NOT EVEN WRONG

Josh Frank gets a lot of stuff right in his recent Counterpunch piece about the Greens. He's right that it doesn't do any good pretending, as Ted Glick does in his Znet retrospective, that the 2004 presidential circus was anything other than destructive and maybe even fatal to the Green Party. And it may be the case that the Greens are now just another progressive racket which exists mainly to pay the salaries of "non-profit careerists" within its leadership. While I think Frank is wrong, the possibility that he is right is cuts pretty close to the bone for those of us who tried to make the Green Party a reality.

But if the Greens are the terminal case which Frank diagnoses, it's not so much a problem for those us who were involved coming away with egg on our faces; it matters much more to anyone who cares about the future of progressive politics, and indeed, anyone who cares about the future at all. For if there is any hope to countering the appalling reality which the two parties have created and preside over, the Greens or something like the Greens will have to get off the ground, sooner rather than later.

In the mean time, torture memos, renditioning, melting polar ice caps, a prison population of two million, Walmart level wages, and chronic homelessness will continue to define the essential reality which any leftist who wants to honestly assess our recent history needs to come to terms with.

And, if we are honest with ourselves, we can't stop there, for we need to recognize something else, albeit unpleasant: our own complicity through our failure to develop a successful strategy for engaging in the struggle. The unbroken string of victories for corporations over the public interest-the near total marginalization of organized labor, the prospect of global environmental collapse, unchecked militarism is not just a triumph for elites and a defeat for everyone else. All these represent a decisive indication of our own dysfunctionality as a movement.

If we're serious about what we're doing, we are required to understand why we have failed so often and so badly and then move on to doing what is necessary to break the pattern. Thinking along these lines brings us back to Frank's criticism of Greens and puts it in a different light. For while Cobb and Glick made mistakes, as Greens, they were at least willing to ask the right questions and try to answer them. In this respect they are far ahead of a left which is defined by its refusal to admit that many of the strategies which we unthinkingly embrace are to blame for where we find ourselves-deafeated and, what is worse, having to live in a world which everywhere reflects the legacy of our defeat.

How we got there: three habits of highly ineffective movements

Having a frat boy dunce in the White House surrounded by religious zealots, cynical manipulators and corporate criminals means that it is pretty easy these days to be good at criticism, And the left, as it has repeatedly demonstrated, has more than warmed to the occasion. Unfortunately, it has become increasingly incapable of self criticism which has the unhappy result that there is little understanding that we consistently return to the same failed tactics which have landed us where we are. A good example of our strategic bankruptcy is paraded in a recent Nation article reporting of a division within United for Peace and Justice between two groups: older activists trying to "influence those in Congress to defund the war" and younger firebrands who "bristled at what they considered the mainstreaming of UFPJ's grassroots base by playing with electoral politics."

While the two sides see themselves at odds, what is revealing is the embrace by both of what should be by now familiar pathologies of a now geriatric new left activism:

1) The assumption that single issue, mass protest should constitute the near exclusive focus of political organizing.

2) The assumption that those who hold power will be influenced by displays of popular will.

3) A contempt for electoral politics (among "radicals") and an out of hand rejection by all sides of the possibility of creating change by competing for and achieving state power.

These are three of the basic premises of a politics defined by protest-a politics which is guaranteed to be limited at best and almost surely a losing politics.

To note the inherent limitations of protest politics does not tell leftists anything that we don't already, at some level, know to be true. For it should now be obvious that huge amounts of activist energies can go into the creation of events which will completely and totally fail. And if the bankruptcy of the slogan defining protest politics - "If the people lead, the leaders will follow" - was not apparent to us before last February, it should have been after.

What happened was exactly the opposite: the people led and the leaders didn't follow. Indeed, they ran in the opposite direction. The New York Senators Schumer and Clinton responded to the million plus throng in front of their eyes on the streets of Manhattan with contempt: voting for the authorization to commit troops in the weeks following and then most of the rest of the New York congressional delegation joined them in signing off on the financing required to sustain military operations. The presidential campaign, fought between two prep school plutocrats competing in their macho willingness to violate international law made for an appropriate coda to a political season based on a cynical exploitation of self-deluding activists.

Stating the obvious: how power doesn't work

This depressing outcome should have been predictable for anyone who is not completely naive to the realities of power. To state the obvious: there is no necessary connection between expressions of dissent, no matter how large and disruptive, and political change. This fact is a logical consequence of something more fundamental and even more obvious which is that changes in governmental policy are effected by political actors-those empowered to disburse funds, levy taxes, write laws and to declare war. This is why demonstrations, no matter how massive or passionate can and do fail: what forces change is political force in the form of a credible threat to put in jeopardy the positions of those who hold and exercise power.

Once we recognize that, it will be seen that protest politics amounts to a parody of the forms of political engagement taken for granted in much of the rest of the world. Protest as it plays out here, as an isolated end in itself, would be regarded as absurd everywhere else.

Of course, protests in Italy, Indonesia, or Argentina can be large, theatrical and violent but they almost always take place within a context of existing political institutions which are explicitly directed towards competing for and exercising power. The huge demonstrations in Madrid which occurred simultaneously with ours, gave a clear indication of a functional politics- where bodies on the street support and give muscle to institutional power which is committed to goals articulated by the bodies on the street. And they worked: following the demonstrations, the Socialists came to power, and immediately withdrew Spanish troops from Iraq.

The socialist victory was, it needs to be stressed, achieved through "electoral politics" which the younger activists in UFPJ deride.

Moreover it's worth adding that political change achieved through the ballot box is not limited to moderates acceptable to elites-a fact clearly demonstrated by Hugo Chavez ballot box victories. Had Venezuelan leftists capitulated to our cynical view of elections as "celebrity driven exercises unworthy of the attention of serious activists," or "playing" at politics as the UFPJ firebrands describe them, the oil industry would remain in the compliant hands of neo-liberal technocrats, its profits continuing to be channeled into the hands of multinational energy consortia. Many thousands of Venezuelans would be much worse off, remaining in desperate poverty which the Chavez' nationalization of the oil industry lifted them out of. Our embrace of the assumptions of protest politics insures that a serious transformation of our politics will remain out of reach. Our nightmare will continue and we will have ourselves to blame.

The only game in town

Few Greens would convey the skeptical view of how the left conducts its business in the unvarnished and admittedly rather confrontational terms I have adopted above. However, the essential realization, that politics without a partisan basis is barely politics at all, is what lies behind our commitment to the party. For all the flakiness of some of the Green membership, Greens, particularly those of us who have won elections, know what it means to engage in politics to win and what it means to compete for and exercise state power. It is this fact, that Greens take politics and political power seriously and insists that others do likewise which has ruffled more than a few feathers on the left. In doing so, the Greens call the bluff of many leftists whose engagement with the movement is well suited to temporary occasional displays of theatrical protest rather than a sustained engagement required of building an insurgent partisan politics. In particular, this includes the academic left whose engagement takes for granted that the mere acquisition and dissemination of data constitutes a form of political activism. This, at best, is of secondary importance and assumes relevance only when institutional power is interested in or sympathetic or at least willing to listen. At worst, assembling the facts of oppression without a equivalent commitment to their remediation amounts to nothing more than voyeurism.

That the Greens are the only game in town puts Frank's criticism in a different light and Ted Glick and David Cobb's capitulation to Anyone But Bush in a different context. For unlike the rest of the left they are merely wrong - wrong in advancing a strategy which ended up hurting rather than helping long term prospects of an insurgent political party. But these prospects, even with a few notable successes such as the Matt Gonzalez near victory for mayor of San Francisco, were weak going into the presidential election. And the fault for that lies not with Glick and Cobb - both of whom did what they could to help build the party's foundation (though Glick's weak New Jersey senatorial campaign was another ill-conceived exercise in "party building").

Rather the fault lies with a left which is constitutionally incapable and uninterested in doing the work which is necessary to engage in the only means by which real political change is achieved and which has shown so little interest in critically examining its own failures in understanding of how political change occurs.

So while Glick and Cobb and the rest of the ABB camp within the Greens were wrong, much of the rest of the left, as the physicist I. I. Rabi once put it, is not even wrong: even when it succeeds its overall trajectory is sure to fail. Not only does the left not have any answers, it has shown itself incapable of even asking the right questions.

And so the Greens have been brought to their knees and may be down for the count. Frank is right that some of its wounds have been self inflicted by the ABBers in the party. But much more of the damage has come from self-professed leftists standing idly by while the one of the few signs of an emergent institutionally organized opposition-the only sort of opposition which has any chance of succeeding against the forces we confront-has vanished.

Much of the rest of the left has thereby gotten what they've wanted.

This will not be the first time that getting what many of us claim to want may turn out to be exactly what we don't need.