Sometimes I put myself down as a bit "flaky" in my politics, as a rather nerdy teenager I flirted with the old Liberal Party, before becoming a convinced lefty and sometime member of first Militant (now Socialist Party) then the SWP. I left militant partly 'cos I found their meetings dull, and preferred the SWP line on Stalinism and frankly the SWP were more active at my university (Militant were too busy with politics in the "real" word, which I now see was perfectly reasonable)
The SWP's strident, often sectarian and over simplistic politics soon began to wear thin with me and I started reading round the subject. Studying Anarchist critics of Leninism like Emma Goldmann and Peter Arshinov and later theorists (especially Murry Bookchin) but, I never really was a true Anarchist and I find the libertarian left nature of the Greens, really suits me best right now. My short attention span means my political theory is broad, but slightly shallow.
Still, within the Green Party we have our fallings out and disagreements, unfortunately sometimes the rivalries become rather too personal, which is a shame. Despite disagreements, I want to be in a broad based party with people from different traditions, coming together to fight for a common cause.
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4 comments:
That was interesting - thanks
Hey Nick you may worry you are 'politically flaky' but nobody else does, you seem thoughtful and commited.
I agree with your comments, although I have always been in the green party myself and have been into ecosocialism since the early 1980s, its important to work with people with different views and a healthy party is plural and democratic, not monolithic or top down
Hi Nick
I find that with my own politics that although parts of them are similar to some political ideologies and theories that have been assigned a name, the overall package is unique to me. I have decided that is the way it should be, we are all individuals and sometimes we agree with other individuals and sometimes we disagree with those same individuals.
Healthy but above all, honest, debate is what politics should be about - if you don't have a diverse range of people in your organisation you end up with groupthink and the sort of decison-making that leads to the economic situation we find ourselves in today.
It is both the blessing and the curse of the Green Party that we can have real stand-up rows with real honest emotions on display. As long as we remember the overall aim of the party, these rows should be welcomed.
I try to balance an inner steer (which is like yours libertarian socialism) with data, but this is hard. Sometimes it seems like the political class in the GP is far removed from the ecologists, climatologists and energy scientists. For example, going round Green Party blogs I subscribe to, I can't find out enough economics, climatology or science to defend wind turbines against the nay-sayers and attackers of planning permission. The Vestas coverage was abysmal in this respect. Even if I had the social skills to negotiate a point of view with angry rural innkeepers, I simply haven't got the requisite unvarnished data to hand. We need to be evidence-based about politics as well as values-based. Call me a technocrat if you like, but the lack of evidence encapsulates my difficulties with all but especially Green politics. I feel Green politics should ideally fuse the scientific and the social, but I'm at a loss here. And as you know, RV, the singular GP international priorities have used up my energies too. Thanks for writing your post, it got me thinking.
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