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

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

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Let's just be clear about what claim it is you originally made: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

Comment author: gjm 04 April 2016 10:59:20PM 0 points [-]

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).

I think this is true to the exact same extent as when they talk about Maoism being a big deal in student activism in the late 1960s they mean some combination of (1) and (2) and are not interested in (3).

it can't help making it clear that Maoist ideas became really popular, comparatively.

It didn't make that clear to me. (I guess it depends on what you mean by "comparatively".)

Do you intend to (1) explain just what you mean by saying that present-day "social justice" is an incarnation of Maoism and/or (2) offer some actual evidence that it is, that bears on that question more directly than observing that 40 years ago some student protesters were Maoists, or that Pol Pot studied in ("freaking") Paris?

If so, I'm all ears. If not, I'm tapping out now.

Comment author: bogus 05 April 2016 04:18:03AM *  0 points [-]

I think this is true to the exact same extent as when they talk about Maoism being a big deal in student activism in the late 1960s they mean some combination of (1) and (2) and are not interested in (3). ... It didn't make that clear to me.

Really? Why would the first document then go to the trouble of saying that "[t]he lack of an industrial base for the majority of Marxist Leninists throughout the 60s and 70s i[s n]ot surprising ... ", i.e. that most Marxist-Leninists at the time did not think that the working-class base as it existed then was important, and then go on to talk about students and the Little Red Book? That's hardly what the article would say if its only point was, uh, "some student protesters were Maoists" - the authors care about Maoism precisely because it was popular and indeed influential. You're seriously underestimating its importance there - and, e.g. the United Kingdom section of Wikipedia's article on student activism makes it clear that the movements discussed in that document were of general importance. But again, very similar things were going on in other Western European countries, particularly France - Marx, Mao, Marcuse! is described as a common slogan in the May 1968 events there.

explain just what you mean by saying that present-day "social justice" is an incarnation of Maoism

I've answered these concerns in a previous comment. The SJW movement shares with Maoism both a broad, general worldview, which is actually fairly well-reflected in the first document (e.g. the ideas of "great cultural revolution" and ideologically-driven "self-criticism" as preeminent, and as an antidote to the perceived vacuousness, oppression and degradation of both petty-bourgeois "consumer life" and "egocentric", "privileged student life" - a means of truly "serving the people" by revolutionizing not just a single political movement but society as a whole) and actual historical heritage since, as it happens, the movement itself gradually developed as a direct result of left-wing student radicalism starting from the late 1960s.

Comment author: gjm 05 April 2016 12:30:10PM -1 points [-]

Really? Why [...]

I'm not sure I understand your question. Taking it bit by bit:

  • "i.e., that most Marxist-Leninists at the time did not think that the working-class base as it existed then was important"
    • You introduce this with "i.e.", but it doesn't seem to me like it means the same thing as the author means by "the lack of an industrial base for the majority of Marxist Leninists". I think his claim isn't that they didn't think the working-class base was important, but that although they proclaimed its importance they were out of touch with actual working-class people and didn't have a good model of their real needs and wants.
  • "and then go on to talk about students and the Little Red Book"
    • He doesn't. This section is not about students, and I see no reason to think the people he's talking about waving the Little Red Book were students.
  • That's hardly what the article would say if its only point was, uh, "some student protesters were Maoists"
    • I am not claiming that the only point of this document is "some student protesters were Maoists". In particular, most of the document is not about student protesters, and the bit you're quoting from is not about student protesters and tells us nothing about how many student protesters were Maoists or how heartfelt their Maoism was.
  • "the authors care about Maoism precisely because it was popular and indeed influential"
    • The author cares about Maoism because he was a leading Maoist during the period the article describes.
  • "the United Kingdom section of Wikipedia's article on student activism"
    • ... doesn't in fact say anything about Maoism being important. It says that from the 1930s on lots of socialist societies (of all kinds) were formed at universities. It names two particular groups formed in 1966, neither of which appears to have been Maoist. And it talks about some particular protests (e.g., the tearing down of the LSE gates, about which our document says "the Left was not actually strong enough to shape events"; and the Grosvenor Square protest, which our document indicates (1) was a minority breakaway group from the larger but less dramatic protest and (2) "went into decline in 1969", again not suggesting a lot of long-term influence).

But aside from all this point-by-point quibbling, I'm not seeing how any of this bears on the question of (1+2) versus (3) being meant when our author says there were a lot of Maoists among late-1960s student activists. The picture he paints of leftist student activism seems to me more or less what you'd expect: a mixture of genuine ideologues of various kinds (by no means all Maoist), more moderate people making common cause with the extremists, and people for whom the far-left politics was more attire than actual belief ("some comrades were preoccupied in trying to solve their 'sexual problems' instead of making revolution").

And, yet again, everything you say remains far removed from the present-day social justice movement you were originally making claims about. It's as if I said, I dunno, that modern physics is lightly disguised Christianity, and when challenged kept pointing out that Newton was very religious. (Not quite so extreme; the gap is 40 years rather than 400. But the same logical problem.)

I've answered these concerns in a previous comment.

Which I answered at the time.

You say they both want a "great cultural revolution" -- but the cultural changes they want are completely different, and only one of the groups actually uses the term "great cultural revolution" that you put in quotation marks. You say they both make a big deal of ideologically-driven self-criticism -- but this is actually a very common idea, which you can find in notably Maoist movements like Methodism, rationalism, and Scientology. You say they both aim to address "perceived vacuousness, oppression and degradation" -- but so far as I can tell (a) sociopolitical movements always get some of their power from participants' hope that they will bring meaning into their lives, so this doesn't distinguish Maoism and SJ from evangelical Christianity or neoreaction or transcendental meditation or anything else; (b) the alleged oppressions with which Maoism and SJ are concerned are extremely different and in fact barely overlap; (c) if by "degradation" you actually mean anything different from vacuousness + oppression, you'll need to explain what.

And you appeal to "actual historical heritage" but again this is very indirect: left-wing student activism was strongly influenced by Maoism for a few years in the late 1960s; subsequent left-wing students were influenced by the aftermath of that activism; those students grew up into left-wing academics; left-wing academics are responsible for much theorizing about "social justice". If that makes present-day "social justice" an incarnation of Maoism, then it seems to me almost anything can be an "incarnation" of almost anything. (The radical leftist students of the late 1960s were by no means all Maoists; being influenced by something is not the same as subscribing to it wholeheartedly; people's opinions and attitudes change, often dramatically, over time; present-day "social justice" is broader than academic theorizing about it.)

And: you say the SJ movement developed from leftist student radicalism starting in the 1960s, but the term has been around with a meaning not entirely unlike its present one since the 1840s and (I repeat) the distinctive concerns of present-day SJ that aren't shared with the 1840s advocates of "social justice" tend to be ones also not shared with Maoism.

Comment author: bogus 05 April 2016 01:05:22PM *  0 points [-]

a mixture of genuine ideologues of various kinds ... more moderate people making common cause with the extremists, and people for whom the far-left politics was more attire than actual belief ("some comrades were preoccupied in trying to solve their 'sexual problems' instead of making revolution").

This is a good description of any social movement. As the newest blogpost from SSC rightly states, 'The Ideology Is Not The Movement', and most movements are largely "about" socialization and tribal attitudes as opposed to their ideological focal points. Nevertheless, when discussing what is distinctive about a social movement, particularly in the goals it pursues, ideology starts mattering quite a bit.

It's as if I said, I dunno, that modern physics is lightly disguised Christianity, and when challenged kept pointing out that Newton was very religious.

And in the absence of further evidence, this would be a good default guess. Now, scientists tend to be a pretty diverse mix when it comes to religious attitudes, so we can conclude that modern physics does not have much to do with religion either way, even though historically it did originate in a religious milieu. But current SJW activism seems to be a lot less like modern physics, and a lot more like, um, Bible study or sermon writing.

You say they both want a "great cultural revolution" -- but the cultural changes they want are completely different

Are they? Sure, the modern SJWs have their own laundry-list of concerns - mostly derived from the Frankfurt School (which ironically was fairly conservative in its own social outlook - this is why the conspiracy theorists who want to implicate it are quite wrong) and the Marcuse-influenced 'New Left'. Their basic attitude is pretty much the same however - get rid of everything that's 'old' and 'traditional' ("the old ideas, culture, customs, and habits" - the Four Olds) as something per-se linked to "the exploiting classes" (or, more generally, "oppression!") which has "poisoned the minds of the people for thousands of years" - and "transform education, literature and art, and all other parts of the superstructure that do not correspond" to the desired system and worldview. This is not something that conspiracy-theorists wrote about "SJWs", "Cultural Marxism!" or "the Frankfurt School", even though it certainly sounds like it. It's how people actually thought at the time.

The radical leftist students of the late 1960s were by no means all Maoists; being influenced by something is not the same as subscribing to it wholeheartedly ...

This is obviously true, and I'm not suggesting that these movements have steadfastly subscribed to the totality of Maoism. But the influence was nonetheless significant enough to describe them as derivative. And people's opinions can certainly change, but when a late-1960s student activist becomes an academic with SJWish views in the 2000s, this is pretty strong evidence that his opinions have not changed that much.

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