gjm comments on "3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism" - Less Wrong

9 Post author: PhilGoetz 29 March 2016 03:16PM

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Comment author: gjm 02 April 2016 09:53:02AM 0 points [-]

In Marxism [...] In Maoism [...]

I also know about Maoism only what I find on the internet. And what I find on the internet doesn't indicate to me that Maoists were dramatically less concerned about economic (in)justice than other Marxists, and certainly doesn't suggest any particular similarity between "social justice" and Maoism. The most distinctive social preference of the Maoists seems to have been for rural agrarians over urban intellectuals, which really doesn't seem to line up with anything in present-day "social justice". It's true that Mao said that women should be treated equally with men, but that's hardly unique to Maoism.

I just had a look back at posts from the two SJWiest people I'm friends with on Facebook, and it looks to me as if their look-at-these-oppressed-people comments cover (e.g.) women, gay people, trans people, poor people, people in poor countries, people whose religion others around them don't like. So no, they aren't cookie-cutter Marxists, but I don't see that they're any more Maoists than they are Marxists.

(And honestly, this whole discussion seems rather odd to me. "Social justice is just warmed-over Maoism!" "Really? Show me how it's Maoist." "Well, look, here's a way in which it isn't typical of Marxism." Huh?)

Comment author: bogus 02 April 2016 12:14:14PM *  3 points [-]

and certainly doesn't suggest any particular similarity between "social justice" and Maoism.

Look, not only are there basic similarities (For instance, Maoism was the first variety of Marxism to really put cultural concerns at the forefront. People dispute whether 'cultural Marxism' is actually a thing and I think you can argue this either way, but there's no disputing that the 'Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution' really was called that and that Mao argued for it on Marxist grounds) but there is in fact a clear cultural lineage from Maoism to student movements in Western Europe starting from the late 1960s and extending into the 1970s and 1980s, to modern 'Social Justice'-ish theorizing as that generation gradually rose up the academic totem pole. It's not something that there's serious controversy about.

Comment author: gjm 03 April 2016 04:46:45PM 0 points [-]

not only are there basic similarities

The example you give is that Maoism made a big deal of "cultural concerns". I find this less than convincing. Not least because Maoism's cultural concerns do not seem to have been at all the same as those of "social justice". E.g., the avowed aim of that "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" appears to have been to purge China of capitalism and to put Mao loyalists in charge. Its famous Sixteen Points don't say anything about any of the themes that dominate "social justice" discourse -- sexism, racism, etc.

It's not something that there's serious controversy about.

You started off with "I like to think of it as ...". Now apparently it's the expert consensus. Can you tell me where to find evidence of this consensus? I'd have thought, e.g., that if it were uncontroversial that present-day "social justice" is basically a variety of Maoism then something like Wikipedia's article on social justice would at least mention Mao somewhere. It doesn't. (It does mention Marx, but only in the specific context of "liberation theology".)

Comment author: bogus 03 April 2016 08:34:58PM 1 point [-]

Now apparently it's the expert consensus. ... I'd have thought, e.g., that if it were uncontroversial that present-day "social justice" is basically a variety of Maoism then something like Wikipedia's article on social justice would at least mention Mao somewhere.

Wikipedia has a neutrality policy, so they're not going to say "SJ is just warmed-over Maoism" or anything like that. But, again, it's simply not controversial that student protest movements starting in the late 1960s looked up to Maoism as a sort of utopia and were heavily influenced by it. And it's not even under dispute that, in many ways, current "social justice" theorizing and practices are rooted in the attitudes of these same social movements. These assertions may not be mentioned in Wiki, but they're common knowledge among people who are reasonably informed about such things; and sources to this effect could be found quite easily, e.g. by perusing these movements' printed or otherwise preserved output.

Comment author: gjm 03 April 2016 10:03:58PM 3 points [-]

they're not going to say "SJ is just warmed-over Maoism"

No, but they might reasonably be expected to say something like "It is widely agreed that the history of the social justice movement can be traced back to a Maoist movement among students in the United States in the late 1960s" or something of the kind. If that's true, that is.

it's simply not controversial that student protest movements starting in the late 1960s looked up to Maoism as a sort of utopia

If you mean that some student protest movements did, I bet you're right. If you mean that most or all did, I bet you're wrong. If you mean that some, including in particular ones that are responsible for the present state of the social justice movement did, then I'm afraid I'm going to repeat my request for some actual evidence that it isn't controversial.

(For the avoidance of doubt: I am not saying you're wrong. I am saying I don't know enough about the relevant history to know whether you're right or not, and that merely telling me repeatedly that what you're saying is uncontroversial doesn't convince me.)

sources to this effect could be found quite easily

Let's just be clear about what claim it is you originally made:

I like to think of [present-day "social justice"] as the newest incarnation of Mao Zedong Thought.

So far, what you've offered in support of this is:

  • Pol Pot studied in Paris.
  • Maoism was concerned with culture, and "social justice" is about culture.
  • Maoism and "social justice" both complain about "bourgeois privilege".
  • Maoism and "social justice" both want to sweep away things that are old and encrusted with bias and oppression.
  • (Some?) student protest movements in the late 1960s admired Maoist China.
  • There is some as-yet-unspecified link between these movements and present-day "social justice".

This seems to me to fall outrageously short of saying that present-day "social justice" is an incarnation of Maoism. And many of these claims seem very doubtful in themselves. E.g., "bourgeois privilege": so far as I can tell, the Maoists weren't much interested in the sort of "privilege" social justice folks complain about, and the social justice folks aren't much concerned with bourgeoisie versus proletariat (or versus any other particular group). There just isn't much actual similarity there.

Comment author: bogus 04 April 2016 12:04:52AM *  2 points [-]

I am saying I don't know enough about the relevant history to know whether you're right or not... "It is widely agreed that the history of the social justice movement can be traced back to a Maoist movement among students in the United States in the late 1960s" ...

Eh, it's not likely that you would find overt Maoism among radical U.S. students. Such attitudes were common in Western Europe however, and by all evidence they filtered over in a derivative form. Even in a possible world where your wording was correct, however, it would simply be too controversial and 'non-NPOV' for Wikipedia to include. Wikipedia is not faultless; it's a product of writing-by-commitee and this shows in any politically contentious article.

I am saying I don't know enough about the relevant history to know whether you're right or not

This is not that surprising to me. It often happens that acquiring high-quality, reliable evidence is just too expensive to bother, and thus one must stop short of fully-assured knowledge. However, in this case, a simple application of Occam's Razor would tell you that if Maoist-influenced attitudes were nearly ubiquitous among Marxist student protesters from the 1960s onwards, and these Marxist protesters are responsible for much of the popularization of Marxism in Western countries since then (especially in academic environments, as opposed to e.g. labor unions!), and modern SJ theorizing is heavily reliant on Marxist theory and was gradually developed in the relevant time period, maybe this makes my earlier claim at least plausible if not overly likely. If something looks like a duck, walks like a duck, talks like a duck, we generally assume it's a duck, not a zebra.

Comment author: gjm 04 April 2016 09:01:45AM 0 points [-]

it's not likely [...]

Just to be clear, that was intended as an example of the sort of thing one might expect to find, not a claim about what specific thing ought to be there.

Wikipedia is not faultless

Very true indeed, which is why thought you might like to suggest some better sources. (Which so far you have not done, preferring to rely on repeated assertions that what you say is uncontroversial.)

Wikipedia is usually not so faulty as to completely omit any mention of what is in fact the expert consensus about the topic of a given article. Still, it can happen, usually as a result of a big fight on the article's talk page. So let's have a look there. ... No mention of Mao or Maoism. A few mentions of Marx, none of them asserting that the SJ movement is Marxist (either in origin or in present content).

So now what you're asking me to believe is that important assertion X about topic Y is uncontroversial, but is not even mentioned anywhere in the Wikipedia article on Y or on its talk page. Again, I wholeheartedly agree that Wikipedia is far from perfect; but it usually does a decent job of reflecting expert consensus and when it doesn't it usually attracts a whole lot of controversy on that point.

(I have looked elsewhere too, though I admit entirely on the internet -- the only really relevant books on my own shelves are too old to tell us much about contemporary "social justice". I have not yet found anything agreeing with your claim that SJ is the newest incarnation of Mao Zedong Thought.)

a simple application of Occam's Razor would tell you that if [...] and [...] and [...] maybe this makes my earlier claim at least plausible if not overly likely.

You keep throwing out these long chains of poorly-supported guilt by association and apparently hoping they will be convincing. But so far you haven't said anything about Maoism and "social justice" that looks any stronger than obvious parallel arguments linking, say, Roman Catholicism to present-day "social justice". Is your notion of "incarnation" broad enough for the same movement to be an incarnation of both Maoism and Catholicism?

Comment author: bogus 04 April 2016 09:31:51AM *  0 points [-]

But so far you haven't said anything about Maoism and "social justice" that looks any stronger than obvious parallel arguments linking, say, Roman Catholicism to present-day "social justice". Is your notion of "incarnation" broad enough for the same movement to be an incarnation of both Maoism and Catholicism?

It certainly is. Whether it's Marxist/Maoist doctrine or Catholic social doctrine (or perhaps both, for that matter) that is of significant influence in present-day SJ circles/communities is an empirical question, and one which (in my view) has a clear answer.

Edited to add: As it happens, I was seriously bored so I actually went looking for sources which could corroborate the extent of Maoist influence in radical-leftist student activism from the 1960s onwards. Man, this stuff makes for dry reading:

The Rise and Fall of Maoism: The English Experience:

The lack of an industrial base for the majority of Marxist Leninists throughout the 60s and 70s is perhaps not surprising. The Cult of Mao was a genuine heartfelt response, the waving of the red covered booklet of revolution, the Little Red Book and the wearing of shining badges bearing Mao's portrait was evidence of the compete submergence into the political agenda of the Chinese Cultural revolution. Henderson Brookes described Mao as the "living personification of marxism-leninism", as the "true heir of Marx...the most respected leader of the international Marxist-Leninist movement". This attitude towards Mao was common to all Western Maoists; that the demi-god status of Mao may have actual detracted from the political integration with a working class that existed within an imperialist-dominated culture was an issue not addressed. ...

... Another trend developing that was to contribute to the student base of British Maoism was the Canadian export, based at Sussex University and active as the English Student Movement. The political inspiration came from Hardial Bains who had established a student group while working at Trinity College Dublin. Bains was a former member of the Communist Party of India, having resigned in protest at the party’s endorsement of Khrushchev’s criticisms of Stalin. In March 1963, while a post-graduate student in Vancouver, Canada, he was active in a political study group called The Internationalists that evolved in a Maoist direction and later Bains was founder-Chairman of numerically the largest of the Maoist groups in English Canada, the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist). In Britain, the Internationalist off-spring was very much the product the upsurge in the youth and student movement. The prime influences were the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" raging in China and in the West Bengal region of India the revolutionary peasant uprising under the leadership of Charu Mazumdar, commonly known as the Naxalite movement. Drawing on both the analysis and slogans emanating from China, the call was for conscious participation with the masses, the practice of criticism and self criticism and spirit of ‘serve the people’. It was argued, Consumer life was the sole basis of the vacuousness, oppression and general degradation felt by the large majority of the petit-bourgeoisie in imperialist society. In stressing the importance of ideological struggle, the subjective desire was to tackle the effects of cultural disintegration and stifling intellectualism and egocentric behaviour of privileged student life.

Hardial Bains, decided to reorganize the Internationalists on the basis of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought. Like other young radicals, they saw the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as a struggle against the dogmatism and bureaucratism of the old communist movement. They believed that Mao Tsetung Thought represented the re-establishment of Leninism in the communist movement, a means through the mass campaign of the Cultural Revolution of ensuring the constant renewal and revolutionization of both the communist movement and society. During this period would-be revolutionaries were looking towards China and Mao Tsetung for political leadership. ...

Radical student groups and others throughout the universities of the Western capitalist world played an organising and agitational role in the great demonstrations and street battles of the year [1968]. Yet all of them withered ... as the idea of a central role for student radicalism itself faded. At its peak in 1968 the student movement envisaged ‘student power’ and espoused the ‘detonator theory’, based on analogies drawn from Third World guerrilla warfare and the foci proposition associated with Che, with universities as ‘red bases’ or liberated zones ...

[And it keeps going for page after page after page]

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1038/ysp-maoism.html

In the mid 1960s, coming out of the failure of the civil rights movement to challenge capitalism (due to its liberalism and orientation to the Democratic Party), followed by the embrace of "black power" by young black militants breaking with liberalism, the provocations against the Cuban Revolution by Democratic Party administrations, the escalation of the imperialist war in Vietnam (also by the Democrats), the draft and the backing of the Vietnam War by the liberal establishment, the growing student protest movement radicalized. In the late 1960s, during the height of student radicalism and black militancy, the bulk of student radicals considered themselves Maoists or were sympathetic to Maoism. The mass radical student organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), came to be dominated by Maoist ideology.

So why were radicals attracted to Stalinism a decade after the Soviet leadership itself had attempted to disassociate from Stalin? Further, the Soviets supplied North Vietnam with the vast bulk of its military hardware. ... Why, then, were those supporting the Vietnamese struggle attracted to Chinese Stalinism?

(This article too includes extensive commentary. Note that both of these articles are in fact quite critical about the widespread Maoist turn, viewing it as a distraction from their preferred orthodoxy of either Marxism-Leninism or Trotskyism. Thus, they would not be biased to exaggerate its importance)

Comment author: gjm 04 April 2016 03:24:33PM -1 points [-]

It certainly is.

Ah. Then I think I must be misunderstanding what you mean by "incarnation". I mean, Maoism and Catholicism have rather little in common, and at least some of what they do -- e.g., a certain taste for centralized authority -- is not exactly prominently found in SJ thought. So what can I actually infer about present-day "social justice" advocates or their opinions from the fact (assuming it to be one) that present-day "social justice" is an incarnation of Maoism?

Thanks for digging up some sources. But I'm afraid they don't seem to me to bear much on the point actually at issue, and so far as they do they provide as much evidence against as for your position.

  • The first document is a history of Maoism among English communists. It makes, so far as I can see, no claim that Maoism was ever dominant within English communism, nor that it was ever dominant among English communist student movements. (Still less that it was dominant among English student movements per se, which is the claim you made.)

    • You'll also notice that in one of the bits you quoted it says that all of those radical student groups of 1968 "withered or perished within a year or two as the idea of a central role for student radicalism itself faded". That doesn't sound to me like a description of something with the strength of social influence you're claiming.
    • Later on (p.48) here is what the author says about Hardial Bains's "Internationalists", the subject of two of the paragraphs you quoted: "They operated on the fringes of the radical student movement." p.49: "The lack of critiques of the Internationalists trend among the British Marxist-Leninists is partly because they were never taken seriously as part of the 'movement'".
    • The document is very long, very boring, and poorly organized, so I may well have missed something important. But it reads to me like a history of a fringe movement within a fringe movement, and I don't see anything in it supporting the idea that Maoism was nearly ubiquitous among student protestors of the late 1960s, and still less supporting the idea that it had a lot of influence more broadly later on.

  • The second document does indeed say in so many words that "In the late 1960s, during the height of student radicalism and black militancy, the bulk of student radicals considered themselves Maoists or were sympathetic to Maoism".

    • But look what else it says. "By 1972, the movement had already ruptured and was rapidly dissipating." (That's the second sentence. You surely can't have missed it?) "After 1972, those who remained Maoists, lining up behind U.S. imperialism against the USSR, underwent a corrosive process that made them different political animals [...] Maoists were now apologists for China’s alliance with U.S. imperialism." Does that sound like the social justice movement to you? It doesn't to me.

So: yes, these offer some evidence that there was quite a lot of Maoism about in the student protests at the end of the 1960s. But both seem to me to argue against the idea that this means Maoism had a lot of further influence even among communists, never mind more broadly. (Most "social justice" advocates, so far as I can tell, are not in fact any sort of communist. Though for sure some are.)

Comment author: bogus 04 April 2016 09:08:39PM *  -1 points [-]

... I mean, Maoism and Catholicism have rather little in common, and at least some of what they do ...

Well, you could have a movement that mixed both attitudes, and in theory SJ could be like that. It doesn't seem to be, though.

... "withered or perished within a year or two as the idea of a central role for student radicalism itself faded" ... "By 1972, the movement had already ruptured and was rapidly dissipating."

Whether (1) student protesters are actively self-identifying as Maoists, and/or (2) student protesters are viewed as having a central role in radicalism are very different questions than (3) are Maoist ideas (such as the broad view of the Cultural Revolution) actually important in student radicalism. When the articles talk about Maoism 'declining', it's quite clear that they mean some combination of (1) and (2). They're not actively interested in (3). Student radicalism is a fairly complicated thing, but let's just say that there's no clear evidence that Maoist ideas declined in sense (3). To some extent, this distinction also explains why the first article tends to treat Maoism as a 'fringe of a fringe'; it too cares a lot more about (e.g. political) self-identification than ideas, and even then it can't help making it clear that Maoist ideas became really popular, comparatively.

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