Green politics: how it started, and how it’s going (Part I)

Ecofascism, like national socialism and international communism, started in Germany. Ashamed of compatriots falling for the blood-and-soil ideology of the recent past, the fledgling German Green Party was cautious of using symbols, Adolf Hitler having espoused mystical Aryan harmony with nature. However, the door was open to radical leftists, who were regarded as morally sound if not quite ecologically tuned. Socialist economics had failed miserably in Europe, and as the large parties of the Left veered towards the centre, some Marxists saw the green movement as a platform. Die Grúnen advanced because of (rather than despite) hard-left infiltration, and that is key to understanding how environmentalism started, and how it’s going.

As told by Charlene Spretnak and Fritjof Capra in Green Politics: the Global Promise (1984), the twenty-seven representatives of the Green Party taking their seats in the Bundestag  on 22^nd March 1983 were a mix of conservative environmentalists, New Age healers and Marxists of varying shade. Such a broad church cannot endure without compromises. Under Marxist influence, conservatism (inherently protective of the environment) came to be inextricably linked to capitalism, which was regarded as the cause of all society’s ills and an obstacle to a green utopia.

The Green Party’s federal programme for West Germany had four pillars: ecology, social responsibility, grassroots democracy and nonviolence. Let us consider each of these as a baseline for green politics (in Part Two we shall evaluate progress four decades onward).

Ecology

The most fundamental concern of green politics, ecology is a field of science profusely fertilised with ideological dogma. In the early 1980s the big scare was acid rain, an alleged effect of industrial pollution that imperilled the Black Forest. This hazard showed that atmospheric contaminants could not be tackled at national level alone; the Greens were globalists at heart.

Farmers, as custodians of the land, were an important ally for the Greens against government diktat, particularly on blanket use of agrochemicals. To the Marxist element, however, farmers were a traditional foe as originators of capitalism. Apolitical Greens knew that socialist countries (such as East Germany) were no less polluting than the capitalist West, absent a profit motive. In the Soviet Union, the vast Aral Sea was drying out from diversion of water to state farms, leaving the incongruent sight of rusting trawlers on parched land.  Hard-left materialists favoured heavy industry led by the workers, wary of mass redundancy resulting from a unilateral shift to renewable energy.

Social responsibility

A seminal text was the persuasive and pragmatic Small is Beautiful by EF Schumacher (1973). The pursuit of eternal growth was leading to ever-larger organisations, alienation of ordinary people and ecological destruction. But Schumacher knew the importance of industry, having spent 20 years as economic advisor to the National Coal Board in the UK.

The Greens were aware that inhibiting consumption of finite resources would hit the poor hard. Unemployment was a serious problem in Germany, the rate reaching 9.6% in February 1983. The Greens pledged to protect the working class, when that generally meant indigenous folk, although there was a large Turkish manual labour workforce. Immigration was not a prominent topic at that time; instead the Greens urged redistribution of wealth to the Third World.

The Greens saw female engagement as crucial to changing the system. Mainstream parties were stuck in a patriarchal order, and male politicians often laughed when Green representatives expressed feminist ideas in the Bundestag. In the political arena, women felt that they had to be twice as good as men to be given respect. Marxists within the green movement were also inclined to sexist attitudes, despite their emancipatory rhetoric. Relishing tribal politics, they were not best advocates of the humanistic paradigm, but by promoting disadvantaged groups they could undermine the ancien regime.

Grassroots democracy

Proportional representation in Germany enabled the Green Party to gain a foothold in regional assemblies, and later at national level. A core principle was decentralisation, the Greens wanting to dismantle the rigid hierarchies perpetuated by conventional parties. Rudolf Bahro, a founder of the party, envisaged society returning to pre-industrial small communities of about three thousand people, not under feudal yoke, but working together for a sustainable livelihood.

A power vacuum is soon filled, so the Greens needed a wider plan of administration.  Averse to the nation state and its proclivities for xenophobia, war and imperialism, they proposed ‘bioregions’; such entities would form naturally from shared culture and terrain that transcended artificial borders. European federalism was enticing. The Greens were wary of the European Economic Community, initially a coal and steel industry cartel, but they hoped to become a political force in Brussels, and to change the middle letter to ‘ecological’.

Nonviolence

The original Greens were fundamentally opposed to violence. The Marxists were always up for a fight, but in the aftermath of the murderous Baader-Meinhof gang, violent political activity was counterproductive, deterring public support and drawing strong-arm policing, The main focus of this policy, though, was not on restraining members, but on the pervasive violence of the state.

The Greens arose from the campaign for nuclear disarmament. East Germany was a frontline Soviet satellite state, and the main West German political parties accepted NATO installation of Pershing short-range missiles. A kinder, safer world was possible if men and their machines were restrained. The German Greens were inspired by the women protesting at the US Air Force base at Greenham Common. They demanded a nuclear-free Europe (not only removing weapons, but civil power stations too).

Prospects for the green movement

While the gravest perceived danger to humanity was nuclear war, economic hardship was a daily household reality. For green politics to prosper, both of these threats needed to be ameliorated. By the mid-1980s fears about unemployment and inflation eased, and the Cold War receded with gradual liberalisation behind the Iron Curtain. The prospect of peace, however, was not enough to save humanity. For the Greens, rampant consumerism was harming the planet.

In the tension between the original Greens and their Marxist befrienders, the outcome was inevitable. The former had a naïve spiritual outlook on Mother Nature, but homeopathy and yoga were no match for Hegelian dialectic. Roland Vogt, a founder of the Greens, was concerned by the leftist influx: –

‘The major problem with the growth the Greens are experiencing is that more and more people are coming into the party who are not really Green, not holistically minded. The core Greens may become a minority!’ (quoted by Spretnak & Capra, 1984)

There were significant differences among the left-wingers. Many saw the Greens’ distaste for capitalist exploitation as a platform for the proletarian principles of Karl Marx (‘workers of the world unite’), but some were Cultural Marxists on student leader Rudi Dutschke’s ‘march through the institutions’.

While not always appreciated, the Marxists’ political prowess, particularly in organising protests, undoubtedly helped the Greens to be taken seriously. By the late 1980s green policies were increasingly adopted by the major parties, both chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats. Meanwhile the movement grew elsewhere in Europe; most notably in Belgium. In the UK the Ecology Party, founded in 1973, attracted personalities such as BBC sports presenter David Icke.

Spretnak and Capra, in the last line of Green Politics, declared: ‘the future, if there is to be one, is Green’. Forty years on, we can see where ecological extremism is taking us, and it is not the sunlit uplands that the nascent Green movement promised.

Niall McCrae RMN, PhD is a social commentator with regular appearances on Unity News Network, Hearts of Oak, the David Vance Show and George Galloway’s Kalima Horra debates. His books include The Moon and Madness (2012), Echoes from the Corridors (with Peter Nolan, 2016) and Moralitis: a Cultural Virus (with Robert Oulds, 2020). He is an officer of the Workers of England trade union.