By Tim Nailsea
The latest craze on the left is Member of the London Assembly Zack Polanski’s campaign to become Green Party leader. Polanski aims to be the champion of the more radical wing of the Greens, calling for ‘eco-populism’. Some on the left have joined the Green Party and called on others to enter it too.
Current co-leader and MP for Waveney Valley Adrian Ramsay, and MP for North Herefordshire Ellie Chowns are running on a joint ticket against Polanski. They represent the continuity ticket. Their constituencies are in middle class, rural areas and they advocate a more moderate environmentalism.
Populism
The term ‘populism’ refers to any mass movement that is seen to challenge ‘the establishment’. For Marxists ‘populism’ is a form of radicalism that appeals across class boundaries. While socialists aim to mobilise the working class, populists aim for an alliance with the middle classes. This necessitates ditching working class rhetoric and policy for radical sounding, but often vague and insubstantial sloganeering.
This is characteristic of Polanski’s campaign. His platform focuses on the need for ‘bold leadership’ and opposes ‘slow, incremental change’. His public statements have the air of radicalism and, to his credit, he has been outspoken against the genocide in Gaza. Beyond that, however, there is little of substance.
Like all forms of populism, the less defined ‘eco-populism’ is, the more one’s own ideas can be projected onto it. The most important criticism of populism, however, is its fundamentally middle class character.
The Greens are a middle class party. Its members are drawn from that class, traditionally in the rural south, although it has recently picked up a share of working class votes. Last summer capitalising on the defeat of Corbynism, it won two urban seats, Brighton Pavilion and Bristol Central, alongside two in rural areas, Waveney Valley and North Herefordshire.
The Greens focus on the more social democratic aspects of their politics in the cities, while in rural areas they criticise ‘mismanagement’ and oppose local development. Their 2024 manifesto promised many reforms, particularly state intervention, to transition away from fossil fuels. But they avoided the radical measures required to reverse climate change, thus remaining safe for their middle class supporters.
James Meadway alludes to this class divide, but claims it is wrong to dismiss rural voters as ‘Countryfile Tories’. Issues like ‘parched fields’ and ‘rivers full of shit’ are pushing many rural voters towards the Greens in a ‘battle for control over common resources’.
But is the solution? The propertied middle classes will never countenance a policy that does violates private property. In this, they share a class interest with the big capitalists. Squeezed between the capitalist and working classes and fearful of being cast down into the working class, the middle classes can be radicalised – sometimes to the left, sometimes to the right.
Meadway makes the mistake all left populists make. They assume that, because the middle classes are injured in some way by capitalism, they will be won to socialist ideas. The problem is that a socialist working class movement that aims to expropriate private property poses an existential challenge to the middle class. However angry they may be about dirty water, the middle class will never lead a struggle to abolish the system that causes it.
Left?
Polanksi and his supporters avoid talking in class terms, but they do see the recent influx of support in urban areas as a natural constituency for the Green lefts. Michael Chessum suggests that Polanski could represent the ‘urban youth’ wing of the party’s ‘hybrid electoral base’.
But Polanski argues against ‘front-footing’ socialist politics, for fear of putting off voters. The main division, he insists, is between ‘bold leadership’ and ‘safe incrementalism’. Polanski wants a more combative Green Party, not a more socialist one.
For sections of the left driven out of Starmer’s Labour Party, Polanski’s leadership bid is the new Corbynism. These comrades have learned the wrong lessons from the Corbyn era. Half a million members, with many more in the trade unions, had the potential to forge a new working class party. It was not Corbyn himself, watering down his policies and protecting the right wing, that offered this possibility, but the movement that grew around and threatened to overtake him.
It is not only that Polanski as a leader stands for cross-class rather than working class politics. A middle class party, however radical, has no potential to develop a socialist alternative to either Labour or Polanski’s eco-populism.
The proof is in the pudding. In Brighton, Green-led councils implemented Tory cuts in both 2013 and 2021, both times triggering bin strikes, then losing control of the council. In Bristol they are set on the same trajectory, with a £43 million cuts budget targeting the refuse collectors (again) and care workers. In Germany they participated in a coalition that sent arms to Israel.
These are not aberrations. The middle class vacillates between the two major classes but in a crisis always falls behind the ruling class. Unless of course there is a powerful, working class movement that splits the middle classes, winning some if not the active majority to its cause. Building a party to lead such a movement remains the key task of socialists today.
