“The Greens are the new workers' party”

Polanski’s Claim and Two Documents from 1979

The group where Socialist Federation and Grassroots Left supporters argue things out was four positions deep on Zack Polanski before I had finished the first coffee on Wednesday, and the line that stayed with me came from someone who was not defending the Greens at all. Like it or not, class anger has coalesced in the Greens for now. Offered as a description, by a supporter who went on to say they were very critical of how Polanski has lately drawn the difference between Labour and his own party.

Another was blunter. The Greens are a trap leading back to a Labour government (as if the other governments offered at the general election will not be worse), Polanski is an opportunist, and if the socialist left keeps lending votes to the Greens while offering nothing of its own we are making a mistake. We need a plan. A third had lived under a Green council for years, watched it make cuts, and came back with something other than a verdict: the Greens had brought in decent working-class councillors, younger and from backgrounds the usual selection machinery filters out, and we have no pipeline to compare. What that supporter wanted was preparation.

All three are arguing about Holborn and St Pancras, Keir Starmer’s old seat, contested on 8 October. Polanski is the Green candidate, Sagal Abdi-Wali the Labour one, Galloway stands for the vile Workers Party of Britain, and Andrew Feinstein, who took 18.9 per cent here in 2024, has stood aside for Polanski after he signed up to pledges on social housing, austerity, anti-racism, the unions and Gaza. An organised left body extracted conditions and got them in writing.

I am not writing about the by-election. I am writing about every ballot paper after it, in England. The argument does not cross the Severn: the Wales Green Party wants separation from the party Polanski leads, and the Welsh left faces Plaid Cymru in a configuration that makes the question unrecognisable. Someone should write that piece.

What the Greens now say they are

On 1 May, launching a Workers’ Charter of Fundamental Rights at a May Day rally in Manchester, Polanski said the Greens are the new workers’ party, and would address the imbalance in our workplaces and give control back to workers. The Charter asks for day-one protection against unfair dismissal, sectoral bargaining, an end to fire-and-rehire and zero-hours contracts, fifteen pounds an hour at every age, and the removal of all anti-union and anti-strike legislation enacted since 1979.

Hold that year: that’s the first of two documents rooted in 1979 we’ll discuss in this post.

The party has passed 200,000 members. Five MPs, 1,300 councillors, twenty-one councils led, Gorton and Denton won in February, 587 seats and two London mayoralties in May. Polanski has been round ten unions asking them to shift their money off Labour, and Unite cut its affiliation payment by forty per cent in March. None of that makes the programme socialist. It is social democratic, and the self-image left populist, which I argued in Listen to Grace, Not Zack is the weaker half of what is available to it.

It does mean that much of the broad vanguard in England, in Mandel’s sense of the layer acting independently of the bureaucratic apparatuses on some questions, will vote Green. Perhaps not join. Vote. Different facts about different people, and we keep collapsing them.

The objection, which is serious

Anyone formed in this tradition has another document ready, also rooted in 1979. The Fourth International’s 1979 World Congress said that where its sections do not run candidates, they call for a class vote for the workers' parties, that this implies no approval of their programme, and that voting directions are tactical. Then the sentence everyone remembers: “The only principle is our absolute refusal to vote for bourgeois or petty-bourgeois formations, because that runs counter to the line of class independence.”

Read that on its own and a Green vote is closed. I want to argue that it should be reopened, and that we should say so instead of dressing the change up as continuity.

Start with what the phrase pointed at. “Petty-bourgeois formations” appears once more in that resolution, in a passage on national movements naming the parties then contesting the ground: the SNP, Plaid Cymru, the PNV, the CDC. The worry was that they would hold the toiling masses where the workers’ movement had failed. Ecology parties are absent because in November 1979 there were none worth naming. Die Grünen was founded in January 1980, after the congress had risen.

The ecological current does appear, and appears well. The resolution lists “battlers on the ecological front” among the forces to be combined into a powerful anticapitalist movement, and notes that in France and West Germany the antinuclear movement had become a new political force. A movement, an ally, a force. Never a party, because there was not yet one to have a view about.

So “workers parties” there is shorthand. It needed no explaining in 1979, when everyone knew it meant the social democratic, socialist, communist and Trotskyist parties, the ones with the organic link to the class. A workers’ party then was generally a politically bourgeois party carrying the support of a large layer of the vanguard, roughly what the resolution says earlier: the social democratic parties serve the imperialist bourgeoisie but are based on the workers, they are the labour lieutenants of capital, and where they stand depends on the relationship of forces and the activity of the workers.

And then the sentence that ought to end the argument. Understanding this, the resolution says, “makes it possible both to avoid academic disputes about the ‘extent of bourgeoisification’ of the Social Democratic parties and to grasp all the opportunities for dialogue with workers in the SPs or influenced by them.”

The tradition told us not to have the argument we are having.

What the tradition actually did, which is better than what it is said to have done

Socialist Outlook 18, October 1989, Steve Roberts on the Greens’ two and a quarter million votes in the June European elections. Roberts was the pen name of a former International Marxist Group political bureau member who was a leading co-founder of Socialist Outlook. He conceded the base without flinching. Most had come from disillusioned Social and Liberal Democrats and Owen’s rump SDP, joined by ex-Tories cross about water privatisation and the Channel Tunnel rail link, the biggest share from the prosperous south. Then: “But to use these factors to belittle the Greens’ breakthrough is the height of sectarianism.” He wanted a red-green alliance built on critical acceptance of the Greens’ main points.

A month later Phil Hearse replied, putting the 1979 category to work. The Green Party “has all the hallmarks of a radical petty bourgeois party”, and is “objectively a radical party, but evidently not a party of the labour movement”.

Then, in December, the wonderful German Trotskyist Hans-Jürgen Schulz wrote on the German party, under the running head DEBATE: most Green members were teachers, social workers or proletarianised intellectuals with very few workers or trade unionists, and in working-class districts the Greens got under five per cent.

Three issues, no adjudication. The objection from 1979 was made by name in the section’s own paper, contested there, and left open because it was open. A better precedent than a resolution.

The obvious reading is that Schulz settles it against us: the sociology has not changed much, so the 1989 answer holds. But that is not quite right either. Hans-Jürgen described a party based on the proletarianised intelligentsia at a moment when the organic links were intact, when the unions represented most workers and had a political partner they funded and were answered by. Both halves have gone. Private-sector density has halved since 1995, to 12.1 per cent, the unions now have four million members in the public sector against two and a half million in the private, and of six and a half million members only 2.7 million pay into any political fund, not all of them affiliated to Labour. Which puts his list in a different light, since the teachers and social workers he counted as proof the Greens held no trade unionists are now roughly where trade unionism still lives.

One thing Schulz reports has reversed completely. Every current of the German Greens, he wrote, agreed that their party did not belong to the workers’ movement, because left socialism and the workers’ movement had failed. In 1989 the strongest Green party in Europe said it was not of the workers’ movement. Today, the Green party in Germany is a party of white-collar social liberals and social democrats, much like the Social Democratic Party. In 2026 the Green Party of England and Wales says it is the new workers’ party. We are not being asked to reclassify the same object. The object moved.

Two errors, and the fight

The first error treats the Greens as a clean break with reformism. They are a social democratic party, subject to every pressure that acts on one. International Viewpoint’s correspondent reported from Bielefeld in 1999 that the German Greens had completed their passage from a movement party critical of the system into an updated party of the enlightened middle caste, and that governing while NATO bombed Yugoslavia allowed no compromise. Then the Irish Greens twice. Now Haringey, where Mark Blake leads a Green minority administration in a borough Labour held for fifty years. The £23.2m of savings being made there this year were voted through in March by the outgoing Labour council, whose leader called them efficiency savings in line with Labour’s values. The Greens inherited those, and a borough needing £84m of exceptional financial support. The supporter who came back talking about pipelines understood what the rest of us miss: the cuts and the recruitment are both true at once.

The supporter who said the Greens sit in local administrations with Liberal Democrats and Conservatives was right. In May, the main minority groups on Worcestershire County Council- Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, and Independents- combined to take the leadership off Reform UK and install the Green Matt Jenkins, with the Conservative group leader taking the deputy leadership under him. Party headquarters suspended him for it within hours. I would not have served in it. But most voters in Worcestershire will forgive the Greens if that was the only way to be rid of Reform, and a politics that cannot hold both judgements at once is no use in a county Reform had won. A party that will govern with the major ‘democratic’ parties to keep Reform out is behaving as Labour and other social democratic parties do when they are frightened, and the budget it still has to set will tell us more than the coalition agreement. Labour has only two Worcestershire councillors: few enough to not be needed to block Reform UK, and we can only imagine the practicalities of adding another party to a coalition.

The second error is the mirror. It treats the Greens as a bourgeois party with no more claim on us than the US Democrats, and it is held in parts of the Socialist Federation by people who would be appalled to see it written that way. It ends in backing a neoliberalised workers’ party against one to its left better placed to win the layer we need.

The fight is inside the relationship. Against bureaucratisation first, and Schulz sketched the mechanism in 1989 when he counted 1,500 Green full-timers, an informal but decisive and uncontrolled apparatus that made policy while the ranks debated nothing. A party that quadruples in a year and takes twenty-one councils is building that apparatus now, and the objects are to hand. The Greens have no nationally binding rules for selecting local candidates; the constitution requires each local party to lay down a democratic procedure and leaves the design to them. In March, the spring conference never reached its most contested motion, as it went on a run of no-confidence motions in the chair, which the constitution obliged it to debate one by one, the ballot crashing throughout. And for a clear line that the party sides with the working class and its allies, settled in budget meetings long before any manifesto.

Which brings back the trap, and the trap is not where the first supporter placed it. Polanski has said he could enter coalition with a Burnham-led Labour government, and that is the part that got reported. The conditions travelled less well: a wealth tax on the very rich, serious action on the climate, proportional representation, and for Burnham in particular the water companies taken into public ownership or the government stands convicted of siding with profit against people. There is nothing there to object to. Any party would work with a neighbour that undertook to carry its three flagship policies, and one that refused would be running a sect.

Not ‘Opportunism’, but a populism that puts demands on Labour

Which is where the first supporter’s word needs care. Opportunist in ordinary English means someone who takes what is going and is not fussy about principle, and on that reading we argue about Polanski’s back catalogue, which is the bourgeois press’s business. Lenin meant something harder: “an alliance between an insignificant section at the ‘top’ of the labour movement, and its ‘own’ national bourgeoisie, directed against the masses of the proletariat”. Apply that and it fails. The Workers’ Charter is an important test: its practical impact would penalise employers that currently rely on insecure contracts, weak union recognition, low pay, or easy dismissal. The Greens’ political rhetoric is especially directed at large employers and powerful business interests. However, Polanski often strikes out at a thin stratum of the international bourgeoisie, on behalf of the mass. The word for his approach is populist, which is what the party sometimes calls itself, and that is the criticism worth making: a politics aimed at the few at the top can be very sharp about the few and still say nothing about capital as a relation.

The answer is in the same 1979 document as the sentence used against us. Facing a Labour government that had spent 1975 to 1978 imposing the bourgeoisie’s programme through the union bureaucracy, it did not conclude for abstention. It concluded that a Conservative victory would be worse, that the task was to call for a Labour government from which the workers will demand satisfaction of their demands, and that the Germans should do the same toward the SPD while pressing it to break with the Liberals. A vote and a demand, in one breath. The coalition was made a demand rather than a reason to stand aside, and the demand had an address. Which is near enough what Polanski has already put on the table: support with a price on it, named in public. The open question is whether the price survives a budget round. Haringey and Worcestershire will answer that, and the interviews will not.

Better vote ‘anti-austerity’ than ‘pro-austerity’

So, plainly. Where we are not standing and there is no meaningful anticapitalist candidate, it is better to vote for an ‘anti-austerity’ Green Party candidate than a ‘pro-austerity’ Labour Party candidate (and vice versa), provided the Greens have majority support among the broad vanguard in that place. That holds even where the programme stops short of ecosocialism (and even, as in Holborn, if a sect like the Communist League stands). And, obviously, ‘anti-austerity’ than ‘pro-austerity’ are relative terms for social democratic parties. The Greens are more likely to resist austerity than Labour, but both operate in the framework of social democratic legalism. The judgement is about where the layer is, in the spirit of the IMG’s formula about voting Labour and relying on your own struggles, and it carries the same obligation: the vote is the small half, the demands are the rest. Green Left turns twenty this autumn as the party’s official ecosocialist group, and I am laying out its anniversary conference newsletter as I write. The relationship argued for here is twenty years old.

Which leaves the Socialist Federation with the problem it wrote into its founding aim in June: a new socialist and working-class party, independent of Labour and the Greens. Independent of Labour is intelligible; that is where the layer came from. Independent of the Greens is harder, because that is where many have gone, and no formation can be independent of where its intended members are standing without being independent of the members too. Nobody in that group on Wednesday had an answer to this and neither do I, though the congress in the Midlands this autumn is where it will be put, and the structure proposal still has not said whether the Federation will stand candidates at all, which may be the more.