control. He supported Green movements because they reflected those principles, but he also warned about the two directions they could collapse into.
One direction is toward centralized authority: structured, efficient, and strong, but ultimately hierarchical and disconnected from the people it represents. The other is fragmentation, where the absence of structure leads to disorganization and political ineffectiveness.
You can see this tension in the Green Party’s own trajectory.
At the local level, Green candidates have had real success. They’ve won offices, influenced policy, and built networks rooted in their communities. But at the national level, the strategy shifts.
Presidential campaigns and large-scale efforts tend to adopt the structure and messaging of the system they claim to oppose. Instead of building independent power, they try to compete within a framework dominated by corporate media, centralized funding, and controlled narratives.
In trying to scale up, the party absorbs the assumptions of liberal electoral politics: that national visibility leads to change, or that participation in existing institutions can gradually transform them.
The party rightly argues the Democratic Party can’t be reformed, that it’s structurally tied to corporate power. But at the same time, national Green strategies often act as if the broader state system itself can be reformed through those same structures.
The structure of the national government is centralized by design. Decision-making is concentrated, participation is limited, and accountability becomes abstract at scale. If the goal is to confront oppression, working within structures that reproduce it creates a ceiling that can’t be broken.
Authority doesn’t dissolve on its own. It has to be dismantled.
To understand why this keeps happening, we have to look at how centralized systems actually function.
Marxist theory, in its revolutionary form, calls for the centralization of economic and political power as a transitional phase. Production is organized at scale, resources are allocated through state planning, and decision-making authority is consolidated to direct the transformation of society. The idea is that this centralization is temporary, a step toward a stateless, classless system.
The problem is that centralization isn’t neutral.
Once authority is consolidated, it has to be maintained. Large-scale planning requires enforcement. Enforcement requires institutions. And those institutions don’t dissolve when their job is done. They stabilize, defend themselves, and expand to manage the system they’ve created.
At that point, participation changes. People are no longer directly shaping production or local conditions. Decisions are made elsewhere and carried out through administrative structures.
Dissent becomes a disruption to coordination.
To keep the system stable, the state regulates expression, organization, and access to resources d.
That’s where rights shift from something inherent to something conditional.
If survival depends on participation in a system that defines the terms of that participation, then freedom only exists within the boundaries that system allows.
The idea that the state will “wither away” assumes concentrated power will voluntarily dismantle itself. Historically, that hasn’t happened.
Instead, centralized systems persist.
When authority is concentrated, the system that develops reflects that concentration.
You can see this pattern clearly in practice.
Under the Bolsheviks, grain requisition policies extracted food from rural populations to supply centralized needs. Control over food was removed from those producing it, and survival became dependent on compliance (Fitzpatrick, 2008).
Under Stalin, that control intensified. Collectivization and rigid quotas contributed to catastrophic famine. In Ukraine, conditions became so extreme that people resorted to cannibalism (Kyiv Independent, 2023; Conquest, 1986).
In China under Mao, the same structure produced the same result. During the Great Leap Forward, centralized planning dictated production while local conditions were ignored. Even as famine spread, grain continued to be extracted (Dikötter, 2010).
When control over labor, food, and information is centralized, people lose the ability to respond to their own conditions. Survival becomes mediated by authority.
And when that authority is challenged, the response follows a pattern.
Religion, independent journalism, political dissent, alternative organizing, anything outside the system gets treated as a threat. Entire groups are silenced, imprisoned, exiled, or executed, all in the name of protecting the system.
It’s never worker control, never liberation. It’s a restructured hierarchy where the state becomes the central authority over production, distribution, and social life.
Private capital is removed, but the structure of domination stays intact. This is state capitalism.
The worker is no longer controlled by a private owner, but they’re still subject to a system that controls their labor, their resources, and their ability to live independently of centralized power. (The Political Compass Decoded- J. weeds 2026)
This is why the direction the Green Party takes matters.
There’s growing overlap with organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, and that’s where liberalism starts to creep in. Compromise becomes normalized. Structural critique stays in the language but disappears in practice.
The party doesn’t openly abandon its values, but by adopting methods that can’t produce those values, it drifts.
I saw this shift myself. I came into the Green Party focused on national strategy. I volunteered for the 2016 campaign and later worked on the 2024 campaign. At the time, it felt like the most impactful place to be.
It wasn’t until I got involved in national delegation work that I saw what was actually happening.
We were platforming Democrats running as “Green,” even when they openly turned against us. We were elevating national figures with little connection to local organizing or the internal work that actually sustains the movement.
Movements that start with emancipatory goals adopt centralized methods to scale, and in doing so, they reproduce the same structures they set out to challenge. If the Green Party is going to be different, it has to take that seriously.
It has to stay rooted in decentralized power, local organizing, and direct participation, not drift toward systems that concentrate authority in the name of efficiency or scale.
Because history has already shown where that path leads.
References
- Conquest, Robert. The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Oxford University Press, 1986.
- Dikötter, Frank. Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962. Bloomsbury Press, 2010.
- Fitzpatrick, Sheila. The Russian Revolution. Oxford University Press, 2008.
- Kyiv Independent. “Interior Ministry Discloses Archived Files on Holodomor Cannibalism Cases.” November 25, 2023.
https://kyivindependent.com/interior-ministry-publishes-documents-on-cannibalism-during-holodomor/ - Weeds, J. The Political Compass Decoded. Forthcoming, 2026.
