It isn’t that YP wasnt prepared for these elections: the Corbyn Cult right from the start did not want YP to stand in them. They fear active members and are happy to lose them. Many of these so called independents are not even slightly radical so any victory gained will not be a YP one despite the lies that will come from Fonthill Road. Tragic
With hindsight, she said everything at the start about the kind of party we needed. It should have been on the agenda at the founding conference, and then used to organise the base.
The Founding Conference had a totally rigged agenda: and security goons deployed to physically prevent it choosing its own chair/agenda. The rapturous applause Zarah received, despite being relegated to a Sunday afternoon graveyard slot, will have terrified the Corbyn Cult. It was not Zarahs fault that democracy was not on the agenda
There's something to Larry's comment that Cubyn's team unavoidably sabotaged the YP electoral intervention, and it is the broad reading across most of the organised left, including the SWP's November pre-conference bulletin. Sortition over delegate elections, the company structure controlling money and membership, the dual membership ban, the absence of national electoral preparation by autumn: each was named in real time, each was tied to the foreseeable consequence, none of the warnings landed.
Where I would slow down is the intent claim. The structural critique is well-evidenced; the move to 'they fear active members and are happy to lose them' attributes a motive that is harder to demonstrate from primary sources. With hindsight, though, a different reading is becoming available. Corbyn looks more comfortable as the unaccountable kingmaker, endorsing or withholding endorsement, than as the leader of a national membership party that could hold him to account. The plausible sequence is that he was carried along with the original Sultana initiative, bounced into activating the McCluskey bureaucracy to contain what it might become, and is now trimming it like a bonsai: small, manicured, ineffectual, exactly the model he can live with. That is a structural reading dressed in biographical detail, not a personality verdict, and it sits closer to the evidence than the cult framing.
The piece I owe is probably about that. Thanks for the prompt.
The Land Value Tax (LVT) commitment has been Green policy since at least the 2019 manifesto and remains so, and on its own terms it is a progressive reform. Ricardo and Mill made the case for taxing ground rent as a parasitic burden on accumulation; Mandel, following Marx, treated rent as a portion of social surplus value appropriated by landowners on the basis of nothing but the monopoly of property. A tax that captures that surplus and shifts the fiscal burden from occupiers to owners is, in Mandelian terms, vertical redistribution. So far, so good.
Two observations, though.
The first is that the activist whose voice anchored the piece was reporting on the local addresses he had received in Leeds. National manifesto commitments do not automatically appear on council election leaflets, and his complaint, which I was reporting rather than endorsing as a complete account of Green policy, was about what he was actually being asked to vote for in his ward. If his Chapel Allerton candidate was campaigning on LVT, he did not say so. The piece is open to correction on that point if local Green campaigners want to write in with what they actually put through doors.
The second is more fundamental. LVT is a reform within capitalism, not a break with it. Mandel's standing position on this kind of measure was that it is worth supporting as a struggle for redistribution, but that it should not be confused with the suppression of big money wealth. As long as the means of production remain in private hands, the logic of profit maximisation continues, and the bourgeoisie finds ways to pass costs down or evade the tax. The argument of my piece is not that the Greens have no good policies; it was that an ecosocialist tradition with a systemic critique of capital is being absorbed into a party whose national programme does not commit to ending capitalism. LVT is consistent with that absorption rather than evidence against it.
Thanks for the link and the prompt to think it through more carefully.
Colin's right to point out my error on LTV. I misread his first comment as a defence of LVT in principle rather than a correction to a specific claim in the piece. The article said the Green Party of England and Wales' national leadership has not committed to replacing council tax. That was wrong. The Green Party of England and Wales has held abolition of council tax and its replacement with LVT as policy for many years; the Welsh Greens' 2026 Senedd manifesto states it explicitly; the Scottish Greens share the same end goal with a more transitional implementation. The line should not have been there, and I'll add a correction note to the article.
The Mandelian point about LVT being a reform within capitalism rather than a rupture with it is a separate argument and stands on its own ground. It's not what yColin was correcting, though, and I conflated the two. Thanks to him for pressing.
I think this is symptomatic of a more general point that I see a lot, which is that because Green principles and worldview are different from both capitalism and socialism, we are dismissed by socialists as being somehow not radically progressive.
Personally, I am a Green because 20th-century infinite growth socialism cannot deliver a socially just and environmentally sustainable world.
Expecting a political party to dismantle capitalism is not reasonable. Representative democracy is designed to stop this happening.
Capitalism cannot be sustained and is already collapsing, the point of voting for parties like the Greens is to facilitate the formation of the highly resilient decentralised forms of governance and mutual aid that will support communities as centralised government and nation states fall apart.
Matthew makes two distinct claims here, and they pull in opposite directions.
The first is that representative democracy is structured to contain socialist transformation, so expecting a party to dismantle capitalism is unreasonable. The structural point is itself orthodox Marxism, not an objection to it; the limits of bourgeois parliamentarism have been a Marxist commonplace since Marx's writings on the Paris Commune. The move from 'parliaments cannot legislate socialism into existence' to 'no party can mount an anticapitalist programme' is a leap, though, and the empirical record contradicts it. La France Insoumise took 22% in the first round of the 2022 presidential election on a programme that named the rupture with neoliberalism. Die Linke held mass support for two decades on a programme of opposition to capitalism; its current rebirth stems from internal departures from that programme rather than from any electoral verdict against it. The Bloco de Esquerda in Portugal, Anticapitalistas in the Spanish state, the historic NPA in France: these are not theoretical formations. They have stood, won seats, retained mass audiences. Anticapitalist parties can find electoral expression. The harder question, which is where the structural critique of parliamentarism actually applies, is whether they can convert that expression into transformation.
The second claim, that the point of voting Green is to facilitate decentralised mutual aid as states collapse, has an honest lineage. Bookchin, Kropotkin, the contemporary collapse-anarchist tradition. It is a real position with real adherents. Where it falls down is the empirical record. Capitalism has collapsed, partially or comprehensively, in several places within living memory: Russia in the 1990s, Argentina in 2001, Greece during the Eurozone crisis, Lebanon now. In each case, mutual aid networks emerged and mattered. In none did they substitute for state functions at scale. What filled the vacuum was, with depressing consistency, a combination of organised crime, far-right consolidation, ethnic violence, and the migration of capital to wherever the next bubble was forming. Rojava and Chiapas are partial exceptions, both at very specific cost, both under permanent military pressure.
Rosa Luxemburg's formulation was 'socialism or barbarism', and it was not rhetorical. Capitalism's collapse does not produce resilient communities by default. It produces fascism unless an organised political force is built to meet it. Voting Green to accelerate that collapse, in the absence of such a force, is a wager on the wrong horse. The Green Party's actual policy commitments, which a fellow commenter has helpfully pointed out include LVT and other genuine reforms, are arguments for the Greens within capitalism. They are not preparation for what comes after capitalism, and treating them as such confuses two quite different political projects.
It isn’t that YP wasnt prepared for these elections: the Corbyn Cult right from the start did not want YP to stand in them. They fear active members and are happy to lose them. Many of these so called independents are not even slightly radical so any victory gained will not be a YP one despite the lies that will come from Fonthill Road. Tragic
Sultana should have announced her own party, she did not need Corbyn or his people.
With hindsight, she said everything at the start about the kind of party we needed. It should have been on the agenda at the founding conference, and then used to organise the base.
The Founding Conference had a totally rigged agenda: and security goons deployed to physically prevent it choosing its own chair/agenda. The rapturous applause Zarah received, despite being relegated to a Sunday afternoon graveyard slot, will have terrified the Corbyn Cult. It was not Zarahs fault that democracy was not on the agenda
There's something to Larry's comment that Cubyn's team unavoidably sabotaged the YP electoral intervention, and it is the broad reading across most of the organised left, including the SWP's November pre-conference bulletin. Sortition over delegate elections, the company structure controlling money and membership, the dual membership ban, the absence of national electoral preparation by autumn: each was named in real time, each was tied to the foreseeable consequence, none of the warnings landed.
Where I would slow down is the intent claim. The structural critique is well-evidenced; the move to 'they fear active members and are happy to lose them' attributes a motive that is harder to demonstrate from primary sources. With hindsight, though, a different reading is becoming available. Corbyn looks more comfortable as the unaccountable kingmaker, endorsing or withholding endorsement, than as the leader of a national membership party that could hold him to account. The plausible sequence is that he was carried along with the original Sultana initiative, bounced into activating the McCluskey bureaucracy to contain what it might become, and is now trimming it like a bonsai: small, manicured, ineffectual, exactly the model he can live with. That is a structural reading dressed in biographical detail, not a personality verdict, and it sits closer to the evidence than the cult framing.
The piece I owe is probably about that. Thanks for the prompt.
The Greens have a longstanding policy of replacing Council Tax with a Land Value Tax, e.g. in the 2019 General Election manifesto: https://www.wrigleys.co.uk/news/tax-and-estate-planning/the-green-party-manifesto-2019-/
The Land Value Tax (LVT) commitment has been Green policy since at least the 2019 manifesto and remains so, and on its own terms it is a progressive reform. Ricardo and Mill made the case for taxing ground rent as a parasitic burden on accumulation; Mandel, following Marx, treated rent as a portion of social surplus value appropriated by landowners on the basis of nothing but the monopoly of property. A tax that captures that surplus and shifts the fiscal burden from occupiers to owners is, in Mandelian terms, vertical redistribution. So far, so good.
Two observations, though.
The first is that the activist whose voice anchored the piece was reporting on the local addresses he had received in Leeds. National manifesto commitments do not automatically appear on council election leaflets, and his complaint, which I was reporting rather than endorsing as a complete account of Green policy, was about what he was actually being asked to vote for in his ward. If his Chapel Allerton candidate was campaigning on LVT, he did not say so. The piece is open to correction on that point if local Green campaigners want to write in with what they actually put through doors.
The second is more fundamental. LVT is a reform within capitalism, not a break with it. Mandel's standing position on this kind of measure was that it is worth supporting as a struggle for redistribution, but that it should not be confused with the suppression of big money wealth. As long as the means of production remain in private hands, the logic of profit maximisation continues, and the bourgeoisie finds ways to pass costs down or evade the tax. The argument of my piece is not that the Greens have no good policies; it was that an ecosocialist tradition with a systemic critique of capital is being absorbed into a party whose national programme does not commit to ending capitalism. LVT is consistent with that absorption rather than evidence against it.
Thanks for the link and the prompt to think it through more carefully.
It’s a local election. Changing the tax system is not within the remit of Local Councils.
Colin, *you* raised their general election manifesto.
Er, it was you who claimed that the Green Party's "...national leadership has not committed to ...replacing council tax."
I was correcting your mistake.
Colin's right to point out my error on LTV. I misread his first comment as a defence of LVT in principle rather than a correction to a specific claim in the piece. The article said the Green Party of England and Wales' national leadership has not committed to replacing council tax. That was wrong. The Green Party of England and Wales has held abolition of council tax and its replacement with LVT as policy for many years; the Welsh Greens' 2026 Senedd manifesto states it explicitly; the Scottish Greens share the same end goal with a more transitional implementation. The line should not have been there, and I'll add a correction note to the article.
The Mandelian point about LVT being a reform within capitalism rather than a rupture with it is a separate argument and stands on its own ground. It's not what yColin was correcting, though, and I conflated the two. Thanks to him for pressing.
I think this is symptomatic of a more general point that I see a lot, which is that because Green principles and worldview are different from both capitalism and socialism, we are dismissed by socialists as being somehow not radically progressive.
Personally, I am a Green because 20th-century infinite growth socialism cannot deliver a socially just and environmentally sustainable world.
Expecting a political party to dismantle capitalism is not reasonable. Representative democracy is designed to stop this happening.
Capitalism cannot be sustained and is already collapsing, the point of voting for parties like the Greens is to facilitate the formation of the highly resilient decentralised forms of governance and mutual aid that will support communities as centralised government and nation states fall apart.
Matthew makes two distinct claims here, and they pull in opposite directions.
The first is that representative democracy is structured to contain socialist transformation, so expecting a party to dismantle capitalism is unreasonable. The structural point is itself orthodox Marxism, not an objection to it; the limits of bourgeois parliamentarism have been a Marxist commonplace since Marx's writings on the Paris Commune. The move from 'parliaments cannot legislate socialism into existence' to 'no party can mount an anticapitalist programme' is a leap, though, and the empirical record contradicts it. La France Insoumise took 22% in the first round of the 2022 presidential election on a programme that named the rupture with neoliberalism. Die Linke held mass support for two decades on a programme of opposition to capitalism; its current rebirth stems from internal departures from that programme rather than from any electoral verdict against it. The Bloco de Esquerda in Portugal, Anticapitalistas in the Spanish state, the historic NPA in France: these are not theoretical formations. They have stood, won seats, retained mass audiences. Anticapitalist parties can find electoral expression. The harder question, which is where the structural critique of parliamentarism actually applies, is whether they can convert that expression into transformation.
The second claim, that the point of voting Green is to facilitate decentralised mutual aid as states collapse, has an honest lineage. Bookchin, Kropotkin, the contemporary collapse-anarchist tradition. It is a real position with real adherents. Where it falls down is the empirical record. Capitalism has collapsed, partially or comprehensively, in several places within living memory: Russia in the 1990s, Argentina in 2001, Greece during the Eurozone crisis, Lebanon now. In each case, mutual aid networks emerged and mattered. In none did they substitute for state functions at scale. What filled the vacuum was, with depressing consistency, a combination of organised crime, far-right consolidation, ethnic violence, and the migration of capital to wherever the next bubble was forming. Rojava and Chiapas are partial exceptions, both at very specific cost, both under permanent military pressure.
Rosa Luxemburg's formulation was 'socialism or barbarism', and it was not rhetorical. Capitalism's collapse does not produce resilient communities by default. It produces fascism unless an organised political force is built to meet it. Voting Green to accelerate that collapse, in the absence of such a force, is a wager on the wrong horse. The Green Party's actual policy commitments, which a fellow commenter has helpfully pointed out include LVT and other genuine reforms, are arguments for the Greens within capitalism. They are not preparation for what comes after capitalism, and treating them as such confuses two quite different political projects.