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You're probably just not old enough to remember, then.
This is only kind of true. The cultural Marxists are the ones co-opting Marx. Marxism is modern and materialist; cultural Marxism is postmodern and sociological. The idea was to use Marxist insights to determine how to distribute sociological, rather than material, "equality." It's all right there in the book. As @MadMonzer correctly observes, the actual Marxists often object to the cultural Marxists (today this manifests as, say, Brian Leiter or Freddie deBoer criticizing Wokists).
But in the United States, the cultural Marxists and the originalist Marxists vote as a bloc, so in practical terms...
Ok. But my question is, is that really still Marxism, necessarily? Redistribution and equality, regardless of their modality, are not intrinsically Marxist ideas; they existed before Marx, and they continue to persist in non-Marxist contexts today. Imagine someone who said "we want to use Christian insights to strive for justice and equality, but we're going to drop all the baggage about Jesus and God and all that stuff, because we don't believe in that". At best, we could say that such a movement is Christian-inspired or Christian-derived, but it wouldn't be Christianity proper, because it rejects the core assumptions of Christianity.
There's been a lot of discussion in the thread over what counts as properly Marxist or not. To the best of my understanding, the core of Marxism would be something like: "capitalism is the name of a self-contradictory economic order; the self-consciousness and self-overcoming of this contradiction, which will take the concrete material form of a mass workers' revolution, will usher in a post-capitalist economic order that is based on transformed relations of production". That's the Nicene Creed of Marxism. If you don't believe in something that's at least close to that, you're not a Marxist. No matter how egalitarian you are, how sexually experimental you are, how resentful of straight white males you are - if your political program can be fundamentally be realized within the limits of liberal capitalism, then you're not a Marxist, cultural or otherwise. You're something else.
There may be individuals who, while adhering to the core Marxist program, decided that they needed to take a more "cultural" angle, and the term Cultural Marxist may be appropriate for those individuals. That's fine, I don't deny that. I do deny that the majority of leftists today (all the way from professors down to disaffected reddit commenters) adhere to the core Marxist program in any meaningful sense; therefore describing them as Marxist is inappropriate.
It seems to be a popular thesis in this thread that contemporary wokeism, while maybe not Marxist proper, is at least Marxist-derived in some crucial sense. This is an empirical question that I'm relatively agnostic on. It could be true or it could be false; it would require the appropriate historical and sociological studies to make a determination. I do worry that, much like the everything-I-don't-like-is-Marxism fallacy I mentioned earlier, this thesis comes close to being an instance of the all-my-enemies-get-their-talking-points-from-the-same-source fallacy. The left is very fond of deploying this against rightists - "no one could actually vote for Trump or oppose leftist social policies of their own accord, they've clearly all been brainwashed by Fox News/Russian bots/etc". And I don't want "cultural Marxist college professors" to be the right's version of Fox News/Russian bots/etc. Your enemies were not all brainwashed by a single malevolent entity. There really are just people who think differently than you.
Voting patterns are not a useful criteria to determine equivalence among ideologies. Most white nationalists voted for Trump in 2016; but so did other groups, and the fact that those other groups voted for Trump doesn't mean they necessarily have any affinity with white nationalism.
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I've recently revisited the the only Cultural Marxism article on Wikipedia after I saw this discussion (again) in the last 30 days. I keep forgetting to ping you. Wasn't it you who used to maintain the Cultural Marxism subreddit? Did that get binned?
In case it wasn't you, you may remember from the /r/slatestarcodex CW thread days: it was a subreddit where someone had tried to collate a lot of older Cultural Marxist materials, since the Wiki page was already shot by then.
It wasn't me, but several of my posts on reddit were included in the maintenance of a cultural Marxism "thread" (maybe on CWR?) for a time, that included numerous materials. But at some point the creator deleted it, presumably either by quitting reddit or by being banned from it. This was not my first post on the topic, but Google is not helping me find older ones and I haven't got the bandwidth just this moment to dig up the others.
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