This is a good description of any social movement.
Which is why I said it's "more or less what you'd expect" :-).
current SJW activism seems to be a lot less like modern physics, and a lot more like, um, Bible study or sermon writing.
In some important respects, yes. But, more specifically, I don't see current SJ activists studying the Little Red Book or preaching sermons about the superiority of rural farmers over urban brain-workers. I don't, that is, see a whole lot of actual Maoism. Which would seem to me to be a relevant thing to look for, when deciding whether present-day "social justice" is just "the newest incarnation of Mao Zedong Thought".
But it seems that what you mean by "the newest incarnation of" is just "shares a few features with, and has some very indirect historical connections with". In which case: meh, whatever, call it that if you like, but your terminology seems odd to me.
get rid of everything that's 'old' and 'traditional'
That was an explicit cry of the Maoists; it does not appear to me to be an explicit cry of the SJ activists.
And in actual fact both movements had/have particular old things they want to get rid of, and they are not the same particular old things.
Suppose we made a list of old traditional things in middle-class American culture (the environment where SJ mostly exists). The list might indeed include ideas about race and gender and sexuality that the SJ movement wants to overturn. It would also, I think, include a whole lot of things it doesn't. For instance, perhaps the biggest traditional shibboleths in US political culture are "democracy" and "freedom"; SJ activists are generally strongly for democracy, and while they aren't so enthusiastic about freedom -- there are all kinds of things they would like to be banned -- my impression is that that's not because of any (overt or covert) dislike of freedom as such; there are just other conflicting things they care about more.
Traditional middle-class American culture (hereafter TMCAC) is big on "family", meaning an opposite-sex couple with 2.5 children and a dog, living in a detached house in the suburbs. SJ activists will complain bitterly about the idea that that's a norm everyone should be expected to conform to, but I've never seen them say that that sort of family is actively bad and needs getting rid of.
TMCAC has all sorts of art in it: music old and new, drama (plays, movies, television), etc., etc., etc. Again, SJ activists will complain about various particular instances (e.g., not enough women in movies) but I've not seen them saying that existing artforms need to be thrown out and replaced with something new.
TMCAC tends to be firmly capitalist and business-friendly. Some (by no means all) SJ activists are far enough left that they want that system burned to the ground. That's a point where they would agree with the Maoists. But, er, that's because we got here by considering the particular subset of SJ activists who are, if not exactly Maoist, at least communist or something close.
There really doesn't seem to me to be a close parallel with Maoism here, beyond the fact -- with which I gladly agree -- that present-day "social justice" leans distinctly leftward and some SJ activists are very far left indeed.
""transform education, literature and art, and all other parts of the superstructure that do not correspond" to the desired system and worldview
Yeah, that does sound really Maoist. And that quotation would indeed be evidence for a strong Maoist current in SJ activism, if it came from an SJ activist. But of course it actually comes from the (original) Maoists' "Sixteen Points".
I'm sure SJ activists would like to see education, literature and art conform more closely to their principles. And evangelical Christians would like to see them conform to theirs. And neoreactionaries would like to see them conform to theirs. And radical Hindus in India. (Of course, many people in all these groups would say, at least for public consumption, that they don't want to extinguish diversity. What would be a good way of expressing that? How about "let a hundred flowers bloom"?) Saying that the Maoists and the SJ activists both want that isn't evidence of some close equivalence between the two; it just shows that both are sociopolitical movements.
The fact that a sociopolitical movement wants to influence culture does not make it an incarnation of Mao Zedong Thought. It makes it a sociopolitical movement.
That was an explicit cry of the Maoists; it does not appear to me to be an explicit cry of the SJ activists.
I agree about this, but what matters in this case is not whether this is an explicit cry of them, but whether it's a good description of their activities, balancing parsimony with the possibility of error. In this case, SJWs have "called out" and railed about things as diverse and seemingly unconnected as Ovid's Metamorphoses, Halloween festivities and a host of "microaggressions" and other sins supposedly committed by professo...
The lead article on everydayfeminism.com on March 25:
3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism
(The link from "decolonization" is to "Decolonization is not a metaphor", to make it clear s/he means actually giving the land back to the Native Americans.)
I regularly see people who describe how social justice activists act accused of setting up a straw man. This article show that the bias of some SJWs against reason is impossible to strawman. The author argues at length that rationality is bad, and that justice arguments shouldn't be rational or be defended rationally. Ze is, or was, confused about what "rationality" means, but clearly now means it to include reason-based argumentation.
This isn't just some wacko's blog; it was chosen as the headline article for the website. I had to click around to a few other articles to make sure it wasn't a parody site.
But it isn't just a sign of how irrational the social justice movement is—it has clues to how it got that way.
The author came to hate "rationality" because s/he thought "rationality" meant "conventionality".
S/he didn't realize that white cis people don't use rationality either to understand their gender and social role. These are cultural values that parents deliberately program in before a child can become rational and come up with their own version.
Making my own inferences, I'd guess that
1. The author has had many unpleasant social experiences because of zis refusal to adopt a gender, and
2. The author is not a good reasoner, and while arguing over these experiences, often makes bad arguments, and gets told ze is irrational, and
3. The author is unable to distinguish discomfort with zis gender non-choice, from resistance to zis bad ideas, as having separate causes.
The 3 reasons are:
1. Being Rational Has No Inherent Value
2. Rationalism Is a Tool Made to Hurt Us
3. We Are Enough Without Rationalism
Also see the same site's recent article "4 Reasons Demanding ‘Objectivity’ in Social Justice Debates Can Be Oppressive".
ADDED, since I'm 50 karma in the hole anyway:
Ironically, today's "social justice" program demands a radical rationalism.
Social justice used to be a rationalist program on its surface, pointing out the irrationality of prejudice and the illogic in narratives used to justify oppression. But as society adjusted its pre-judgements closer to targets that were rational but still unequal, e.g., from "Women can't do engineering" to "Most women don't want to do engineering", the emphasis switched from being rational about our beliefs to irrationally assuming equality of everyone and everything, not just as a default starting point, but as a mandated endpoint. (Historically, this was tied to an influx of reality-denying continental philosophy into social activism in the 1960s.)
De-emphasizing rationality on its surface requires a more radical rationalism for its practical implementation. Changing social conventions has a cost. When we extend social justice beyond respect for difference that people have no choice over, such as race or sex, to roles that they choose, such as religion or gender, the justification for allowing everyone to defy any particular social convention must be a rational cost-benefit assessment. Many people enjoy the ritual interactions specified by social roles; they are part of their identities and one of their terminal values. A demand to give up these values must fall back onto consequentialist arguments.
(Is constant social pressure on the person doing the defying more important than thousands of irritations to the people who don't know how to deal with zim, and who feel their own identities inhibited in zis presence? I don't know. It's torture vs. dust specks.)
The new social justice program is ultimately to strip from human consciousness all shortcuts, biases, prejudices, pre-computations, and priors. This requires making each individual a rational consequentialist capable of reasoning zer way from every situation to a rational behavior. To know how to use social roles, people require either social heuristics (which will inevitably oppress somebody), or radical ends-based rationality. This is particularly true when people are allowed to unilaterally opt in or out of social roles, so that every situation has a mix of people demanding to be treated differently.
(It isn't clear whether priors are permissible in this rationality.)
Even the oppressed classes must be ideal rationalists (Homo economicus). If women are still allowed to prefer not to be computer programmers, or men are allowed to prefer not to raise children, a free market will make mandated equality cause, rather than alleviate, injustice.
Alternately, we could possibly say that social justice doesn't require radical rationality, provided that we allow no social roles (a commitment to radical individuality). This also imposes a cost in so far as social roles serve to increase social utility.