The Left's big idea?

Another good op-ed in The Guardian today comes from Cem Özdemir, co-leader of the German Green Party, writing about the sudden upswing in support that the Greens have seen since the financial crisis. It is not the best-written piece on the face of the earth, but he makes a number of good points, including noting progressives' disillusionment with the Third Way politics adopted by the Social Democratic Party under Gerhard Schröder - a politician very much of the same mold as Bill Clinton or Tony Blair. But what I find really interesting about the article is his discussion of how the Green Party has moved beyond being a single-issue party focused on energy policy:

Green has become a conscious lifestyle choice – eating organic food, using public transport, buying energy from renewables, consuming from small shops, ethical banking in ethical banks.
Last year, the German Greens celebrated their 30th birthday. It is worth reminding people of the extent to which the party has influenced public opinion in those three decades. Founded above all as an anti-nuclear party, the Greens have helped to generate a new consensus about gender balance, party democracy, renewable energy, genetically modified food, consumer rights and new family models.

He also notes that it helps that the Greens have been able to prove their mettle in coalition governments thanks to Germany's proportional representation system (providing an interesting contrast to my general perspective on PR - see my previous post).

The really interesting point to me here, though,is the range of issues that he highlights as being part of the Green movement in Germany - not just environmental issues, but "ethical banks", "gender balance", "party democracy", "consumer rights" and "new family models". Caroline Lucas has done a great job of this with the Greens in the UK, too - she fought the last election not really on an environmentalist platform, but mainly by opposing cuts as a means of balancing the budget.

I have written before about how I think the new challenge for the Left is coming up with a new Big Idea to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of Socialism in the late 80s and early 90s - and how in my view the Third Way was really just Neoliberalism with a gloss of social concern. It has been on my mind lately that the Green movement could fill this gap: Sustainability as an abstract concept helps cover a lot of the ground that the Left talks about, and Slavoj Žižek, among others, has cited the environmental crisis as a prime example of the kind of problem that markets alone cannot solve. This is why Özdemir's mention of "ethical banks" caught my attention - if the Green movement can provide a viable, alternative economic model, it might be just the thing to put the "late" back in Late Capitalism.

That said I have serious concerns about the Green movement. It's clearly a bourgeois movement at this stage, and I have concerns that "localism" and "anti-globalization" could be proxies for what amounts to a reactionary nationalism, especially given the bourgeois nature of the movement. It's important to make sure that the Greens have a properly Socialist attitude towards the poor and excluded - that it's not just all about buying shiny, expensive (but environmentally friendly!) consumer goods. Özdemir's article, in that respect, is slightly heartening.