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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.
Yes, that's true. That's why I limited the (tangential, and so unelaborated) point to "practical terms..."
As for the rest, I've had this conversation many times over the years, and the answer ultimately depends on your question, which you don't appear to have clearly stated yet. Calling out a "Nicene Creed of Marxism" is akin to the "true Communism has never been tried" trope. In my experience, cultural Marxists tend to regard themselves as Marxists, or Marxists-plus, or also Marxists, while avowed Marxists may or may not accept cultural Marxism, but I have never seen a rigorous attempt at putting empirical numbers to these things. Presumably, that would be difficult or impossible now; "cultural Marxism" has been a somewhat contested term for a long time, and its memory-holing into an "anti-Semitic conspiracy theory" has only made that worse.
So in general I would say that the term "cultural Marxist" should probably be avoided simply because it's been hopelessly muddied. But at the same time, when people insist that it just is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, or that it has nothing to do with Marxism as an ideology, I just have to point out that this is wrong as a matter of history. It certainly evolved from Marxism; it certainly is intellectually downstream of Marxism; it certainly shares many structural features with Marxism. If a "true Marxist" feels the need to gatekeep and insist that "cultural Marxism" is an ideological heresy, like, fine? I don't have a horse in that race, I'm happy to taboo "cultural Marxism" so long as the conversation is not explicitly about the term "cultural Marxism."
But you seem to be attributing fallacious reasoning to the people talking about cultural Marxism, whereas I and others responding to you are focused instead on the mischief of the people who muddied the term in the first place. If there was a group who called themselves cultural Marxists (there was) and this group believed the things they are accused of believing (they did) and later on the term was abandoned by its users because it had become a useful tool in the enemy's toolbox (it had), then getting conspicuously annoyed with the aforementioned enemies who go on using the term anyway seems like misdirected ire from anyone who is not, well, part of the group-formerly-known-as-cultural-Marxists.
All my enemies get their talking points from Plato. What pisses me off is that they don't seem to realize it.
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If you find yourself surveying the attitudes of actual existing self-identified Marxists, and the vast majority believe one thing while only a relatively small and disempowered rump minority believe another, isn’t Marxism just “whatever most Marxists believe?” Christianity has undergone multiple profound changes - theological, structural, and otherwise - in the two thousand years of its existence. If you described modern Protestant Christianity to one of Jesus’s contemporary followers, that person would find many aspects of it unrecognizable. (In fact, that person might be shocked to learn that the world still exists two thousand years hence, since it’s quite clear that a substantial portion of early Christians expected the Rapture to happen within their lifetimes.) The fact of various schisms, sectarian conflicts, doctrinal disputes, and pragmatic political compromises does not invalidate our ability to discuss “Christianity” as a distinct phenomenon identifiable across time, does it? (If you want to argue that it does, that’d a more interesting conversation, but it doesn’t appear that you do.)
Similarly, Marxism, though a far younger movement than Christianity, has already undergone multiple schisms and evolutions as it has had to interface with the real world. I’m not sure why you believe that Marxists are required to be fully faithful to the dead hand of Marx’s and Engels’ original writings, with no room for adaptation or innovation, in order to still be considered Marxists. Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School - all of these guys were grappling with which parts of Marx’s predictions came true and which didn’t, and have tried to salvage the core theses while figuring out how to make them work in reality. They believe in his fundamental goals and vision, and are trying to discover - through experimental praxis - the means by which to effectively actualize that vision.
Marx was never entirely focused on mere economics; see his famous letter to Arnold Ruge in which he states, “It is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists…” Keep in mind also that Marx was building on the ideas of Hegel and was only one member of a larger philosophical movement derived from Hegel’s thought; in that sense, Marxism has merely been building on previous ideas from the beginning, so it should be unsurprising that its modern inheritors should continue that process of philosophical evolution.
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