The Politics of a Green System.

• Author: Woodberry, Mike
• Position: Brief Article

The Green Party made a name for itself and ourselves with the 1996 Ralph Nader presidential campaign. The fact that the campaign got such widespread support despite Nader's equivocation on some crucial issues gives us reason to expect that we are going to have a lot of people looking to see what we come up with in 2000. Due to his waffling on immigration and other issues, another Nader campaign is likely to generate less enthusiasm, not more.

We are unlikely to find someone else with such widespread name recognition. What can we come up with? Politics. Green Politics. The politics of advocating a new economic system based on a diversity of ownership forms. These politics are now buried on page 4 of the Green Program.

Anarchists put their advocacy of a new system without rulers at the front of their politics, not on page 4. Socialists put their advocacy of a new system based on public ownership and control of production and distribution at the front of their politics, not on page 4. We are not guaranteed that we will get a new system by putting it at the front of our politics, but we are most unlikely to get it by keeping it buried in the middle of our program. This will be especially true if we continue to pay no attention to this new system which we allegedly advocate in any of our other political work. A new economic system is not something we can expect to quietly usher in through political back windows.

This is no intellectual exercise in useless political theory. Our planet seems unlikely to indefinitely withstand the incessant pressure of profit-driven motivation to forever increase the exploitation of the finite resources on our finite planet.

Putting this new system at the front of our agenda will first require having a name for this system. "A system based on a diversity of ownership forms" is just too much of a mouthful. Since our new system is not based on an ideology, it isn't an "ism" like socialism or anarchism. My suggestion is that we simply refer to it as a/the Green system, and let it go at that. To be able to put our advocacy of a new system at the front of our agenda where it belongs, we will have to transform the present Green Program, which is basically a statement of the broad aspirations of the green movement, into an electoral program of the Green Party.

If you look at the Labor Party Program, you will see a clear statement of legislation which a Labor Party majority government would pass. If you look at the...