The Green Socialist. Zack Polanski and the Battle for Britain’s Future. By Russell Warfield. Pluto Press, October 2006.
It is an odd title since Polanski does not claim to be a socialist, at least not openly. Warfield’s justification for calling him one is that the policies Polanski supports are the same as those advocated by others who do claim to be socialists, such as taxing the rich to pay for measures to benefit the mass of the population, public control of utilities, and rent controls. Polanski himself claims only to be a left-winger who wants the Green Party to be a left-wing party rather than the centrist party prioritising reforms to protect the environment that it has historically been.
Warfield is unstinting in his praise for Polanski and the ‘ecopopulist’ platform on which he stood to win the contest last September to become the Leader of the Green Party which, he says:
‘involved communications which foregrounded policies that spoke to people’s immediate, material needs; acknowledging and feeling the public’s justified anger but directing it towards hope; shaping strong narratives with clear enemies; and building a mass party which was powered by a broader social base of vibrant movements’.
What, you might ask, has blaming the super-rich and taxing them to pay for meeting people’s ‘immediate, material needs’ better got to do with the environment?
Warfield argues that this always was the vocation of the Green Party, describing how it always did have a policy on social and economic matters as well as on the environment. It is true that on paper it did, but its main plank was always the environment; that was why it was set up, why people voted for it and why people joined it. Its other policies, which Warfield tries hard to interpret as prefiguring ‘a principled left-wing offer which transcended narrow environmental interests’, have varied over the years from advocating self-sufficient regional communities to local currencies to protect local businesses. It went into the 2015 general election promising bank reform based on the currency crank idea that banks create money from thin air (it wanted to prevent them from supposedly doing this). In the 2024 general election it promised a Green New Deal which, Warfield says, ‘called for Keynesian investment to stimulate the economy through the creation of green jobs across renewables, home insulation and so on’, as if Keynesianism hadn’t been tried and failed.
Warfield himself does claim to be a socialist, an ‘ecosocialist’, but is pretty vague as to what this means. He seems to envisage ‘democratic control of the economy’ that would give priority to producing and selling what people needed rather than being oriented towards ‘perpetual economic growth’. In any event, the book does show the illusions held by those within the Green Party who call themselves socialist.
Adam Buick
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