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)
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 afra...
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.