The Green movement has to answer several questions about changing this society:

• What is the power structure we face?
• Who will make the changes?
• What actions will the Greens take to bring about change?
• How should Greens organizations relate to broader publics in helping to instigate social change?
• What organizational structures best suit the Green Party's values and purposes?

Understanding the Power Structure

Most of the power in this society is not up for election. Most of the power lies with the private economic decisions of large corporations and the unelected bureaucracies and military forces of the state.

A Green government instituting reforms will thus face the extra-parliamentary powers of corporate wealth and state bureaucracies. The corporate elite can resist economic justice and ecological reforms by a strike of capital. They can lower government bond ratings, redline, and disinvest from the jurisdiction in which Greens hold governmental power, attempting to wreck the economy, blame the Greens, and recover a pro-corporate government in the next election. For a century now we have witnessed in country after country how labor and socialist parties have been elected into office only to abandon their programs when big business threatened a flight of capital that would ruin their economy. In countries where the government has persisted in their program for change, the military-often backed by US military force-can stage a coup and slaughter the reformers, as we witnessed in Chile in the early 1970s.

Even modest reforms at the local level in this country can be nullified through bureaucratic red tape and non-enforcement by regulatory bureaucrats angling for more lucrative jobs in the private sector they regulate and by police agencies that have become powers unto themselves in municipal and county jurisdictions.

The corporate media dominates the means of communication. Not only the corporate slant on the news and corporate politicians' political advertising is involved here. It is also the choice of what books, films, and records get produced. It is the constant advertising to shape people's needs and wants to fit corporate marketing strategies. This corporate view of the world is propagated 24 hour a day, day in and day out, year round. As the Green Party grows in influence, the corporate media will target it for smear and slander.

All this means that voting is not enough and that Greens must be active outside as well as inside the electoral arena. It means that the Green Party must recognize that when it is elected into office it is not being elected into real power. The Greens must understand that they will inevitably antagonize big business with their program of change. They must be prepared for a drawn-out struggle that will rely at least as much on popular mobilization and direct action as legislation in order to transfer power from corporate elites, state bureaucracies, and military forces to the people. The only way to counter the extra-electoral power of the corporate power structure when it resists lawful change is through the extra-electoral direct action of the people to support lawful change.

A Majoritarian Alliance of the Concerned, the Exploited, and the Oppressed

Green movements and parties around the world have found their initial base in the educated middle strata of their societies. This base is not unusual for social change movements. The leaderships of working class and national liberation movements have generally come from the same social groupings.

Nevertheless, as a movement committed to nonviolent, democratic change, the Greens recognize the movement for social change must become a majoritarian movement with a much broader social base.

Accordingly, the Greens appeal to all people who concerned peace, justice, democracy, and a sustainable environment.

The Greens appeal to working people who are exploited by capitalism and live without economic security. While not imparting any inherently revolutionary nature to the working class as some movements have, the Greens believe the majority of workers will support radical ecological measures that change the nature of technology and consumption if basic economic security is guaranteed, starting with the right to a job at a living wage or a decent minimum income and free access to quality health care, child care, and public education.

The Greens appeal to the most oppressed and marginalized sectors of society-to racially oppressed minorities, to immigrants, to sexual minorities.

The Greens appeal to feminists who want to end once and for all the age-old subordination of women.

These groups-concerned citizens, exploited workers, oppressed minorities, feminists-constitute a majority of society. The challenge for the Greens is to bring them together in a majoritarian coalition.

The Greens reject the notion of the centrality of any one sector to a movement for an ecological democracy. The Greens believe all are central and necessary. The Greens build coalitions by supporting each other's issues across lines of race, gender, sexual orientation, locality, nation, and issue. We multiply our numbers by supporting each other's issues and moving forward together on all the issues.

Nobody's issues take a back seat for very practical reasons. People of African, Asian-Pacific, Latin, and Indigenous descent in the US are not going join a movement that downplays questions of racism in order to unite on the basis of class because racism is often the most pressing grievance in their lives. Women are not going to join a movement that relegates sexism to a "secondary contradiction." Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people are not going to support a movement that is afraid that standing up for their human rights will alienate a broader constituency. Working people are not going to join a movement that says saving the planet is more important than their families' economic security. Nor are environmentalists going to join a movement that is afraid to shut down ecologically destructive industries for fear of alienating particular workers. The Greens work for changes that secure economic AND environmental security, that liberate people from oppression based on race, gender, sexual orientation, AND class, and that improve the lives of Americans AND people from other countries. Linking issues and mutual support builds bridges, not walls, and multiplies our numbers.

In organizing, Greens take the path of least resistance, starting with those who are ready now to around the Green program. At the same time, they orient their work toward the most oppressed sectors of society with the most to gain from fundamental democratic change. They take affirmative action to bring people from oppressed social sectors into positions of responsible and visible of leadership in order to demonstrate the Greens' commitment to these sectors.

Transitional Demands as Structural, Non-Reformist Reforms

Creating an ecological democracy is a process of social transformation, not a single event. In most periods, movements form around concrete, winnable reforms, not demands for a complete transformation of society. The role of the Greens is not simply to proclaim the ultimate vision, but to raise demands that mobilize people for practical struggles.

The Greens support all popular demands for reforms that to expand democracy, increase economic and social justice, and protect the environment. In the sections that follow, this Green Program lists many such reforms that we support. While supporting these reforms, the Greens also point to their limitations and make the case for more fundamental democratic changes.

In particular, the Greens raise up structural reforms as transitional demands. These are demands that are self-evidently just, reasonable, and necessary to large numbers of people, but not necessarily compatible with the system. They are non-reformist reforms in that they justify themselves not in terms of what can be within the existing system and power structure, but in terms of what should be to provide for human needs and a sustainable environment. They are structural reforms that expand democratic powers.

For example, the demand for the right to a job at a living wage for every one willing and able to work is something a majority of people believes is only right and just. However, it is also a demand that the capitalist economy cannot integrate without engendering inflation and declining profit rates, investment, and thus a recession. At this point, society will face a choice either of securing full employment going beyond full employment with such measures as democratizing investment policy and regulating prices, or of falling back to previous rates of unemployment.

To take another example, the demand for the right of local governments to set higher labor and environmental standards within their jurisdictions than the federal government or world trade agreements set is a demand most Americans regard as their democratic birthright. However, it is also a demand corporations will resist by disinvestment from jurisdictions with higher standards. At this point, the local reformers face the choice of replacing absentee ownership of productive resources in their communities with community ownership, or capitulating to the corporate blackmail of disinvestment threats.

The strategy of transitional demands as non-reformist reforms is not a recipe for gradual change. To the contrary, because the reforms are democratizing and impinge on corporate prerogatives, the reforms provoke a corporate backlash and possibly a social crisis in which the movement must either move beyond the immediate reform in order to secure it or back down before the corporate status quo.

International Solidarity

The Greens understand that in a world of global corporations operating in global markets where US military forces will intervene to maintain corporate rule, no country, let alone any local jurisdiction, can long survive as a democratic island in a sea corporate dictatorship. The Greens are by necessity an international movement that coordinates its actions, develops common demands, and acts in solidarity to create a democratic globalization from below to replace today's corporate globalization from above.

Direct Action for Direct Democracy

The Greens' goal is not to get into the existing power structure, but to restructure the power. Electing Greens to office who legislate non-reformist reforms will provoke a corporate counter-revolution that will seek to undermine and, if necessary, overthrow the Green government. The Greens must be prepared to counter the extra-legal actions of the corporate power structure with its own direct action to defend and expand the democratic reforms. In the end, the goal is to create direct action in its highest form-direct democracy-where we, the people, make the social decisions that affect our lives.

Even before such a crisis erupts, Greens support direct action and civil disobedience as means of protest, public education, and practical education for movement activists. But they do not believe civil disobedience is the only tactic or the best tactic in many circumstances.

The Greens remember that new people enter the movements for change every day. These people are concerned about the consequences of social activism for themselves and for how it appears to the public at large. Greens take these considerations into account when planning actions. Which tactic will be most effective in any given circumstance depends upon the goal, who is doing the action, and how the public is likely to perceive the action. Thus, what the group wants to accomplish-the goal-should be clear before deciding on a tactic.

If the goal is to inform the populace on a particular issue, one could:

• hand out fact sheets in public places;
• gather signatures on a petition while handing out the fact sheets;
• write letters to the editors of local newspapers;
• speak at schools and churches and community clubs;
• put up information tables wherever allowed.

  If the goal is to get a new law passed by the State Legislature, one could:

• get one's legislator to introduce the legislation and use this to inform people;
• gather signatures on a Citizens Referendum (if your state allows) to put the issue before the voters to decide, using the ensuing debates to further inform the populace;
• run for office oneself, using the campaign to inform and organize people.

If the goal is to show militant and massive public support, one could organize a coalition of as many people and groups as possible in a public place to demonstrate against a policy and insist on an alternative. Such a demonstration would generally be a legal, peaceful protest with steps taken (movement marshals, prior agreements, etc.) to ensure the safety of those who do not wish to participate in illegal actions. Actions that risk arrest should be kept separate from the legal demonstration. Most first-time participants, and those physically unable to deal with arrest and jail, usually do not wish to partake in acts of civil disobedience. To build broad movements, we must make it practical and comfortable for such people to participate.

Most of these forms of action are direct action because they engage many people directly. They have a very different dynamic from electoral campaigns where the focus is on the candidate and the rest are a supporting cast. Direct action is thus a practical school for participatory democracy.

Because the Greens aim to build a massive movement for genuine democracy, they work on all fronts, using whatever tactics are most effective to help build the movement.

Too often, people indulge in acts of civil disobedience as an end in itself or to act out personal frustrations. Some want to appear militant. For some, it is the most cathartic way to express their outrage at the system. Some want use it to bear their own crosses and salve their own consciences. Some like to brag about the number of times they have gone to jail in civil disobedience actions. For some, it is a macho thing, as if they could "Smash the State" by physically challenging the police or military on the street. The Greens discourage people from using movements to act out of personal issues like these. They encourage choose tactics that advance the movement, not simply enable some people to act out other concerns.

Symbolic militancy in the form of window smashing or street battles with the police is rarely effective in building the movement and broad public support for its goals. The general public views such tactics as vandalism, violence, and "terrorism" and the corporate media focuses on it to obscure the broader movement's message. The Battle in Seattle garnered broad public support because there were tens of thousands of trade unionists and environmentalists who supported the several thousand who participated in direct action blockade of the World Trade Organization meeting. But the isolated window smashing and dumpster fires of a few dozen acting against the actions guidelines did nothing for the movement. Instead, it gave the corporate media a sideshow to sensationalize and the police cover for their unprovoked brutality against the nonviolent blockaders.

Greens support civil disobedience wholeheartedly when it is an effective tactic to advance the movements toward their goals. Civil disobedience can be effective early in movements to bring attention to issues that are being ignored. It can also be effective at later stages of a movement when the general populace is ready to support it because it has exhausted legal and less forceful methods in trying to get the power structure to change a policy.

Rather individualistic acts of symbolic civil disobedience, the Greens focus their efforts on building a massive movement capable of bringing about fundamental social change for ecological democracy. Civil disobedience has a role to play in building that movement as one of many tactics the movement employs. However, we need a broad movement where everyone who cares can play a role. Only such a movement, with the support of the general populace, has the power to make real democratic change.

Green Workplace and Union Organizing

While the Greens do not regard the working class as the sole or hegemonic agent of democratic social change, they do know that a majority of the working class majority must be won over to the movement for an ecological democracy.

At its peak in the mid-1950s, 35% of the workforce was organized. Today the unionized workforce has declined to 12%. Although in decline for decades, labor unions remain the largest popular social organizations in America. Labor unions present one of the key organizing arenas in which Greens can link to large numbers of people.

Labor unions are contradictory organizations. On the one hand, unions are a principal vehicle for defending and advancing the economic interests of working people. On the other hand, they are often hierarchical, bureaucratic institutions that corporations use to discipline their workforces and advance corporate political agendas. Unions have often been undemocratic. They have often practiced racism and sexism. They have often sided with their corporate employers against environmental protection. They have often been special interest rather than class institutions that advanced the interests of their members, or even a sector of their members, against the broader interests of workers. Today, they represent only a small portion of the working class.

As long as we have a capitalist economy, unions-even unions with reform leaderships, even Greens, elected by rank-and-file democracy movements-will be contradictory, caught between the pressure of rank-and-file members from below and the pressure from above of the corporate employers with whom they must bargain. Nevertheless, organized workforces are in a better position to advance their interests than unorganized workforces. Greens work to organize unorganized workplaces and to strengthen rank-and-file democracy in organized workplaces.

Every Green who works should be involved in workers' struggles. Greens do not counterpose the Green program to the union program and set up dual unions or forsake union organizing for Green Party organizing. They work within the existing unions as Greens and acquire the moral authority to speak as co-workers rather than outsiders by being consistent activists in union struggles. As Greens, they have three goals in particular.

First, Greens support union drives to organize the unorganized and to build rank-and-file organization and democracy in organized workplaces. They work for labor law reforms that will make union organizing and recognition easier.

Second, Greens argue for demands that unite workers and environmentalists around a common program for economic and environmental security. The labor movement has won very little over the last 50 years of what it has sought in terms of labor law and economic reforms. Despite all the fear generated by the supposed conflict between jobs and the environment by the corporate media and public relations industry, the most significant gains labor has made in recent decades have been in alliance with environmentalists, including the Occupational Safety and Health Act and Right-To-Know laws that enable workers and communities to know what chemicals are being used. Greens can play an important role in linking the labor and environmental movements.

Third, Greens argue for independent labor political action. They argue against the dominant political strategy now in organized labor of supporting the Democrats in particular and incumbents more generally in hopes of securing influential allies in the power structure. As a junior partner in coalition with the corporate oligarchy inside the Democratic Party, labor has lost its independent voice. Because they can take labor's votes and financial support for granted, Democratic politicians move to the right chasing swing voters. Labor has gained nothing from this alliance. As the largest popular organizations with the most resources, unions can provide a solid organizational and financial base for independent progressive politics. Greens argue within the unions for class independence in labor's politics.

In addition, workplace organization will be in political crisis where a Green government making changes is being resisted by the private power of the corporations. Organized workers at the point of production, taking their extra-parliamentary direct action to counter corporate extra-parliamentary action of the corporate power structure, will be necessary to secure democratic changes.

Green Electoral Strategies

The Greens regard community self-government and confederal to forms of social self-administration as a fundamental alternative to elitist conceptions of government by representatives and statist forms of social management. Conventional electoral parties are based on elitist and statist conceptions of politics. The Greens, however, do not abstain from electoral politics. Greens enter the electoral arena in a new way-to extend extra-parliamentary direct action movements into the electoral arena, not in order to get into the existing power structure, but the restructure the power and create direct action in its highest form: direct democracy.

The Anti-Party Party: Linking Movement and Electoral Politics

Some people look at this power structure of corporate capitalism and conclude that electoral politics is pointless. They look to building social movements and direct action to make social changes.

The Greens are not a conventional political party interested only in electing their candidates to public office. The Greens have a broad conception of politics. The Greens are civic force between elections as well as an electoral force during elections. Not only do the Greens embrace electoral politics, but also popular education, personal transformation, alternative institutions, nonviolent civil disobedience, and the incorporation of Green values into our everyday lives.

The Greens participate in social movements as a necessary but not sufficient means of social change. The Greens support all nonviolent social movement methods, from education and alternative institutions to mass demonstrations and civil disobedience.

However, the Greens do not support one method over another. Education without action is not serious. Alternative institutions can prefigure the new society, but they will not supplant the corporate power structure simply by expecting people dropping out of the existing institutions. Mass demonstrations can be ignored by the power structure if they are not accompanied by an independent electoral alternative and direct action. Civil disobedience and direct action can isolate the movement if its participants regard those who do not or cannot take the risks involved as not sufficiently committed. The Greens support and participate in the range of tactics, urge movements to place them into complementary relationships, and support activists working in whichever ways they feel they are best for them.

Social movements have their limits. Movements tend to be episodic and single issue. As a political party, the Greens can provide things that episodic movements cannot. A party provides a forum in which to link the issues into a common program. A party provides an organizational framework that can sustain activists in periods when movements subside. And, of course, a party is an electoral vehicle for the movements, an independent electoral alternative, so that the Democrats, as the liberal side of corporate rule, cannot ignore movement demands and still its votes for granted.

In the US, which has never had a major independent progressive political party, the liberal face of corporate rule, the Democratic Party, has been able to take for granted the votes of the people's movements-the farmers movement, the workers movement, the movements of people of color, the peace and environmental movements. When the People's Party fused with the Democratic Party in 1896, the farmers' and sharecroppers' populist movement died. When the industrial union movement abandoned the idea of a Labor Party for the Democratic Party in 1936, the labor movement relegated itself to being a junior partner to the corporations inside the Democratic coalition. When the black liberation, anti-war, women's, environmental, and other movements of the 1960s failed to consolidate the many Freedom Democratic, Black Panther, and Peace and Freedom initiatives of the 1960s into a new People's Party, the Democratic Party was able to continue to pay lip service to the concerns of the movements while carrying out the corporate agenda as loyally as the Republicans.

In Europe, 1960s activists coalesced their "new social movements" against war, environmental destruction, and the oppression of women and minorities into the Green Party. One Green Party founder, Petra Kelly, called the Greens "the anti-party party." The notion of the anti-party party meant the party of the movements. It meant that the Green Party participated in the democratic movements, was the electoral arm for the movements, and was accountable to the grassroots base of movement activists organized into the party. This new type of party was in contrast to the traditional parties of the Left in Germany and Europe. They had abandoned action outside the electoral arena for a purely electoral strategy of change and became integrated into the system as hierarchical bureaucracies serving career politicians instead of the party program of change.

In the US, it is the corporate-ruled Democratic Party that serves as the phony party of the people. The Democratic Party has been the graveyard of every democratic social movement for more than a century. The people's democratic social movements need their own party. Voting is not enough. Movements are not enough, either. It is in combination, in a movement-based anti-party party, where the strengths of each compensate for the other's weaknesses.

Independent Politics

The key criterion for uniting the many against the few-the people against the corporate ruling class-inside the Green Party is class independence. As generations of progressives have proven by their repeated failures, the Democratic Party is hopeless as vehicle for democratic change. Inside the Democratic Party progressives become very junior partners in a corporate-dominated coalition. They lose their voice inside the Democratic Party, where they are reduced to lobbying corporate politicians to say something about their concerns. Outside the Democratic Party, progressives can speak for themselves, directly to the people, and build a movement that is strong and clear about what it wants.

The Greens are therefore committed to independent political action. "Independent" means outside and opposed to the corporate ruling class. It means running candidates from this position of class independence against the candidates that represent the corporate parties, the Democrats and Republicans.

A United Electoral Front

Under the winner-take-all electoral system in the US, the Greens seek to build a party with the broadest possible unity of progressive movements outside and independent of corporate oligarchy's parties, the Democrats and Republicans. The Green Party seeks alliances and eventual convergence with other political parties and organizations that share a commitment to independent political action and a program of grassroots political and economic democracy, social and environmental justice, and international solidarity.

Fundamental Opposition

Greens do not make the mistake of confusing being elected into office with being elected into power. We do not want to be held captive by the extra-parliamentary powers of the corporate oligarchy and responsible for administering public policies we started out to change.

Greens concentrate first on winning office in legislative bodies, particularly city and county councils, where we can raise alternatives without compromising our fundamental opposition to corporate rule by taking executive responsibility for administering the existing system.

Greens may enter races for executive offices where they afford the opportunity to achieve certain goals, such as ballot qualification or the public profile of a Green policy demand. Greens will take executive office if elected and make the best of it. But as a general strategy, Greens do not want executive responsibility before a legislative majority-and a popular movement ready to back it up-is ready to restructure the political institutions and subordinate executive power to the people's representatives in the legislative branch and the Community Assemblies that hold representatives accountable to the people.

Community Power and Intercommunal Confederation

The Greens are committed to building popular power from below. In the end, the only power that ordinary people have that can counter the private power of corporate wealth is an extra-parliamentary movement of the majority of people. That movement must be ready and willing to take direct action to carry through a democratically legislated program of change when the ruling elites try to subvert democracy through their own extra-parliamentary actions.

The only means we have of creating a participatory political culture is to build a grassroots movement that creates a local, immediate institutional framework through which millions of people can participate in shaping social policy.

The Greens are therefore committed to building a new politics that is practical for ordinary people. We believe that the principal arena for a practical popular politics is the arena where we can begin immediately to exercise some democratic power, namely, our own communities.

The Greens call for citizens to take control of their own communities and, by that means, eventually society as a whole. We seek the progressive development of a grassroots counterpower in opposition to the centralized state and corporations.

Municipal and county governments in the US have more autonomy than most local governments around the world. They have to power to zone, tax, borrow, spend, invest, divest, boycott, contract, lobby, police, and even expropriate private property for public purposes through eminent domain. While the state and federal governments do put some limits on these powers, the practical problem is not the lack of local powers but a democratic movement willing to use them.

The strategy is to build up a grassroots counterpower, a parallel system of self-administration that is in opposition to the centralized state and corporate powers, in the following roughly successive phases:

• Green Locals: Organizing local Green political organizations that combine study, action, and mutual aid;
• Direct Action: Building issue-oriented campaigns and democratic counter-institutions such as Community Assemblies, cooperatives, and educational and cultural projects;
• Independent Political Action: Standing independent Green candidates, at every level but with a concentration on local legislative offices at first;
• Parallel Councils of Assembly Delegates: Forming shadow city councils, county boards, state legislatures, and eventually a new "Continental Congress" consisting of mandated delegates elected by Community Assemblies that can track the "official" legislative agenda, add its own agenda, vote the wishes of the Community Assemblies on these agendas, and thus act as a moral force upon the "official" legislative bodies and prefigure the eventual replacement of statist oligarchy with confederal democracy.
• Municipal Democratization: Campaigning inside and outside the electoral arena to secure home rule from state constitutions and to change municipal and county charters so as to institutionalize a structure of municipal democracy based on Community Assemblies that elect mandated, recallable, and rotating delegates to municipal councils and county boards;
• Municipal Confederations: Linking democratized municipalities and counties into confederations for mutual support, shared resources, and joint projects in order to bring more and more political and economic power into community-controlled institutions.
• Dual Power: Working through the municipal confederations to develop a parallel system of self-government, a dual power that can initially resist and Ö
• Confederal Grassroots Democracy: Ö ultimately replace the centralized power of the state and corporations with grassroots political and economic democracy.

Local elections are where the Greens have the most opportunities to begin having an immediate impact. The 1992 Census of Government found that there are 511,039 popularly elected officeholders in the US:

• 542 (0.1%) in the federal government,
• 18,828 (3.7%) in 50 state governments, and
• 491,669 (96.2%) in 84,955 local governments.

The major parties' corporate money has a dominant influence in federal and state elections. But in most local jurisdictions, it is harder for money to buy elections. Grassroots organization with old-fashioned person to person campaigning can beat money.

The Greens do contest state and federal elections for many reasons: to establish ballot qualified parties that make it easier for local candidates to run, to bring the Green program to more people, and, as a growing grassroots Green base makes it possible, to win state and federal offices. But the Greens emphasize local races where the campaigns are more readily accountable to rank-and-file members, where greater initial advances are possible due to the smaller scale and reduced influence of corporate money, and where grassroots organization, power, and experience can be developed.

Local electoral campaigns may grow out of a movement that is already forming Community Assemblies or may be an initial means of propagating the idea of Community Assemblies. Different circumstances will call for different approaches. In a large city with huge city and county electoral districts, it may not be effective to run for local office and the emphasis will need to be on organizing Community Assemblies in the neighborhoods and confederating them as a counterpower to the city and county governments. On the other hand, in some of the smaller and more democratically structured states, it may be appropriate to run candidates for state office immediately on a program of democratizing the state into a municipal confederation based on Community Assemblies.

Greens are under no illusion that the national state can be reworked through its own legislative processes into a confederal grassroots democracy. Small minorities can too easily block the constitutional amendment process. A constitutional convention will be required for restructuring. Moreover, the corporate oligarchy will never let democratic restructuring happen without fighting back with its enormous extra-parliamentary powers. In the UK, the metropolitan regional governments were simply abolished by the Tories who did not approve of reforms instituted by the Left Laborites in these metropolitan councils.

The confederal grassroots democracy we seek will have to develop alongside the national state, resist its attempts to crush its emerging alternative power, and eventually replace it. Just as the dual power based on town meetings and the parallel and illegal legislatures they set up resisted and eventually overthrew the rule of the British monarchy in the first American Revolution, so a democratic revolution to overthrow the corporate oligarchy will require the development a popular grassroots counterpower.

Greens are skeptical of the efficacy of state and national electoral politics because they implicitly convey the idea that radical-democratic social change can come by capturing the offices of the national state and imposing change from the top down. Democratic change requires democratic power exercised from the bottom up.

Moreover, activity in the state and national electoral arena can easily degenerate into the conventional party politics of pandering to the lowest common denominator in order to win office and of appeasing the extra-governmental powers of the corporate oligarchy in order to stay in office.

The foundation of our electoral approach is therefore local elections and democratizing municipal and county institutions where we can build up a grassroots-democratic popular power in opposition to the centralized state and corporate power. The question of whether to enter a particular state or national electoral race will be answered according to whether it serves the goal of building the movement for a confederal grassroots democracy from below.