Greens offer blind alley

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I WAS surprised to read Les Hearn's tentative suggestion in the Science column in SO 111 that in West Germany "the best way for Marxists to get through to the working class is to work with the Greens"

The ecological Green Party does not claim to be a specifically socialist or working class party. They have not ruled out in principle or in practice working with or supporting measures of the conservative CDU-CSU block.

Insofar as the Greens have a programme - as the elections draw nearer the Greens are being forced for the first time to define policies on most issues -much of it, particularly its anti-growth views, is both utopian and often reactionary. The Greens have never been able to give an adequate answer to the accusation made by the SPD and union leaderships that their policies are a threat to workers' jobs and living standards.

The Greens have not made large inroads into the traditional working-class/ union base of the SPD. With the advent of the right wing Kohl-Strauss government, the SPD has already begun to pick up electoral support again.

Whatever view one might take of the tactical issue of whether West SUGAR CANNED TINNES MeAT German socialists should work in the SPD, the SPD today is more open than it has been for years. At the last SPD congress, there was a major challenge to Schmidt qver the stationing of US missiles in Germany. This would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

The Greens have won support among youth and the peace and nuclear movements which have come up against the opposition of the SPD government. The Greens, however, have no strategy for leading this movement anywhere but a blind alley.

The tragedy of the last 15 years of revolutionary politics in West Germany has been that the thousands of people who came into the student movement or the movement against repression never managed, in many cases never even considered it possible, to take their politics to the heart of the West German working class.

This was a major reason why the ecological and Green movement grew in the first place. Many of the West German far left -and Les tentatively agrees - now see the G eens as a way round the right-wing nature of the German labour movement. In reality no such way round is possible.

Bruce Robinson, Islington. *Both available from BSSRS, 9, Poland St., London WIV 3DG.

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