To the extent that I am part of the anti-war movement, I must admit that we are getting our asses kicked in a futile, futile effort to stop the gears of the machine. The killing, the advance of empire, the crass profiteering, and the worthlessness of our supposedly representative form of government in representing the people’s will to end the nonsense continue as though no anti-war movement existed at all.
To the extent that I am part of the environmental movement or climate movement, I must admit that we are getting our asses kicked in a futile, futile effort to stop the gears of the machine. The greenhouse gas emissions by humans, the advance of earth-destroying industries and fossil-fuel insanity, the crass profiteering, and the worthlessness of our supposedly representative form of government in representing the people’s desire for a cleaner, greener way continue as though no environmental or climate movement existed at all.
To the extent that I am part of an ecological electoral movement, I must admit that we are getting our asses kicked in a futile, futile effort to stop the gears of the duopoly. The private takeover of our government at every level and the advance of special interest money and for-profit ideology into nearly every inch of our politics continue as though no electoral alternative existed at all.
On all 3 fronts, I will happily and thankfully concede that there are some exceptions. And I consider myself part of other movements for social change. But across the board, each small step forwards is met by more and bigger steps backwards. We are losing. And I am tired of losing. I am ready to win.
And that’s why I’m ecstatic to have joined, in full force, a game-changing campaign that is as uplifting as it is forceful, as promising as it is frustrating, as hopeful as it is intimidating, and as good an opening as any that I see before me to rewrite the politics of today.
Across the issue spectrum, as I tried to indicate above, we are having our asses handed to us. And more people are waking up to this, admitting this, and struggling with that hardest task of them all… breaking out of the patterns and habits that are so deeply ingrained that we barely even know they exist. Conversations like this one on Facebook are happening as if to taunt us that the very things we are fighting are helping people make the necessary connections to decelerate the madness and replace it with more grounded, workable systems in its place.
Bill McKibben’s work with 350.org is exactly right in its emphasis on building a more coherent, more coordinated, more collaborative global movement. Local examples like the JP Greenhouse, GreenPort, Grow Food Northampton, and efforts like permaculture and eco-villages are exactly right in their emphasis on place-based organizing for a secure future. And I think the Green Party and Transition Towns, locally, nationally, and globally, are exactly right in their emphasis on finding ways of working at all levels. I think the global Green movement tends to take more seriously the notion that all collective action is politics, while Transition Towns tends to take more seriously the idea that there’s a lot we can do outside of the partisan or electoral political realms.
The politics of place has a long history, going back to the ecological beginnings of our species at least. More accurately, it probably applies just as strongly to other species’ interactions as they collectively work to make the most of their surroundings and carry their species forward. The politics of peace has a shorter history, a reaction to the curious construction of war. While I don’t know really know its history, I do know its ultimate failures. Some think its failures are inevitable, and that war, violence, and empire are innate to humankind. I tend to think that we’re an incredible species that can overcome such a horrific weakness by designing social systems that are truly based on the values that we aspire to. Social systems where a Facebook group like When Jesus said Love Your Enemies I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean Kill Them wouldn’t make any sense. In the society we’ve got, it makes all too much sense.
To do this, to design alternative institutions and systems that replace the prevailing, unsustainable, and even presently unraveling ones, I think we need to marry the politics of peace with the politics of place. And with no disrespect to the important work of 350.org, Transition Towns, the peace movement and the rest, I think the clearest, most coherent vehicle for doing this is the Green Party or its equivalent where you live. In Massachusetts, due to the merging of forces of the Rainbow Coalition Party and the Massachusetts Green Party, we’ve got the Green-Rainbow Party. While some blame that unwieldy, confusing name for the failures of the GRP, and others blame all of the outside forces working against the GRP’s success, and yet others blame things like the consensus process, I think most of the blame goes to our basic failure to strategize and synthesize our experiences into a clear, common agenda, with continued assessment and reassessment.
Even still, I find the Green-Rainbow Party in Massachusetts to be the most clear-headed and promising home for the kind of ecological alternative that we need as a model. Despite the problems, there are many promising signs and inspiring achievements. And one of the most hopeful is the decision to throw everything we’ve got — and I’ll admit that it’s not much — into the 2010 gubernatorial election. With just 3 short weeks remaining, this contest holds promise to be a leverage point for Massachusetts politics as well as nationally. With the Tea Party’s well-funded successes making big waves across the nation, the Green Party’s coming of age can be the grassroots narrative to counteract all the astroturfing.
Unlike the Tea Party which is grounded in criticism and cynicism, the Green Party is grounded in values, vision, and the truth. As Congressman Sam Rayburn said in 1953, “Time will tell, if they [the Republicans] can really run the Government. Any jackass can kick a barn door down, but it takes a carpenter to build it back.” In my view, we’ve given both the Democrats and the Republicans quite enough chances at running the show, and all they’ve proven is that they can run it into the ground, killing lots of people in the process. No matter who is at the helm, in the legislative and executive branches, we continue the march toward war, extraction, and exploitation. Giving the reins to the Tea Party or voting in Scott Brown Republicans is no sensible answer, but they are the logical result of a spineless, gutless, visionless, valueless Democratic Party.
Voting for these people — the John Kerrys and the Barack Obamas who would send young men and women overseas, or hand them video-game-like controllers here at home, in order to kill and destroy or expand and protect American Empire — is inexcusable at best and insane at worst. That is, if you consider yourself to be anti-war or pro-peace. Or a religious or spiritual individual. Or a humanist. These faces of the pay-to-play political system are little more than that… faces, a facade. Voting for them is a clear endorsement of American Empire, of the encroachment on our civil liberties, of the militarization of our society, of the further warming of our planet, of the continued pillage and plunder of our only home. Focusing down on the hyperlocal or individual level and ignoring this reality is missing reality itself. Focusing on peace and ignoring social justice, economic justice and climate justice is also missing reality. And any labor movement that ignores these realms is simply wasting people’s resources in a futile attempt at self-preservation.
The politics of peace and place demands locally-rooted organizing that is part of a global political movement. It means getting traction where it is easiest to gain traction. It means cutting down redundancies, minimizing atomization, and maximizing synthesis and synergy. It means leveraging resources strategically into collective gains. It means cross-cutting solutions, across issues and across geography and other divides. It means advancing policies and candidates for municipal, regional, state, and national office that do this. It means economic ventures that re-shape our approaches to livelihood. It means tuning out irrelevant political distractions and the dominant disempowering narratives and creating our own, community-based ones. It means tearing down the barriers to community where we live, whatever they may be. For college students, this means registering to vote where you live, not where you’d like to cling to some false notion that your vote has more power back home. This means engaging both the local politics of your community and the institution within which you are studying.
This century, all politics is local and global. That’s reality. With greenwashing turning towards localwashing, multinational companies are trying to get back down to earth. But the nature of their enterprise is inherently contradictory to community-based economics. Similarly the Democratic Party inherently supports war, growth, and profit-maximization at the expense of people and the planet, while trying to present a softer alternative to the Republicans. But the McKibbens and the MoveOns invest a whole lot of hope in the notion that the Democrats are just the clumsy underdog and can simply improve to start winning. Of course, even when they win — and win big — they still can’t deliver.
To paraphrase Gary Snyder, the politics of peace and place is about finding your place on the planet, drawing a line in the sand, and then digging in and taking responsibility. We need to learn to connect, and to build — networks, knowledge, institutions, infrastructure, and movements. If a critical mass of people draw that line and commit to learning and working together to do this, the victories, and the transformation, will follow. Future unraveling will only serve to accelerate this success. People are, in record numbers, looking for a new direction. The Green Party still is neither left nor right, but in front, even with all of its many flaws. This is our moment to reassess, repair and rebuild for the long haul.
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you’re one of the best Green writers out there.
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Well, the business about the Greens being neither left nor right makes for a good slogan, but according to just about any definition out there, we’re about as 100% left as can be imagined. I make no apologies for that, myself.
And I think you do a disservice to the Tea Party types in insisting that they’re grounded in cynicism rather than values. I don’t see them as nihilistic. They have values. They just aren’t mine.
But all in all, you’re dead-on here. The transition people need to get politically active or, guaranteed, their efforts will fail. And Greens need to walk the walk–to live sustainably, as do transition types, to show it can be done.
I’ll continue to argue that for Greens, that means working in those industries that transform. To many of us are theorists and academicians and “professionals.” We need to BE farmers. We need to show that we have the skills to get investors to throw some capital at OUR ideas, and to open and manage and work on the assembly lines of in those weatherization and other companies we talk a lot about. Talk is cheap. We need to show sunburn and blisters and bruises. We lack cred.
That part I can handle. The part I haven’t figured out yet is how to get the transition-sustainable movement beyond the tiny and insignificant fringe of people actually engaged in it. For example: we’re both pretty good at talking to Greens. Can you rewrite this in such a way that it grabs mainstream democrats and Republicans and Independents by the balls? THAT’S where we’re failing–all of us. Myself as much as anyone.
The Tea Party is kicking our ass. They came out of right field last year and they got more press in a month than the Green Party has gotten in two decades. And it’s not simply because of Koch money and astroturfing. They tapped instantly into something we didn’t. Anger–make that rage; the sense that they’re being fucked over; a sense of aleination. They didn’t use all the pretty language the Greens do with those silly, weirdly religious sounding Key Values; they don’t talk utopia. They’re onto something. Whether the fact that they’re simply being led down the same path as ever by those who have realized that they quietly capitalize on this is another matter. The fact is that the Green movement–as you indicate–has been a wholesale failure in the states. We need to start from scratch (and yes, that means, in part, getting rid of our utterly ridiculous name).
It’s time to reformat the hard drive.
I’d suggest moving beyond our traditional vicious anti-democratic rhetoric. Telling the people that we want to convert that their behavior is inexcusable and insane isn’t going to win many friends. I hear those very same terms thrown at me by mainstream, Democrats, and my response isn’t “gee, tell me more!” We need a movement that allows Democrats to go on being Democrats, Greens to be Green, etc, but that encourages progressive Democrats to vote for a better Green in a race, and to encourage Greens, and strongly, to line up behind solid Democrats in their districts. Because so long as we insist on our own smug “we’re the only answer,” and so long as we refuse to vote for–and endorse!–good Democrats, we will most assuredly continue polling right about where we’re at right now.
And I’m tired of losing, myself.