 Hello, hello, hello, and welcome, I'm Merron Kevili. We are DM 25, a radical political movement for Europe. And this is another live discussion with our coordinating team featuring subversive ideas. You won't hear anywhere else. And today we're talking about green politics. Not so long ago, the term green had a much more radical meaning. And a vote for the greens was a vote for climate justice, for non-violence and for grassroots democracy. But today, with green parties in government in eight countries across Europe, the picture is very different. Green politicians defending coal mining in Germany, setting police on climate protesters of all ages, green politicians embracing sanctions, apartheid regimes and NATO, jacking up military spending, leading the charge for war in Ukraine and pushing for a new Cold War on China and Russia. Green politicians splitting off from the grassroots movements that help them get elected. And all the while, the word green is being co-opted frantically by corporations and decision makers across the spectrum, making it almost meaningless and slowing down material progress in favor of symbolic moves and feel-good gestures. So how do we get here? Has green politics become decoupled from economic, social, and democratic justice? Or is this just real politic in action? And what, of course, can we do about it? Our panel, including our own Janis Varoufakis and our crew of activists and thinkers and doers from across Europe will be weighing it on this and you, you out there watching us on YouTube. If you've got thoughts, comments, opinions, rants, anything you want to say on this topic, just put it in the YouTube chat and we'll put it to our panel. Let's kick off with David Clastro now from the belly of the Beast in Brussels. David. Thank you, Mehran. Thank you, everybody, for joining us tonight on YouTube. Let me preface my remarks about today's topic by telling you a little bit about me. I'm Portuguese, but in 2003, the economic crisis in my country, mainly due to the impact of the euro, changed the direction of my family forever. My father lost his job. My mother was clinically depressed and unable to work and my brother had to abandon his studies to make ends meet at home. I was able to migrate with my mother to the UK when I was 12 to join my father and I grew up in pre-Brexit Britain in some of the poorest, roughest regions in the country. This wasn't the England of love actually, but this is England of Shane Meadows for those who have seen that brilliant film. It was certainly an educational experience that we missed Portugal and my brother and our extended family terribly. Yet, this move also gave me the chance to go to university, which has led me to where I am today, working in Brussels and carrying over 30,000 pounds worth of student debt. So when the M25 was created in February 2016, I immediately felt, here's a movement that actually speaks to me. I read their proposals at the time before I joined and saw how they could tackle the kinds of issues that had affected my family and millions of others, like the crisis of involuntary under-employment and involuntary migration. So I signed up and I've been working with them ever since. But before I joined the M25, I had worked in the center of the Brussels machine at the interface of business and green politics. And this experience is what I'd like to talk to you about today. I was employed by an organization called CSR Europe, the leading European business network for corporate sustainability and responsibility. And it gave me a masterclass of how propaganda it works in practice, I tell you. For example, every year we organize meetings between executives from corporate giants, like Huawei, IBM, NL, just to name a few, with European commissioners. The purpose besides unofficial lobbying behind closed doors, obviously, was to get the commissioners to rubber-stamp the sustainability reports of those companies quite publicly, reports that were financed, here this, by the companies themselves. We created initiatives like the European Back to Youth under the high patronage of Egypt Majesty, the King of the Belgians, and with a high level support of Donald Tusk, president of the European Council at the time, Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament at the time, and John Claude Junker, the president of the European Commission at the time. On the surface, the Back to Youth was a program to improve partnerships between business and education in order to boost the chances of young people getting jobs. But in reality, what it did was provide a cheap labor force for corporate giants through underpaid and unpaid traineeships and apprenticeships, effectively turning universities into conveyor belts for the job market. CSI Europe was a slick greenwashing operation. Everyone who worked there believed they were doing something good, helping to bring about more sustainable solutions for our planet. Yet all they were really doing was serving corporate interests. They were legitimizing and perpetuating a broken system, and they never, ever questioned it. Throughout my work in Brussels, I also saw this kind of greenwashing extended to politicians in Brussels. Look at the European Commission and its use of terms like green and sustainable. It's enough to make one stomach churn. Yet, sorry, I lost my train of thought there. The Commission's green deal and the Beyond the Growth Conference being just too recent example, not to mention the so-called recovery plan, recovery for whom it's pure naked co-optation. And now I come to the Greens themselves. I wanna say this first. After we announced today's livestream topic, I read a few comments from former comrades of ours complaining that we're daring to attack the Greens when we ourselves failed to re-enter parliament in Greece in the latest election just a few weeks ago. Other comments pointed to the fact that the green politics exists outside of Austria and Germany. My message to them is this. Yes, we did fail to convince enough people to vote for us in the last election. We have no problem whatsoever admitting it. But there's a follow-up coming up and you bet we're doing our best to make it happen again. But the point I wanna make is the following one. There is a gigantic difference between a political party not achieving backing for its ideas during an election and a political party already having enough backing for its ideas and then entering parliament, forming a government, and then doing a U-turn on those ideas. And that is what I'm criticizing. In the same way that we as DM and as Metta must have the capacity to accept our own shortcomings sometimes, it would do well for the Greens to have some humility and do the same. Because all Democrats, regardless of party affiliation, have a duty to stand up for democracy, for the people and for the planet. Whenever we see political parties that are meant to fight for those things and instead do the opposite when in power, because they're so obsessed with power at any cost, we must call them out. Whether they are Greens, socialistic really doesn't matter because they're supposed to be better than that. Didn't we witness precisely this behavior with the Euro crisis? So many mistakes that made by an arrogant self-centered establishment that couldn't take a tiny wee bit of criticism for what it was doing. An establishment so fragile that the mere insinuation that what it was doing to the pigs was wrong led to the doubling down of its position on austerity. Now, I know plenty of people work for the Greens. Most of them are lovely people. My criticism really isn't towards them. It's towards the leadership of most, not all, but most Green parties. With that said, if the Greens are Green today, then I think I must be going colorblind. Is it Green to raise villages to the ground like they're doing in Lutzeraff in Germany, like they've done in Lutzeraff in Germany, where they are in power in order to have more coal mining? Is it Green to ally with fascist parties like the Greens I've done in Austria while the world is careening towards a crucial 1.5 degrees Celsius mark in the average global temperature rise? And when it comes to world affairs, is it really Green to be pro-war and to label people campaigning for peace? Campaigning for peace comrades as Putin apologists. And looking at the Greens in Finland and Belgium too, last year in Finland, Green NGOs sued the Finnish government over carbon neutrality goals. And in Belgium, just last week, I was reading about it, centrist Prime Minister Alexander the crew came out and said that he's in favor of putting a pause on any Green legislation because it might threaten to destroy Belgian industry following in the footsteps of Emmanuel Macron in France. And in response to his statements, his own federal climate minister, Zacchia Katabi, former leader of the Greens here in Belgium, came out and criticized his position, saying that it isn't, quote, the government's position, nor the Belgian one. I honestly don't know whether to cry or laugh when I hear these things. He's the Prime Minister of our own government. And again, if you look at the Greens in Sweden from 2014 to 2018, they held a total of eight ministries and were widely seen as failing to fulfill key promises such as a reduction of the working week in the closure of Broma, Stockholm airport. And then you have the Irish Greens who are in a coalition government with two right-wing conservative parties. The examples are numerous. It isn't just Germany and it isn't just Austria. The Greens have ridden the Greenway generated by movements like Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future and so on, only to increase the risk of our extinction with their wrong-headed policies. It's not bad intentions here, it's just sharing competence. This is where the Greens are today. They have put themselves entirely at the mercy of corporate interests. They have lost their spine and forgotten their roots. They have entered into governments that are doing all they can to destroy the planet and people's hard-core rights. And they're complicit in all this because like my colleagues before in CSR Europe, they legitimize and perpetuate the broken system. They never ever question what they're doing. So if you really want to know the kind of radical climate policy that would fix all these things that I've been talking about, it is the Green New Deal for Europe from the M25. And the only thing that it requires, believe it or not, to be put into practice are people in power willing to do it. It's quite as simple as that. Thank you. Thank you, David. Yenis, for yours. Thanks David. Thanks, Maren. Look, I'm going to go soft on the Greens. I'm not going to be very harsh on them because they are not the only radicals or reformists who lost their mantle, who lost their way, who lost or sold their souls once in government. Every radical who has shifted to government so far, unfortunately, with very few exception, maybe Che Guevara has gone down that road. The communists, when they took over in 1917 after the Magnificent October Revolution, but very soon after that, they drifted to authoritarianism. They forgot socialism as Noam Chomsky correctly says, and they went towards a collectivism state capitalist route. The social democrats who did a lot of work in the late 60s and 70s to rebalance distribution of income and the distribution of power between capital and labor. Well, the moment Bretton Woods died in 1971 and financialization hit and social democrats in government were the worst, the worst. They invented the state. They destroyed the working class in the name of the working class in cahoots with the financial sector. We here in Greece, we stood tall against the Troika in 2011, 2012 with Syriza. We entered government. We fought valiantly for a few months. And then after that, the same party, not only collaborated, not only was co-opted by the toxic Troika establishment, but they imposed the worst austerity in the history of the world upon the people who elected them to fight against austerity. So the fact that the Greens have done the same, sold out, means that we should be nuanced. We Marxists, leftists, and so on, we should ask the question, the broader question, why is it that radicals who find themselves in government end up changing themselves rather than changing the world? That, I think, is the bigger question. And I think the answer to that has to do with capitalism and the way that capitalism is being developed and the way that capital in the end wins. If you don't challenge capital's reign over people, if you don't challenge the property rights which undermine and underpin the whole power game, then even if you have the best of intentions, and I have no doubt that the Greens, like Syriza, we had good intentions when we entered government. That's my preference, that I'm going to go easy on them. But now let me go back to the basics about green politics. Now, what is green politics? Since I talked about capitalism, we're all products of the great transformation as Karl Polanyi described the transition from feudalism to capitalism. That transformation meant that essentially exchange value triumphed over experiential value. That sounds a bit philosophical, so let me break it down. There used to be a time when things had the value that was separate from its price. Even in authoritarian regimes, in the Middle Ages, let me give you an example. The land of Gentry would inherit the land from there. Usually it was from father to son, but the son would never think of selling the land. Never. It would be treachery, treachery to the very principles of the land of Gentry of feudalism, to say, oh, well, don't be a feudal lord. I want to sell out, get money for my land, and go to the Bahamas or wherever to have a nice time. It just wasn't done. There were some things whose value was much more significant than its price. And you have, with capitalism, you have this constant imperialism of prices destroying values. First with the enclosures, then with the property. You have the commodification of labor under feudalism, slave societies. Labor was not a commodity. It was exploited. It was enslaved, but it was not commodified. People were commodified. Labor was not commodified. There were no wages. If you had slaves, serfs, or you didn't pay them wages, you simply took a large part of the produce that they produced. So capitalism is the, that's the main point I want to make. Think of it as a virus that takes over everything that doesn't have a price and has a value and gives you the price. That is immensely important regarding the environment. Because you know what they say about GDP, why GDP sucks as a measure of well-being. You burn down a forest, GDP goes up. Why? Because the forest has no price. The tree has no price, it gets burned down. GDP doesn't go down. But the decent fuel the fire engine uses in order to pretend to extinguish the forest, that is expended and that's added to GDP. And suddenly the forest fire doesn't deplete the wealth of the nation according to GDP measurements, right? Why is it? Because the tree has not been commodified yet. So if you think about it, capitalism goes into nature, takes over crucial values, environmental values, biological values, biodiversity. It has no price for capitalism. So its destruction is not a cost. To the extent that its destruction gives us $1 or gives the capitalist $1, this is a good thing. It increases GDP, okay? Now Marxism was a challenge to the idea that capitalism is equivalent to progress. It's that amount of progress. Yes, the creation of a steam engine is progress, but no, it doesn't mean that the use of the steam engine by the capitalist is going to enhance the human condition. According to the Marxist analysis, if it is owned by one person and then worked by many, and that one person uses the ownership of the steam engine in the mine, in the textile factory, in the car factory, wherever, in order to extract surplus value from the worker that he doesn't pay for, because he has power due to the unequal property rights over the steam engine, then that creates massive misery amongst the workers and misery in the spirit and the heart of the capitalist, because he ends up being a sad bastard at the end of the day, the day constantly worrying about bankruptcy, constantly worrying that one day he may end up being a proletarian. So Marx is effectively challenging the notion that technological change and progress is progress for humanity to the extent that we lose the opportunity to value things in ways that are separate from their price. And then you have a Soviet Union, a Soviet planning, which in the name of the working class to create goods and services and food and shelter for the workers, it continues along the lines of not valuing trees, not valuing biodiversity, not valuing the things that can not be converted immediately into utility for the working class. And that's where the green movement comes in in the late 1960s, early 1970s, challenging on a humanistic basis, if you want on a class basis, the notion that whatever contributes to the growth of goods and services for the working class is necessarily a good thing for the working class. So when the German greens emerged in the 1970s, okay, they were challenging as radicals capitalism. And they were also challenging the notion that state capitalism in the Soviet Union or Soviet planning was indeed a fundamental departure from the depletion of the things that can make humanity progress in a genuine way. So in that way, the greens were a very radical movement, a movement that was a breath of fresh air, a movement that slapped across the face the social democrats and the communists, rightly so, reminding them that they had been caught up in a kind of laborism, that whatever was good for wage labor was good for society without wanting to give workers the ownership and the control of the production process, a production process which was creating some values but destroying other values that capitalism had rendered value less. That was the early stage of the greens. Not of course the moment they got into government with Joschka Fischer, by the way, let me remind you because I'm a bit older. This is not the first time that the greens are in government and it's not the first time that they are war mongers. The first bombing of a country in Europe after the Second World War included aircraft of the German Air Force sent to Yugoslavia to bomb Yugoslavia by Joschka Fischer, the leader of the Green Party in Germany. So what's happening in Ukraine today is small fry compared to what happened in the 1990s in Yugoslavia. But you see the point is this, the moment you enter, whether you are Syriza or the Social Democrats or the Green, you enter government and you accept the property rights over capital of the capitalist class, right? Thinking that you can use the instruments of the state, whatever levers the government allows you to play with as a politician, government minister in order to arrest the progress of commodification and genuine value distraction, which is the essence of the capitalist beast, of the capitalist dynamic. If you think that, if you believe that, that's it, you're finished. If you are the best person with the best meaning agenda in the world. I remember now I'm going to finish off on a personal basis. I remember in 2015, when I was a finance minister of Greece and I was in Berlin, number of times I was in Berlin. And on one occasion, one day, after having locked horns with my nemesis, working on show, I remember after that, I met with the parliamentary group of the Social Democrats, then separately, separate meeting with the parliamentary delegation or group of the Greens. And then finally, with Dilinke, with the parliamentarians of Dilinke. With the parliamentarians of Dilinke, it went very well, they were comrades, they were supported. I tell you, the worst meeting I had was with the Greens. The worst meeting I had, the ones that were most cynical about our attempt in Greece in 2015 to liberate the country from austerity, from debt bondage, from the imperialism of the Troika, which was demanding, by the way, the Troika was demanding that we go into bed with ExxonMobil, with Total, in order to have oil drilling and drilling for gas and pipelines. This is what the Troika was pushing us to do. I was resisting it when I was in Berlin and the Greens were the ones that were more cynical about this resistance and who were undermining me more than anyone, more than Shoaibler, more than the social democrats, more than any representative of the European Central Bank. Now, why was that? Were they bad people? Were they the worst people? No, they weren't. They were actually, on a personal basis, quite cuddly and sweet. And I'm sure they rode bicycles around Berlin and they refused to get into diesel engine cars. And I'm sure they disdained the idea of sweatshops and the exploitation of labor and all that. But I tell you what was the main reason why they were the worst of the worst, because they were anxious. They were anxious that the establishment would consider them a radical. They were in the business of leapfrogging over the social democrats. Remember, at the time, there was a coalition government being the Christian Democrats of Angela Merkel and Volkan Shoaibler and the social democrats of Sigma Gabriel. And the gains were struggling to lift themselves in the opinion polls and in the next general election above the social democrats to become a party of government. And it was in their sights that the only way of becoming a party of government was to leave it open to forming a coalition either with the Christian democrats or with the social democrats. That was always going to be their game plan for getting power. Now, in their minds and hearts, they legitimized them. They were saying, well, we need to get in there in order to stop nuclear power, to close down once and for all nuclear power stations to build cycling lanes, to have more cycling, to move Germany away from Lignite and Coral. I have no idea that they were not thinking of themselves. I want to gain the government in order to dig out of the earth more Lignite or to sell out and to sell my soul to the devil. No, no, no. They were thinking in practical terms in terms of success, of political success. Here a little parenthesis because David mentioned those who mock us and saying, oh, but you failed. You didn't get reelected in this parliament on the 21st of May. Yeah, the assumption that success and somehow being right are connected. They're not. More often than not, if you're right, you don't succeed. More often than not. And it is our job as radicals, whether we're Marxists or Greens or whatever radicals to be right, to say the right thing and to do the right thing independently of consequences because the moment we allow ourselves to be lured by success, we are the stuages of the worst and most toxic part of capitalism, of authoritarianism, of neo-fascism. Close-back. So what happens is these people, they start thinking strategically, tactically. How do we get into government, right? So they meet in Varoufakis, who is resisting the Troika in a media environment with their Spiegel, you know, fats and tats and mats and chucks, right? And the various television channels that are demonizing Varoufakis. So they are fearful that if they cozy up to me, they will be demonized. So they're being harrowed. And immediately, without even thinking about it, they become corrupted by Shoebley. So they become what I back then once quipped when talking to a friend of mine, I said, you know, when I was talking to them, suddenly they brought up the image of Shoebley with recycling. That's how green they were because they had adopted austerity. And now you can see they are adopting NATO and they're adopting the Cold War. Because you see, it's really very easy if you don't have a backbone, if you don't have an ideological anchorage, an anchor that binds you to what is right as opposed to what is expedient and what leads to success. It's very easy to say, okay, so where is the whole thing drifting? NATO is winning. The Ukrainian war is happening. Putin is a criminal, undoubtedly, right? So we'll go with the flow. We'll go with the flow. The flow is, you know, the Chinese are treating minorities terribly, which they are. They are oppressing the students of the Hong Kong Polytechnic, which they are. Legitimacy amongst the West for the Greens means going with the flow with the NATO narrative, right? Instead of saying, neither Putin nor NATO. That takes guts. But once you have opted for victory and you've left behind principle, you're gone. This is it. You're on a landslide, you're on a, you are riding, not a wave at tsunami. You can't go back. This is my view. But again, I will finish off being stuffed on the Greens. We leftists can't point fingers at them. More than we point our fingers to our Marxist friends, our social democrat friends, our anarcho-syndicalist friends, because in the end, power corrupts. And if you are not prepared to give it up, to give up government, office, design, if you're not prepared to lose elections, like we just lost on the 21st of May, then you're a goner. Finally, let me confirm what the big caster said. Your comrades here in Greece, Mera25 are working 20 hours a day, 20 hours a day, and also during the remaining four hours, we're in a kind of days and half-sleeped during which the mind subconsciously continues to work in order to revive the prospects of a genuinely radical agenda here in Greece and make sure that this voice is returned to parliament and we trust that we will. No guarantees, folks, because again, we will not do whatever it takes. We are not going to do whatever it takes. If whatever it takes means selling out. Capital. Thank you, Janice, and you just answered a question there that I was going to put to you. It's somewhat asked, how can we guarantee as members of DM that we wouldn't find ourselves in the same position as the Greens if we were to come to power? But I think you just enunciated that very well. A couple of other comments from the chats. Non-Latifundia says, in the West, i.e. Canada, Green politics has become green neoliberalism. Social considerations have taken a backseat to financial remedies for climate change. BDA says most Greens are just eco-libertarians, unfortunately. Sunil gives us his personal experience. He says, I was a Green Party member for over a decade. It's just over a decade. I stood for the Green Party in several general elections when the Greens shifted to support membership of NATO. I left. And Rebel Wins says Greens is now just refers to the colour of money. Dushan, Dushan Pajovic, our previously Green New Deal for Europe coordinator. You had a lot of connections with Green decision-makers, Green activists. What's your take? Thanks, Michael. First, to answer to the question about the M25 and how do we ensure that we wouldn't get corrupted, because the structure is so powerful in here. Every major decision that needs to be held from the party needs to be approved by all member votes. And we have our own organizing principles that cannot be broken. So if you are part of this movement, you shouldn't worry about that because we even vote for, as members, who is going to be on the list of candidates. So you have the full democratic horizontal control over that. Regarding the Green issues, well, listen, money always finds its way to corrupt, to co-opt, and everything else. So Capitalism learned that they can play with Green ideas, with anti-racism ideas, with pro-LGBTQ ideas, and so on, and strip them from the meaning. So they funded a lot of money towards NGOs, towards different parties that are never tackling the core issues. They're just talking about some cosmetic things, and they're literally lying to you that everything can just change in a matter of second, and you can just continue living as you were living. And that's just not possible. For example, ExxonMobil and Shell are both really capable of adapting as well. That's why they have their own Green energy sources to compete with their fossil fuel brigade as well. And listen to what Jason Hickel said to quote him now, clean energy might help deal with emissions, but it does nothing to reverse deforestation, overfishing soil depletion and mass extinction. A growth obsessed economy powered by clean energy will still tip us into ecological disaster. So the whole system needs to change. We cannot just shift our cars with electric cars and then some kids in Africa are going to be digging for lithium batteries. That doesn't do anything. We need much, much more radical practices. And unfortunately, Green became a bad word and they're trying to co-opt everything. Green New Deal, first of all, and now even post-growth, which is atrocity. And it all comes back to the very same point, if you ask me, that Green ideas are now being presented as not necessarily anti-capitalist and they are being marginalized from the other two main topics that are interconnected, which is economics and democracy. What I mean with that is that we need to completely shift our way of production, but also in means of production, but also to completely change the energy that we are emitting ourselves, not in esoteric terms, but in terms of how society operates. It operates on strongly patriarchal values, pro-war values. It operates on exploitation of animals, of humans, of everyone else. If we want to call something Green, we need to tackle it all with the combined means. So I think that some of the features that the M25 puts out would contribute to this. And those are for day work week, those are demilitarization, global demilitarization, abolishing animal agriculture, and so on and so on, citizens assemblies. So if you want to change something environmentally speaking, you need to tackle the other two prices as well, because only 10% of people in this world are emitting around 40% of greenhouse gas emissions. And if we don't worry about that, then we are in problem. Then we are just going to have green imperialistic capitalism, where some kids are going to be digging uranium in a global South, where we are driving fancy electric cars. And that is leading us into the global, global deep hole. Thank you, Dushan. Amir, Amir Kiyai, our policy coordinator based in The Hague. Dennis, what's on your mind on this topic? Yeah, thanks, Mehran. Sort of trailing off from what Dushan was saying, I remember this statistic where average electricity use per capita in some parts of the global South per person per year is the same as a typical American fridge. So, you know, if you just think of thinking a bit from that statistical point of view, it's clear that a significant reduction in consumption is the way to go. And even when we break it down by sector with energy use being about 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions. So the statistics actually points away into where we need to make radical changes. And at the moment we have the crowd editing of our green ideal for Europe policy. And a major component of that is introducing the provisions of the plant based treaty which aims to end industrial animal agriculture which itself accounts for roughly if we look at the whole quote on quote value chain of slaughtering of animals of about 20 to 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions. So we've got some solutions if you like in our green deal for Europe either existing or coming up. And people can of course inform themselves and read into that. But let's also quickly touch on something, besides policy ideas and what solutions can be put into place from that point of view. We have to go and go back on what needs to be done now by the public by us and with all this greenwashing and there's no institutional accountability anywhere really, the role of the public becomes even more important. And let me just illustrate this as well on a more personal level. This past weekend I was attending a protest in The Hague. There was about 8,000 of us demanding an end to subsidies for fossil fuels in the Netherlands which is a very reasonable demand. And something I can be done right away ending a subsidy is not too complicated because they're also ending also cutting back on mental health care and so on with very quick effect. So that's not a problem. But the amount of subsidies is so high to fossil fuel companies that ending it and using the money could make public transport completely free in the Netherlands. I'm talking about trains, buses, metros, trams, water taxis and so on. It can be made completely free and still have billions left over. That's how much we're subsidizing fossil fuel industry in the Netherlands. So these are very reasonable demands but we were dealing with of course the system of power in this country doesn't support that and the authorities sort of intervened quite rapidly in the protest. I was amongst the nearly 1,600 people who were arrested during the Peaceful Demonstration. And we were briefly detained and then passed to the outskirts of the city which happens to be a football stadium and there we were freed and of course made our way back and joined the demonstrators again. So being physically in the public spaces is critical in power a month and especially why we still have this liberty because that liberty has also been taken away in other countries in the UK for example, in Australia. Right to protest is becoming increasingly harder in Western Europe. Middle-minded in the rest of the globe which we of course know what we've talked about before, Iran, et cetera. So our presence on the street and participation and demonstration protest is not only there to speak out against injustice but also to strengthen network of activism amongst us so that we can organize for a just future. That's very critical. So it's not just a more of a practical ask that we all have to do. We should then join protest and maintain the public presence in public spaces. Thank you, Amir. Just to loop it back to the Greens and maybe you can respond, maybe you do, Shem, before we move to Germany and the German Greens. Janice was talking about before how they lose their radicality once they're in power and maybe that's because these are people who are not really suffering to begin with. I mean, I've always had this idea of Greens as a kind of yoga, muesli, organic food but it's a bit of a lifestyle choice, that your politics is expressed as a lifestyle choice, Greens supporters. Am I right about that or is that just some crude stereotype? Who is the primary base of voters in your experience or is it too varied to tell? Yeah, sure, in the Netherlands, I mean, the Green Left Party has lost supports. It's moved to the support base that they have has reduced by about 30 to 40%. And just also linking into the protest, there's, I went on the tour to feed early on in preparation as well for tonight and there's no mention made of the protest by the public. So in that sense, maybe that answers your question in that way, that maybe for them, their audience is somewhere else. May I just start one thing? That's a good analysis but also depends where. In Montenegro, it's radically different. They are even worse than that. It's the worst part. One of the worst part is here and I would just to have one strong note for our viewers. This doesn't apply for the UK Greens and our friend and comrade Caroline Lucas who's very, very close to DM's policy and we strongly endorse her, I'd say as well in her fight. Thank you, Dushan. Important point there. We're talking about the Green, I mean, Green politics. It's a Green family and there are many different parties involved in that. A take from Brussels here that I'm quite right judging by Brussels. There are hipsters everywhere. I haven't met a working class Green yet here. Maybe that does back up that view. Okay, let's move to Germany, which if I understand correctly is the most successful Green party ever, anywhere. And now that they're in government, as Yanis mentioned, not for the first time. They're betraying their principles or at least it seems so. Johannes, Johannes Fair, Berlin. What's your take on that? Thank you all. I want to start with a question from the chat, which was what is a progressive pragmatic roadmap for smooth transition from fossil fuels energy to Green energy from Salman Ali Ahmad Malik. Nice name. And I think, I don't know, I don't know any smooth transition that is possible anymore, I think, nowadays. And especially if you want to really change things, I think you need to, as speakers before me have already explained, you need to tackle actually the ownership of energy production, and also the profit model that goes with it. Because if you want to have a sustainable system, the goal of profit will always be different than the goal of actually having sustainable energy for the many, for all of us. So I think that is also a major mistake if you look at the German Greens, what they're basically given up quite some time ago already. And in Germany, we have a federal state and in the south of Germany, the Greens are quite strong for a longer time already. They are having, leading the government even in one state in Baden-Württemberg. And there you can really see a very, by now conservative party that tries to change things a little bit into green, into the direction of green energy, but is not tackling the ownership question at all anymore. And that is also true for the movement of the whole party in Germany. Though I have to be honest, I still would argue they are in our government that calls itself a progressive government. The Greens are still somehow the most progressive part, but of course this government has, last year decided to spend 100 billion euros on the military instead of actually taking maybe the last chance to invest a lot of money into the green energy transition and is not at all tackling the question of ownership of energy production in the fossil fuel area and neither in the green area. And also they have moved to build up huge LNG, liquefied gas import infrastructure that is actually studies have shown is much too big and will bring a lot more LNG than we actually need to transition away from Russian gas after the pipeline was blown up in the terrorist act that we all already also spoke about. Also recently they had a scandal in the economic ministry which they're running, the ministers, Mr. Habek from the Greens, he had a secretary of state that was involved in choosing someone for the German energy agency and you had, and it turned out that this guy that he was involved choosing was also a friend from school days and had his best man at the wedding. So this is a scandal that comes from the side at the same time as the Greens were actually trying to introduce a law to have from the 1st of January next year have every heating system that is installed in Germany run with at least 65% of renewable energy and completely end fossil fuel heating by 2044. This is something, a direction in general that is necessary because we need to change to heat pump heating in Germany and away from fossil fuels. But of course, how are they doing it in this government with the social democrats and deliverables? They kind of keep the model of giving a little bit of subsidy, like 30% for if you change your fossil fuel heating system with a eco-friendly one, but new houses, for example, then get the necessary subsidies. And as I mentioned before, last year, they spent 100 billion on the military, which they could have spent on this heating pump subsidies to help house owners to actually do this transition, which is necessary. So as always, it's kind of like, on the surface trying to change a little bit. And I want to end on something that is actually, I think also from the chat, I feel like green is becoming another scary word, something at the cost of the working people to benefit the environment. I feel like certain people connected with elitism. And that is the core problem or the core where this is coming from. So the right wing media spins it in this way is also because the green politics is unfortunately not tackling the ownership of energy system production, for example, which they should and which certainly in our program, there's a much more radical vision, which then of course means that you will not have support, for example, of mainstream media when going to government. You will have them against you as we also saw in Greece, for example. Thanks. Thank you, Johannes. You've gone very gentle on the German greens, relatively speaking. Juliana, would you like to twist the knife? Thank you, Mahan. Well, the problem is with twisting the knife is really that almost everyone in Germany is twisting the knife with the greens. But the problem is the big, big problem is that they are criticized for something completely different that we are criticizing them for. I mean, one big takeaway from seeing the greens in government for us is for sure that the majority of German society is not prepared for transition, for progressive politics. And the fossil fuel, conservative politics, the fossil fuel industry, conservative politics, neoliberals have really turned on their machine in form of media and form of disinformation campaigns. And right now, yes, I think many people see green politics as something that is super affordable for rich people and is going to ruin everyone else. It's not working class politics. And when it comes to who is electing the greens, it's not working class people. What I think the greens are doing very wrong from the beginning is that they have never approached any communication with the people. They are hiding behind the other parties. We cannot do that because the FTP is standing in our way. We cannot do that because the SPD is doing that. They are letting this, as I said, this whole fossil fuel machinery to take the stage and scare the people about every single policy. They're not able to step up and say, well, yes, it's going to be expensive, but we will make sure that people are not being left behind. There's no approach in that way. And I think in 10 or 15 years, we will look back at this period in Germany and we will see that this is a historical failure of the greens. Because after the 90s, this is their comeback. This is their second chance, actually. And it so happens that they are the green party and this is why the Fridays for Future, Parents for Future, all the climate activists gave them a chance because they thought, OK, this is the party we have to historically go for now. After 16 years of CDU, we have to admit that the CDU didn't do anything for the future of the country. There was no preparation for a future and renewable energy and so on. So now is really the time to do everything that needs to be done. And now watering down every policy will lead to what, actually? To whatever is done now by the greens, which is just a bit in every direction, will be it for the next decade because at the next elections, they won't come up as first. I'm quite sure the CDU, the conservatives, will probably come back into government because in four years, the people will be scared so much of green policies and green politics that they, as we see it, agrees with Mitsotakis and in every country with conservatives in right wing going into government. The same will happen in Germany if the narrative is evolving into this direction. And then we will have, again, backwards thinking politics for a few years and we will fall behind in Germany on renewable energy on everything quite a bit. So I guess that is turning the knife because I think this is the historical failure of the party. OK. Thank you, Juliana. Daphne, Daphne Delcara, based in France. Hey. Where there is also a green party, of course, please tell us. Well, I'm actually not going to talk about the green party per se. I would like to touch upon something that's been multiple times mentioned and that Yanis started talking about, about why green politics first emerged, which was like the failure of both camps, be it the capitalist camp or the, like during the Cold War, the socialist camp to ignore the social cost of the loss of environment and ecosystem and because there was no value assigned to them. And that starting point is, I think, important because now I come back to the question of why is green politics never working class or why is green politics always stuck on this very upper middle class, almost elitist French and why is the greens, why have the greens become war mongers? So I think these three questions are all very related to each other. And I think this comes from the first, even the initial part where you say, we are above ideology. We have a common goal to create, to protect nature and that should be enough, which is never enough. This is a very, very naive way of thinking about the world. And as we know that the moment people start to think they're above ideology, they reproduce the dominant ideology without noticing it. And the other thing is that because of this, being aware of the environmental distractions in a global scale comes from like a certain amount of knowledge, so usually a university degree and all this, it became really stuck into this class that is very like knowledge producing class, let's say. But a knowledge producing class that thinks it is above ideology and not only above ideology that rejects, has positioned itself against socialist working class politics. Like we forget that the just transition was initially trade union demand. This is where the first just transition framework was born. And I think, and then coming into the 90s, it becomes even more solidified because if you have a professional, well-educated group of people that think they're above ideology and then they come to the moment where the world becomes post-ideological and the history and all that. And that you have no working class constituency because I think another very big important question is, who is the Green's constituency? Who are they accountable to? And that's not the vast majority of people. And all these three things become aligned. And that's why this technocratic way the Greens have defined themselves has aligned so well with the technocratic European Union. That's why there is like such a European EU party and EU thinking and they're because the EU by structures also so technocratic. And I think then they become more involved in an establishment, an institutional framework. And that institutional framework is pro-capitalism inevitably. And this and capitalism is pro-hegemony and there they become pro-ward. Like for example in the Beyond Growth Conference one of the shocking things to me is that everybody talked a lot about anti-capitalism or capitalism is destroying the planet. But at no point was the word dollar mentioned ever. And what was mentioned though, there was a very interesting talk by somebody from Carnegie Mellon, Carnegie Europe, sorry, that had a long talk about how China is so evil because they control these minerals and this should terrify us all and they're going to kill us all and we should be against China. And this talk got like lots of applause. And another moment that I thought was very revealing was a panel on economic model where there was this person from the IPCC's economical panel that I'm going to get a bit technical, my apologies here, but they started by saying they're not ideological and that everybody in this conference is so ideological. They're like scientific and then they proceeded by defending one of the IPCC economists who's got a Nobel Prize for the famous Nordhaus model. That is basically a neoclassical model that was so entrenched in climate denial that it is shocking that anybody would defend that. And then she finished by saying, this person was trying their best. This person is like a big neoliberal economist, a neoclassical economist. And that got, because it was a friendship, a nice humanistic message, that got a big applause. Because the Greens have also not only declared themselves anti-ideological, they have lost all curiosity about the ideologies and the economic critiques these different ideologies present. You might not agree. I'm not saying that everybody should adhere to an ideology, like we should all become dogmatic orthodox Marxists or something like that. But this comes over and over, rejecting ideologies actually creating this ignorance. And I think these are the core problems that define not only the Green parties, but I think the Green movements in general. So I guess this is my two cents. Thank you. Thank you. The moment people start to think they're above ideology, they reproduce the dominant ideology. Well said. We're getting close to the top of the hour, but we've got one more speaker before we close. Ivana, Ivana Ninadovic from Serbia. Go for it. Because I'll be wrapping up. I would like to end with how do we in DM 25 help with clarifying all of these valuable issues and the points of view that we heard tonight. And not to make it just about criticizing the Green party because it's not about that at all. It's just that they are the leaders of the Green politics, so to say. And a lot has been said here, but for me as a non-expert on Green politics transition and so on, it seems like for the left, it goes without saying that we are for the Green transition, Green politics and so on. However, I think that we need more conversations and debates within the membership as well to clarify what are our proposals and how not to scare off people that are being intimidated by the means of the radical Green activists, which is usually counterproductive for the average Joe. And people are trying to meet their ends every day and talking about going vegan, which is very expensive, especially in some countries, speaking from Serbia, it's more expensive than living on cheap meat and so on. So, how do we explain that recycling makes microplastics, for example, or it's not true, but that's what I found out and so on and so on. So this is my call for the M25 members to internally have more of these discussions taking aside ideologies or the small groups of all differences that we all have as leftists and to try to bring our message across in a less abstract and frightening way. Thank you, Ivana. Two quick comments from the chat from Kat Terrell. She says, Green means corporate, no matter what you think. And Constance Aaron says, why would you expect that a one issue party, even the Greens, would be aggressive across the board? So with that, we're going to wrap up. I would invite you all, I interviewed last week, it wasn't two weeks ago, Jojo Metta, she's the founder of the Stop Ecocide Initiative, which is trying to criminalize destroying nature. It's another way of tackling climate change and very interesting. So the interview is on our DM25 YouTube channel. Please subscribe and hit the bell icon to get notified if you're interested in that, it's a related topic. Thank you to all our speakers and to you out there for listening. And if you'd like to be part, as Ivana said, part of the solution to some of these issues that we've been talking about today. And I know we've discussed a lot and there's a lot of open threads, but if you'd like to help to knit them together into some kind of impactful action, then there's only one address. It's dm25.org slash join. And in a few minutes, you can become a member. Thank you again to all of you and see you again at the same.