Most of the Green Party members and supporters who post on here are closer to Murray Bookchin and Noam Chomsky type views than Jonathan Porritt or J. Fischer type views. They are not typical, but it is also true, IIRC that various polls of Urbanites (e.g. on the last UK Parliamentary election) show the Greens to be in most cases the favoured party of a majority or certainly a large number of Urbanites too. Now not all Urbanites look like Rowan Williams and knit their own yoghurt do they?
Most Greens who post on here would probably also have considerable sympathy with what Bernie has to say about parliamentary co-option - and I second most of what Larry and Japey have said about our attitude to the German phenomenon, and where they went wrong.
The problem is, building a movement for social change - how you do this is an issue for all those not prepared to accept the crumbs from the table approach of new labour and the third way, which has led, -intentionally or otherwise- to craven surrender to, and then actual
strengthening of the corporate elite. I see the Green movement and environmentalist ideas as
crucial to any "mix" that is going in the right direction, for the reasons sketched out so eloquently by Bernie and others on a frequent basis on here. But also, like Bernie and most other Greens on here, I accept that it is not
sufficient - that the social and democracy questions that have been being fought in this country from the time of the Levellers et al in the English Revolution at least, that the question of
economic democracy and control raised by socialists and anarchists for the last 120 years at least is still crucial to any long term solution.
We must not forget that the establishment media will present every socialist as Dave Spart or Derek Hatton, every anarchist as a "mindless" rioter or potential bomb chucker, and every Green as a beardy-weirdy moralistic pontificator as a matter of course - that is their
function. That is what their owners and controlling financial interests get for their money along with hopefully their profit.
We should not play their game by playing along with the stereotypes. An example would be the climate change bus feature in, IIRC one of the news broadcasts running up to the last Euro election. There were probably lots of decent Greens travelling around on this bus distributing propaganda - as it was during the Esso boycott, leaflets called for a boycott of Esso I believe, to raise the issue and expose the multinational for its relative lack of progress on climate change issues and its collusion with anti-Kyoto lobbyists. The news report focussed almost entirely on the
most stereotypical and unsympathetic Green on the bus - no explantion was given of the leaflets, or the Esso Boycott, or of the aims of the campaign. Anyone not in the know would have been presented with
a rather disturbing looking woman running across petrol station forecourts yelling. The clear impression that was meant to be given was that this was a Green campaign
against motorists in general, and that Greens were
unhinged 
The key questions then, are as Bernie says - how we build coalitions and bases (of community activists, socialists, greens, trade unionists, marginalised and victimised groups) at local level to address the environmental, economic and social concerns of ordinary working people - it is,
as ever, through face to face contact, through
organisation and struggle, that political consciousness is -collectively- raised, that the barriers fostered by the ruling elites and their cynical lackeys are swept away, and that progress is made.
