Green Confucianism: ecology, class and the Green Movement.

• Author: Eytchison, Patrick

The regulatory role of the Confucian scholar in feudal China was to warn the Emperor and other officials of the landlord ruling class when their squeeze on the peasantry became so severe that revolt might be provoked. The best of these scholars were quite sincere in their belief in Confucian ethics. This, however, did not negate the fact that in social reality they were acting as a stabilizing mechanism to maintain the system of landlord oppression. Curiously, much of the Green Movement can be understood in the same way.

Redwood Coast Greens

Like the Confucian scholars of feudal China, Greens as a whole represent a part of the modern intelligentsia: the professional and semi-professional class, the new intellectual class or whatever term one wants to use. While the Confucianists bird-dogged the landlord class for its own long-term good, the Green Movement can be seen as bird-dogging the modern industrial capitalist class so that its need for profit will not undercut its necessary foundation in nature. Thus the warnings on global warming, resource depletion, biodevastation, and so on. Present capitalism, being of necessity expansive, must also of necessity reach its ecological limits. Thus seen objectively, the regulatory function of the Green Movement is to warn of this danger ("ecological wisdom") and prepare a vision for how contemporary industrial capitalism can transform itself into a new system of "sustainable" class exploitation once this ecological limit is reached.

This social dynamic presents a complex challenge for the Green Movement. Obviously global warming and all the other aspects of contemporary ecological devastation are real and must be faced as a human challenge as well as an issue of capitalism: that is, even if class exploitation cannot be done away with the ecological crisis must be solved. But for the working class this is thin soup indeed. If Greens are to be true to the meaning of our color in its best sense, a path of Ecological Wisdom that is not that of the tame doggie of the capitalists must be found. Yet this will be a severe challenge: of necessity it will be an untrodden path, both intellectually complex and politically demanding. Essentially it will mean the transformation of the Green Movement into a movement of explicit class struggle centered at the bottom.

I will discuss key facets of this challenge, under the two headings, Class and Ecology.

Class

In the most general sense, capitalist society consists of two classes, the owners of capital and all those who work with exploited labor for the commodities capital with...