Listen to Grace, Not Zack

The Green Party’s left has a strategic choice to make. It probably does not know it is making it.

At the Green Party of England and Wales Trade Union Group’s AGM, two speakers shared a platform. Grace Blakeley and Zack Polanski. Both are on the left of the party. Both are articulate, committed, and serious about building something beyond the managed decline of Starmer’s Labour. But they are pointing in different directions. And only one of them is pointing toward a politics that can actually win.

Polanski is the better politician. That is not a compliment. He connects dots, he tells stories, he understands the electoral logic. His instinct for the moment is sharp: eco-populism, Naomi Klein’s framing, the argument that the Greens must speak to disaffected working-class voters before Nigel Farage does. He is right about the problem. His solution is to become better storytellers. ‘We need to improve our communication and messaging.’ And there it stops. No theory of how power changes hands. No account of what happens when the Greens reach office and the structural pressure begins. A moral obligation to be bolder. That is not a strategy; it is an aspiration dressed as one.

Blakeley is doing something harder. Her argument in Vulture Capitalism is not that neoliberalism made the state too small; it is that neoliberalism reorganised the state to serve capital more effectively. Boeing is not a story of insufficient regulation: it is a story of state power deployed in the interests of shareholders against workers and passengers alike. Lucas Aerospace is not a nostalgic example. In 1976, facing redundancies at a major British defence contractor, shop stewards from across the company’s factories did something almost without precedent. Rather than simply fighting to save their jobs, they asked a different question: save them to do what? The workers at Lucas, through their combine committee, produced an alternative corporate plan running to hundreds of pages. It proposed converting the company’s productive capacity away from weapons systems toward what they called socially useful technology: kidney dialysis machines, heat pumps, hybrid vehicle engines, equipment for people with disabilities. Products the society needed, made by workers who already had the skills to make them, in factories that would otherwise be shuttered or sold. For the full history, see Hilary Wainwright and Dave Elliott's The Lucas Plan, the definitive account of the plan and its significance.

The Lucas Plan was greeted with something close to panic by the establishment. The Financial Times called it remarkable. An MP told Parliament it cut to the core of the capitalist model. Tony Benn, then Industry Secretary, was sympathetic but ultimately could not deliver government support. Lucas management rejected it outright. When Thatcher came to power three years later, the plan was finished. The company was broken up in the shareholder value revolution of the 1980s. Parts of what had been Lucas Aerospace ended up, as Blakeley discovered in her research, in the hands of the company that manufactured the faulty sensors in the Boeing 737 Max planes that killed 346 people in 2018 and 2019.

The Lucas Plan failed not because the workers were wrong about what was possible, but because the labour movement did not defend it with sufficient force, and because capital understood the threat more clearly than the left understood the opportunity. Workers demonstrating that they could plan production democratically, that they could orient industry toward human need rather than profit: that is precisely what capital cannot tolerate. The road not taken in 1976 leads directly to the question the Green left needs to answer now.

The conclusion is not ‘we need better politicians.’ The conclusion is that the only force capable of countering the concentrated power of capital is organised popular power, rooted in the working class.

This is ecosocialism. Not the word, which Polanski uses too, but the content. The metabolic rift between capitalism and the conditions of life on this planet cannot be closed by greener storytelling. It requires breaking the power of the corporations and financial institutions that profit from it. That requires a theory of the class, a theory of the state, and a theory of how the labour movement and the climate movement become one thing rather than two movements occasionally sharing a platform.

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The layer that is already there

Here is what is easy to miss: the Green Party is not merely talking about this. It is, in fragments and without fully knowing it, already doing it (and I have added some highlighted clarifications).

The Green Party Trade Union Group and the Association of Green Councillors have jointly produced a briefing, Drawing a Line, aimed at the party’s 800-plus councillors across England and Wales. It is a practical document: how to build relationships with UNISON, Unite and GMB in local government, how to engage with trade union representatives on council, how to connect the labour movement’s presence in communities to the political campaign against cuts.

Eight hundred councillors. That is 800 people attending committee meetings, speaking to officers, voting on budgets, sitting across the table from trade union representatives in councils across England and Wales. If even a fraction of them are doing the work the briefing describes, that is an organic connection to working-class institutions that most small revolutionary organisations cannot claim. The Trade Union Group is pushing for trade union liaison officers in every regional and local party. It is making the case, explicitly, that picket line solidarity is electoral work, not a distraction from it. It asked whether new members could be asked on joining whether they belong to a union. These are not gestures. This is class composition work, even if nobody in the room is using that phrase.

The revolutionary Marxist tradition has a name for this kind of work. Writing in 1955, Livio Maitan set out the theoretical foundations of the Fourth International’s approach to working inside mass organisations. The task, he argued, was never mere adaptation: revolutionary cadres entered existing formations with a precise objective, to link the critical elements already in tension with the leadership line, advance the movement toward more developed positions, and connect those elements to a complete programme. The specific organisations Maitan had in mind were Labour and the Communist parties. The structural conditions were different. But the basic logic holds. A layer of the broad vanguard has concentrated inside and around the Green Party since the Your Party dispersal. The question is what politics it develops.

The analogy has limits. Classical FI entrism targeted hardened bureaucratic formations with histories of betrayal, organisations the FI understood itself to be hostile to at leadership level. The Green Party is a different formation: a rapidly growing party whose leadership is in many respects to the left of its membership, and whose structures are genuinely open to activist participation. The task is not to prepare a split but to deepen political formation from within a party that is itself still politically unsettled.

The Drawing a Line briefing is also honest in ways that repay attention. It distinguishes three responses available to Green councillors facing the local government funding crisis: finessing cuts, owning cuts, and contesting cuts. The third category comes with a warning. Setting an illegal budget, it notes, would simply trigger the Secretary of State to step in and remove the council from control. The Liverpool Militant precedent is invoked and immediately foreclosed. The briefing does not recommend contesting cuts in any meaningful sense; it recommends coordinated political pressure, national campaigns, motions, relationships with unions. All valuable. None of it sufficient.

This is precisely where the Blakeley argument and the Polanski argument diverge. Polanski accepts the limit as given. Blakeley’s analysis, taken to its conclusion, has to ask why the limit exists and what it would actually take to break it.

There is a structural complication worth naming honestly. The Green Party’s governance model inverts what most left organisations would recognise as the normal pyramid. GPEx is elected directly, conference is policy-sovereign, and central discipline is relatively weak. The result is a leadership that is, in some respects, considerably to the left of the membership it represents. Polanski won his leadership election with around 80 percent of votes cast, on a 38 percent turnout of a then 64,000-strong membership: a stronger mandate than his predecessor, and one that preceded rather than followed the membership surge his victory helped generate. The membership that joined in his wake is probably more left-wing in instinct than the pre-existing party base. It is also less politically formed, less experienced in struggle, and less connected to working-class institutions. The organisational challenge is not to manage a conservative membership but to develop a politically uneven one. The party’s left character at leadership level is partly an artefact of who participates in internal democracy, not a settled index of where the broader membership stands.

This matters for the strategic argument. A membership that grew rapidly in the aftermath of the Your Party dispersal, and before that in response to the 2024 election results, is a membership whose political formation is uneven and incomplete. The window for developing class politics inside the Green Party, for connecting the critical elements to a complete programme, may be narrower than it appears. Left leaderships in membership organisations with low internal engagement do not stay left indefinitely. The membership’s political centre of gravity reasserts itself, usually at the moment of the next internal election, usually in response to the pressures of electoral growth and the demands of managing 800-plus councillors across England and Wales.

The work of political formation, the trade union engagement, the austerity pledge, the ecosocialist current, the connections forming between the Green left and the FI-aligned British left: this is not background activity that can wait for a more favourable moment. It is the condition for the favourable moment not being squandered when it arrives.

One reader puts the challenge directly: the problem is not primarily wrong theory but insufficient activist practice. More Green members participating in strikes, campaigns, and community organising would develop their understanding of the state through experience rather than argument. Theory follows practice more reliably than practice follows theory. The Trade Union Group's work is valuable precisely because it creates the conditions for that experience to accumulate.

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The trap Polanski is walking into

It would be wrong to dismiss Polanski. His membership growth is real. His instinct that the Greens must speak to working-class voters is correct. His support for striking workers, his presence on picket lines, his solidarity with United Voices of the World campaigns: these are not gestures, and they have mattered to the workers involved.

The problem is the horizon. ‘Pushing Labour to the left.’ ‘Building the narrative.’ ‘Growing the movement.’ These are objectives appropriate to a pressure group, not to a party serious about transforming the distribution of power in society. And the eco-populism frame, for all its tactical intelligence, contains a structural trap: it frames the crisis as a story of bad elites and good people, rather than as a story of a system that produces bad outcomes structurally, regardless of who is running it. Farage tells a version of the same story. He is better at it. The only answer to his version is not a greener version of the same story: it is a story rooted in class, in the actual material interests of working people, in why the fossil fuel executives and the financial institutions are not going to deliver the transition no matter how many times you vote them out.

The Drawing a Line briefing contains a sharp detail that illustrates exactly this tension. It advises Green councillors to build relationships with all three major local government unions, including the GMB. The same GMB whose Congress 2023 called on its executive to persuade Labour to drop its commitment to net zero electricity generation by 2030, on the grounds that the target was ‘simply not viable.’ The same GMB whose General Secretary Gary Smith told the union’s 2024 conference in Bournemouth that Labour’s reputation for competent government would be ‘destroyed if there are avoidable power cuts and blackouts.’ The same GMB that supported fracking at its 2015 Congress while Corbyn’s Labour leadership moved to ban it on climate grounds. The same union found by the Monaghan Report in 2020 to be institutionally sexist, and criticised for backroom recognition deals with Uber, Deliveroo and Hermes that served the union’s institutional interests rather than the workers nominally represented.

The briefing notes some of these facts and moves on. It cannot do otherwise, because within its own framework the answer is still: build the relationship, engage constructively, apply pressure. What it cannot say is that the GMB’s political trajectory is not an accident or a personality failure. It is a structural product of trade union bureaucracy accommodating itself to capital, prioritising institutional survival over the interests of the class it claims to represent. That accommodation runs from backroom deals with gig economy giants all the way to telling a Labour government to abandon its flagship climate commitment. These are not separate stories.

Blakeley came close to saying what needs to be said at the Trade Union Group AGM. ‘An awareness and an analysis of class would be really really beneficial as part of that broader anticapitalist narrative.’ She pulled the punch slightly, the way you do when you are a guest speaker at someone else’s event. The argument was there. It needs to be made fully.

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What this means

The Green Party left does not need to choose between Blakeley and Polanski as personalities. It needs to choose between the two strategic logics they represent, even if neither has fully articulated the choice in those terms.

One logic says: communicate better, speak to more voters, push the established institutions toward bolder positions, be present in the movements. This is a politics of influence. It assumes the system is reformable if you apply sufficient pressure in the right places.

The other says: build class power in the workplaces and communities where Green members actually live and work; connect the climate movement to the labour movement not rhetorically but organisationally; develop a theory of why capital cannot deliver the transition and what it would actually take to force it. This is a politics of rupture. It does not assume the system is reformable. It prepares for the moment when the contradiction between what capitalism requires and what the planet can sustain becomes undeniable.

The Green Trade Union Group and the Association of Green Councillors are already doing some of this second kind of work. The Drawing a Line briefing, for all its self-imposed limits, is evidence that the connection between the labour movement and the party’s elected representatives is being built deliberately and systematically.

The critical elements are present at different levels of development. Green Left is the ideologically formed ecosocialist tendency: producing serious political analysis, oriented outward toward the broader left and labour movement, and drawing on the intellectual tradition of the Ecosocialist International Network, the work of Joel Kovel and Michael Löwy, whose ecosocialist manifesto provides the common theoretical ground connecting Green Party ecosocialists to the anti-capitalist left beyond it. Green Left looks outside the Green Party in a way that reflects a genuine understanding that the ecological and class crises cannot be resolved within any single party's internal politics. Its organisational form, a newsletter and a committee that predates the current membership surge, has not yet found its shape within a rapidly growing party. Greens Organise has the organisational model the moment requires: clean campaign infrastructure, a legible demand, a pledge that can recruit broadly. But its horizon remains the Green Party itself. The anti-austerity pledge is a case in point: a demand that could have been put to candidates from Labour, independents, and across the left as a cross-party accountability tool, deployed instead as an internal Green instrument. That narrowing may reflect the practical logic of building inside a specific formation, but the demand's potential reach is being undersold. The task is to connect Green Left's outward orientation and political formation to Greens Organise's organisational reach and recruiting capacity, neither subordinating one to the other nor pretending the connection has already been made. Some of that connection is already forming. Livio Maitan, writing seventy years ago about a very different conjuncture, called this the essential task: linking the critical elements, helping them move from the particular grievance to the general programme, patiently and without imposing schemas on a movement that will find its own form.

The connections are already forming in unexpected places. Kate Jones, the Green Party Executive’s trade union liaison officer, is speaking at Anti-Capitalist Resistance’s Brighton meeting on trade unions and ecosocialism. That a GPEx officer is engaging with the anticapitalist left on precisely this terrain is not incidental. It is the argument made flesh: the dividing line between influence politics and class politics does not run neatly between leadership and members, between the executive and the insurgent currents. It runs through the party at every level, including its national leadership.

The terrain is shifting in other ways too. There is a serious and growing movement for the Wales Green Party to separate from GPEW entirely. With around 8,300 members and a formal commitment to Welsh independence adopted in 2020, the Welsh Greens have both the political rationale and the financial base to stand alone. Polanski personally supports an amicable separation on the Scottish model; the Scottish Greens severed formal ties with GPEW in 2022, later renewing cooperative arrangements. An independent Welsh Green Party would be operating in a nation with a stronger collectivist tradition, a labour movement with deeper community roots, and an independence movement framing self-determination in terms of economic justice rather than ethnic nationalism. What ecosocialism looks like in that context may differ substantially from its English counterpart. The strategic choices ahead will not look the same on both sides of Offa’s Dyke.

Lucas Aerospace was crushed in the 1980s. Not because the workers were wrong. Because the labour movement did not defend it with sufficient force, and because capital understood the threat more clearly than the left understood the opportunity.

The next opportunity is already assembling. The question is whether the Green left will understand what it is.