"The Greens and the Left" (8/12/24 panel)
On August 12, 2024, Platypus New Zealand hosted a panel to discuss the history and meaning of the Green Party of New Zealand in context of the Left.
Featuring Sue Bradford (ex-Green MP), Francisco Hernandez (Green MP), Paul Chalmers (NZ Fabian Society), and Sione Ma'u (Revolutionary Communist International [formerly IMT]).
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The rise of the Green Party as an electoral force in Aotearoa since the 1990s cannot be taken in isolation. Following the union environmentalist Green Bans movement in Australia in the 1970s and the German Greens' electoral successes the following decade, similar parties and movements have gained prominence worldwide, including Canada, Austria, France, the US, Colombia, and elsewhere.
The Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand reflects a readiness of the voting public to accept causes equated with the international Left: environmental protection, the rights of sexual and gender minorities, pacifism, anti-racism, and more. In these, one sees the outcome of the New Left "new social movements," whose activists founded the Green parties of the world after becoming disenchanted with earlier generations' attempts to oppose mainstream capitalist politics from the outside.
Compared with the revolutionary Left at its pre-WWI historical height, the question today arises as to whether the Green Party's political rise represents progress or regression, even a victory or defeat for the Left. To ask "which way forward?" for the Greens is not only a question of policy, but one that entails genuinely political considerations. Their roots lie in the history of the Left and its crisis.
1. Under what conditions did the Green parties of the world come into existence in the 1980s-90s? Have the Greens made good on the potential they had at their foundation, or repeated the mistakes and defeats of previous social emancipation efforts?
2. To what extent do the Greens owe their current standing to the global New Left of the postwar decades?
3. How do the Greens preserve or negate the memory of the tasks of socialism?
4. How does the Green Party's vision for the future reconcile with the traditional socialist goal of the state's eventual dissolution?