Green Confucians

Another youtube, just because I said I would. With each of these I learn a few new tricks. So I am getting something out of them, even if you aren’t…

Here’s the words I tried to intone-

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.
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.

Green Confucianism: Ecology, Class and the Green Movement
by Patrick Eytchison, Redwood Coast Greens
Synthesis/Regeneration 31   (Spring 2003)