In any case, the Green Party needs to prioritize where its activists
should spend their time and energy, mapping the political geography
of race and class, and to set numerical targets (how many campaign
workers, how many votes, etc. in each precinct), in order to garner
more than 2-5% of the total votes. Is the Green Party organized
enough to do so?
In New Zealand, which featured the first nationwide Green Party in the world
(then called the NZ Values Party, formed in May 1972; I think the initial
party leader that emerged was Tony Brunt), my experience was that the same
cultural factors which drew people into the party, made it also more
difficult to organise them. The Greens had an alternative vision, they were
quite flexible, open, and pragmatic, but there was much less of a feeling
that party members could organise massively in a disciplined or coordinated
way. Much depended on personalities, credibility stakes and the images
people had in the eyes of others. People were thus often caught in a
contradiction: the party was supposed to deliver organisation to achieve
common political tasks, but in reality people came into the party as a means
through which they would get people organised for projects, or else discuss
their own issues, so it could be difficult to decide common objectives and
implement them together in a co-ordinated way. By contrast, the Marxists
didn't have that problem, because the party leadership committee already had
all the answers from Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, people just worked
together in a military way on the basis of democratic centralism, and if you
didn't agree, you got purged. So you had a much larger Green Party
membership which couldn't actually achieve so much explicitly under the
party auspices and direction, and various small Marxist parties which were
extremely active organisers, but this activity wasn't really publicly
acknowledged, and few people wanted to join them anyhow.
This trend reflected the primordial difference between the Green approach
and the Marxist approach at the beginning of the 1970s: the Greens thought
they had to create a local political alternative themselves, an alternative
vision for New Zealand, whereas the Marxists confidently believed they had
the alternative already, and it was just a question of winning people to the
Marxist programme somehow. In the former case, one ended up with too many
alternatives in the party, which could not really be implemented by the
party as a whole, in the latter case, extremely few New Zealanders were
prepared to commit themselves to working for the alternative which the party
had already confidently decided. So, the Greens had more members, but the
party membership did less together and could not consolidate political gains
organisationally, and the Marxists had much fewer members who put in much
more time and energy on average, but they made few political gains as a
party at all.
By about 1979, the NZ Values Party had effectively fallen apart into
different groups and networks, and became defunct, but the Marxists, who
lost half, or more than half of their following by then, just kept going,
because they still had the Marxist programme which answered all questions.
Eleven years later, the Green Party of Aotearoa was formed, with help from
some of the original Values Party supporters, and it eventually gained 7
Members of Parliament, including Keith Locke MP, who had been a founder in
1969/70 of the NZ Socialist Action League (Keith's father, Jack Locke, was
actually a member of the CPNZ from the 1930s; his mother, Elsie Locke was a
wellknown New Zealand author and pacifist).
Reference: http://www.greens.org.nz/about/history.htm
J.
