Marxist Thought Of Environmental Justice And Its Contemporary Significance

Environmental justice is an important concept of environmental ethics and the actual trend of the development of the contemporary environmental ethics. The study on environmental justice began in the United States,and then it caused strong response from the third world countries and showed different value tendency. Recently, Chinese scholars uesed the foreign research fot reference and tried to construct the discourse of environmental justice with Chinese characteristics. But mostly they overlooked the discursive power of Marxism in environmental justice issues.This paper is committed to mining, and combining the Marxist environmental justice ideas and discuss its realistic significance.Firstly, it generally studies on the concept, type and principle of justice and environmental justice. Environmental justice is a special justice embodied in environmental affairs, which is the unity of intergenerational justice and intra-generational justice, and is also the unity of the procedural justice and distributional justice. Rawls's justice principles reflect requirements of both freedom and equality, which can provide us formal reference to analysize environmental justice issues.Secondly, the paper explores Marx and Engels's environmental justice thought in diachronic order. Marxism clearly safeguarded the interests of the proletariat and the laboring people, which determines the class attribute of its environmental justice. In the early period,Marx and Engels exposed that there was some phenomenon of environment unjustice in capitalist society, initially from the viewpoint of national legislation and economic facts. Although they sympathized vulnerable groups, they were inclined to the criticism of value. In the mature period, Marx and Engels made full use of historical materialism, From the levels of political economics and natural science, revealed that the capitalist production mode and social system has no compatibility with environmental justice,and pointed out that social possession of production material is the premise condition of realizing environmental justice, which enhance value critique to system revolution.Thirdly, the paper attempts to comb socialism environmental justice thought with Chinese characteristics, and actually analysize environmental justice issues in contemporary China. Deng xiaoping, jiang zemin and hu jintao and other party and state leaders, who considered the national conditions of many people and little land, started from people's fundamental interests, and put forward the thought of sustainable development and the scientific concept of development,which reflects environmental justice requirements in the new age. Contemporary China is confronted with a sharp contradiction between population, resources, environment and economy development, so we need to implement the strategy of sustainable development, and coordinate the relationship of different interest groups. Contemporary China is faced with the challenge of climate change, so we must actively participate in international climate negotiations, and seek international environmental justice according to the principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities".