Understanding the Greens’ 10 Key Values

The first of a series of essays to help introduce new members to the Green Party’s values, history, goals, and strategies. Readers are encouraged to get involved in our local and global struggle for Green politics! Learn more and sign up at: AlleghenyGreens.org.

Hazelwood neighborhood of Pittsburgh looking toward downtown at dusk in September, 2020.

As we enter the 2020s, we also enter a period of great uncertainty and unease. Much of the US has still not fully recovered from the 2008 “Great Recession;” many jobs have never come back, wages have remained stagnant, and various forms of housing, education, and medical debt have only grown. With another global slowdown in the wake of COVID-19, many workers and families are more uneasy than ever about where the future will go. Meanwhile, the effects of climate change are beginning to grow worldwide as countries begin to face the reality of regular flooding and intensified natural disasters. The specter of world war haunts us yet again as countries look to take advantage of pandemics and natural disasters to assert dominance over the global fossil fuel industry.

Clearly, we face many crises, and yet the public discourse largely centers around a “hodge-podge” of ideas on how to best address these problems. Most of these ideas center around the very capitalist system that created these problems in the first place, and rely heavily on “the market” to magically fix issues if only we lower a percent interest here or raise a percent tax there. These small tweaks to high-level economic policy are — at best — too slowly incremental, but increasingly appear to be the tools of politicians desperately trying to maintain the wealth and power of themselves and their donors in the face of growing challenges. The cry of the people for food, for medicine, for unpolluted air to breathe, gets “lost in the sauce” of techno-babble economic talk. In fact, much of this economic talk outright scolds people for daring to talk about pollution, the environment, and the climate crisis, as if having healthy air and water, necessary for life, is some “luxury” distraction not near as important as “creating jobs” or “growing the economy” — again, economic ideas firmly rooted in the right-wing capitalist ideas of austerity and market economics that has time and time again failed the people.

In short: there’s a distinct lack of unity around solutions to many of the challenges we face. And perhaps even worse than a lack of a plan: activists on the left often don’t even have a shared core set of values or principles that can help find a good plan! While activists often have vaguely similar goals, there’s disagreement on which issues might be “more important” or at least more urgent, as well as disagreement on the mechanisms and tactics that might be used to achieve those goals. In fact, the debate over tactics might be the fiercest part of the conflict, and one of the biggest reason’s today’s left remains relatively divided.

The Green Party attempts to address these issues by developing a shared set of values and principles, with which we can evaluate tactics, strategy, and plans to determine which may be the most successful while still remaining in line with our long-term goals and objectives. This shared set of values is an important first step toward uniting more of the left around a common vision of the future, and can help us shape debate into a more friendly, constructive form centered around those values. We can this shared set of values that unites the Green movement worldwide our 10 Key Values.

The 10 Key Values start with our Four Pillars, the four values and goals that best sum up not only the Green Party’s values, but also the tactics and strategy of the movement. These pillars are: peace (through non-violence), social justice, ecological wisdom, and grassroots democracy. Let’s take a moment to talk about each one, and see how these pillars bring about the rest of the ten key values upon closer inspection.

Peace and Non-Violence

The first Green pillar is Peace, or sometimes described instead as Non-Violence, because the two are inseparable. “Peace” evokes ideas of opposition to war and imperialism, and while our Green movement is certainly anti-war and anti-imperialist, Peace implies a lot more. Peace must be a general opposition to all forms of violence, especially institutional and systemic violence that is perhaps the hardest to see and the hardest to change.

Many of these social institutions are in fact governmental institutions. One of the most prolific is the institution of policing, and all of the courts, jails, and prisons that go with it. A quick glance shows the punitive nature of this “justice” system that relies on violence to enforce — or rather, punish — people for not following the law — or in reality, the rules and conventions set by society. Aside from many other problems we’ll get to in a moment, the use of violence by government officials such as the police and judges teaches the youth generations to rely on intimidation and violence to settle disputes or achieve their goals. Instead, we must look for healthy ways to manage conflict and dispute by teaching our children how to resolve issues with non-violent means, which requires a restorative justice approach that restores all parties in the dispute back to full standing in the community.

War and violence, including a punitive “justice” system, are often tolerated because of rampant racism, sexism, and general xenophobia against anyone not perceived to be part of the group. It is sadly much easier to look away from and even rationalize suffering when convinced that the suffering person is “sub-human” or otherwise undeserving of attention, care, and love. Our pillar of Peace therefore promotes compassion, empathy, understanding, and love for all people — actually for all life on the planet. This also implies that humanity must end its violence against nature and the planet itself, and learn to live in harmony.

One might notice a theme here that much of Peace has to do with our social institutions, which is what leads us to our next pillar value.

Social Justice and a Respect for Diversity

Paraphrasing Martin Luther King, Jr., “Peace is not merely the absence of tension, but the presence of justice.” Taking a cue from King, the Green movement embraces Social Justice in all forms as our second Green pillar. We cannot have justice without peace, and we cannot create peace without justice. The two are linked together.

As discussed for Peace, Social Justice implies a number of forms of justice: racial justice, gender equity, economic justice, environmental justice, and more. We must stand up to racism and all forms of xenophobia and hate; but as often said, it is not enough merely to be non-racist; we must be anti-racist and actively fight to end racism and xenophobia for good. We therefore clarify our Social Justice pillar with another key value — Respect for Diversity. We end racism and xenophobia by actively teaching that we should respect diversity — racial, cultural, religious, linguistic, and more — and encourage and embrace diversity, rather than fear it. We create gender equity by promoting understanding of sex, gender, sexual orientation, and other parts of the diversity of the human experience, and teaching about the history of institutional violence and repression of these groups. Because of the importance of sex and gender in human social history, we develop this into an explicit key value of Feminism and Gender Equity. It is important to note here that feminism does not mean simply electing or appointing more women to institutional leadership, if those institutions would continue to perpetuate violence anyway. Likewise, we cannot have gender equity if our social institutions always favor particular genders or sexual orientations as being the “normal” or even “only”, rather than accepting and celebrating diversity. In this context, to have true feminism and gender equity, we must have institutions that do-away with violence, and indeed, do-away with the whole idea that one sex (or gender, race, culture, or any other grouping, for that matter) has any sort of “authority” over the other. As such, our Green feminism is in fact anti-patriarchal, and more generally, anti-hierarchical, to create equity among all. In fact, some Greens advocate renaming this value to Anti-Patriarchy or Anti-Hierarchy to make this relationship more explicit, but for historical reasons we continue to acknowledge it as part of Feminism and Gender Equity.

Similarly, we can view poor wages and living conditions as a form of violence enforced by our social institutions today. When the government allows evictions and homelessness for the sake of the profits of others, that is violence; when those forced into homelessness are then punished for it by the “justice system”, that is even more violence. Much of this violence is made possible by these large, national and even international corporations backed by governments, in which economic decisions are made by on profit numbers in spreadsheets, rather than understanding — or caring — about the impact those decisions make to families. These poor economic conditions can be greatly improved by shifting to a Community-Based Economics, which becomes another key value. A Community-Based Economics is one that puts the health and well-being of the community and all community members first, rather than profits. This form of economics will therefore put living wages, affordable housing, guaranteed healthcare, and more as a top priority in order to create Justice and Peace.

In the context of environmental justice, we recognize that institutional violence is often perpetrated in the form of pollution (dirty water, dirty air, etc.) onto groups of people due to hate, racism, sexism, and xenophobia — we therefore can never fully solve pollution and other ecological catastrophes until we’ve addressed Social Justice. We also encourage an understanding of the evolutionary diversity of all species and forms of life on the planet that form a complex ecology capable of supporting human life and activity. Justice and Peace require living in harmony with nature, which only comes from developing a respect for life in its diversity. Because this understanding of ecology and living in harmony with nature is so important, we develop this into our third Pillar.

Ecological Wisdom and Sustainability

Justice and Peace won’t fully come without learning how to live in harmony with each other in peaceful societies, as well as in harmony with nature and the planet itself. We therefore commit to developing an Ecological Wisdom and using it to guide our creation of new social institutions.

Developing Ecological Wisdom requires careful study of the natural world — relying on our scientific knowledge such as biology, physics, chemistry, geology, archeology, and even sociology and psychology to better understand the social behaviors of many animals. We therefore look to the natural world and attempt to learn the principles the natural world follows, and consider how human society might better adapt to those principles.

As one might expect, the natural world is complex, but a few guiding principles seem to emerge through the study of evolutionary biology. In this context, we consider evolution as a way of determining the principles and tactics “most successful” to the survival of not only a species but the ecosystem itself. Among these principles are that evolution prefers diversity — a solid backing for our concept of Diversity as a key value earlier — and that nature is distinctly anti-hierarchical — again, reinforcing that our concepts of Social Justice and Feminism are on the right track and even clarifying why they are so important.

One of the perhaps most interesting principles of nature is that nature is very intolerant of parasites — life that only exploits others for its own gain. Instead, most species survive through some form of mutualism, or mutual dependency. Loosely-speaking, most species give and take, or help each other in some way either directly or indirectly through complex interactions in the web of life. As such, an important ecological principle is to develop mutualism — when done consciously, this becomes mutual aid and cooperation — between humans within society. We survive best by helping each other, especially through the rough times. The principle of mutualism then meshes very well with our key value of Community-Based Economics that we discussed earlier, and even helps clarify it — our economy must be one based on cooperation and mutual aid, which is very different from today’s capitalist economy built on competition and exploitation.

Nature also relies on homeostasis — an ability to compensate for “shocks” to the system. If one species dies out because of a natural disaster, for example, other species exist to take over and keep natural mutualism cycles going. This implies a bit of redundancy — again, some diversity among species even if they occupy similar roles in nature — as well as sustainability. These cycles cannot keep going if resources are used up for good; there must be a way to replenish that which is used in order to sustain homeostasis. By applying this principle to our value of Community-Based Economics, we see that an important gap was missed — while Community-Based Economics addresses needs of Social Justice, it does not automatically address the natural needs of sustainability and homeostasis. In other words, even if all workers are paid living wages and the economic system otherwise works flawlessly, if that economy is built on unsustainable, non-renewable work and processes, it runs the risk of eventually destabilizing homeostasis and threatening the ecology — and eventually, if a large enough shock, of all life, including humanity. This is exactly the crisis we face with climate change; change has already begun, and while nature and society can adapt somewhat, there is a tipping point from which society and even all of nature may not be able to return. We therefore adopt Sustainability and Future Focus as a key value to help clarify how our economic system and social institutions must operate. All decisions must not only comply with Justice and produce Peace, but must be Ecological Wise in a sustainable way. We must always keep eyes toward future generations; we shouldn’t merely create Justice today, but ensure that future generations will also have Justice and Peace too, rather than ecological and social crisis.

Being able to balance current and future generations in a sustainable way requires a certain amount of social responsibility. We must be responsible with our decision-making today, for the youth and those yet born unable to make those decisions. We must make decisions in a way that promote Justice, Peace, and Ecology, not just for ourselves and our communities, but for all humans, and all of nature. We therefore adopt a clarifying value of Personal and Global Responsibility — we cannot create Justice, Peace, and Ecology in any one community until we’ve done so globally, otherwise the poor decisions of others may impact us, and vice versa. In essence, this value promotes international/global Peace and cooperation toward Justice and Ecology. While many decisions are made locally, we must have the responsibility (or duty, or moral obligations, if you prefer) to consult with others around the globe to make the best decisions possible, to cooperate and implement those decisions globally for Peace, Justice, and Ecology. This value also crucially recognizes that sometimes there is only so much an individual can do on their own; sometimes, the responsibility lies in the system itself, and not with any one individual. Shaming individuals is counterproductive when many problems are systemic and require cooperation to seriously change.

But we haven’t yet said much about who makes these decisions or how; that missing part of the puzzle makes up our last pillar.

Grassroots Democracy and Decentralization

Throughout our discussion so far, we’ve talked about how important it is to make responsible, sustainable decisions for Justice, Peace, and Ecology. But we’ve not really clarified how to make these decisions, or who might make them. One might image some sort of expert that might negotiate, debate, and ultimately make a decision, with the advice of other community members or global experts, and ask the community to implement it. Since nature and society have such complex interactions, it might seem wise to have experts, well-versed in the topics, make these decisions for the community.

If the expert decision is enforced on the community in some manner, often by force and violence, then the decision-making process has violated our key values of Peace and Justice. We’ve instead created some form of dictator and authoritarianism, where a select few, or perhaps even a single person, make decisions for the community under threat of violence. This situation puts a small group “above” others, which creates hierarchy and even patriarchy, again violating our principles of Peace, Justice, and even Ecological Wisdom arguments against hierarchy. It become immediately clear that decisions should not be made and enforced by a small group. We must instead take an anti-hierarchical viewpoint; if there is no hierarchy, then it means all are equal in terms of decision-making, and we must therefore take steps to ensure equity and include all in decision-making.

The community debating an idea and then choosing to implement it together, in a Peaceful and Just way, is what we call Democracy, and we therefore adopt it as a pillar value, required for decision-making. To distinguish with the decision-making style in the US today that is commonly called “democracy”, but is really a representative republic, some call this pillar “Grassroots Democracy”, or even “Participatory Democracy” to emphasize that all are welcome and encourage to participate in decision-making.

Encouraging Democracy implies a number of important points. Firstly, since the whole community is now making decisions, it becomes clear that the whole community must have the wisdom (ecological and otherwise) and knowledge necessary to make such decisions with potentially global implications. This implies the importance of some form of public education as a requirement for Democracy and therefore Justice, Peace, and Ecology.

It is particularly important to take another look at our key value of Community-Based Economics. We can now clarify that this form of economics that puts Justice and Peace and even Ecology first, must be an economics that makes decisions via Democracy. We cannot have economics experts or elected representatives or other form of hierarchy making our economic decisions for us and enforcing them on us; instead, our economy must be guided democratically by all community members. This implies that the workers themselves, and all of the community, should have a say in all economic affairs. Once again, today’s capitalist economy is shown to fly in the face of our values, as private decisions by capitalists made for private profits can potentially violate all four of our pillars. Indeed, an economy guided by worker and community democracy is not a form of capitalism, but socialism — we might even call it “eco-socialism”, since our Community-Based Economics is guided by Democracy and Ecological Wisdom.

It therefore becomes critically important that the community make its own decisions via Democracy. However, there’s one last ambiguity to discuss, which is with the word “community” itself. Who is this community? Is a community just the neighbors on your street? People within a mile radius? A whole city? What about the whole state, or nation, or even the planet?

The larger the community grows, the more voices and votes will be in our Democracy institutions. At some level, the “community” has grown so abstract that the different people have different concerns and viewpoints — consider for example the difference in climate between different parts of the US, say Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona, and Alaska. Florida must worry about hurricanes, which is not something that impacts the other states; Alaska gets blizzards and months of darkness each year that the other states will never see. Arizona is dry and must be careful to watch its water usage, while Pennsylvania is forested and largely has abundant rivers and water. Each state has totally different conditions, and so each region has different problems that require different solutions. For certain decisions, Democracy among all these regions at once would actually not produce ecologically-wise decisions, for each region is dealing with a different ecology. One wouldn’t want any one region to force its requirements on the others — violating again our principles of Peace, Justice, and Democracy — and so it becomes natural to think each region should do what makes sense for itself in keeping with Ecological Wisdom and our other values.

We therefore have to clarify what we mean by Democracy — we actually want a Democracy based in Decentralization, where communities can make their own decisions largely independent of other communities. This allows each community to specialize their proposed solutions and decisions to the unique problems they face that other communities may not. Decentralization is the recognition that “one size does not fit all”, and so to respect our values of Democracy, Peace, Justice, and Ecology, we must recognize and even encourage autonomy. We recognize that communities function best when they remain relatively small, small enough that all members share the same conditions and challenges and can easily participate in decision-making. Democracy then is when everyone that might be affected by the same conditions, problems, or challenges, is invited to the decision-making table. We might assemble different groups of people for each type of decision being made, depending on how wide-spread the impact of the problem and the decision is. When the problem is very local, we only need assemble the local community; when the problem is wide-scale or even global, such as climate change, decisions relating to that problem should be carried out only in careful consultation and cooperation with other communities, so that we may preserve Peace, Justice, Ecology, and Democracy. In other words, while we recognize the importance of Decentralization, we also recognize it isn’t a pass to “do whatever I want” or fall into tribalism — true Decentralization requires Global Responsibility to consider and cooperate with others when necessary, a Future Focus that will consider long-term impacts of those decentralized decisions, and of course careful consideration of all other key values.

The Ten Key Values Revisited

Our discussion has therefore clarified ten Green Party key values, coming from four “pillars” that are inseparable from one another.

• Peace / Non-Violence
• Social Justice
• Respect for Diversity
• Feminism and Gender Equity (Anti-Patriarchy, Anti-Hierarchy)
• Community-Based Economics (Economic Justice)
• Ecological Wisdom
• Sustainability and Future Focus
• Personal and Global Responsibility
• Grassroots Democracy (Participatory Democracy)
• Decentralization

Peace, Justice, Ecology, and Democracy are inseparable. We cannot fully address one without addressing the rest. Our key values help clarify the best ways to address these issues when we are making decisions and developing policy. Good policies will fit in neatly with these key values; “bad” policies will violate one or more key values. Even policies with good intentions might be “bad” in the sense that they violate some key value, even if meant to promote one or more other key values; instead of accepting such “half-solutions” and “compromise”, we should go back to the proverbial drawing board and attempt to find a solution that respects all of our key values.

While details matter, we can paint a few broad strokes about what Green Party policy should look like, and even how it might be different from other organizations or parties, in particular the “progressive wing” of the Democratic Party.

Our key values imply an “eco-socialist” economy that values decentralized, grassroots decision-making. A Green society is anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-hierarchical. A Green society is one built from peace, and non-violent ways of settling disputes and disagreements without the need to use force, violence, or coercion — therefore, a society with a radically different vision of public safety and peace than today’s policing, court, and jail systems, implying a need to abolish those violent policing systems and replace them with restorative justice institutions. Green society respects diversity, and works to guarantee everyone in the community has what they need to live a good life. Green society is built on renewable, sustainable technologies and processes, to ensure not only a good life today, but a good life for our children, grandchildren, and on into the future.

While “progressive” Democrats might agree superficially on some policy, they do not agree on all policy because they do not share all values. Democrats believe capitalism can be “reformed” rather than implementing economic democracy or “socialism”. Democrats want more top-down decision-making from an elected “progressive” Congress, rather than decentralized direct democracy in each community. Democrats view feminism as simply electing more women into the hierarchy, rather than opposing patriarchy and hierarchy itself. Democrats want a “nicer” policing system, rather than abolition and restorative justice. Democratic policy continually focuses on today’s “jobs” in oil, gas, and other destructive industries rather than keeping a future focus and demanding sustainable jobs and economics. Despite the rhetoric for programs like a higher minimum wage, Medicare for All, and even a (watered-down) Green New Deal, the differences are quite stark when we look at it terms of values and the long-term vision for society. It should be clear at this point that Greens are not merely “environmentally-conscious Democrats”, but have a distinct set of values from not only Democrats but even from other leftist organizations.

Now that we have a clearer vision of what kind of society we want to have, and what guiding values and principles we must follow, the next step is to turn these values into direct actions to achieve our goals. To do so requires an understanding of the past (to know how we got to this point) and the present (to know what we’re up against today) so that we can build a vision and action plan for the future. These topics will be the discussion points for future essays in this introductory series on the Green Party.

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