Restoring the roots of the Green Party 
By Rick Whaley
Wisconsin Green Party

"I am glad the Left does the work it does. Somebody needs to. But it frees me up to do the [Green] work I need to." 
-Walt Bresette, Anishinabe activist and founder of Lake Superior Greens and Wisconsin Greens

Despite the issue intersections of Green and Red, Greens start from a different philosophical basis (ecology) and are using a different method (decentralization) than the Left. Although Green parties in Germany, the U.S. and elsewhere have radical roots, these Green parties were founded as critiques of the Left as much as of the mainstream parties. 

Significantly missing from the conception of who are the Greens today are most of the founding constituencies of the Green Party: bioregionalists, Native Americans, eco-femin-ists and the other recoverers of women's spirituality/history, faith-based environmentalists, deschoolers, Schumacher decentralists, futurists, back-to-the-landers, conservationists, green-business founders, open-minded revisionists, and Green Fundis (social, but not political, conservatives). People didn't just leave the party and move onto other things. Mostly, the above constituencies were marginalized in the Green Party over the last five years.

One core group the Green Party needs to understand better is Native Americans. The Left sees Native Americans only as victims of racism and in terms of Lenin's Land Question. They are not seen as essential leadership on the questions of feminism and family, patriotism, subsistence economics and the taking of animal life. Although Native Americans are only 1 percent of the electorate and their role is easily missed, they have led the way in defining the land/spirit as living and have long understood the necessity of a value-based politics. Before joining the Green Party, native activists, friends or potential candidates need better answers to these questions than I got:

1) Does the Green Party support the sovereign right of Native Americans to run their cultural schools, including determining their own curriculum, funding and staffing?

2) Do Greens agree with John Mohawk that socialism is the flip side of capitalism, dealing only with just distribution of industrialism's goodies, while both systems exploit the natural world, the Third World and indigenous peoples?

3) How do earth-based spirituality and other traditional values relate to Green politics today?

4) Does the Green Party support the right of Native American nations to spend their casino revenues however they see fit?

Green Fundis are another stonewalled constituency. In Wisconsin they have suggested issues to validate and reach social conservatives, be they a social force, a voting bloc or part of the counter-revolution that needs to be split. These constituencies include mothers against medical waste incineration (Racine-Kenosha), preachers against genetic engineering, taxpayers against publicly financed stadiums and sports districts, parents and educators against pesticide spraying near schools (Casey, Wisc.), and Republican businessmen against the Exxon mine (northern Wisconsin). I have been told that conservatives can admit the Left was correct and join up, but Leftists have nothing to learn from conservatives.

Here is a critical point missing in Green history and obscured to new members: the Greens began, nationally in 1987, in Wisconsin in 1988 and elsewhere, as a movement-based organization with electoral campaigns as a subcommittee. Now the Green Party is an electoral formation from top to bottom with movement-issue subcommittees under the rule of the electoral wing. My experience in Wisconsin was that the top-down vetoes of GP central committees marginalized Green activists and autonomous locals rooted in neighborhood organizing. 

Greens have always welcomed recovering Leftists. But from my vantage point within the Green Party, many from the classical Left who joined during the Nader campaigns of 1996 and 2000 came in with the attitude that core Green constituencies were naïve New Agers who needed to be shown how to really organize the proletariat. They had little knowledge or regard for the already-existing Left-Green synthesis and did not understand such questions as how public school reformers relate to the decentralist and deschooling legacies in American education, why the feminist process is the key to building organization, or whether pro-choice and pro-life groups together can fight the extinction of other species. Leftists show a disgust for or an unwillingness to synthesize with the Green paradigm or process, even refusing to meet in circles.

To see the Green Party today go back to old Left assumptions and organizational styles is a disincentive for Green constituencies to come back or stick around. The ecological crisis as the "primary contradiction" has receded in GP thinking, and its inevitable implications for organizing around the other -isms is lost. My counsel is that Greens should be more independent and strategic in every election and work with those individuals who reciprocate respect on issues of concern and community-building.

Rick Whaley is co-founder of the Wisconsin Green Party and Upper Great Lakes Green Network and former spokesperson of Milwaukee Area Greens 1993-99. See the article "Shades of Green" at www.greenmajoritywisconsin.org for a lengthier expansion on Green constituencies. 

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