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I think what's missing here, for me, is the history or genealogy of these posited tendencies? One of your examples of 'economic Marxism' is from many centuries before Marx - it seems undeniable to me that whatever John Ball was thinking, it wasn't Marxism, i.e. it was not using the same ideas, analyses, etc., as Marx.
You can, I suppose, redefine 'Marxism' to mean something like 'any sensibility that can be roughly characterised as egalitarian, or opposed to existing hierarchies', and I think I see something like that in your post here. But that doesn't seem like a decent general understanding of it.
If we understand 'Marxism' instead as involving, well, Marx's thought specifically, and then the thought of followers or disciples of Marx influenced him - the wider Marxist tradition, as it were - then I think that forces us to be more precise in our analysis. Thus, say, Jacobs' criticism of 'cultural Marxism' - that the word 'Marxism' functions as a mere bugaboo, associating any roughly egalitarian movement with the spectre of communism.
I am not asserting that there is no way to draw a genealogy that would get you to a 'cultural Marxism'. That's probably there, even if I think the most enthusiastic, even promiscuous, users of the term don't respect that genealogy much. But just as far as it goes, I think the historical connection or tradition matters.
I only quoted Ball to give an example of a purely economic argument for redistribution and equality.
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This criticism doesn't work at all. If you understand "Marxism" to involve the thought of the followers or disciples of Marx, than Cultural Marxism is Marxism, and the word "Marxism" is not any sort of bugaboo, it denotes the use of oppressor-oppressed analysis that Marx first applied to one's relation to the means of production, and the "Cultural" prefix indicates that it's applied to other aspects of the culture. This criticism is extremely dishonest, because people calling themselves Cultural Marxists have explained this in their own words:
What more do you want at this point?
We are not talking about "a genealogy that would get you to a 'cultural Marxism'", we're talking about "the ideas labelled Culturally Marxist do, in fact, have a genealogy going back to OG Marxists, if not Marx himself, and the label itself was originally self-applied by Marxists".
The top-level comment is plainly not doing that, though. It cites a 14th century peasant leader as an example of 'economic Marxism', even though, bluntly, there is no way to regard John Ball as a Marxist except by redefining 'Marxism' so broadly as to be practically meaningless. If John Ball is meaningfully a Marxist, then George Washington or Thomas Jefferson are even more Marxist.
Definitions can't be wrong, so if you want, you technically can define 'Marxism' as broadly as 'the analysis of oppressed and oppressor classes'. But that definition is so broad as to be useless. If that's how you define Marxism - if any analyst who identifies a class of oppressors is a Marxist - then everybody's a Marxist and the term is useless.
I would argue that, in order to be useful, 'Marxism' should mean the broad school or schools of thought historically derived from Marx's ideas.
Are there forms of 'cultural Marxism' that fit that definition! Sure! Entirely possible!
But I think there's a motte and bailey here. Is Martha E. Gimenez a Marxist? Sounds like, yes. Is any analysis of oppressor-oppressed relations Marxism? No.
Thus in the top-level comment here - there's no reason to think that any of the (fictional) examples of 'cultural Marxism' are Marxist at all. It's not Marxist to be LGBT or socially progressive in the Deep South. It's not Marxist to think that your family are annoying, or that people shouldn't fly the Confederate flag. If Marxism means anything at all, it means something more than that.
Ok, and I'm saying "Cultural Marxism" meets that criterion. If you pick a random thinker from an "intersectional" school of thought, and follow their citations, you will land on someone who is indisputably Marxist and, quite possibly, will go through someone who at one point called themselves a "Cultural Marxist".
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