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The Green Party platform: Reformist politics in the service of imperialism

dimensionallava

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A wonderful article about the US Greens

“Our nation was born as the first great experiment in modern democracy,” the Greens write in the introduction to the section. “We seek to rescue that heritage from the erosion of citizen participation.”

They continue: “Moreover, we seek to dissolve the grip of the ideology…that government is intrinsically undesirable and destructive of liberty and that elected officials should ‘starve the beast’ by slashing all spending on social program, in the name of freedom. We challenge that tactic by calling on all Americans to think deeply about the meaning of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. In a democracy, individuals come together to form structures of governance that protect and advance the common good. We the citizens are the government…”

There is not a hint of a class analysis here, or any suggestion that the pretensions of democracy under capitalism, even under the best of conditions, are illusory and compromised to the core by the underlying reality of the bourgeoisie’s economic dictatorship, founded on its ownership of the means of production, and its ruthless exploitation of the working class based on these economic relations. The Marxist truth that the state is an instrument of repression of the dominant economic class—played out in the daily lives of workers and youth in the form of police violence and the crushing machinery of the so-called “justice system,” with its vast prison complex—is rejected. Instead, one gets the pauper’s brew of banalities and fictions typical of what passes today for liberalism.

The Greens can provide no explanation as to why the American political system has become so totally unresponsive to the needs and desires of the broad mass of the population. To the extent that they offer one, it is to suggest that this situation is the result of the apathy of the population itself and the supposed “fact” that the people are under the sway of conservative ideology. The argument that the growth of political reaction reflects defects within the masses themselves is common to all middle-class tendencies, which reject a class analysis of political developments.

The Green Party platform: Reformist politics in the service of imperialism - World Socialist Web Site
 

I see these things and see, what the dreams formulated in those terms in Europe in the 1960s. At first it looks good and the population loves the promises and moneys it receives from government programs. That bred more programs and three generations of politicians have lived from selling the goods.
Now the party is coming to an end slowly. The promises are being broken as the population grows older. Pensions are being reduced, health care is being rationed, the quality of health care in falling to reduce costs, social programs are being slashed, while the party bureaucracies are still proposing new blooms of special visibility are being introduced to fix old foundering programs for an other year and garner votes for the parties that stand for social democracy. This thrashing about with minimum wages or two years parental leave for either husband of woman and other measures that reduce the countries' efficiency are already failing to sustain or even bring back the old enthusiasm for social democracy, that is becoming mere lip service in many areas.

In the back rooms the scene is an other. There some are worried about the transfer and how the population can be conditioned to accept the personal loss of living standard as the broken promises teat holes in their living standards and the state looses legitimacy as the ideology of 100 years proves a lie. A number of the countries are at the front of this movement and are proposing various alternatives from hard austerity to general minimum income. The latter is probably the more likely. Though, Switzerland just shot it down in referendum, the Finns are running experiments with the definite goal of replacing their whole social system and getting rid of the testing and individual aimed social bureaucracies by paying everyone a small income. Holland seems to be discussing something similar with at least one experiment planed and decided and in Germany it is being looked at soto voce behind closed doors.

So why this romantic idea of bringing to the US, what we have been able to partially avoid, just as it is falling down after a set of long term experiments that show it does not work? That is as intelligent as voting for Trump.
 
The Greens are loons.
 
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