Photograph Dmitryshein and Bristol Greens, Wikimedia Commons

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Polanski and Mamdani are no counterbalance to a monstrous system of global wealth extraction

by Richard Steinhardt

Zohran Mamdani and Zack Polanski are trying to get into your knickers. In the 1980s, something called “The New Man” emerged as a cultural phenomenon. Born partly in response to the Greenham Common critique of masculinity—where women peace activists had camped outside RAF Greenham Common to protest nuclear cruise missiles—the New Man was supposed to represent a reconstructed masculinity. He was sensitive. He shared the housework. He changed nappies. He was, ostensibly, the feminist’s ally.

But beneath the surface, most of these ‘New Men’ were the same male chauvinist pigs they had always been. The reconstructed exterior was, for many, merely a performance, a show put on to trick feminists into sleeping with them.

Mainstream environmentalism, and the soft left, particularly as embodied by Germany’s Green Party and figures like Zack Polanski in the United Kingdom and socialists like Zohran Mamdani in the United States, have  abandoned anti-imperialist principles in favour of militarism (in the case of European Greens) or committed themselves  to managing the capitalist crisis acting as Western capitalism’s last line of defence.

Radical responses to exploitation, oppression and genocide are quickly transformed into shock absorbers for a decaying system absorbing dissent that might otherwise challenge capitalism’s structural foundations while deploying strategic victimhood for credibility.

This is not an accident. It is the predictable outcome of a politics that ignores Marxism, socialism, and anti-imperialism, confining itself instead to offering obvious solutions to the symptoms of systemic problems. When you do this, you become an accommodator—someone who replaces broken spare parts rather than someone who builds a new machine.

The green movement has a vile history which reached an apogee in Eco-fascism; the marriage of environmental preservation with authoritarianism, racial hierarchy, and Malthusian population control. This is foundational to the green movement. The idea that people, especially all those poor people cutting down the rainforests in Brazil and Congo, are a plague.

Madison Grant (1865–1937) , an American eugenicist, conservationist, and co-founder of the Save the Redwoods League, exemplifies this tradition. His 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, became a foundational text for Nazi racial ideology. Grant’s environmentalism was explicitly tied to his belief in preserving the “Nordic race” from “inferior” immigrants and the “degeneracy” of urban, industrial society. For Grant, conservation was not about ecological justice but about preserving racial hierarchy. He argued that democracy and charity were allowing “unfit” populations to multiply, threatening both the environment and the “superior” stock. This is the archetype of eco-fascism: the belief that the solution to environmental degradation is not systemic change but the elimination of unwanted aliens and the preservation of the autochtonous.

The German Völkisch movement is another example. Long before the Nazi Party came to power, a strain of German nationalism combined Heimatschutz (homeland protection) with Blut und Boden (blood and soil) ideology. This movement romanticised a pre-industrial, rural past and framed Jews, Slavs, and urban socialists as parasitic forces corrupting both the nation and the natural landscape. When the Nazis came to power, they enacted progressive animal welfare and conservation laws, including some of the world’s first anti-smog regulations, while conducting genocide. The Kruger park was a wonderful exercise in conservation in South Africa, while black South African workers were barraked in townships and their families were sent to scrabble for an existence in ‘the homelands’.

The German Greens were founded in 1980 on a platform of pacifism, anti-NATO sentiment, and the Friedensbewegung (peace movement). But the greens, Annalena Baerbock (Foreign Minister) and Robert Habeck (Economy Minister), champion war and call for a massive, multi-billion euro-military buildup (Zeitenwende). This German Green Party’s evolution is damning. Its presents a clean, “progressive” face on a far right political tradition and with its fanatical support for Ukrainian Ultra-nationalism its roots are showing. The link between German Nazism and eco-fascism and the invasion of the USSR on the one hand and the current war crazed German Greens advocating enthusiastically for the proxy war against the Russian Federation is clear and obvious.

Zack Polanski (Leader of the Green Party of England and Wales) and Zohran Mamdani (mayor of New York) are people who may have strong principles, but these principles are founded on shifting sands. They are compromisers by definition, because they willingly and wholeheartedly participate in reinforcing the superstructure of late-stage decadent capitalism. They do not operate outside it or as real opponents of it. They are reformers.

Polanski’s campaign platform mouths good intentions: to ‘strengthen’ workers rights—but not workers’ power. He speaks of renationalisation, ‘expanding’ union rights, and ‘fairer’ taxation. Yet when confronted with a concrete test of principle, he reveals the hollow core of his politics.

Green-run councils—such as the one in Bristol—had implemented £50 million in cuts while adding £60 million to reserves. A student asked whether Polanski would instruct the party’s 800+ councillors to adopt “no-cuts budgets” using legal borrowing powers, a strategy endorsed by major unions including GMB, Unite, and Unison.

Polanski’s response was an apologia for cuts: “If councils do no-cuts budgets… they effectively down tools, and then the government comes in and then do all the cuts anyway. And the councillors actually have nothing to do about it, and it can be even worse than actually making the cuts in the first place.”

This echoes the arguments of the LibDems who were partners in crime with the Conservative government. The Conservative government under George Osborne and David Cameron made swingeing cuts and the LibDems went right along with them. LibDems like Ed Davey argued that the cuts would have been even worse if the LibDems had not been in coalition with the Tories. Forgetting that it was that very coalition that secured the Conservative government in power.

Polanski’s qualified platform of ‘expanded’ unionisation, ‘fairer’ taxation and ‘partial’ renationalisation becomes meaningless when his party, in practice, chooses to implement the neoliberal status quo at the municipal level, and prepares for quick compromise and retreat in the face of media and political and economic opposition. His policy statements are a piece of string. How much ‘fairer’ how far would unionisation be ‘expanded’ and just how ‘partial’ would renationalisation be in the face of concerted opposition. Just how long is a piece of string?

This is the definition of replacing broken spare parts on the clapped out capitalist and imperialist machine. It is an admission that the Green Party, when faced with a choice between breaking with the capitalist state (by refusing to implement its austerity) and administering that austerity, will choose the latter.

Polanski’s qualified platform of ‘expanded’ unionisation, ‘fairer’ taxation and ‘partial’ renationalisation becomes meaningless when his party, in practice, chooses to implement the neoliberal status quo at the municipal level, and prepares for quick compromise and retreat in the face of media and political and economic opposition. His policy statements are a piece of string. How much ‘fairer’ how far would unionisation be ‘expanded’. How long is a piece of string?

These are the hollow men, compromisers, who profess ‘strong principles’. As a prominent organiser with the Democratic Socialists of America and a figure associated with its “electoralist” wing, Mamdani represents the American parallel. His work (getting progressive Democrats elected) serves the same function as Polanski’s: it absorbs radical energy into the Democratic Party, which is the guardian of US capitalism and co-responsible for all of imperialism’s many crimes.

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By offering obvious solutions to the symptoms: slightly higher taxes on the rich, a few more more union consultation rights, and a focus on local NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) issues, they create a pressure valve. They allow an angry population, and especially disaffected middle class intellectuals, to express that anger through voting and parliamentary politics, rather than through strikes, occupations, or real and revolutionary change.

The Greens and the Social Democrats serve to leech away support from organisations that do, in fact, face up to real issues: those that genuinely oppose zero-hours contracts, exploited workers, unionisation, the need to nationalise, and the need to force corporations to pay taxes—issues emblematic not of income reaccommodations, but of a restructuring and creating a new foundation for a new kind of society. Organisations like the Communist Party of Great Britain represent this real alternative.

Principles are not explanatory. Real opposition and the analysis that sustains must be rooted firmly in a class and anti-imperialist critique of the current conjuncture of late-stage capitalism. The morality of one politician or other participating fully as part of a global system of wealth extraction doesn’t make a bit of difference, though social democratic policies may ameliorate some of the harm caused.

Society is run by the ruthless ruling class and its representatives: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Kenneth C. Griffin, Bill Gates, Larry Fink, Ray Dalio, Paul Singer, Robert S. Kapito—the 0.01 percent and their vast army of hangers-on, parasites upon the people. This is a capitalist class that will do anything to hold on to its economic, political, and military power. The Greens are not going to change that, because to become a Green is only the first step to some kind of political education and awakening, it is not the last step. Zack Polanski and Zohran Mamdani and their well meaning educated followers are no counterbalance to a monstrous system of global wealth extraction.

For all the finger-pointing at Israel, it is America that has bombed schools in Iran. It is American based global capitalism that has provided the weapons for its proxy, Israel, to slaughter Palestinians and Lebanese. A genuine anti-imperialist stance would demand a complete break with NATO and embrace BRICS and multipolarity at the very least. These are luke warm measures that no Green Party or pseudo socialist Democrat in the West is willing to do.

The treatment of Polanski and Mamdani as victims is a calculated dynamic. The NGO worker detained at the border of Israel convinces Palestinians that he is a target; the left-leaning politician smeared by the right-wing press gains credibility among liberals. This is the old trick: a little bit of victimisation goes a long way in terms of generating credibility for soft left opportunists.

This managed opposition prevents the emergence of a politics that does not just ask for “fairer” treatment within the system but seeks to install a new system that really works for everyone.  When figures like Polanski or Mamdani are attacked, it serves to cement their position as the “authentic” left opposition. But this is a trap.

The lesson is that this cycle of Green/Soft Socialist co-option should be predictable by now. To be surprised by it is to have ignored the history of social democracy, the roots of eco-fascism, and the unchallenged power of the ruling class, to believe and follow either Mamdani or Polanski is to be a fantasist. Sit back and watch the inevitable sell-out, Polanski in the UK, and Mamdani in the USA. Haven’t you learned your lesson by now?

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Richard Steinhardt is a committed socialist and a radical humanist and has published in the Morning Star and a variety of other communist and socialist publications. He believes that human conscience and understanding should always precede dogma.