Howie Hawkins, Interview by Denys Pilash
Denys Pilash: Howie, you came to Ukraine as part of your European trip. Сould you please explain what was the purpose and how it aligns with your solidarity with the people of Ukraine that you have expressed since the beginning of full-scale invasion?
Howie Hawkins: I've been working with the people in Ukraine and Ukrainians in the diaspora and I was told that just showing up, giving moral support would mean a lot. I also want to amplify the voices of Ukrainians, particularly progressive forces – socialists, anarchists, trade unionists, environmentalists, feminists – back to the United States. Unfortunately, too many leftists in the U.S. ignore people fighting for their national liberation. They're caught up in a campist ideology supporting anybody that's against the U.S., even if it's a fascistic regime like Putin's. For them anything the U.S. does, by definition, should be wrong, which is understandable given how vicious U.S. imperialism has been — Vietnam, Iraq, now Gaza — but you just can't apply a formula to a place you haven't even looked at. I want to let the Ukrainians speak for themselves, back to the people in the United States, particularly on the left, and hopefully they'll recognize who their real allies are. We have people like Jill Stein, the presidential candidate of the Green Party, that haven't talked to any Ukrainians. She's getting Kremlin narrative filtered to her through campist podcasters and people like the architect of neoliberal shock therapy in the former USSR Jeffrey Sachs. I'm hoping to break through some of this mental confusion.
You have been to Kyiv and Kryvyi Rih, and you will also be in Lviv. What struck you the most from this journey?
I've already been impressed by some of the left writings here in Ukraine. I think it's a level higher than a lot of the Marxist left in the United States, which is kind of trite, and it's stuck on the campuses and not engaged in real struggle. Here, it's more real. I met with members of Sotsialnyi Rukh and had a good discussion in a meeting to talk about my perspectives on Ukraine and U.S. policy toward Ukraine in the recent elections. I met with Svitlana Romanko from Razom We Stand, a climate activist with whom I worked in the past. We went to the climate march in New York together last year. I want to support her efforts to get stronger sanctions on Russian fossil fuels and rebuild Ukraine, as well as the other parts of the world, around renewable energy. I also met in Kyiv with activists from a number of trade unions, including construction and nuclear workers. But the meetings that impressed me the most were the people in Kryvyi Rih — the miners' union, the veterans' union. They teach English to one group of six-year-olds, another group of 13 to 15-year-olds out of the office, as well as teach political work. I don't think I've ever met such class-conscious workers that are as mad at the oligarchs here in Ukraine as they are at the Russians invading. So far, that's been the highlight.
The results of the U.S. election have been shocking for many people throughout the world. Many are fearing the worst from the Trump administration, arguably the most reactionary: even more, compared to his previous one or Bush or Reagan and all these right-wing conservative ones. What do you expect?
I think the American left and just broadly progressives are a bit stunned. The guy is obviously a liar, a con artist. He insults everybody. He's a reactionary. Most people don't support his policies. So why was he elected? From what I see is the Democrats came across as elitist. They're good on social issues – equal opportunity for minorities, women, and so forth, but not on class, not on economic redistribution. And the American working class and much of the middle class is struggling. They're living paycheck to paycheck — and this is where we're at after years of neoliberal economic reform. The Democrats didn't offer an alternative: Kamala Harris ran as the reasonable establishment candidate compared to crazy Trump, but Trump was saying “I'm going to change things”. And it was a change election. People were angry, so they voted for the person who promised them changes.
The Democratic vote went down and that was the difference. Because the marginal Democratic vote was just not ready to vote for the Democrats again, they just said “I'm staying home”. And they did, which made the difference. The Democrats didn't give them a reason to vote.
Kamala Harris was talking more about protecting democracy from Trump, kind of abstract, when people are feeling economically insecure. She just didn't give people a reason to vote for her. And then on top of that, she lost a lot of votes, especially among Muslim and Arab voters, because of the carnage in Gaza, particularly among Muslim and Arab voters (we know from exit polls that among Muslim voters, Jill Stein of the Green Party actually won with about 60% support). I think that also contributed to some people staying home. They didn't want to vote for Trump, but Harris was attached to this genocidal war in Gaza. And that, I think, hurt her.
Still, contrary to all previous presidential elections in the 21st century except for 2004, you had the Republican votes being more in numbers than the Democratic votes. It seemed to be a massive loss of support. As you said, people felt abandoned and they felt discouraged to actually show up and vote. But then you have people say that actually Joe Biden was the most pro-union, pro-labor president. He paid the most attention to working classes since FDR. So is it an overestimation or just that the bar set by his predecessors is too low? Or maybe what he did was still too late and too little compared to what had to be done?
Yes, the bar is too low. It had to be raised much higher for the working class to feel like he was really fighting for them. And yes, too little too late. The things that did pass were compromised in the Congress, and Biden was too willing to compromise. The Democrats don't know how to fight the fascists. You defeat the fascists, you fight them, you don't accommodate them, compromise with them, and thereby normalize and legitimize them. The Democrats set themselves up, they made Trump seem like a normal candidate. And he's a fascist, he's anti-democratic, he's authoritarian, and he's going to persecute all kinds of people, he's announced it. We're going for a period of repression. If they do call out the military to deport 12 to 20 million people, it's going to be a violent mess. And instead of attacking that anti-immigrant narrative of the Republicans, Joe Biden compromised with them. Then Kamala Harris ran as the one that was going to pass this very reactionary immigration law: she was saying, I can do Trumpism better than Trump. And so that's why a lot of Democrats were discouraged and stayed home.
At the same time, polls have consistently shown that the social democratic programme that made Bernie Sanders a sensation in the 2016 election campaign is supported by the majority of the electorate. And still you have a winner candidate that proposes the exact opposite, the most reactionary policies. So the question is: how will those people from the underprivileged, who actually voted for Trump in the expectation of ‘change’, react to the fact that the changes will actually hit them? It will essentially make already this carnaging American capitalism even more vile and even more pro-top billionaires and CEOs. What do you expect from them?
I think they'll soon become alienated from Trump as he starts attacking them. And you're right — social democratic policies like raising the minimum wage, Medicare for All (a national health insurance program), paid family leave, and expanding social security to cover dental care, vision care and long-term care for the elderly are key issues. Harris did bring them up, but she didn't emphasize them strongly. These issues receive more than 60% and sometimes more than 70% of support in society. Even the majority of the Republicans support those kind of policies. So then you ask yourself: why didn't the Democratic Party run on them? Bernie Sanders had a popular reaction. A lot of Republicans like Bernie Sanders. I know that from Vermont, which used to be a Republican state. Now it's more Democratic, but in Vermont Republicans like Bernie. They say: he may be a socialist, as someone else may be a Presbyterian or a Catholic. But Bernie is for us. We know Bernie cares about the people. And so grassroots Republicans vote for him because of that. So why didn't the Democrats run that kind of program? That's because the people who control the Democratic Party — the more liberal oligarchs from industries such as high tech, Wall Street finance, entertainment, Hollywood, retail and so on — just like their more reactionary counterparts, do not want social democratic policies, they want to continue to exploit labour. The other big sponsors are the professional managerial classes. They don't want to pay taxes to provide universal benefits for everybody, they want to keep their privileges. That is now the power base in the Democratic Party. The support of the unions and the working class are taken for granted by the Democratic Party. They paid the price for that in this election because enough of the working class said “to hell with both of you, we're staying home”.
The Democratic Party, in the words of Nixon's political strategist Kevin Phillips, is essentially this world's second most enthusiastically pro-capitalist party in the world. But the most enthusiastic party is now more openly supported by this very vicious figures from the capitalist class, the most reactionary part, like Elon Musk. And Trump is actually now waving that he will put entire sectors under control of such types of people who can completely damage everything. Like Musk can destroy everything you have with labor regulations, environmental regulations. And RFK Jr. can destroy everything with the health care. JD Vance is a pawn of these tech bros with their extreme ultra-capitalist vision of even some sort of techno-feudalism like Peter Thiel.
So first of all, will they be able to put forward such a radical anti-worker and pro-capitalist agenda? Because, for instance, Liz Truss in the UK tried to do this sort of libertarian way of “let's cut all taxes” but she failed very miserably, very fast. And if they do try it, what may be the ways to resist it?
I don't put much hope in the Democrats resisting. Their history since Reagan was elected, when the Democrats held the Congress, was to adapt and support the presidential cuts in social spending. Before that they used to be New Deal Democrats, mild social-democrats in the European sense. They became neoliberal New Democrats as Bill Clinton called them. And that's who that party is now. I'm afraid they're going to try to compromise with Trump. They will try to soften the rough edges and basically go along with that conservative reactionary program. The last guardrail in the federal government is the closure vote in the Senate. It needs 60 votes to get a piece of legislation to be debated and voted on. And the Democrats have enough votes to stop that. So they may be able to veto legislation, but Trump is going to act through the executive branch. And he can violate the law because of the Supreme Court decision that said he is not criminally liable for anything he does as an official act. So we are no longer a nation ruled by law where we got one man in charge who can do whatever he wants. Although the American Revolution, which created the United States, was about getting out from under the power of a king who had such power.
We're in for a rough, rough period. I think the American left has got to do what the left did in Europe in the late 19th century, that is form a mass membership party supported by the dues of regular people so it has a budget and start running candidates at the local level. There are over half a million local elected positions and the Green Party has proven that we can win elections to them. There's plenty of opportunities to build up a base of people who have the legitimacy and the experience of working in local government, move up to the state, and then to the House of Representatives. We get a caucus of Greens or a new left party in the House. And then the Democrats, when they want to get legislation passed, they're going to have to come to this new left party, the left will have some leverage and can negotiate and make some changes. To me, that's what we got to do, that's how we build a resistance. If we rely on street protests, the Democrats are who those street protests are aimed at. But they don't have power: they're a minority in the Senate and in the House, the Supreme Court is in the Republicans' control, all the executive power is in the Republicans' control. So you can demonstrate on any issue you want — there's nobody listening.
You've got to get some power. And that means being active in movements, for example, our labor movement. It's predominantly business unions, they're very defensive. Trade union coverage is only 10% of the total workforce and 6% in the private sector. These are mainly unions, which are called business unions, as opposed to class or revolutionary ones, and are constantly on the defensive, not on the offensive. These unions are simply trying to protect the labour contracts they have and provide services to the members they have. They're not organizing to expand their base, let alone take a real role in politics, independent of the Democratic Party. That's a potential power base. But I don't think the labor movement is going to move in that direction, what you could call social movement unionism, as opposed to business unionism, until there's a left party that salts locals and organizes reform of the labor movement from the bottom up. It's going to take a politically conscious left party to do that.
The problem is the same with other social movements. Many of them face challenges due to their funding sources: they are largely funded by liberal oligarchs. For instance, liberal oligarchs and groups like Roy Singham, a pro-Chinese government tech entrepreneur, and Medea Benjamin of (pseudo)pacifist organisation Code Pink, whose $47 million foundation stems from her family's real estate wealth, heavily influence them.
I could go on (there is, for example, the isolationist Eisenhower Media Network, made up of former intelligence officers, military officers and diplomats who refuse to take sides in the Russian-Ukrainian war — it is sponsored by ice cream magnate Ben Cohen), but that's a problem that the Ukraine Solidarity Network, and those of us who are on the left, are confronting a compromised left that's funded by these wealthy people who are oriented to the Democratic Party. That's why we need an independent left party, independent working class political action. Marx and Engels talked about that in 1848. And Americans haven't caught up to that. We almost did with the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas in the first 35 years of the 20th century. And then the communists formed a popular front. They got a lot of support and they brought the left and the labor movement into the Democratic Party and it never came out.
Even despite the Red Scare, McCarthyism, and actually throwing out the left people from the unions…
Yes. And they still say “well, but the Republicans are fascists”. And they were crying wolf until Trump came along. Now they're right about who the Republicans are, but the Democratic Party is not the vehicle to fight the fascists, they accommodate them. So the left never reemerged in almost a century now as a mass-based independent organization or party with its own ideology, program, and identity. So self-described socialists when it comes to elections tend to go to work for liberals and neoliberals in the Democratic Party. That makes it hard for a radical left that wants to go beyond capitalism to get any traction.
But speaking about the radical, anti-capitalist and socialist left who want to organize and not be subjugated to the Democratic Party, what are the sectors that can be involved into this movement? Because, for instance, you described that the labor movement is rather weak in the U.S., but still there were some points like the teachers' strike that was unprecedented for many decades to have this sort of activity. What social movements can you now call the ones that seem more prospective to build this broader base? What are the forces that can bear this torch that was actually manifested with the Sanders campaign? It was also sort of unthinkable in U.S. politics for a long time — masses of young people who reject capitalism and willingly identify as socialists. What can be those people and those groups that can move forward in this direction?
The college-educated left, which is the base of Democratic Socialists of America that exploded after the Sanders campaign, is one base. They're activists, they're well-educated, but the problem is that they're still trying to run within the Democratic Party instead of breaking with it and being a radical opposition. But that's one source of energy, another one is the climate movement. Young people really feel that existentially and I think they are open to an eco-socialist critique of capitalism as you cannot solve the climate crisis under capitalism. And so I think that is a mass movement that we can enlist in this radical alternative. And then within the labor movement, workers are not just concerned about wages and benefits, they're concerned about the climate, they're concerned about quality of life in their communities. They can be reached not necessarily always as workers or union members, but as community members who have these other issues.
But then we got to link it to the unions, which, even though they've shrunk in the United States, are still by far the largest sector where the budget is paid for by the working class, with dues. The workers got to get control of their unions and the left can help that happen. Also, I think, workers can be won over to eco-socialism. Back in the 1980s and early 90s, Tony Mazzocchi, who was a leader in the oil, chemical, and atomic workers union, proposed to his union that they come up with a way to transition out of those toxic industries — oil, chemical, nuclear power and nuclear weapons — to cleaner industries, because it's better for the workers. And they came up with what today we call the Just Transition and they were the leaders on that. They were way ahead of the mainstream environmental groups on that question. Tony Mazzocchi's example shows that we can do that within the unions.
I think you got to take the argument to the unions, but you gotta take it to the rank-and-file, because the formal structures are pretty closed. My truckers' union Teamsters experience is that the rank-and-file wants to talk about issues. I had a friend who refused to register to vote, he was so cynical about what was going on. But every time something happened in the news, as soon as I got to work, he came up to me and said, what's going on? He was following politics, but he was just so alienated. He felt powerless, which is the other thing. That's the biggest problem we got, people feel powerless. But if you have organizations through which people are acting together, just acting together, even if you don't win your demand, empowers people, it lifts their spirits. And that's the kind of thing we got to do.
We got to do less online and more face-to-face so you build community, which is missing in our society. People are so atomized between social media and the consumer culture that everybody thinks the solution is individualized. But if you engage in collective action, it's fun, it's empowering, you build friendships, it becomes a place you want to hang out. That's so important to building a movement.
I think all those things are before us, but it's going to take a party that understands that's the task. Not the single issue movements around just climate, or just equality for LGBTQ people or just for Black liberation or Chicano liberation — what a party can do is linking those movements together in a common program so we have more power. Because even the Democrats in Congress may be receptive to demonstrations and lobbying, they can play one movement off against another, and they do that. So that's why we need a political party that brings us all together.
Almost like 50 years ago when you were among those who formulated this eco-socialist vision, and then went on to found the Green Party, you worked with Murray Bookchin: you mentioned Tony Mazzocchi, and your other comrade Ralph Nader played an enormous role also, to bring lots of very progressive regulations into US legislation. It was actually showing that you can make a difference, you can get this change too. When you were founding the Green Party, were you anticipating that this could be not just a single issue thing, but actually that all-encompassing left-wing party that would provide the program for all these groups and all the issues?
Yes, in the U.S., the Green Party from the beginning was not just about environment. It's about economic justice, participatory or grassroots democracy, anti-militarism to stop all the wars the U.S. is getting into: those were the three pillars. But the public often associates green politics primarily with environmental issues. In fact, we are not a mass movement on the ground and do not receive much media coverage. So unless you're in a community where there is a Green Party that's doing things around all these issues, you don't know that it's more than just an environmental group. Most socialists have stayed away from it and independent political action; they like to say: our task now is to explain to the working class that we need to form a working class party. In my experience with the Green Party, you don't talk about it, you do it. And where we've done it, and have been organizing, we've elected people and we've had influence.
I experienced that in my own campaigns for Governor of New York, running against Hillary Clinton and against the Iraq war. We had an impact and moved the needle on some issues in New York: we got a ban on fracking, a $15 minimum wage, paid family leave, refunded the public schools, which the guy I was running against, Andrew Cuomo, was underfunding in the name of fiscal responsibility. This was the Democrat who was promoting austerity, neoliberal kind of program. And we removed him from these positions, thereby he was forced to make concessions to keep the votes. In the next gubernatorial election, my candidacy got almost 5%, which is more than any left-wing political force in New York since the anti-slavery Freedom Party in the 1840s. But then they changed the state's election laws to make it almost impossible for third-party candidates to get on the ballot (now you have to collect 45,000 signatures in 45 days to get on the ballot, which is more than even the draconian requirements in Putin's Russia).
The U.S. Green Party is widely criticised for its lack of understanding of class issues. Jill Stein, contrary to you, isn't a socialist, and what's the bigger problem is that she and her wing of the Green Party are, to put it mildly, lenient towards imperialists and dictators in matters of international politics, if they see them as a counterweight to the United States. And here we come with your experience, a person who has been anti-war, protesting all the illegal aggressions made by the U.S. since Vietnam. You understand how it's consistent to be against the U.S.-led wars, but also other imperialist-led wars, like Russia's invasion of Ukraine. So what's the problem with this campist left? Why are they completely ignorant and not even willing to listen to the people on the ground, actually?
The American public generally is insular, parochial, American-centric, American exceptionalist. American chauvinism is just as dangerous to the world as Great Russian chauvinism. The left, which calls itself anti-imperialist, also manifests this logic of ‘American exceptionalism’, which is characteristic of the whole society. They just don't see other nations, little powers don't matter in the big inter-imperialist struggle between big imperialist powers. That mentality, it's not just in the Green Party. We're probably the largest group on the left. If you count the people registered and who vote for us, about half a million people. Next biggest group is Democratic Socialists of America, which exploded to 90,000 from 3,000 after the first Sanders campaign. Now it's back down to about 50,000. But, just like the Greens, they're split right down the middle on whether to support Ukraine, national liberation, or support Putin's invasion. It's shameful. And then you go into the smaller socialist sects, and they're divided as well.
We have people that talk about multipolarity like Putin does: whereas we see that as multi-imperialism, inter-imperialist rivalries. And we shouldn't take sides between the imperialists, we should be with the people wherever they're struggling for liberation. So that is a big ideological struggle between left-wing internationalists and campists that we've got to go through. Now the broad American progressive-minded people, Democrats and people that consider themselves liberals or even moderates, support Ukraine. To them it's obvious: Russia invaded and the only imperialist army in Ukraine is the Russian army. And they're with the Ukrainian people, as well as the unaffiliated left. By the way, the majority of Americans who identify themselves as socialists are not members of socialist organisations. There is a certain contradiction in this: the godfather of the Democratic Socialists of America, Michael Harington, said that there is no such thing as a non-organisational socialist. So, two-thirds of the U.S. population is in favour of Ukraine; the only ones who support Russia en masse are the Trumpist MAGA Republicans.
Now for the left to not be with Ukraine, means isolating themselves from the common sense of what ought to be their base, like progressive-minded people whom we should win over to a more radical system-changing point of view. The left is isolating itself by taking the campist position. The left has got a lot of problems communicating in a popular way with the people that ought to be their base.
Speaking about those biggest denialists of Ukraine's and every other small nation's right to self-determination, the MAGA Republicans. Many here also feel that Trump is going to throw Ukraine under the bus. It's clear that many in this most reactionary sector of the Western ruling classes would stop all the aid to Ukraine and instead channel it to Netanyahu's government to do everything it wants to eradicate the Palestinian people. What to expect and how to continue Ukraine's solidarity if Trump's administration is going to have these shady deals with Putin behind closed doors and without the presence of Ukrainians themselves[1]?
Well, I think you're right. Trump is going to try to get together with Putin and force a bad deal on Ukraine. There's a chance that won't happen. Probably he doesn't want to be the one that gets blamed for “losing Ukraine”. He's unpredictable, there's some hope that he won't be so bad, but I wouldn't count on it. I think for the Ukraine solidarity movement in this period, where we are unlikely to have a federal government that supports Ukraine, the movement's got to emphasize material aid and moral support for the people in Ukraine. Our Ukraine Solidarity Network is running a project to provide generators to the miners and the railway workers’ unions and hopefully we can scale that up and get some of our unions in the U.S. involved. The teachers did a little material support, but could do a lot more. We've also got to build stronger ties with the Ukrainian diaspora, who have actually been the most effective in Congress. Federal policy with Trump in there is going to be really tough, but we should advocate and keep explaining why we should support Ukraine.
And speaking about the Trump-Putin possible axis. These are two figures revered by the far-right all over the world. And one of the biggest fears is not just that Trump will now spoil everything in the U.S. but what he can do on the global scale boosting these reactionaries, ultraconservatives, neo-fascists, market fundamentalists, from Milei and Bolsonaro in Latin America to Orbán in Europe. What do you expect from this possible reactionary international, whether it will group all these far-right forces in the West and also authoritarian dictators in the East with Trump being this connecting figure? How to actually resist globally this dangerous wave of maybe 21st century fascism?
I believe that this resistance should be coordinated internationally, and we need international solidarity. Because if we try to do it separately in each country, they will take us out one by one. We have to work together across borders, not be isolated and scattered by fascist forces in our own countries while the global far-right is on the rise. We should be offering an internationalist programme to counter those.
I also think that when the far-right gains power, especially in the United States, they will do things that will anger the population. In the next congressional elections, there may be an anti-Trump reaction, and the Democrats, say, will take the House of Representatives, where they can defend their positions, and not just try to adapt to Trump. But the left in the United States must build its own independent force, not rely on the Democrats, because the latter, from what we have seen, are timid and willing to compromise with the far-right. Yes, they have already compromised with the Reagans and the Bushes, but they were not fascists, they were just staunch conservatives. Now we have fascists.
What do you consider these qualitative distinctions that makes this Trumpian moment in the Republican Party distinctive and clearly fascist, contrary to the previous, which you say was merely conservative. What made Trump's danger really fascist?
Well, his lack of respect for democracy and votes. He tried to discredit the election he lost and overturn the results. He appointed people to the Supreme Court who gave him unlimited power outside of law. He's an authoritarian dictator in the sense that he has that power now, that's qualitatively different from Reagan or Bush. They were pushing conservative economic policies, imperialist foreign policies, but they weren't trying to overthrow the democratic parts of the United States constitution.
I don't think Trump's read the constitution. He doesn't care, he just wants power and he feels now he's president, he can do whatever he wants. And most of the people he's appointing are the yes-people: they are totally loyal, they will do what he says. They won't have any independent voice. A big question is the military. For example, if they're called upon to enforce mass deportations, that's against the law, our military is not supposed to do domestic law enforcement. But the Trumpists will invoke, I think it's the 1798 Insurrection Act, which hasn't been used since then — to say, oh yes, they can. And then the question is what will the military brass, the generals do? Will they go with Trump or will they say, no, sir, we can't carry out an unlawful order? Will the military split? There's a lot of dire possibilities that we'll have to see if they come to be.
But maybe he still can manage to purge the generals. People say that back in his first term, it was terrible, but he wasn't prepared, actually. Now he is prepared and there are all these talks around Project 2025, so it seems that they are now ready to overtake everything. Do you have a plan B in case it's really this sort of usurpation and what may be more radical means will be necessary to actually push back?
The left in the United States was not prepared for this. I thought most of them had not believed it could happen. And you're right: Trump's election in 2016 was a surprise to him. He was doing a branding exercise, building up his name for selling it on buildings and so forth. And then he won and he didn't have the people in place, he didn't have a transition team. So he grabbed traditional Republicans and he couldn't follow through on his more radical stuff, partly because he's kind of lazy and incompetent.
But now the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 not only has a 900-page playbook, they've recruited the cadre, thousands of people ready. They're going to purge the federal bureaucracy, put their own people in there that will follow orders and destroy, as they say, the administrative state, environmental regulations, labor regulations, occupational safety and health regulations, and then the social safety net. They'll probably take some big cuts out of that. So they are a lot more dangerous than they were the first time.
And the resistance, I think we got to build a party and it may have to be partly underground in the sense that it's not doing public events that might get smashed by local authorities, but meeting in apartments, spreading word of mouth and building a resistance network that can go public when the conditions allow. And this is kind of organizing we've never had to do really since the Underground Railroad against slavery. So we're not ready for it, but we've got to learn quick.
Back in the 60s, you also had the anti-war movement, you had to protest against both parties, and still it was successful. It was primarily, of course, the Vietnamese themselves who succeeded, but also the anti-war movement in the U.S. contributed to make one of the most reactionary administrations, the Nixon administration, to backtrack and stop fueling that war. That experience back from the 60s, how relevant is it today? And what, in general, you think about that sort of generation of this new left in the 60s and 70s?
I was part of the G.I. movement. I got drafted: enlisted in the Marine Corps, went into basic training, already being a member of Vietnam Vets Against the War and the American Servicemen's Union. And so the Marines threw me out. By the time I got into G.I. movement, which was 1973, when I was on active duty, the army had already revolted a few years earlier. Nixon had to act, he couldn't escalate with our own troops because they wouldn't fight. In fact, sometimes they turned the guns around at their officers. It was an ineffective army. And that organizing was underground by G.I. 's amongst themselves, talking about what a rotten deal they had being drafted and sent to Vietnam. And when officers really tried to carry out missions, sometimes they said, no, we're not going to do that. They killed their officers or they got their officers to agree, we're just going to go into the woods and sit and say we did the mission, but we really won't. In terms of organizing semi-underground, that's the best example I can think of now.
There were other misguided actions, like the Weathermen bombing toilets in Congress and causing property damage. These efforts only pushed people away from the anti-war movement, leaving many wondering, “What are you doing?” I knew these people, they were arrogant, they split the Students for a Democratic Society movement, they thought they knew everything better than anyone else, they talked a lot about Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh, but they were not going to listen even to them when they advised them to organise mass movements and protests. The Black Panther leader Fred Hampton compared their disregard for human life to General Custer's reckless and suicidal actions against the Sioux. That kind of elitism and arrogance toward the masses is something we've got to avoid.
This may be full circle when you get to, again, the foundation of the Green Party, because it was in a way emulating what was happening in Europe and West Germany in particular. There they also had these different ways to move forward from this new left movement of the 60s. Part of them went into more militant and terrorist activity, ultimately, and part went after Rudi Dutschke. Maybe you can tell about it, because it seems that the U.S. left in general was very isolated also from the global experience, from activists in Latin America, in Europe, maybe not so much in Africa, because at least the African American movement listened to pan-Africanist figures. You actually tried to implement some of this European experience. What can you say about these internationalist connections back then?
Yes, when the Greens started, there was an eco-socialist group in Hamburg and one of their inspirations was Rudi Dutschke, whose wife Gretchen Dutschke-Klotz was in Boston when our green movement was born. Rudi Dutschke had a left-wing position, they were called the Fundies or the Fundamentalists. They took their lessons from the experience of social democracy in Germany as World War I came along. And they said “we don't want to go into coalition with the bourgeois parties, or even the social democrats who will become a bourgeois party. We may tolerate a social democratic government., but we won't take cabinet ministries. And we'll build in opposition until we've got a majority and can implement our program”. And the opposite, more conservative wing of the Greens, the Realos — from the term real politics — declared: “no, we want those ministries, we want to go into coalition”. And my reading of it is: because the German state publicly funds those parties, by the time you get to the mid-90s, almost every Green party member is either a politician or on the staff of the party or a politician. They're all getting paid by the party. So to keep getting paid, they were willing to make compromises with the social democrats and then the Christian democrats.
I was following that back then. I haven't followed it so much in the last 20 years, although I'm hoping to meet with German Greens, because unfortunately, the American Green party and the European Green party haven't been talking to each other. A few days before the American election, the European Green party told the American Green party that you should get your presidential candidate to bow out of the race and endorse Kamala Harris. In the afternoon, the American Greens sent back an open letter saying that you don't know what you're talking about. I think both letters had good points and bad points, but my reaction is: why the hell are you sending open letters to each other instead of not having talked to each other for years? I kind of anticipated that problem because I know the Europeans are wondering about the campist anti-Ukraine politics of Jill Stein, which to them was an embarrassment. It's an embarrassment to me.
So, going back to the roots of the Green party, I came out of it from the same perspective as Rudi Dutschke. He said, we got to make a long march to the institutions, by which he meant, we got to run our own candidates. We needed a new party and he spent the 70s on it before he died. He'd been assassinated, got shot, had epileptic seizures, which finally killed him — a few weeks before the founding congress of the national Green Party.
His message, I thought, is the same thing I have felt. I was 15 years old in 1968, I couldn't vote, but I campaigned for the Peace and Freedom Party, which was for peace in Vietnam and civil rights. Then we had the People's Party for two cycles and the Citizens' Party’s Barry Commoner, our most famous environmental scientist. I supported all those efforts. Then we had a meeting to organize the Green Party. The Citizens' Party was losing steam, so it seemed like the right time.
You also worked with Bernie Sanders at his start.
Yes, I used to go to neighbouring Vermont, arrange meetings for Bernie, distribute leaflets until his campaign manager got tired of sending them to me. He had a slideshow about Eugene Debs later in the 70s. I got to know him back then. Then he became mayor of Burlington by 10 votes, which was a shocker. The head of the largest bank in the city heard about it on the radio and was so shocked that he drove off the road and crashed into a tree. Bernie's a good politician in terms of going to the people. He can talk to Republicans, Independents, and Democrats alike. The people feel like he's on their side, even if they don't know what he's talking about on policy or what socialism is. Bernie is not about building a party, he's about building his campaign organization and staying in office. He's been a career politician, not a movement builder. He's been good at raising issues and getting them before Congress, but what we really need is an organized left-wing party.
When I was 15 years old, my attitude was both parties support this terrible war in Vietnam, and they're both sliding or being slow to implement civil rights and the war on poverty, which is where Martin Luther King and the other leaders of the civil rights movement were going from the March on Washington in ‘63 to the Poor People's Campaign in ‘68. As we were saying back then, we're losing the war on poverty and Vietnam. That's why “peace and freedom” was a good slogan, and I've felt that ever since. The Republicans have been conservative, the Democrats made a turn away from New Deal liberalism to neoliberalism; in the European context, they would be closer to centre-right parties like the Christian Democratic Union.
Speaking about a more radical strand of green left politics, that vision that was put forward by Bookchin, like this more grassroots municipal democracy. You also mentioned how it was actually steaming from the local traditions in New England, but how then he found out in his latest years that suddenly it was picked up by the Kurdish movement and ultimately it came to reality in Rojava, at least, attempts to implement it. What does this example teach us, in your opinion?
I think it says: every time we do something and it doesn't manifest in immediate results, just wait. It will. When I worked closely with Bookchin for about a decade in the 1980s, we hoped to build upon the tradition of town meetings in New England. These are face-to-face, direct democracy. Everybody in the town can go to those meetings. They set the budget for the year, they elect the selectmen, which is like a council, to administer the budget and they can call town meetings whenever there's an issue they feel needs to be discussed. So it's real grassroots democracy and we wanted to give those towns the power to instruct their representatives to, in the case of Vermont and New Hampshire, the state level. It's the old anarchist idea of a communal, direct democracy, and then federation to coordinate policy made from below. And we thought New England would be fertile ground for that. Unfortunately, too many people who considered themselves anarchists didn't want to run for local office and implement laws to change the structure. And others who wanted to do electoral politics weren't interested in restructuring the governmental institutions. They wanted to get Medicare for all, or stop the war in Iraq, or issues like that. They wanted policy change, but not structural change in governance.
So in the early 2000s, I think it was Öcalan, the leader of the Kurdish Workers' Party, who wrote to Murray Bookchin and said that I've been reading your stuff, and I want to follow it, and I want to have a dialogue with you. And Murray was in his last years of his life, and he said, I don't have the energy for that, but good luck and thank you. And so that has international ramifications. When I first came to Kyiv, you brought me to a meeting of Ukrainian activists with MEPs representing the newly formed European Left Alliance for People and Planet. And the first person to come up to me was a man from Sweden named Jonas Sjöstedt. And he said that we met at a meeting about 15 years ago. I was thinking, when did I meet him? What could that have been? I guessed it was a meeting that the Socialist Party organized to support my Green Party gubernatorial candidacy in 2010. And he was there because he was working with the Socialist Party. The meeting was maybe 15-20 people in a big city like New York. And you think, well, that's nice, but nothing's going to come of it. But this guy is now a Member of the European Parliament, representing the Left Party from Sweden.
Former leader of this party, actually.
Yes. And from what you guys tell me, he's been your best ally on the left in the European Parliament. So you never know what's going to come out of small actions. That always gives me hope. And the other thing that gives me hope is I've been in movements where we've won our demands, like the anti-nuclear movement, the anti-apartheid movement, getting a ban on fracking in New York, and so forth. And so even in my experience in those it seems like you're getting nowhere. You're pushing against the door, and suddenly the door flies open, and everybody comes rushing through it with you. An experience like that gives me optimism.
Footnotes 1. ^ The interview was conducted right after the U.S. elections won by Trump.