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I think you kind of miss the point. The people arguing that modern SJW ideology is descended from Marxism aren't wrong, but they are wrong when they think it's a direct and coherent lineage, and especially when some people seem to think that it's part of some grand master plan laid out by Gramsci and the Frankfurt school. (Or, going deeper down certain rabbit holes, a grand master plan by George Soros and Da Jooooooos!) Frankly, I think it is all fundamentally about resentment of the have nots against the haves, and this is essentially a parallel development. Marx built an entire economic theory around it, but without Marx, we'd still have people agitating for redistributive efforts and cutting down the tall poppies; they'd just use different labels.
Thus, arguing about whether "Cultural Marxism" is a thing or whether it's "really" Marxism seems pointless to me. Yes, "cultural Marxism" is a thing whether you call it that or something else; are "Cultural Marxists" actually trying to bring about a revolution of the proleteriat and the True Communism That Has Never Been Tried? Mostly not.
Most people (rightists and leftists) don't actually think about this very deeply the way us Motteian nerds do. The average SJW, including, I would wager, the chick who drew that "Kyriarchy" cartoon @FCfromSSC linked to, and the average right-winger railing about "cultural Marxism," cannot actually articulate what Marx espoused except in very general terms. The New Atheist/Christian analogy is apt; you're right that New Atheists smugly declaring they know the Bible better than the Christians they're arguing with were very obnoxious, but they were frequently correct.
The problem with the "Cultural Marxist" label is that it just reads as a cheap low-effort pejorative. "Commie" is still a dirty word in America, and calling SJWs "Cultural Marxists" reads as "Hurr hurr you commie!" It reminds me of right-wingers claiming every Democratic president ever was actually a communist.
There is of course a visible shift happening now where the left is using the same tactics to call every conservative "far right" and every Republican a "fascist." Boomerang back to conservatives claiming Nazis were actually leftists.
It's sloppy thinking all around, and while @FCfromSSC wrote a very thoughtful post tracing the lineage from Marx to Everyday Feminism, most critics don't and can't. (Freddie DeBoer, everyone's favorite anti-woke actual Marxist, is constantly driving himself crazy(er) trying to explain how everyone on the right and the left is Wrong About Everything.)
The people who fit this description in the strongest sense believe that the Cultural aspect has superseded the OG economic analysis of Marx; mostly they probably don't think about that at all, or maybe endorse some sort of MMT in which debt doesn't matter and therefore needn't stand in their way. Not sure how much they think about their desired end-state either, but my impression is that it looks less like a dictatorship of the proletariat and more like a dictatorship of them personally -- maybe we can switch the name to "Cultural Stalinism"?
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What of the march through the institutions, the endless attempts at entryism?
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The Frankfurt school brings a memeplex that the solution is obvious, and those in-the-know just have to keep reiterating why the problem is bad until people come around.
But it's also postmodern and Gnostic. The one unifying agreement is that everything is white cis-hetero patriarchal capitalist—our modern Yaldabaoth. That Everyday Feminism comic is reminding you that even if you think that you have gained knowledge and escaped, you probably haven't. There's always more work to do.
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What exactly do you mean by this? If there isn't a direct and coherent lineage, why can I literally draw a straight line from Marx to Gramsci to the Frankfurt School to people who self-labelled as Cultural Marxist to Critical Theory to all the stuff that people complain about when they talk about SJWs? If that's not a direct and coherent lineage, what is?
How is that my problem? Maybe they should have picked a better name?
https://music.ishkur.com
Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music discusses various ways that music genres grab ideas from other music genres. Or enthusiasts take a particular element from one genre and put it front-and-center into new tracks, making it distinctive enough to be its own genre. Calling this process "direct and coherent" would overstate things.
Same process here.
(I suppose that "Cultural Marxism" is roughly equivalent to the hearing "Oh, you listen to disco?", back in the day.)
In another comment, somewhat to my surprise actually, I've found and linked that a woman who was unironically using the term "cultural marxism" to describe her own ideas back in the '80s, has recently published a book about Critical Pedagogy. If you follow the likes of Chris Rufo and James Lindsay, you'll see that Critical Pedagogy is a decent chunk of what they're raging against. I don't know about you, but "written by literally the same people" is hard to beat in terms of "direct and coherent lineage" in my book.
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I'm saying the average SJW/woke posting BLM flags and talking about trans rights is not a "cultural Marxist" in a coherent manner and literally wouldn't know what you mean by calling them a Marxist (or they'd laugh at you because they kind of know what Marxism is and don't consider themselves to be one). You can argue their ideas are influenced by Marxism, which is true, but true in the same way we all swim downstream of Marxism, Christianity, and all the other memeplexes in our culture. I'm saying calling them "Cultural Marxists" is only very vaguely accurate and not very useful except as a boo word. (And of course boo words are pretty useful as rhetorical devices, but annoying to people who actually pick apart what words mean.)
If by "they" you mean the people who actually call themselves Cultural Marxists, obviously they wouldn't contest the label, but they are a small percentage of the people you typically attach it to.
What do you mean by "lineage" then? I'd say that by definition it must include people from who woke SJW BLM-flag-posters derived their beliefs.
I mean people who used to call themselves Cultural Marxists. Some of them still hold on to the label, others seem to have moved on. In any case a lineage, the way I understand the term, exists, and is direct and coherent.
Maybe it's my bubble, but most of the SJW BLM-flag-posters I know are liberal Christians/former Christians, the sort who if they go to church at all anymore go to one with rainbow flags, or a UU congregation. They would argue passionately that their beliefs are derived from Christianity and what Jesus taught, and I don't think that is less accurate than saying their beliefs are derived from Marx. (There has long been a strain of liberal Christianity arguing that what Jesus preached was in fact a sort of proto-Marxism.) That many traditional Christians would vehemently argue otherwise is no more relevant than Freddie DeBoer saying they aren't "really" Marxists.
My point here is that calling a woke trans rights activist a "Cultural Marxist" is not much different than calling a MAGA a fascist.
Are you talking about individual people who literally called themselves Cultural Marxists, or are you claiming the entire movement (for some value of "movement") used to call itself Cultural Marxism? Because there might be some of the former, though I don't know who you are referring to, but if you mean the latter, no, I don't think there is some single coherent movement that used to be known as "Cultural Marxism" and has now relabeled itself BLM, woke, trans rights, etc.
Well, this is getting a bit confusing because when 4bpp tried conflating "wokness" / Cultural Marxism with LGBT rights, I was the one that had to point out he's making a mistake. So I'm not sure why this point is directed at people who want to use the term "Cultural Marxism" rather than the people who are dissuading from it's use.
I hold that trans activism is Cultural-Marxism-agnostic, but that there is a strand inside it, that traces it's lineage to Cultural Marxism. Or are you saying that when the WPATH name drops "intersectionality", "power and privilege", or "minority stress", those ideas are derived from Christianity?
Trans rights is a broader term that includes non-Cultural-Marxism-derived ideas, but if we go with Queer Theory, BLM, and "woke", all of it sprouts from "Critical Theory" which is the politically correct (for now) term for what was once known as Cultural Marxism. If you don't want to call it Cultural Marxism anymore, I'm ok with that, but the idea that there isn't a direct and coherent lineage from ideas commonly known as "woke" to Critical Theory and from there to Cultural Marxism seems just flatly wrong to me. I'd even be willing to bet that even your friends who swear they got those ideas directly from Jesus, took some kind of a Critical Theory course at some point in their lives.
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