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First off, I’m surprised that nobody has brought up James Lindsay and his New Discourses project. Lindsay gets a ton of ridicule from many on the right (some of it justified) and is treated as a joke by the left, but I think he has done a wonderful service on this front. He does sprawling podcasts where he actually reads and deconstructs some of the foundational works of 20th-century post-Marxist thought, tracing the explicit genealogy not only of the ideas but also of the authors. It’s trivially true that most of the writers and thinkers people are taking about have common intellectual mentors and influences, and I think Lindsay does an able job of demonstrating this.
Secondly, people are getting hung up on the specific term “cultural Marxism” when in fact most of the proponents of that school of ideas would instead call it “critical theory”. (There are, of course, various subdisciplines - most famously critical race theory, but also critical fat studies, critical pedagogy, gendercritical, etc.) Critical theory also comes with critical praxis - the specific actions and analytical approaches applied by practitioners of critical theory, who for a while were calling themselves crits. (I don’t remember if it was Richard Delgado who coined the term. I’d have to go back and check.)
In discussions about whether or not “critical race theory” is being taught in K-12 schools, educators will usually protest that critical theory is a college- and graduate-level set of ideas which are both inappropriate for, and impossible to teach to, children. And that’s true! What they are teaching children is critical praxis. They’re teaching children how to apply a critical (and this word has a very different meaning in this context than it does in the phrase “critical thinking”) lens to specific real-world examples.
And what is critical theory? Succinctly, it’s the view that social relations can be accurately described as a set of unequal power relations between socially-constructed affinity groups, such that groups can possess and accrue social capital - the power to disseminate and reproduce a hegemonic set of cultural norms - which, barring intentional efforts to redistribute social capital/prestige, will allow those groups to maintain their dominant cultural power indefinitely. In this sense it is applying the analytical tools and framework of Marx (the dialectic, the identification of complex power relations, the belief in accrued capital as an inherently unjust state of affairs) and treating social/cultural hegemony as the unit of capital, rather than money or land ownership. And much as communists seek to intentionally seize and redistribute/democratize the means of economic production, crits seek to seize and redistribute/democratize the means of cultural production.
Just as the end goal of communism is a world in which no person or group can possess and selfishly hoard more economic capital than another, crits want a world in which no group has more prestige than another. No group feels more “at home” in a certain place, no group feels confident as a majority to impose its cultural norms on others, etc. To get there, we must first identify the current power relations and actively subvert them; the formerly-marginalized must be centered, the hegemonic/bourgeois cultural norms must be relentlessly critiqued and negated, and the means of cultural production must be actively turned toward the dissemination of counter-hegemonic narratives.
I fail to see how anyone can miss that this is Marxist analysis applied to culture and status instead of money. I think that a fair reading of the authors in question will make their intellectual foundations very obvious.
I'm not criticizing you, as you're just describing, but man. The last one contradicts the others! They have to impose their own preferred cultural norms on others in order to get those things. And can you imagine how utterly insane such an imposition would be? I've talked here before about the Khmer Rouge banning free enterprise and preventing people from picking berries in the countryside, because they might acquire a lot of berries, maybe even sell them on a black market or something, then become unequal and unfair. And that's just economically. Can you imagine not allowing anyone to have more prestige than another? One of the diagnoses I've seen here for what is perceived as a cultural malaise today is that, in the before-internet days, people had all sorts of little local hierarchies that people could climb and feel good about. You could knit the best socks or play the best chess or cook the nicest meal in your little local social circle. Nowadays, everything is so globalized that people can always tear down any hobby you just want to self-improve on and point to the few on Insta that you'll never match up with. Forget whether this diagnosis is true or not or which of those worlds you'd prefer, but can you imagine the extreme anti-prestige black shirt brigade you'd need to make sure that nobody was feeling just a hair too smug about how they won a local chess tournament? When it's worded as bluntly as this, I don't see how they could possibly accomplish their goals without completely grinding down all the hopes and dreams of literally every person on the planet, even more brutally than forcing them all onto the State farm and prohibiting them from picking berries.
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The 'crit' term is older than Delgado and actually originally applied to the predecessors of the critical race theorists like him: the critical legal theorists. Once the critical race theorists began to think of themselves as a real distinct group in the 80s and 90s, they were actually the crats, as opposed to the crits, who they were reacting against.
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