They are like the proper green and peasant parties should be - green on the outside and red on the inside.
Not brown inside like the current european ones, especially german.
Funnily enough, “watermelon” is either a slur or a term of endearment for Green Party members and leadership in the U.S., depending on who’s using it or who it’s referring to.
A lot of Amerikan comrades likely have some amount of disdain for Jill Stein and even Ajamu Baraka, for some justified reasons and some reasons that stem, I feel, purely from anti-socialist propaganda manufactured to sabotage them from both the left and the right. They’re watermelons, green on the outside and red on the inside. I had the wonderful pleasure of meeting comrade Ajamu in person in 2019 or so. The man is undoubtedly a communist and an anti-imperialist. I met Dr. Stein, too, and she’s quite wonderful albeit with perhaps a more optimistic and maybe naive belief in “pan-leftist” organizing as it were.
I don’t think the greens are the vanguard. I don’t think the Green Party as it exists can or ever will function as one. But I implore comrades who dislike them for surface level reasons to examine if those reasons actually make sense or are justified.
(I didn’t mean to hijack your post in support of the Amerikan green party lol. From my understanding, the German greens are filled to the brim with fucking pedophiles. They’re brown and rotten watermelons all the way through.)
god damn it now I have to deconstruct some of what I feel is common propaganda against the greens
Jill Stein is not anti-vax. In a reddit AMA a long time ago she replied to a question about vaccines saying that she believed that corporate oversight on shit that goes in our body is not ok and that we need civilian oversight into vaccine production and distribution. Redditors took this to mean she was anti-science instead of, you know, aware of the way vaccines have been weaponized by the U.S. state and corporations historically. Do we suddenly believe that the corporate dominated healthcare industry in the U.S. has the peoples’ best interests in mind simply because anti-science reactionaries distrust them too, for different reasons?
Ajamu Baraka is a communist. I personally saw him shut down a libertarian dweeb weaponizing Stalin’s legacy against socialism. Is his engagement in electoralism incorrect? Is the praxis he engages in indicative of liberalism? Perhaps. But he himself is a comrade, and the green party is not the only vehicle for action he participate(s/d) in.
Green Party has problems. Its pan-leftist approach is evidently incorrect as it has led to massive infighting and no democratic centralism to speak of. It is mainly a vehicle for “awareness”, whether you think that is a worthwhile endeavor or not. And a lot of the membership hold batshit ideas and only support the party because it’s a break from the duopoly. I merely would suggest that we don’t discount every member or leader as a lost cause - I’ve met far more radical Greens than I have DSA members. End lukewarm defense rant.
libertarian dweeb weaponizing Stalin’s legacy against socialism
Wait what
Also thank you for posts about US greens.
It was at a college event my group hosted, we had dinner with Baraka beforehand and we got the pleasure to hear about his start in organizing and about him being a black draftee. He was stationed in Germany and helped organize a strike at his base. The experience radicalized him, iirc.
But he gave a talk afterwards, small university so maybe to 30 or so people. The Libertarian group on campus (Young Americans for Liberty) arrived in full force and peppered him with bad faith questions after his speech about the necessity for socialism and an end to war. One of the kids asked him “but how you can say Socialism needs to come to America when Stalin killed tens of millions of his own people?”
I turned to a comrade and said “picturing Stalin in the back of a pickup just absolutely mowing people down on the street for shits and giggles”. Baraka had a much more dignified way of shutting it down, something like “I’m not talking about Georgia, I’m not talking about Russia, I’m talking about here and now. With climate catastrophe coming, we adopt socialism or we die.” Little dork might well have melted into his seat.
This would be nice sticker material:
Wait I thought Jill Stein was libertarian or something? At least that’s what I heard
“Ecosocialist”, whatever that means. I believe she stays a little vague and focuses more on what a proposed “green socialist” policy would look like so as to not alienate potential members/voters with too-radical language as it were. Having Baraka as her running mate instilled in me some amount of confidence that she is at least sympathetic to communists - I told her outright I was a communist and she pointed me in the direction of Socialist Alternative (Trotskyists) who had a booth at the rally and signature collection event I attended. I fucking hate Socialist Alternative for a plethora of reasons but idk, she was obviously welcoming of communists and knew that we have common enemies.
This is all anecdotal of course. But I’ve met em and I liked em. Stein also got black-bagged by the feds and dragged to an undisclosed location and interrogated for hours once for her actions in support of the Dakota Pipeline protests (picturing this sweet older woman handcuffed and ruthlessly interrogated, fucking animals). So something she was doing was scaring the powers that be.
Thank you for your insight!
Yeah i know similar parties can be different in different countries, for example i do not know anything about USA greens.
German greens real practice in govt is basically fash, even some liberals call them “war party” lol.
Polish greens are just insignificant neoliberal add to main liberal party.
I have a friend and comrade living in Austria at the moment who lived and studied in Germany for a year, and he has talked my head off for hours about German infighting and ideology lol. Most of what I know about the CDU, AfD, Die Linke and the Greens comes straight from him. IIRC the German Greens are one of the most hawkish parties against Russia and China rn, no? It’s interesting and frustrating to me how wildly divergent “green” parties can be ideologically nation-to-nation. Just call yourself the ecofash party or the social-environmentalist party or whatever and be done with the confusion.
The German Greens are an ultra neoliberal war hawk party, they have the deepest ties to Washington of any German party and are the most Atlanticist of the bunch by far. Many of them have Ivy League educations were subsequently trained in NED institutions. They are basically CIA assets. Their base is overwhelmingly upper middle class intelligentsia with some labor aristocracy and petty bourgeois.
The irony is that they started out as a party not too dissimilar from the US Green party, very anti-war, pro disarmament and big on social justice in the 1980s, with many being quite open to socialist ideas. That’s when they were still mostly old hippies. Now the character of the party has changed completely and their alleged environmentalism is a joke, they shut down the nuclear power plants and doubled down on coal.
They love NATO and hate Russia and China, they are the main proponents of a big German rearmament and fanatically pushed for abandoning Russian pipeline gas in favor of US LNG that is way more expensive and has a far worse environmental impact. They engage in all the typical liberal virtue signaling but then turn around and always vote for pro-corporate policies.
I worry that the US Greens will end up the same way in a few decades if they ever get any real power the way the Greens did in the late 90s.
Thanks for the rundown! They sound like a bunch of insufferable assholes.
Yeah this means that merely being “green” is meaningless especialy since most of those parties are more or less participating in neoliberalism which is straight up the ideology of chief polluters. Could be even worse as in ecofascism which is basically the same neoliberalism plus potential genocide of global south and poors.
It’s also often frustrating in leftist circles, when the “ecology” is often weaponized against marxists… by a neoliberal westolefto.
It’s also often frustrating in leftist circles, when the “ecology” is often weaponized against marxists… by a neoliberal westolefto
There is a strange ass myth that Marxists or “state socialists” are industrialists first and foremost. In the eyes of some environmentalists I’ve met, Marxism calls to mind polluted air and factories overtaking the natural world. I don’t get where the hell this came from. China is building some of the greenest cities on earth rn, solarpunk style shit with soil that can soak up floodwater and utilize it to create beautiful masses of flora and clean air. Marxism is environmentalism! That’s why I don’t vibe with “ecosocialism” as much either, it’s just unnecessary obfuscation and myth-peddling imo
It is idealist and frankly also chauvinist to demand that developing countries adhere to the same strict environmental standards that we should expect from an already developed, industrialized country. The developed global north owes a massive environmental debt to the rest of the world, most of the carbon emissions since the industrial revolution came from Europe and North America.
China and the USSR needed to go through their own phases of developing their industry and agriculture, and that had an environmental cost. Other nations in the global south will need to do the same. The global north cannot have their cake and eat it too, living in the prosperity built on huge environmental damage and demanding that the underdeveloped nations hamstring their development for the sake of the environment. People need to be lifted out of poverty.
China needed to industrialize even if this meant accepting some adverse environmental impacts for a time. The USSR is often criticized for the ecological catastrophe around the Aral Sea but the agriculture of Central Asia needed to be developed to properly feed the millions of people living there.
Everything comes at a cost. The important thing is how you behave once you do achieve a sufficient level of development to no longer have rampant poverty in your country. And it is very clear to see that China under Xi Jinping is making huge efforts to become a more ecologically harmonious society. Now that they have developed they have the means to do so.
Yes, absolutely. Alvaro Garcia Linera (Marxist-Leninist former vice president to Evo Morales of Bolivia) has written great and illuminating things on western environmentalist crocodile tears over “extractivism” etc. in the global south. Bit lengthy but I recommend this in particular to anyone interested.
Exactly. They should better look at their liberal politicians who are often paid by the people sitting on accurate reports for 50 years yet hiding it to get more profits.
Watermelon at 10 lira the kg!!! Wait, im not in reddit.
