Mass Politics Must Win

Por Barney Iley — Tribune

History has come for the Greens. With the passing of the ‘Zionism is Racism’ motion at their Brighton conference, the contradictions within the party that have been gently warming since Zack Polanski became leader are now white hot. How they are resolved will determine whether the Party seizes the political moment or slides into the footnotes. Can it become a mass, populist, ecosocialist force to the left of Labour, opening up new fronts in the fight against international fascism, climate breakdown and hyper-inequality? Or will internal divisions tear it asunder?There are many reasons one might object to the motion currently tearing through headlines — but it’s worth noting that not a single good objection came from the party grandees that spoke against it on the conference floor. As a member of the left-wing faction Greens Organise (GO), which wants to see the Greens stand on a broad ecosocialist platform of the sort Polanski has been setting out, the motion presents major strategic challenges that have nothing to do with the inane respectability politics of Caroline Lucas et al. It risks turning the Greens into a marginal, minoritarian force. We must now confront this danger head-on, rather than getting distracted by relitigating the merits and demerits of the vote itself. This means asking two questions: how did we get here, and what do we do next? We got here because the Green Party is astonishingly underorganised for anyone wishing to practise a politics connected to reality, and the proposers of this motion exploited that fact more energetically and pragmatically than anyone else. I had never been to conference before, and the sight of a thousand people solemnly voting on issues like whether the floor plans of leisure centres should be made available to the public resembled a piece of surreal and strangely compelling performance art (I voted against: keep them secret!). You’d be forgiven for thinking that the Greens had achieved total hegemony and were simply making the final tweaks to their utopian programme. Of course, this isn’t all the Green Party does; there are many impressive councillors who fight good fights and raise political consciousness. But its labyrinthine decision-making structures put the Vatican to shame, and give it a run for its money in terms of large rooms of people listening to enigmatic metaphysical statements. At an undelegated conference where anyone with a ticket and time to spare can decide official party policy, the Greens For Palestine group, which organised the Zionism Is Racism motion, was able to get about 1,000 people — less than 0.5 percent of the party membership — to pass it. It does not bear repeating that this is an absurd way to run a party. What does bear repeating is that our part of the left, with a vision to transform the Greens into an outward-looking majoritarian project that can contest national power, failed to either work with Greens For Palestine to get a better motion to the floor (saying we’d lock Lammy and Starmer in the Hague would have been far more productive and wildly popular) or to make any significant interventions of our own. We — GO, ecosocialists, whoever is committed to building a party of that kind — have been too cautious and too slow. This may have already bankrupted us, especially if Polanski loses today’s byelection, but the only way to find out is to attempt an urgent course correction.We must now work to prevent either of the two most likely scenarios from unfolding. The first is that the liberal centre within the Greens, who despise the motion for its militant member-led organising as much as its politics, collaborate with the rest of the establishment to crush Greens For Palestine, and use the opportunity to destroy Polanski and all majoritarian ecosocialists while they’re at it. Then they’ll return the party to their happy place on the sidelines, winning a few councillors here and there while the world burns.Or there is the less likely but still possible scenario that the tendency which coalesced around the motion, and which also ran in slates for various internal committee elections with some success (nearly half were elected), wields its organisational strength to force out the liberals. If they manage to dominate party structures and pursue this strategy, then those interested in a mass-party building project may also be dispensed with, since these strategic outlooks are fundamentally incompatible. This second outcome may be even worse than the first for the prospects of a serious socialist movement, as well as being considerably more annoying. Note that the end-point of both the liberal-centrist approach and the radical-minoritarian one is the same. The first tendency suffers from process-fetishism, elevating procedural correctness over political impact; the second is lost in a maze of academic theory, performative purism and unsolvable semantic puzzles. Both are recipes for political irrelevance. The likelihood is that even if the left successfully defeats the liberals within the party, the threat from the ultra-left will only increase. Advocates of this political tendency seem to think, consciously or not, that a party which adopts the most morally correct and theoretically advanced positions will awaken the masses to their revolutionary obligations — as if it is for want of expression elsewhere that their maximalist positions are not prominent in society. Why they are interested in the Greens is therefore somewhat obscure. If you want a far-left party with a far-left programme, you should probably join one of Britain’s many small sects (take what you will from the fact there are no large ones). If you want the leverage and momentum provided by a mass party, you must accept mass politics. It is striking that there is not currently a single party in this country that is earnestly trying to adopt the positions of most of the British population. We have minor parties that agitate for revolution and major ones that compete to see who can hurl us into oblivion most efficiently. But few adhere to Lenin’s injunction to be as radical as reality: no less, no more. A strategy that seeks to use the Greens as a radical flank to pressure Burnham will be redundant when — and it is when, not if — his programme of pygmy-social democracy falls apart. Ironically, the radical approach places great faith in the Labour government to maintain its current levels of support, which is unjustifiable given even a cursory look at its multiple submissions to capitalist interests. If we’ve swerved too far left by the time Burnham’s mask slips, it will be too late: we will have made ourselves too remote from the views of the majority to channel their frustrations.GO are the only faction, in the only party, that is capable of providing a popular alternative. To chart a path between the liberals and the ultras, GO must accelerate its attempt to build a populist platform that can recruit the hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of people who have progressive, common sense views on major issues: public ownership, wealth redistribution, climate justice, rent controls, arms spending, trans rights. Only by bringing these people and their concerns into the Green project can we place ourselves at the centre of political life. We need to internalise the best aspects of the party’s liberal base — good-faith debate, mutual respect, welcoming and inclusive instincts — and combine them with the organisational methods that have proved so effective in the relative vacuum of the Green Party: running slates, endorsing candidates, controlling structures and dominating discussions with our political vision. Using these tools does not preclude a healthy party culture, it enables it. Let our hallmark be the presence of both: ruthless organisation practised honestly and openly. Our aim should be to orient all our activities around a popular ecosocialist platform and let its gravitational force overwhelm our challenges and opponents.This does not mean we must repeal or disavow the motion on Zionism. Socialists inside and outside the party must remain disciplined, and one of the best tools for discipline is honesty: Zionism is racism. We lose a great deal if we start apologising for things we believe or denying that we believe them. We lose respect with the people we need to win over (most of whom probably agree with us, or at any rate care more about the image of consistency than about the issue at hand); we demoralise and divide our base; and worst of all, we harm the Palestinian cause in the midst of a generational struggle. Here we might look to Jean-Luc Mélenchon for inspiration: when your opponents are eager to exploit an issue that can hurt you, you must triple your defenses and concede nothing. If you back down, they will only escalate their assault. So even if we would rather be talking about other things, we must stay firm: we are socialists, we despise all racism and we despise the racist genocide waged in the name of Zionism, and we are not sorry for it. The pressure to bend on this point will be immense. If we bend, we fail. But as well as Mélenchon, Zohran Mamdani also offers lessons: that your political platform comes before anything else. Much commentary on Mamdani praises his charisma and slick comms, but impressive as these things are, they are not the reason he is winning. This puts the cart before the horse. These factors are relevant only because of his political orientation, which convincingly responds to the questions of his time and place, combining mass politics with principled ecosocialist and anti-imperialist positions. If Mamdani had run on a narrow, ultra-left platform, his charisma and comms would never have mattered, because his candidacy wouldn’t have gained traction in the first place. A leader can only be as popular as the politics they practise. The priority for GO is therefore to form the pillars of such a platform around a handful of key issues. We have the resources to run campaigns, make press interventions and hold events that convey this platform to the public. We must also develop robust lines on anti-Zionism and disseminate them across the party, and to socialists standing in solidarity with Green members who are now coming under attack. With this in train, GO can define its candidate search criteria, derive its priorities for future elections, and identify the main decision points and bottlenecks in the Green Party bureaucracy. The moment offers us a chance to create an organisation which can change the balance of forces in society at a time of great volatility and danger. Our obligation as ecosocialists is clear. We can refuse this offer, of course, but only in the way that one can refuse Vito Corleone.This piece is part of a debate on Green strategy after the ‘Zionism is Racism’ motion. You can read the other entry, from members of Greens For Palestine, here.

Fonte: Tribune