It is often argued by those seeking to tear the Green Party away from the politics of the sustainable common good that the “foundations” of Green politics change. An example is the ‘education’ presentation by ‘Bright Green’s Chris Jarvis on YouTube for Young Greens. It is full of nonsense, much of it a travesty of the historical record but here let us focus on the issue of “change”.
The notion of some open flux conflates values (which, basically, are unchanging), goals (long term ones tending to remain the same, though transitional steps may well change according to circumstances), analysis (which may be enriched and refined but whose core tools – in the Green case, limits to growth, ‘non-neutrality’ of technology, the precautionary principle, etc — remain essentially the same), policies (the general programme also remains more or less the same, though details can vary quite considerably) and strategy and tactics (which certainly do change).
The issue of “change” is not that things do or do not “evolve over time”, as Jarvis puts it, but, rather, in what direction, why and by whose decision. The ‘Militant’ group (aka Revolutionary Socialist League, a Trotskyist faction) infiltrated the Labour Party, for example, with the aim of transforming it from within. If it had succeeded, Labour would not have been anything like its former self. That would not have been evolution but obliteration of a tradition (parliamentary social democracy).
What is happening now is that a clique is hell bent on changing the Green Party into a vehicle for a sectionalist identity politics that stands in opposition to the core green tradition.
The Green Light 