During an online livestream on X/Twitter on August 16, Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein announced that her running mate will be Rudolph “Butch” Ware III, an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Shortly after the announcement, the Green Party officially nominated both Jill Stein and Butch Ware as its candidates for the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
The nomination of Stein and Ware, a professor of African History, African American History and Islamic Intellectual History and a practicing Muslim, was hailed as “historic” by sections of the upper middle class and the pseudo-left rooted in identity politics.
A typical response from a Green Party supporter was, “I’m voting for the only presidential ticket that has a Jew and a Muslim on it who will stop funding genocide.”
Following the livestream announcement, Stein wrote on X/Twitter: “This is truly a historic ticket bringing together a Jewish woman and a Black Muslim man against genocide, endless war, climate change and rampant injustice, and for an economy that works for working people, a livable future for our children, and an America and world that works for all of us.”
The upper-middle-class left uses race and other aspects of personal identity to obscure the real issues of their political program, which arise from their class position. Parties and candidates must be judged on the basis of the class interests they represent, as demonstrated by their political program and history.
There are numerous such examples in recent American history, and particularly under Democratic Party administrations: there was the first black president to order drone strikes, including on American citizens; the first major party presidential candidate to call for war with nuclear-armed Russia; and now the first African-American and Asian-American woman nominated by a major party, a staunch supporter of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, which threatens to destroy the planet.
And that’s without even mentioning the African-American, female, or gay CEOs, mayors, governors, police chiefs, and other capitalist billionaire authority figures and power holders. They are just as deadly enemies of the working class as their white, male, or heterosexual counterparts.
Professor Ware is generally described as an “activist,” a slur used by a number of pseudo-left and middle-class “progressive” politicians generally aligned with the Democratic Party. He himself has no history of significant involvement in social struggles. Jill Stein wrote on X about Ware’s qualifications: “His personal experience in overcoming systemic injustice, his extensive knowledge of history and popular movements, and his commitment to building a sustainable, just, and peaceful world make Butch the ideal candidate.”
What is clear is that Ware has spent the past few decades immersed in academia at several elite American universities that have long been the ideological center of anti-Marxist postmodernism and irrationalism. Ware received his doctorate in history from the University of Pennsylvania in 2004 and taught at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan before taking his current position at UC Santa Barbara. According to his online profile at UCSB, Ware’s research and teaching focus on “Islamic thought, anti-slavery movements in West Africa and the African diaspora, and the broader intersection of race, religion, and revolutionary thought.”
Typical of this social class, Ware rejects a class-based analysis of social and political development. In a recent video posted on social media, he declares, “(Democratic Party politicians) are not your friends. And if you are an independent, proud black voice who even tries to speak out for liberation, they will humiliate you and make sure you are driven out of the corridors of power. And if you don’t believe me, ask Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush.”
Bowman and Bush, members of the pseudo-left “Squad” in the House of Representatives and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), were both defeated in the primaries by establishment Democratic Party opponents generously funded by the Zionist American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Bowman and Bush are far from “independent” voices of social justice and peace. Despite their lame criticism of the ongoing US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, they are loyal Democratic Party politicians who support the party’s core priorities: escalating imperialist wars abroad and attacking working-class living standards at home.
In an August 19 X/Twitter post, Ware further demonstrates his postmodern, subjective, irrational approach to politics and social development. He writes, “Donald Trump has lived every day of his life afraid of men like me. Misogynistic racial supremacist delusions always spring from a deep well of insecurity and inadequacy in the depths of the psyche. Could someone please be so kind as to plumb these for him and then explain them.” According to Ware, the threat of a fascist dictatorship should be understood as a consequence of the racist psyche of insecure “white” men, not as a symptom of the deepening crisis of the prevailing socioeconomic system, capitalism.
The Socialist Equality Party in the United States wrote in its main resolution of the Eighth Congress of the SEP (USA): “The basic objective causes of the turning of the ruling class to fascism and dictatorship are: 1) the escalating imperialist world war and 2) the extreme growth of social inequality.”
The working class increasingly faces the threat of a full-scale nuclear World War III provoked by US imperialism and its allies, endless mass deaths and contagion from Covid-19 and the threat of new pandemics, environmental devastation, unprecedented social inequality, mass layoffs, ruthless exploitation and the turning of the ruling class to authoritarian forms of rule. The Stein-Ware Party and the Greens are trying to keep the resistance of workers and youth within the framework of bourgeois politics and prevent the emergence of a truly independent working-class movement against the profit system.
Stein-Ware’s manifesto accepts the persistence of capitalism and seeks to sow illusions in the possibility of reforming this decaying socioeconomic system. The words “working class,” “capitalist class,” “capitalism,” “imperialism,” “revolution,” or “socialism” are nowhere to be found in the program. Instead, entire sections are devoted to maintaining national borders and identity-related issues, particularly upper-middle-class demands for “racial” reparations, which aim to enrich a small privileged segment of the population and divide the working class.
The Green Party is a nationalist, pro-capitalist party. In class terms, they are an upper-middle class party that is hostile to the working class and advocates the development of an independent socialist movement against the capitalist profit system. For decades, they have operated as an interest group aligned with the Democratic Party. In elections, the Green Party has consistently garnered votes for Democratic candidates, arguing that their presence pressures Democrats to adopt more “progressive” policy positions.
This is evident today in Stein’s appeals to the Biden administration at one antiwar demonstration after another to reverse its support for Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. It is also evident in the Green Party’s support for the subordination of the working class to the corporatist union bureaucracy: a labor police force of wealthy bureaucrats deployed by the ruling class to discipline workers under conditions of escalating imperialist wars abroad.
Workers and youth must have no illusions about the Greens and must learn the crucial political lessons from the experiences of the working class around the world. Wherever the Greens came to power, they quickly abandoned their “principles” and worked hand in hand with the various bourgeois parties to defend the interests of the corporate and financial oligarchy.
In 2020, the Austrian Greens entered into a coalition government with the right-wing Austrian People’s Party and adopted the policies of the far-right Freedom Party, including attacks on immigrants. In New Zealand, Australia and numerous other countries, the Greens support murderous pandemic policies that put profits before lives.
The Greens’ experience in Germany is the worst expression of the Greens’ nationalist, pro-capitalist policies. From 1998 to 2005, the Greens, who were in power for the first time, were responsible for the first German combat mission since World War II: the NATO war in Serbia. At the same time, they supported the Social Democrats in the most massive social welfare cuts of post-war Germany.
For nearly 30 years, the Greens have been vying for the title of Germany’s most pro-war party. They support the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, the war against Russia in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza, while simultaneously scapegoating immigrants and refugees fleeing these wars and supporting the government’s austerity policies.
There are crucial lessons to be learned from these experiences. If Stein and Ware or other Green Party politicians come to power in the USA, their nationalist and pro-capitalist attitudes would force them to defend the interests of American imperialism, despite their pacifist and “leftist” phrases.
Workers and youth who are concerned with ending the genocide in Gaza and the general threat of a nuclear-powered third world war, stopping the threat of fascism, defending basic democratic rights and reversing the environmental destruction that threatens humanity’s existence through ever more devastating pandemics and rising temperatures must be armed with a revolutionary socialist, Trotskyist political perspective aimed at uniting the international working class in a mass movement against the source of social inequality, genocide, war, climate crisis and fascism: the capitalist system.
