Nothing else in the world… not all the armies… is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
— Victor Hugo
Last night I got to see Bill McKibben deliver a typically rousing and depressing speech in his hometown and the home of the American Revolution, Lexington, Massachusetts. McKibben is one of very few leading lights building a global climate movement up to the task of preventing an all-out climate catastrophe. I credit McKibben more than any other single person with pushing those concerned about climate change to take meaningful collective action. So I was a little nervous when I got to ask him a question from the audience about something I find troubling about his approach.
Early in his talk, McKibben pointed out that the number 350 — equal to the maximum safe level of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere — was entirely non-ideological. He went on to suggest that we can build a movement that can shame and pressure our elected officials to act to price carbon high enough that we begin to phase out our devastating use of fossil fuels. Missing from this approach, however, is McKibben’s own analysis that the paradigm of economic growth is an underlying cause of the climate crisis. While McKibben was clearly embracing the task at hand as a political one, he seemed excruciatingly timid about the fact that the political task at hand is an ideological one.
In the context of ideology — a word that most of us associate with rigidity and doctrinaire sectarianism — McKibben’s approach seems overly cautious. He makes the case (rather poetically) that the time for baby steps forward is behind us. Yet he fails to recognize his own power — our own power — to knock down the destructive paradigm that has been ravaging precisely the people on this planet who, as he points out, have done the least to alter the face of our only home in this universe. The people of the world — all of us global citizens — have the power to replace the failing paradigm of perpetual economic growth with a political economy based on justice and sustainability. This new paradigm is rooted in the natural world, and sees humans as part of nature, not separate from it. This new paradigm is based on all the odd quirks and realities that define our very existence. This new paradigm is an ecological politics, informed by the insights, desires, and participation of every willing human being on this new planet, Eaarth, as well as the other natural systems that surround us and that we depend upon.
And while McKibben longs for — and is doing wonders to build — an effective global political movement focused on the safe level of carbon in our atmosphere, he seems skittish about embracing the one global political movement that has already been exploring its ideology over the past four decades – the global Green movement. The reason this is important is because McKibben has boiled down our most essential undertaking to putting a meaningful price on the carbon that will be emitted into the atmosphere. But the ecological crisis that most of the world’s people are facing is bigger, more complex, and more immediate than (though inclusive of) our destabilizing climate. And average citizens living in the developed nations opposed to meaningful climate action, even with a dramatically higher standard of living (and carbon footprint) than those in developing nations, are also suffering the ravages of the failed, competitive, and individualistic paradigm of economic growth.
The task at hand is orders of magnitude more complex than simply putting the right price on carbon. As McKibben admitted, it’s possible that that task is impossible. But it’s only impossible so long as it is isolated from every other pressing issue in people’s lives. The tragedy of the moment is just how distracted, distressed, and divided we all are, at the time when we most need to be effective agents of change. Despair across the United States is setting in, and being organized by the right wing into the kind of reactionary political force that can dramatically reverse the arc of this nation’s history towards justice.
The time for head-scratching about any of this is over. There is no longer any rational reason to be disappointed in the Democrats. They are acting in absolute harmony with their ideological focus of economic growth. They are operating according to their principles, funded predominantly by the corporations that have a vested interest in Democratic and Republican support of business-as-usual. They make up 50% of the status-quo two-party political system that stifles dissent and absorbs genuine movement-building. This two-party duopoly happily diverts trillions of taxpayer dollars into unconscionable wars for securing natural resources (The Carter Doctrine), for “humanitarian” interventions (The Clinton Doctrine), and for naked projection of imperial power (The Bush Doctrine).
Since any political debate needs two sides to the story, it is beyond convenient that both sides of the debate are awash in campaign contributions from the very industries we desperately need to rein in. Duopoly politics, then, frames for us the artificial debate between whether global warming is real/man-made and whether climate action will cripple our economy. The debate is between whether our energy solutions should be clean coal and nuclear power or more drilling, more shale oil and tar sands extraction, hydrofracking, and countless other shortsighted and highly irrational profit-making schemes. Meanwhile, the “environmental movement” is so firmly implanted within this corporate political and economic system that sometimes it’s hard to tell who is on which side. The answer to the Republican refrain of “drill, baby, drill” was the Democratic policy of, well, “drill baby drill.”
And so we spend trillions of dollars to bail out Wall Street and stimulate the deadly fossil-fuel economy, and we get no meaningful, conscientious political answer. We get an escalation of war in the Middle East, an escalation of the use of private contractors and predator drones, and a collapsed peace movement and a collapsed environmental movement, blinded again and again by the more progressive forces in the Democratic Party. Indeed, the Democratic Party is certainly the more progressive half of the corporate duopoly, but it is designed to serve elite interests and it does so by masterfully pulling wool over the eyes of the rank-and-file Democrats who are true champions of small-d democracy — only they’re caught in an identity crisis and an ideological trap. This trap has them giving precious time, money, and votes to candidates who are taking much more money from, and giving much more time to, corporate interests with business at stake in our elections. Every dollar given and each professed hope that our politicians can be nudged to do the right thing adds to the false story cementing their destructive paradigm. This support ignores the ideological realities of the political system these politicians perpetuate at the same time it ignores the physical realities of a changing planet and the social realities of distressed peoples the world over.
So I was disappointed by McKibben’s response to my question about whether the Green Party and the global Green movement might represent the ideological answer to the ideological political construction of our current framework of unabated economic growth, and whether investment in the notion of a President Obama changing course is misguided. He said he thought Obama was probably the most progressive President we’ll see in a long time.
While the task at hand is immensely complicated, I think the political solutions are quite simple. The question “what can I/we do?” has 3 basic answers:
1) Pledge to withhold all of our support (money, volunteer time, advocacy, faint praise, benefits-of-the-doubt, votes, etc.) from any candidate who accepts money from corporate interests
2) Pledge to help create and support institutions and political parties that do not accept money from corporate interests, and to only support candidates who do the same
3) Pledge to build the non-electoral, non-partisan movement that can bridge to a new ecological paradigm
Bill McKibben has accepted that the time for individuals acting on their own has past, and that it is time for collective (i.e., political) action. He is laser-focused on number 3, and while I sympathize with that choice, I think he unwittingly lends counterproductive support to the deadly status quo. His advocacy has undeniably shifted the realm of political feasibility, putting “80% by 2050” on the lips of countless politicians in the span of months. It is time McKibben and the rest of us recognize our power to shift the prevailing paradigm as well. I was glad to get in a plug for the idea that Bill run for President in 2012. He laughed it off, but I insisted that it would really get the powers-that-be to perk up and pay attention.
Either way, a global ecological political movement is an idea whose time has come. Keep an eye out for it in a town near you, and on your ballot this November and beyond. In its absence, throw your hat into the ring or encourage your friends, loved ones, and community leaders to throw in theirs. Live Green. Vote Green. Run Green. We are the ones we have been waiting for.
To my fellow swimmers:
There is a river flowing now very fast.
It is so great and swift,
that there are those who will be afraid.
They will try to hold on to the shore,
they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly.
Know that the river has its destination.
The elders say we must let go of the shore,
push off into the middle of the river,
keep our heads above water.
And I say see who is there with you and celebrate.
At this time in history,
we are to take nothing personally,
least of all ourselves,
for the moment that we do,
our spiritual growth and journey come to a halt.
The time of the lone wolf is over.
Gather yourselves.
Banish the word struggle from your attitude and vocabulary.
All that we do now must be done
in a sacred manner and in celebration.
We are the ones we have been waiting for.
–Hopi Elders
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…and fish emulsion.
We–obviously, I hope–agree on the goals. I’d like nothing more than to see a FAR less materalistic, consumption-oriented culture–and globe. And I’m the political animal I am because I don’t think it’s going to happen voluntarily. But I think we disagree on the role of political parties–I don’t see the issue as goodhearted people versus corporations that need to be reined in by legislation; I believe that the masses need coralling as well. That by way of framing what follows.
I think it’s important to keep in mind that many of the “insights, desires, and participat[ory acts] of every human being” are in fact being taken into account right now. Those include the desires of nearly every human to have more at less cost–we are a decided minority, you know; the desires of a GREAT great many to punish enemies real and imagined for crimes real and imagined–the US is hardly the only nation waging war!–from sub-Saharan Africa to the Philippinnes to Latin America, everyone from superpowers to tribalized indigenous peoples are busy spearing and skewing one another, and those that aren’t are either preaching the same … or tempting the rest of us to want to do the damn same (cf. Beck and company in DC).
We forget, sometimes, that we live in a pluralistic democracy, and that the greedy and the warmongering make up a large segment of the same. They’re NOT interested in seeing themselves as part of nature, and they’re most certainly not interested in social justice. And this was always the case, long before the idea of a “corporation” even existed. They’re interested in security and gettin’ what they can while the gettin’s good. I believe you’re right in that the two parties hoodwink their adherents, but I also believe that if we’re ever going to take power, we’re going to have to hoodwink people as well. What, really, do you think is the reason that after several decades, the Greens in the US have achieved–what?–a state legislature seat here or there, a mayor’s seat? We like to blame that Vast, Centrist Conspiracy, but the fact is–a hell of a lotta people simply don’t like our message. If they did, each of us would be converting dozens of people every day. Sure, they’ll all pay a degree of lip service to the 10KV–just as so many do to the tenets of christianity–but they’re no more likely to practice them than they are true christianity. So… rather than constantly preaching at them, we need to start telling them things they want to hear.
Which I think our GRP candidates are doing–without any hoodwinking, byw!–even as I’m looking forward to hearing them address an even wider range of issues of importance to my town. (I know–that’s MY job as a potential candidate. It’s coming, it’s coming.)
And we also need to keep in mind that most people simply don’t have the luxury of taking the long view. They neither want nor expect their politicians to undertake wholesale cultural reform from the standpoint of an ecological politics. They want jobs, they want to pay less taxes, they want to make sure they’re not going to get blown up in the subway, they want safe schools, and they want medical insurance. (They do NOT want to bike and walk to work, I can tell you that.) Until the Greens start addressing bread-and-butter issues and show that they have truly solid plans on a municipal, county, and state level, and that they can perform, rather than calling for the wholesale transformation of society (the kidn requiring the transformation of nearly every individual, a project which has never worked–remember Che’s idiotic notion of “the new socialist man?”) and the wholesale damnation of everyone who disagrees with them, they’ll remain a fringe moral crusade, and not a viable POLITICAL party–pure, and right, sure. Pure, right, and impotent. (As evidence, I give you the Green Party’s history in the USA).
I actually agree with McKibben that Obama IS the most progressive President we’ll see in a long time. No, he didn’t wave his magic wand and make single-payer happen. There was no freaking way and I am still 100% confused by those who think he could have acted one whit differently on that issue (what would a Green President have done? Asked for everything and got nothing?) No, he’s not leading hard enough on environmental catastrophe, but we’ve failed to lay the groundwork–over the past couple of years, we’ve seen FEWER people “believe” in “global warming”!! That’s not the fault of Democratic legislators, you know. (And what would a Green President tell the reps from coal mining country?) No, he hasn’t ended the war, and I writhe over this myself–but I wonder what a Green president’s policy would be towards Afghanistan and Pakistan. There are some savage, merciless motherfuckers out there who make the US military look like it’s being run by Mother Theresa, and they murdered a very close friend of mine –what’s the Green President gonna do about that? The war is unwinnable, but what’s the Green solution? Talk to those sons of bitches about their relationship to Pachamama? People want security–maintaining the national defense is the number one priority of the President as mandated by the Constitutions. And this trickles down to the local level–I hear plenty about CORI reform–a good thing!–but I hear nothing about the fuckers who gunned down a slew of innocent people on the streets of Boston this weekend. Nada. Until the Greens demonstrate that they’re as tough on al-qaeda and street corner gangs as they are tenderhearted towards Palestine and ex-cons (most of whom are simply drug offenders, but in re that, I’ve yet to see a Green candidate call for the legalization of all drugs by users….), I don’t think they’re going to develop real traction.
You quote the Hopi, but their fate is illustrative of what I’m talking about here.
As Obama said, quoting a stream of others: you elected. Now make me do what you want me to. We aren’t.
(As for drill, baby, drill–note that the citizens of those areas of the bayou devastated by the BP fuckup [I hate that word “spill”] aren’t screaming for an end to drilling. You can’t overhaul a local economy overnight, and you can’t simply eliminate the livelihoods and the local revenues from oil and coal country until you already have in place an alternative. And you can’t let the price of oil skyrocket until you HAVE IN PLACE alternative, affordable energies. And THAT’s going to take decades. We can’t ask for sacrifice from certain sectors unless we have something better to offer, and that something has be more than slogans and platitudes).
As for McKibben, it’s hard for me to gauge his effectiveness. Every time I’ve seen him, he’s preaching to the choir. My friends and neighbors have never heard of him (aside from my incessant yapping). But he’d be crazy to join the Greens–a guy whose goal is to rouse the entire populace is going to be instantly tuned out by those segments of the population–make that 90%–who are damned by the Greens as wholly corrupt or bamboozled. While we MUST support candidates and demonstrate that our policies are going to be more efficient than those of rival candidates, the ongoing wholesale dissing of the Democratic Party, and the attack on their EVERY position as not-good-enough as simply another bone to corporate interests, simply bespeaks itself of a holier-than-thou smugness and a we-have-all-the-answers type attitude. As you suggest, we need to incorporate all views, and to reach out to all people–thus, joining or endorsing any political movement would effectively preclude McKibben from doing that. WE can call Democrats all the names you do above–McKibben has to stick to critiquing specific policies.
Which is also why I would not take your pledge–I will offer praise where I feel it’s due and will continue to vote for candidates who accept corporate money. Happily? Hell, no. But I have kids, and aging parents, and I live in the real world where little things go a long way–and if someone turns a profit off them, well, so be it (keep in mind as well that most people’s investments are tied up in corporate stocks–including union pension funds etc–we ALL have a serious stake in corporate success!). Nor am I going to emasculate myself or sit outside the arena–the Greens have me inthe nosebleed seats, but your pledge–not to vote for or in any way endorse a decent Democrat who has accepted corporate campaign monies–(and there are a LOT of them in office)(incidentally, does that extend to unions?)–means not even participating in most partisan elections. It means sittiung outside teh stadium while teh game is on. No way. I have too much at stake. Give me a Green candidate, and I’m quite likely to vote for him or her–but until you can give me one in every election, your pledge, noble as it is, is suicidal.
I know the old line about “lie down with pigs, come up smelling like shit.” Well: the first thing you learn on your very first day as a parent or a farmer is that at the end of the day, you’re gonna smell like shit. Same with politics. The reward comes at the end of the season.
I’m proud of the fact that Greens don’t take corporate money. That alone–and not the values and all that other stuff–is why I’m a Green. But I am truly horrified at the thought of not taking an active part–beyond voting!–in elections in which there is no Green candidate–I think it’s irresponsible, unrealistic, and I truly hope that all Greens will continue to support the best candidates in every election. I certainly will be this November.
More than that–I do not believe that my Democratic statehouse reps vote the way they do or co-sponsor what they do because they’re wholly in thrall to big bad corporations or to a Senate/House leadership that is the same. They’ve been very responsive to my own requests. And my rep in the Senate voted in favor of casinos for the same reason the mayors of 12 towns in the region did–no one has shown them a better plan to put people back to work, pronto. That doesn’t make him corrupt.
Rather than: I won’t touch you with a ten foot pole if you take money from lobbyists, my philosophy is: s/he who is not against us is with us. I want to make as much common cause with as many Democrats and Republicans and Libertarians as I can, and when they respond to my request/pressure to do something, they can take all the credit and I’ll sing their praises to the skies. Why work so hard on alienating them? Aren’t we alienated enough as it is? I’m more than willing to play the whore when need be.
Additionally, Bill would be nuts to get involved with GPUS. They are in absolutely no position to even consider running a presidential campaign and would best focus on aiding candidates for office in each of the 50 states.
And if and when they do, here’s a concept–rather than running a figurehead or a symbol, the Greens (nationally) might want to consider runnning someone whose shows the demonstrated capability to manage the world’s greatest superpower. They might actually be taken seriously. McKibben-Clemente didn’t exactly say “we’re serious,” you know? I didn’t vote for them. I’m not even sure they showed up in Massachusetts. Maybe I wasn’t paying close enough attention, but they certainly didn’t go overboard getting the word out. Running a “hip hop activist” for the second highest office in the land doesn’t exactly shout gravitas, and it would be exceedingly presumptous of a McKibben to speak on a variety of subjects about which he knows nothing–since he has a hell of a lot more dignity than does, say, a S-Palin–or to pretend that he knows the ins-and-outs of all the federal and congressional agencies he’d be in direct control of. Whether we like it it or not, running for serious high office entails more than expertise on a subject and purity of heart. I’d like to see the Greens run someone with extensive knowledge of how things work on the Hill, who can talk intelligently and gain the respect of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, etc. Again: are we about symbolism and cvrusades or being a viable political party meant to be taken seriously? I actually often wonder.
(That’s actually one reason I supported Nader–who knows the Hill better than a guy whose probably been in more offices and hearing chambers than anyone over the past five decades!).
Again, this all comes down to what we think the role of the Greens is. I’m not interested in crusades—I want power, and if I have to kiss ass, dissemble, whatever to get it, I would. I’m interested in being a political party, committed to both the looong, slooow, and INCREMENTAL process of gradually transforming our systems–which frustrates the living daylights out of me, but that’s reality. I’ll make common cause with anyone, I’ll compromise, and I will happily deal with people and organizations who are tainted. Frankly, I’m not a pure enough person to do otherwise.
McKibben doesn’t have the luxury of throwing his lot in with what is in fact a fringe party, and I wholly respect that. He really need to focus entirely on your point #3–and to remain wholly non-partisan. It’s up to us to create the infrastructure that might someday allow him, or, more likely, his heirs, to point to a Green canddiate and to be able to say, this person is both the ideal President and a viable one.
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Michael, you are not a philosopher laying out an argument. But you have premises and principles that you only allude to and do not make explicit. The reason I point this out, is because when I engage such vast and complex subjects like these, I am trying to gain some kind of understanding and perspective.
I go on enough blogs to trade barbs and insults. Its somewhat entertaining but it gets boring quickly. And many of the conversations we have here are among friends and concern things that are actually concrete. These are complex issues, but taking a stance on it has real consequences.
So I am going to try a new exercise. I will lay out the principles and ideas I think underlie the political rationale you just gave, and then offer my criticism, touching on disagreements of fact as well as of values. I might not do you justice, but it will boil down this stuff to its essence and it will be fairly easy for you correct. If you don’t like a label remember I am using it for ease of use and not to pigeon hole you. This will go deep into philosophical territory, but yeah sometimes you need ask questions several times in a row before you figure out what the basis of disagreements are and where common ground lies.
Human beings are self-interested. This is an innate feature, and is largely not a social construction. They tend toward violence, greed, and material security at the expense of other values. They are short-sighted and do not concerns themselves with long term impacts of their actions. Human civilization is on it way to destroying itself because human nature writ large is in contradiction with the limits of the natural world. The drive for consumption, for growth, for a materially high standard of living, is unrealistic and in fact suicidal. And the effective end of the party is not far off but fairly close at hand.
This is the way human beings are. Civilization, governments, and all the other institutions in society more or less accept this assumption in order to keep things going. So to make it possible for society of some sort to continue, those who are aware of the above problem need to do whatever is necessary to gain the power to shift civilization, or at least portions of it, to a sustainable trajectory. The ethical maxim here is utilitarian, and the importance lies in the outcomes rather than means. Because if we worry about the means, well we there’s a good chance we will be dead.
It just so happens that in the United States the dominant political parties are not controlled by people serious enough about the looming crises. And there are interests in society, economic, social, and political, as well as a very large portion of the population, if not a majority, whom want to procrastinate and ignore what is obvious to the people and organizations that have the luxury of foresight.
A large section of the population needs to be won over. So education and non-electoral efforts are important. Pulling power centers, like corporations and governments, in society closer to a sustainable path is progress. And any independent electoral efforts need to be confined to immediate concerns in order to make people with the right outlook look credible enough to have a place in the driver’s seat.
Pheww! Ok so that might be horribly off, and it may even be insulting in my simplification. Many pardons. And I am probably leaving out other assumptions, concepts, and values that buttress your arguments and conclusions.
I think human beings are innately a lot of things, but the expression of these innate aspects is socially constituted. People can be cooperative and amiable, creative and inquisitive, and often in spite of societies whose key values are opposed to this. The violence, greed, and material longing, yes its rather prevalent, but its not universal to the last man and woman and these aspects can oft be expressed in construction and cooperative ways.
If human beings exist in democratic and horizontal communities in which the prevailing norms and means to life in society are governed in a democratic and decentralized fashion, then the attitudes and dispositions most attuned to this situation will be strengthened and those opposed weakened.
So I think the contradiction between human beings and nature is primarily social rather than biological, technological, or somehow written into the fabric of the universe. We have social systems which designate human beings as objects, as divorced of meaning. Some are better and some are worse and its all arbitrary. So of course modern societies will aim for economic growth at the expense of everything else. It covers up all the sickness and literal misanthropy our institutions depend on to sustain them.
So a key aspect of politics is about appealing to our better nature, about aiming high, about creating new kinds of social relationships, new kinds of thought, and new kinds of organizations and institutions which embody ecological and humanistic premises. I do not want just survival, I want virtue, happiness, justice, and freedom. Lets mend the rift between human and human, as well as the rift between humans and nature. I am an utopian.
So I basically have my head shoved up my ass. And not only do I smell like shit, all I can smell is shit. You have to sympathize with this situation, its very dark and cramped. And somehow I have to take my imagination with its rather unrealistic ideas and figure out a strategy to make them real.
Well Social Change 101 makes some very simple distinctions. The up-the-ass folks might be crazy but they are certainly not naive. Any social movement worth its salt organizes based on immediate issues, concerns, and problems. It uses the language of every day life, its examples and stories are down to earth. By building community it builds power, when that power is exercised victories can be won. With the victories the movement grows and expands beyond its origins and can create institutions counter to the powers that be. With credibility of action comes credibility of the ideas and the analysis. The utopian aspect helps the movement grow and act, rather than diminishing it.
And while I agree politics is rather dirty, even with my utopian aspirations, I think you are putting the cart before the horse in one respect. You do not build power by supplicating powers that be. There is a distinction between access and power after all. To think that access, especially by itself, will lead to power and social changes is worse that utopian, its just wrong-headed. Power creates access, and its far more important to be able to have a strong bargaining hand than being all warm and cordial with some leader.
Labor, women’s, environmental, racial justice, immigrant rights, LGBT, and so on all have utopian aspects. Its not all about sleeping in bed with people. For many of these movements it meant a whole lot of direct action, lawsuits, oppositional electoral action, and popular education, and only later lobbying.
In line with this observation its important to point out that its not just the Greens who fucked up over the past 30 years but nearly all progressive, leftist, and populist politics inside and outside the Democratic Party. But its not the utopian aspects that are dooming them.
The last successful progressive third parties, the Populists and the Socialists, were in fact led by strong utopian impulses. The real difference between now and then, is the utter obliteration of farmers and industrial workers as distinct economic and social categories whose interests were clear and apparent to their own members. Having proportional representation or at least delayed suffrage (in the case of the UK) were extremely important for radical parties in Europe, because it enabled them to build allegiance from specific economic classes and obtain actual results.
The underclass, the working class, and the middle class no longer have communities as lively and connected as their predecessors. It really is the geography of nowhere. And with changes in our economy has come changes in attitudes and lifestyles. You cannot go to a church, a union hall, or a town meeting and find the majority of a community. A coherent social fabric where people know each other and can see the structure of society gives way to private spaces and an individualism devoid of individuality.
From my perspective I see your realistic (or pessimistic) observations as historical in nature rather than being based on the nature of human beings (and this is me assuming of course, so correct me if I have gone wildly astray for most of this post). And I think you might be underestimating the sheer level of frustration right now. I have knocked on thousands of doors, talked to hundreds, if not thousands, of people in varied kinds of organizing over the past year and a half. If I were to run for a local office I could get away with some of my philosophical grandstanding simply because people are that outraged. You merely have to dig an inch or so below the surface and all that apathy and supposed centrism gives way.
And I would re-characterize your criticism of Green impotence from being about content and message to being about organization and tactics. If all I did was knock on doors for the Green-Rainbow Party or table at local events I could find enough people to start a local to find candidates and do issue work. No one has been doing sustained local outreach, besides in the Berkshires. Running for large offices without a good deal of experience, good overall circumstances, or strong media coverage is not the most efficient way to build an organization.
And being afraid to fund-raise and hire staff is also a bad way to build an organization. Unless you are organizing groups with a lot of spare time, like students, the unemployed, retired people, and people on fringes of society (homeless, vagrants, professional radicals, hehe). Even then, not having people paid to devote some time to your efforts will have its limits in terms of how large you can build your organization.
I probably share most of your crits of the GPUS, and I do think Obama is the most progressive president we’ve had in a long time or will have (but I am not praising him with that description).
I should say I do not really see the point of a Green president, most of the necessary shifts in policy could be done through a better Congress and popular pressure. But it may be that we will not be at the latter until the former is actually feasible.
I also agree with the BP fuckup point. When the Cold War ended there was of course some downsizing of the Pentagon largess and some smarter folks in the peace and labor movements worked to help retool workers and businesses for civilian activities. This experience may be helpful in figuring out how to de-carbonize our economy.
As for McKibben? He can do want he wants. Its not part of my strategy.
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I wrote the above last night, and despite its length I left out a few things. One point is that its possible the material condition of human society and the ecological position of the earth are so awful that betting on survival pure and simple is the most rational course of action. You may have to stay entirely at the base of Maslow’s pyramid for a good long time.
Another point I should make more clearly is that because I see the problem as social, as embodied in institutions and social practices, I see movements for racial justice, economic justice, for greater democratization, and other liberatory movements as actually being part of the practical organizing necessary to save the Earth. I suppose an extremely democratic and decentralized society could be horribly unecological, but its unlikely. Horizontal relationships and norms of equality and a holistic human condition are unlikely to make people want to annihilate their means to existence. At least human scaled societies tend to come to some balance and natural understanding of their surroundings. But that’s an empirical case I would need to make.
There is also a strong case for radical and utopian movements making social change happen a great deal faster and enabling the compromises that bring a society’s institutions to a new equilibrium. The New Deal was a reaction from the organizing and tumult largely instigated by Socialists, Communists, and other populists during the Depression. The specter of the Malcolm X made white elites much more willing to deal with the demands of more moderate civil rights leaders in 1960s.
And you can even look at today’s Republican Party. My utopian leanings are least based in rationality, and I am not talking out the side of my mouth. This political party is literally bringing government reform to a standstill on behalf of a small elite, they do not compromise and do not try to make new friends, and they lie constantly. Over the past 40 years they have changed the narrative and gained control of enough power centers to shift all political debate to the right. In many cases their policies are against the interests of their own members, especially the non-wealthy, but even the wealthy ones sometimes. The bank bailouts, the existence of the Federal Reserve, and the stimulus were very good things for most corporations. These things save them a whole lot of heartache. And yet they demand more, often incoherently, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is how they are organizing and shaping public opinion, the facts be damned.
But that’s nationally. In Massachusetts the Republicans have more or less failed miserably for just as long. The population is too educated, too secular, and too professional. So any alternative to the Democrats is going to get a hearing.
And again, I am not saying go forth and preach my philosophy of history and society. No, that’s not how you organize and build power. In the suburbs you have to figure out what sources of power exist or could exist that could make society more just and sustainable. I see unionized workers, workers who ought to be unionized, public employees, the bohemian bourgeois (who is shopping at Whole Foods? I’m not), the unemployed, the poor, the young, minorities, and the increasingly less secure middle class as a considerable base of power that in Massachusetts certainly makes up a majority. If you include the CEO of Raytheon in your organization well you have already compromised a shit ton to have access.
But in some cases these groups are not organized or their organizations are too tied to the status quo. So we need to actually go out and organize them. Getting GRP registration up past 1% and closer to 10% or more would immediately strengthen our impact on any and all policy initiatives. Building credibility and trust with non-electoral groups is also important.
(of course legislators are nice and have good intentions, many recent policy initiatives will have tremendous practical benefits for many people, its not all about corporations, but, and its a big but, these same people can fight for single payer or not, fight for public education or not, fight for progressive taxation or not, fight to get toxics out of children’s products or not, and trade groups and other interests do hire lobbyists and frame the debate in such a way as to prevent these initiatives from taking root)
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The best way to organize is be a part of whom you’re organizing. If you want to organize cafeteria workers, start by getting a job in a cafeteria. In you want to organize suburbanites, buy a home in the suburbs, and be sure you’re paying property taxes. If you want to organize in the slums, rent an apartment there. Credibility matters.
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Alas I don’t have time to write as full a response as you fellows deserve. I don’t really have much more to say than was included in the position paper I helped write a few years back and which USED TO BE on the SHORT-LIVED strategy page of the GRP website. But here’s a few things.
The global “system” which runs the world today includes both capitalism and socialism. The world “progressive” used to refer to policies and people who were felt to move capitalism in a socialist direction. It’s beside the point to me whether Obama is more or less progressive. Nor do I think it matters to most voters. What matters to them is, Who’s going to cut social security and how? Who’s going to start or stop this or that war? Who believes in God and who doesn’t? Voters do make their choices on things like that and I don’t blame them.
I don’t favor the GP running candidates for president or even governor from our weak programmatic and organizational position. But as long as I’m in this party, goddammit, I’m going to support its candidates. If a small party doesn’t even have the discipline to hold its own activists, then nobody’s going to respect it-myself included.
The Green parties have become a worldwide force, both as mass movement and as participant in governing coalitions in Germany, the Czech Republic, Ireland, Italy and apparently now in Australia, as well as in cities or provincial governments in most industrial countries. And indeed they have got into some smelly shit there but they have also won significant reforms. By showing that they are a force to contend with they have forced the other parties to respect them and helped to shift the ol’ paradigm greenward.
However Green political strength has been essentially among middle-class in the industrialized countries or industrialized parts of countries like Colombia and Brazil. Greens are not strong in working-class communities or in the rest of the world.
However Greens are not the only worldwide movement challenging the Globalist “growth paradigm.” Our counterpart in the less-industrialized countries is the Indigenist movement. Most of the “leftist” governments which have come to power in South America recently have drawn on this movement. Islamic resistance movements which rely on “tribal” loyalties also have Indigenist roots. I hope that those who are willing to “play dirty” in American politics can appreciate the position of those who “play dirty” to resist our common foe, the U.S. Empire.
I think it pays to use words with care. Ideology has so many meanings and we use paradigm far too often. I generally use the term ideology to mean an “ism,” which is both a theory and a practice which claims to be based on scientific principles. Thus racism, socialism, capitalism, and-my favorite-economics. We have our own isms of course, but let’s be aware of them as both guides and blinders at once.
As we know, the word paradigm was invented to describe a theory and practice, or a research tradition, within a scientific field. If we want to extend it to mean something like “world-view and way of organizing social life,” I see ecological politics as not a new paradigm but a very old one. That is also true of the Ten Key Values. These are in many ways a restatement or views which we share with conservatives and religious folk as much or more than with liberals and “progressives.” So again-progressive, shmogressive.
Agreed with Michael that we are a minority and with Eli that we need to put forward our principles. The Green view is revolutionary with respect to the existing system but conservative with respect to the real world. That’s because the “existing system” is itself radical with respect to the real world. The so-called “Right” taps into this sense, only to make it seem like nonsense.
It is no wonder that most people don’t always see things our way! Hell, WE don’t even usually see things our way. I would strenuously disagree that the GP’s lack of success is due to people being repelled by our ideas. Our candidates aren’t noteworthy for expounding our ideas. I would say that the number of people who fundamentally agree with us is an order of magnitude over the percentage of votes we usually get.
Hey, if all the ex-cons and pro-Palestinians (of which I am both by the way MF) voted Green I think we would be respected and feared (which in politics is about the same thing) instead of being dismissed as harmless (which I don’t at all enjoy being).
Wake up Greens! The USA has a different electoral system and social structure from other countries. We need to study and understand OUR system and OUR local conditions in order to succeed. Yes, study. Knowledge and vision are relevant to politics! But whatever, real politics ALWAYS entails focus on the needs and issues that interest the folks on our block-and ourselves as needy block-dwellers. We need to focus especially on the issues that the others avoid because of their ties and interests, advance answers that will work but which the others don’t want, and work with people to help them resolve their day-to-day.
That’s all for now.