Howie, Murray, Amherst, and Boston

In the last Green Horizon issue Charlene Spretnak wrote: “The ISE [Institute for Social Ecology] group’s aggressive way of doing politics was evident at the first national gathering, in Amherst, MA, in 1987. On the opening night several journalists from leading publications, such as the New York Times, were in the audience, curious to see what Green politics was about. Instead of speaking on that subject to help launch Green politics in this country, as we other plenary speakers did that night, Murray Bookchin used his time to attack and demean a long list of male ecological-political authors he wanted to take down. He and his ISE adherents also cultivated other conflicts during the conference, explaining afterward that (in their belief system) you have to ‘make some heat to get any light’.”

The Amherst conference was a major event. I first got interested in the Greens after reading about it in Z Magazine in the fall of 1987.

As Charlene intimates, the kernel of the bad vibes that would split the Greens (GPUSA vs. ASGP) in the mid-nineties was evident in Amherst. Many of us attribute the bad vibes to Murray Bookchin. He had a nasty 1930s-style contentious leftist tone to his participation in the movement. To the extent that his M.O. bled into the Left Green Network, it made the LGN anathema to many Greens. Charlene is correct when she writes that Murray’s ISE and then Howie’s LGN tended to have “a vanguard mentality by which they pretended that the rest of us had no interest in economic change and that Green economic policy was a vacuum, which they rightfully should be the ones to fill.”

Howie Hawkins was very associated with Murray Bookchin during the 1980s. But Charlene fails to acknowledge the extent to which Howie drifted away from Murray in terms of ideology, orientation, and tone after Howie helped launch GPUSA (Greens/Green Party USA) in 1991.

I was inspired to leave Michael Harrington’s organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, and join up with the Greens after reading Howie’s seminal 1989 document titled “Toward A New Politics.” Having been a leftist since college during the 1960s, when I came into the Greens I at first gravitated toward the Left Green Network — and then toward the GPUSA side when there was a split between ASGP and GPUSA.

But by 1995, in trying to organize in my own area, I noticed that the ASGP (Association of State Green Parties) orientation had more resonance.

GPUSA adhered to the idea of activist locals seeing themselves as sub-units of a national dues-paying membership organization. Most leftist groups are organized that way.

ASGP recognized that, early on, membership in the locals would be too thin to reach critical mass and membership at the national level would be too remote and diffuse. A state party is where critical mass could be achieved. People were most likely to identify with their state party. And, anyway, with a more electoral focus, state-level election laws had to be learned and considered.

I came to see that the ASGP orientation was more appealing and more effective. I also could see the logic and appeal of the slogan: “Neither left nor right, but out in front.” By 1998 I hoped ASGP and GPUSA would merge, adopting the strategic orientation of ASGP along with the anti-capitalism ideology of GPUSA. On that basis I helped form a caucus called “Greens for Unity.” Two years later I volunteered to be one of the GPUSA representatives to the “Boston negotiations” (September of 2000).

The negotiations failed because too many GPUSA members wanted to stick with their more-leftist, more-activist orientation and to retain much of their organizational autonomy. I could see that was a mistake on their part; that if the negotiations failed, ASGP would become the Green Party of the United States; GPUSA members and their orientation would become marginalized. And that’s what happened.

Howie could see it, too. He tried to move his “comrades” to appreciate the reality they were facing and thus be more compromising in Boston. Don Fitz, in particular, wanted Howie and the other GPUSA negotiators to hold out for more GPUSA influence in the ultimate national party. Their intransigence wound up ruining GPUSA. Instead of being influential it just faded away over the next ten years.