by By Brandon Madsen
The Full 2018 Program Must Be Defended – Not Reinterpreted as Piecemeal Reforms
When the Green New Deal first came to political prominence in 2018, it was incredibly well-received, with an eye-popping peak approval rate of 81 percent among registered voters at the end of that year. Support from registered Democrats was overwhelming, but the Yale Program on Climate Communication poll showed majorities of registered Republicans and independents supporting the idea as well. This would be an impressively high level of popular appeal for any policy, especially in the contemporary political atmosphere of fragmentation and hyperpolarization.
Smaller-scale campaigns often invoke the GND slogan in their messaging, but any fighting vision for a transformative nationwide program has been largely absent.
Still more impressive was the fact that the far-reaching, all-encompassing nature of the Green New Deal framework seemed to increase rather than decrease its popularity. It was able to be radical without being alienating; it already had a built-in answer to most critiques that could be lobbed its way.
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Since that time, some of the original luster of the idea has worn off as what remains of the climate movement has increasingly focused on more narrow, “realistic,” immediate battles for minor reforms. These smaller-scale campaigns often invoke the Green New Deal slogan in their messaging, but any fighting vision for a transformative nationwide program has been largely absent.
At a speech to mark the reintroduction of the Green New Deal bill this April (on the fourth anniversary of when it was first formally introduced to Congress), Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) exemplified these lowered ambitions by spending most of her time congratulating the movement on how much had been won, while heaping praise on Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act for its climate provisions. While AOC is probably technically correct in calling it the “largest piece of climate legislation in American history,” that is frankly not a very high bar to meet, and she failed to mention the myriad ways in which the bill falls miserably short of what climate scientists agree is objectively necessary to avoid the most catastrophic future scenarios – much less outline what a plan to fight for what’s truly needed would look like.
DSA and the Green New Deal
DSA’s approach to the Green New Deal and climate campaigning has been a mixed bag. Its national Green New Deal Slate and their initiatives have – outside of New York – turned out to be mainly focused on typical electoral campaigning around mildly left-wing candidates.
In New York, the four-year-long Build Public Renewables (BPR) campaign led by New York DSA chapters in coalition with unions and other organizations in the state fared much better. The proposed Build Public Renewables Act didn’t just include new investments in publicly owned clean energy; it also accelerated the planned shutdown of toxic fracked-gas power plants disproportionately polluting BIPOC communities, added new automatic discounts on utility bills for those most in need, expanded labor protections, and more.
The campaign succeeded in forcing the proposed BPR language into the state budget – an otherwise nasty austerity bill which, admirably, the eight DSA representatives in Albany voted against, while correctly still claiming the inclusion of BPR as a victory for the movement. There was also electoral campaigning and grassroots action linked to the BPR struggle to try to exert some political control. This even resulted in DSA primarying the original lead sponsor of the Build Public Renewables Act (which never passed as a separate bill).
There is every reason to celebrate successes of working-class people’s struggles in general – and DSA’s involvement in particular. However, it does not help us to oversell such successes. An official DSA statement claimed that “BPRA will bring working class control over the energy system” of New York state. In reality, what the bill does in terms of ownership and control is throw up walls to prevent the privatization of current and future energy infrastructure owned by the state. It also enacts new labor protections called for by the New York AFL-CIO.
These labor and anti-privatization protections are good and significant. But approximately 75 percent of the state’s power is already provided by private companies, and the new measures do not bring any of that into public ownership, much less working-class control.
Another issue is the fact that, while the BPR campaign has tied itself to the Green New Deal slogan, it does not seem to have been tied to promotion and agitation for a broader political or strategic vision of how to actually achieve the nationwide goals outlined in the Green New Deal.
DSA’s public statements imply that the lesson is to try to emulate campaigns like BPR in other states, which is certainly compelling from the standpoint of inspiring other DSA chapters to action. Great local campaigns that can bring more people into activity and win progressive reforms – big or small – are extremely valuable. But this all needs to be linked to a strategy where we plainly and publicly assert that the scale of the climate problem is too large to be satisfied with local reforms alone. There are too many politicians and NGOs out there who present piecemeal reforms as a replacement for the fundamental changes we need. We in DSA need to keep this reality in mind and work to consciously challenge their tepid approach at every opportunity. What’s needed is an inspiring movement that not only encourages and celebrates working-class people moving into action for reforms big and small, but which also links these reform struggles to the need for mass mobilization aimed at changing the fundamental structures of power, in the spirit of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything.
There is no shortcut, no way around the need to take the country’s major energy producers and biggest polluters into public democratic ownership. And there is no way we will solve the climate crisis on a state-by-state level. We need a nationwide plan (and ultimately a global one). It is a mistake for DSA not to hammer away at these political points when we put out statements on the environment or our campaigns.
If we hail smaller or more local reforms as “Green New Deal victories” while failing to highlight how much further we need to go to actually win a Green New Deal, then we risk unconsciously contributing to the ongoing dilution of what that slogan means.
Let’s revive and defend the bold aspirations proposed in the 2018 Green New Deal: a transformative plan to reduce the carbon footprint to zero in ten years, linked to a million-job program and the reorganization of the economy to support a just transition, and backed up by a solid foundation of Medicare for All and guaranteed food security.
What is the Green New Deal?
The Green New Deal was first introduced as a resolution in the US Congress in February 2019 by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey. Its main objectives are to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, create decent jobs, promote renewable energy, invest in sustainable infrastructure, and ensure a just transition for workers in fossil fuel industries.
Some of the key components that have been proposed as part of the Green New Deal include:
1. Transitioning to 100% clean and renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar power, to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions according to a ten-year plan.
2. Creating millions of family-supporting union jobs by upgrading and retrofitting buildings to improve energy efficiency, expanding public transportation systems and investing in electric vehicles, and investing in research and development of clean technologies.
3. Universal healthcare for all with paid family and medical leave.
4. Retirement security and vacations.
5. Ensuring a just transition for workers affected by the shift away from fossil fuels, providing retraining and job opportunities in the clean energy sector.
6. Promoting sustainable agriculture and supporting family farms against the assault of corporate agribusiness.
7. Ensuring access to clean air and water for all communities, with a focus on environmental justice and addressing disparities in marginalized communities.
8. Food security, guaranteeing healthy and affordable food for all.
For a “Socialist Green New Deal”?
Some activists have put forward the slogan of “a Socialist Green New Deal” as a way of giving a sharper left edge to socialist-led campaigning for systemic action on climate and the economy. This phrasing also appears in the Green New Deal resolutions proposed for this year’s DSA Convention. Given how the waters have been muddied over the past four years, the meaning of the Green New Deal diluted, trying to politically differentiate DSA like this is understandable and in some ways reflects a positive instinct. Ultimately, however, the main task for DSA is to connect with those activists – already socialist or not – in the climate justice movement who want to build a mass movement for the necessary, radical changes.
The beauty of the 2018 Green New Deal proposal was that it was quite radical and far-reaching in its vision while still being well-rounded and general enough to serve as a basis for winning mass support and buy-in. It admirably avoided what Matthew Huber has aptly called “the politics of less” – the tendency to pit average living standards against the environment. Achieving what it sets out to do would be almost impossible without toppling the capitalist system, yet the Green New Deal itself erects no artificial political barriers to entry. That is, it doesn’t require one to have drawn anticapitalist conclusions in order to support it; it allows the struggle itself to be the ground upon which these questions will be worked out, letting people draw these conclusions in the course of fighting.
By campaigning for a “Socialist Green New Deal” and contrasting it to the original, we risk losing this big advantage by throwing up artificial barriers to gaining support, making our job as organizers harder because we start with a discussion about different labels, not the joint struggle. We also risk making it harder to bring the necessary masses of people into the campaign without first convincing them to fight for a “socialist” demand. Of course, we should still be clear in our arguments that we believe workers taking power and beginning a socialist transformation of society is certainly the best and easiest way – perhaps even the only way – that the full Green New Deal program can be won. And we want to reach out to convince people of that. But we shouldn’t make agreeing with this a prerequisite for getting involved in the campaign, which is what we effectively do if we frame the campaigning demand as “socialist.”
The most effective path to mass political education is through struggle. Our approach should aim to bring the maximum number of workers into the struggle while pushing the envelope wider with our demands. That struggle then serves as the fertile soil in which deeper ideas about the need for a revolutionary socialist transformation of society can be sown and take root.
The Transitional Method
Using slogans and demands that push the envelope of what is thinkable within the movements of today, pulling in the direction of a socialist transformation of society while still retaining the potential for building mass support and drawing the working class into struggle – that is the approach we should advocate (and which the Green New Deal fits into quite nicely). In Marxist theory, this way of building bridges from current struggles and consciousness to lay the basis for a socialist revolution is known as the “transitional method.” It is applicable to historic periods when the “objective” material conditions are ripe for capitalism to be superseded but the “subjective” factor of the working class’s own political organization and revolutionary leadership lag behind.
Though it was first explicitly formulated by Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky in 1938, the transitional method has in practice been an important component of effective Marxist organizing since well before that, arguably since Marx and Engels themselves. Trotsky’s contribution was to draw attention to the practice, name it, round out its meaning, and tease out its logic, so it could serve as an ongoing conscious point of reference for the movement in formulating its approach.
The transitional method remains a useful concept for contemporary Marxists in thinking through how to build the socialist movement through our campaigns today.
Brandon Madsen
Brandon Madsen has been a Marxist and activist since the early 2000s, when he helped organize students at his high school against the Iraq War and military recruitment in schools. He moved from the US to Copenhagen, Denmark, in September 2022. He serves on the Reform & Revolution editorial team and works in the Hearing Systems labs at Technical University of Denmark (DTU). He is a member of the trade union IDA (Ingeniørforeningen i Danmark).
