Green Party Leader Convicted of Taking Bribes

like much of a Green to me.

He could have a future as a lobbyist.

Just another capitalist party

Could this be an example of power corrupting? An indication of the nature of politics, regardless of ideological affiliation? Oohhh, What does it mean? My totem of white redemption has been toppled!

Or, alternatively, one could blame this all on the individual(s). That is the fashion of the day, afterall. You know, "Bush is eevil", "impeach bush" and restore our (utterly imagined) national credibility.

Seriously, how much time and energy is spent every two years by thousands, if not millions, of well-intentioned people working for Jack or Jill Candidate, only to see that investment returned in the automated and destructive policy that is inherent to the entire structure of our society?

Without grinding ideological axes, this little scandal points out one of the great virtues of the anarchist critique of electoral politics: anarchists reject the politics of political personalities, which is the key failure and downfall of electoral politics.

As soon as one steps into the field of electoral politics, one's activites are all about championing a particular personality over another personality. Whereas anarchist are insistent that political leaders should be true REPRESENTATIVES. Anarchists scoff at the notion of leaders exercising their own political will in "principled" opposition to the will of the those they were elected by. Instead, anarchists champion ideas like the "instant recall," and insist that, if a political leader cannot gain the assent of those he or she wants to lead, then that leader should RESIGN, instead of considering themselves entitled to coerce their constituents involuntarily.

Anarchists point out that "principled opposition" to the wishes of one's constituents, which also goes by such names as "by-partisanship," or being "statesmanly" or "above-the-fray" is more often than not little more than a cover for the basest kind of egoism and venality. (Joe Loserman being recently the textbook case.)

Anarchists insist that the very notion that a leader is entitled to carry out different policies than are favored by the people who elected them is the beginning of all the rest of the problems in so-called "electoral democracies." As soon as leaders think they can take such liberties without consulting and gaining the assent of those they are supposed to represent, then the slippery slope of bribery, self-dealing, and every other form of corruption and venality inexorably follows.

That ideological axe needs to be sharper in places like the Green Party. I thank the person who hauled out their grinding stone.

It's no coincidence that most of the anarchists were driven out of the Green Party around the same time that the organization embraced electoral politics. To my knowledge, this occurred sometime during the early 1990s. The next step (naturally) was a cult of personality, in this case around Ralph Nader. And the rest, as they say, is history.

The party is now almost entirely consumed by running for office. Most Greens know little or nothing of the anarchist and countercultural roots of green ideology. The party has been mostly reduced to a tragic vehicle for Marxist and New Left opportunists like Zimmermann.

One can hope that the Zimmermann conviction will be a wakeup call for Greens. But I'm not holding my breath. The party has utterly failed to develop the intellectual culture necessary to sustain Something Completely Different. This failure was largely due to anti-intellectual would-be revolutionaries like Zimmermann himself, who drowned out the rest of us.