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So what do you call a movement that seeks supporters by appealing to the cultural grievances of marginalized groups in predominantly left-wing hierarchical social environments? Is it okay to also call them - presumably including you - "Cultural Marxists"? Is the entire Online Right, as represented on this forum, a Cultural Marxist movement, or is the term reserved for those who fight against a right-wing environment? That seems like it's pretty close to @Primaprimaprima's observation below that part of the motivation is simply to be able to say that opponents of right-wingers = Marxists.
And then, who even gets to define what is right-wing? What do you tell to people like me whose political compass is rotated just enough that the SJW establishment looks like a right-wing movement with a new coat of paint, simply having gone through the usual evolution where a left-wing movement (ex. early Christianity) overthrows a right-wing establishment (ex. the pagan Roman aristocracy) and proceeds to become the new right-wing establishment (ex. the papacy) itself? Now you have to refine your definition to say "no, Marxists is the proper term for whatever instance of this general dynamic my tribe is fighting against", which looks increasingly contrived.
In general, I think it is right to be suspicious of people who insist on using a particular preexisting term for some politically significant notion at all costs, because this is the central element of a widely deployed manipulation strategy to redirect people's intuitions, heuristics and rules that were built up in response to one thing to be aimed towards another. This is what is going on when SJWs insist that you use their definition of "racism" (and relegate portions that were in the old extension but are excluded from the new to the semantic ghetto of "reverse racism"), instead of going the least-resistance path of coming up with a fresh word to capture the exact set of tendencies that they want to suppress, or "fascism", and why the content industry is adamant about referring to copyright violations as "theft" and "piracy", and I'm sure you could come up with many other examples. This is notwithstanding the other extreme, pointed out by @ArjinFerman, where one side is denied the use of any term for a politically significant notion at all - but the answer to a trap being laid in front of you isn't to defiantly turn around and walk into the trap laid behind you.
Of course, "Cultural Marxism" is an interesting example, because part of the intended transference seems to go the other way - the insistent advocate hopes that by being convinced that he is fighting against "Cultural Marxism", the anti-SJW will in the future also take up the torch of the fight against plain (economic) Marxism. I can't think of many good examples of this from other sides, since it requires a degree of having lost but still being around to plot a comeback; perhaps old-school economic lefties should pick up the strategy and push the idea that newspapers, Hollywood etc. are just "cultural Big Oil" that pulls the same tactic of using US foreign policy might to gain access to new markets.
The problem with this transference is not just that it is manipulative, but also that as soon as it is recognised, you lose a big part of your potential coalition, namely all the people (me included) who think that (economic) Marxism isn't particularly good, but the movements that fight against Marxism or think that we directionally need less Marxism are strictly worse. I would like to fight against SJWs, and in fact I consider it very important to do so, but I would be very reluctant to make common cause with a movement that wants to take some or all of my energy to do that and redirect it towards reducing taxes, abolish mandatory healthcare, or give more of a political voice to the wealthy.
Sovereign is he who defines the exception, or so it is said.
Then what is, exactly, the strength of the person who is allowed to make the definitions?
Let me short-circuit the definitional arguments: imagine that we are gesturing at a horse... and I call it a horse. No, some obnoxious college activist emerges, it is a four-legged ruminant ungulate!
Okay, I concede. It's a four-legged ruminant ungulate (bad). We take a step forward on the euphemistic threadmill.
You horrible, horrible person! The college activist says. It's actually an equine monodactyl animal of herding!
And so on. At no point is the discussion is allowed to proceed beyond what identifying the horse is.
Cultural Marxism is identifiably so because it uses the oppressor/oppressed dynamic but replaces the class structure with a whole assortment of intersectional replacements. No, it is not orthodox Marxism. But it very succinctly describes what it is. You are falling for a psy-op, a plausible smokescreen of academic confusion. Strip out decades of cold warrior rhetoric and it is still an accurate description of what they're trying to get at.
There is no distinction between cultural and economic marxism in the end because it all leads to redistribution of wealth from oppressor to oppressed. If you don't recognize that basic fact, you don't really want to fight the SJWs at all: merely moderate their excesses.
I know you are trying to quote Moldbug here, but that's neither the exact quote nor is it a particularly deep insight. The "sovereign" gets to write your dictionary, so He actually defines everything.
What upstart movement can not be glossed as saying that some group is not getting what it deserves and some other group is getting more than it deserves? If this is the definition of Marxism, then the Nazis, the Basque and Catalan independence movement, the Kievan Rus throwing off the Mongol yoke and the American Revolution are all Marxist. Why don't you call it Cultural Patriotism, or Cultural ETAism? This analysis is not predictive of anything either, because it is not a feature of "cultural marxist" SJWs that who they want redistribute wealth from and to has anything to do with who is oppressing whom. No amount of oppression heaped on their political opponents would make them think "huh, I recall that we were Marxists and must pursue the redistribution of wealth from oppressor to oppressed" and proceed to expropriate their allies to pay their enemies.
What exactly is the psy-op I am supposedly falling for? I don't think I'm particularly confused about what SJWs want, or what Marxists want, or what anti-Marxists want, and I'm strongly against the first, mildly against the second, and strongly against the third. If your rhetorical trick made me support the third because I wanted to oppose the first, you would be the one psyopping me. You might be trying to frame things as if there were a contradiction in my position, but your argument only works if you consider "oppressed" and "oppressor" to be pointers that must not be resolved or refined, which as I argued above not even the SJWs do. I want some redistribution from rich to poor, and no redistribution between any ethnic groups, and this is independent of who oppresses whom: even if the rich were publicly flagellated and forced to eat dirt for two hours every day while the homeless get to spit on them, I would still want them to pay more taxes.
I really don't want to get into definitional arguments, because they don't get anywhere.
I am using their terminology. You can argue it as much as you want that it is vague and nebulous, but it doesn't matter, because it describes a real subset of people that do exist that push policy and active goals. I don't have to go back to the Kievan Rus to explain it. What am I, Putin?
Don't dive into generalities. I am addressing a very specific movement (the woke, the intersectionalists, the crt) who can be described as cultural marxists. I am intentionally limiting the scope of the discussion here because there is where an argument can actually be had.
But if you want to continue down this path, please, provide your definitions of these things.
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This is like the guy on datasecretslox who claimed not to know what race is. People know what right-wing is to enough of a degree to be able to talk about it, even if you can "well, aksually" the edge cases.
No, it's not so alike. Germans, Americans, Africans and Chinese would agree about classifying a typical black and a white guy, even as the others might find the US "one drop" boundary weird. Meanwhile, there are real differences between what people consider fairly central examples of left and right, to the point that I've seen German press refer to the BSW (new split-off "tankie" party with direct lineage from the GDR capital-P Party) as right-wing because they are against SJWs, immigrants and Ukraine.
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Ok, but what if I told you I don't want the transference? Like I mentioned, I like MadMozer's analogy to Mormonism, because I can understand the Christians' impulse to say "hey, don't put me in the same bag as those weirdos", but that's not what the Marxists here are saying. What they're doing is more akin to "the Church of Mormon is a conspiracy theory", it's maddening.
I don’t know of any atheists out there saying a Mormon state is the end-goal of American Christianity, which is what would garner the equivalent response, “The Church of Mormon is a conspiracy theory.”
It would be easy, actually, to point out how the LDS church is a major driver of conservative culture, trying to match the Roman Catholic Church in cultural power through new media (Angel Studios, Glenn Beck, The Blaze, etc.). Now, build up a conspiracy theory of a group of influential and wealthy Mormons trying to bring about the White Horse Prophecy. Then check the funding of conservative candidates and PACs by Mormons, and you’ll see “evidence” for the theory everywhere you look. Easily disproved, of course, but now you’ve got the mind-worm whispering to you every time you see a Mormon involved in the culture war. (It works because of the successful othering of Mormons since their beginning, the American equivalent of the perpetually-othered Ashkenazi Jews of Europe complete with pogroms.)
But all that aside, the reason “Cultural Marxism” is denied is because most people have no clue what actual Cultural Marxism was/is. The progressive movement’s economic policy wing is rolling along on the momentum of bog-standard envy-driven collectivism, same as it ever was, grabbing and using new terminology by opportunity, not by design.
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So then why do you want to use the term so badly? You should have seen a lot of arguments against using it that are not "it's a conspiracy theory" by now. Can you be baited into doing something if the outgroup condemns you for doing it in sufficiently maddening terms? If the "right-wingers take Ivermectin against COVID because they are anti-science conspiracy theorists" needling had become obnoxious enough, would you have taken it just on those grounds? (If you do actually believe in Ivermectin, replace with drinking/injecting bleach)
You'll note that I don't actually go around calling the woke stuff "Cultural Marxism" in day-to-day conversations. It's only when someone denies that such a movement ever existed, and applied that label to itself, and that they were inspired by Marxist ideas, and that they resulted in what we now call "woke", that I pipe up, and point out that they are wrong.
Well, this is (almost) a motte I'm happy to concede - the only part that I find doubtful is how by "resulted" suggests that the lineage of "woke" is entirely, or mostly, within the movement that referred to itself as "Cultural Marxism". I have seen evidence of existence of communities that used that term for themselves, but the volume of evidence is really too small for there to ever have been more than a fairly small number (on the order of a few academic groups and attached activist groupies? Perhaps 100-1000 people?). If you want to claim that those groups, however small they are, begot the "woke" that we see today to a sufficient degree that "resulted" is justified as a term, when the "woke" themselves see their lineage as a procession of mass movements (civil rights, LGBT etc.), this is pretty close to the textbook definition of a conspiracy (events are secretly steered by a small group). Then the moniker "conspiracy theory" would be appropriate on the surface. Whether one should abstain from using it because of the pejorative connotations, or push back against the pejorative connotations on account of those being obvious enemy action by conspiracies, is a separate question.
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Reactionaries, I suppose.
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