Principled Unity in the Alternative Party Movement

The Greens/Green Party USA welcomes the new initiatives for an independent party by a number of progressive and radical groupings in the U.S., including the 21st Century Party, the Labor Party Advocates, the New Party, and the Project for a New Tomorrow, as well as a number of independent state and municipal parties. The Greens believe that these organizations should work toward organic unity over time based on shared principles. In the meantime, we wish them all success in breaking down the political monopoly of the two establishment parties.

A Process for Building Principled Unity

The Greens believe we must build from below, city by city and state by state. A party of the people cannot be called forth from one national center, but must be the construction of grassroots people in communities all across the country. We anticipate that in different states and localities, different parties will take root. As far as the Greens are concerned, what is more important than the name is that the political principles advanced can move us toward a grassroots-democratic ecological society and that the party has the support and fosters the participation of grassroots people.

We also believe that the way to create viable unity is to build unity from below. Where more than one of the new alternative party initiatives exists in the same city or state, we must work toward unity at that level first, before we can reasonably expect a functional national unity. The national leaderships of the different efforts could agree to unite, but if their memberships were not really with the program, it would matter little.

The Greens believe that in the movement now emerging for an independent party of the people, there are probably greater political differences within our organizations than between them. We agree on 90% of the issues which is enough for some sort of operational unity. The Greens support the creation as soon as possible of a national networking structure for the alternative party initiatives and other organizations committed to independent politics. Initially, it should encourage: forums for discussions among member organizations; information sharing through a newsletter that reaches the individual members of all participating organizations and the interested public; and joint action on issues of common concern.

With the longer term in mind, discussion of what the next steps should be toward organizational unity should begin immediately. We do not want to get bogged down in the stage of a “party movement” of many different organizations. The goal should be from the start a “movement party,” a common organization rooted in grassroots movements. We should always have concrete goals that are steps toward principled unity. If we get stuck in a loose coalitional form, it will become a creature of a few representatives of the different groups, distant from the ranks of the movement, and less of a vehicle for building effective principled unity.

Green Principles

For unity to be effective and real, it has to be based on broad common principles about the kind of society we want to create and how we should go about creating it. The Greens suggest that the following eight points are crucial to building the kind of movement and party that we need.

1. Grassroots Democracy—Political and Economic

We need new political institutions in this society. Electing new people into the existing political structures will not change this society fundamentally. We need new political institutions of grassroots democracy in place of the elitist representative republic. We don’t need new rulers. We need new structures that enable grassroots people to make the rules.

We also need new institutions of economic democracy that enable grassroots participation and coordination from below in place of corporate and state bureaucracies. Without economic democracy, political democracy is overruled by the private power of corporate capital.

A purely electoral strategy doesn’t have the power to overcome extra-electoral powers of corporate capital and the state managers. The unelected corporate managers can wreck economic reforms by disinvestment. The permanent state of unelected bureaucrats, police, and military officers can simply block the enforcement of hard-won legislation or repress a radical party with legal harassment or violence. Only a participatory politics of direct action can create the kind of popular power based on broad grassroots activation that has the social force to overcome the extra-parliamentary powers of the corporations and government bureaucracies.

We need to develop a new politics that has the goal of creating direct action in its highest form: direct democracy in face-to-face citizen assemblies that coordinate from below through mandated, recallable, and rotating representatives to confederal councils.

2. Grassroots-Democratic Organization

Our movement must prefigure a confederal grassroots democracy in its internal workings. We should place great emphasis on building participatory local chapters in communities everywhere. Our members elected to positions of leadership responsibility must be accountable to the grassroots membership through mandation, recall, and rotation.

3. Full Participation of People of Color

The movement as a whole must contribute substantial resources to enable people of color at the grassroots to organize their communities and participate in the broader movement. People of color must be in the decision-making bodies at least proportional to their numbers in society. But token symbolic leadership is not enough. The movement must take root in communities of color, with people of color organized and active at the base of the movement in numbers at least proportional to their numbers in society. If these conditions are not met, the movement will likely repeat the historic pattern of social change movements in U.S. history which have accommodated to white racism in order not to divide their white support, which in fact divided people of color from whites and destroyed the movements as effective agents of radical change.

4. Gender Parity

The movement must provide structural guarantees of gender parity in decision-making bodies at every level. Beyond the mechanics of equal participation, feminist values should pervade every aspect of the life of the movement.

5. A Movement Party

We need a party of the movement, one that integrates electoral and extra-electoral action. It must be a party that grows out of, is rooted in, and is accountable to a grassroots movement based on popular action, counter-institutions, and an oppositional counter-culture. This sort of movement party is needed to be able to weather the ups and downs of issue campaigns and electoral fortunes. Electoral action must grow out of a movement party that is very serious about the education and personal development of its members. Otherwise it will easily fall prey to opportunism at the first successes or easy discouragement at the first difficulties.

6. Independent Politics, Not Fusion Politics

Fusion candidates are cross-endorsed by more than one party. Fusion among like-minded alternative parties is a good idea, a way to lay the foundation for unity. But fusion with Democrats or Republicans is really confusion. If we want to build a clear alternative to the establishment parties, we should be completely independent of them.

7. Value-Based Politics

Traditional revolutionary theories have been based on the premise that the decisive motivation for change was the poverty of the majority. But in U.S. today, the majority isn’t poor. It is part of a culture of consumption that tries to fill emptiness with status-oriented conspicuous consumption and relieve alienation with the compensatory consumption of material distractions. The old radical theories don’t apply here.

Under the advanced capitalism of the U.S., the material demands of the majority are no longer in conflict with the system. Rather, consumerism is advanced capitalism’s precondition because it needs constantly expanding consumption. Actions to advance the material self-interest of any particular group—even when justifiable—do not challenge the capitalist order in the U.S. Indeed, advanced capitalism is able to co-opt and pacify movements based on material demands with concessions, even if they are only temporary.

What advanced capitalism cannot co-opt are the values of an ecological pro-democracy movement—grassroots empowerment, cooperation, community, ecological harmony, social stability, freedom, peace, equal access to responsibility and personal development. Advanced capitalism does have its contradictions—with the ecology due to capitalism’s inherent propensity toward endless accumulation and the externalization of ecological costs, with human fulfillment due to the alienating nature of capitalism’s hierarchical and market social relations, and, on global scale, with the material needs of the vast majority. But to heighten these contradictions in this country, a new movement/party must project new values, not simply demand more things.

Liberal programs for economic growth and the trickling down of benefits do not challenge to the existing order. Instead of joining the corporations in promoting greater consumption as a means of numbing emptiness and alienation, we must appeal to people from the high ground of moral renewal . We must build a visionary movement that projects a reharmonization society with nature on the basis of a new harmonization of human with human. We must challenge the repressive moralism of the right with a liberating moral vision.

Yes, we must demand that the material needs of the poor be met. That is part of our moral vision. But it is the moral vision of an egalitarian, participatory, ecological society—not an economistic appeal to material self-interest—that will mobilize a majoritarian movement for radical-democratic change.

Taking the moral high ground is what the most successful of America’s transformative movements have done. From the Abolitionists and Populists to the pre-1920 Socialists and the Civil Rights Movement, the utopian visions of the city-on-the-hill, the cooperative commonwealth, and the beloved community succeeded in mobilizing both lower and middle classes against the prevailing order. Given the luxury consumption and high-tech productivity of the U.S. economy today, this value-based approach makes more sense today than ever before.

8. Internationalism

The existing system of compulsive accumulation and inter-state competition is global in scope—and so must be our opposition to it. The U.S. Greens are far less attached to the name “Green” than to having the alternative party in the U.S. work within the emerging Green Planetary Coordination, which was initiated outside the June 1992 U.N. Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil by a meeting of Green and left-alternative parties from all the continents and which will hold its Founding Congress in 1993.

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