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When asked for his thoughts on Hegel, Wittgenstein replied, "Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different". There is of course a time and a place for both. But my preferences lean towards the latter.
Certainly, the popularity of anti-capitalist rhetoric in woke circles gives it a superficial similarity to Marxism proper. Certain people in those circles may even profess to be Marxist. But we can't always take what people say at face value. It's more important to analyze what they actually think and do. Conveniently, Marx himself provides an example that can be used as an analogy. He and many of his immediate intellectual descendants said that Marxism was "scientific". Is Marxism actually a science? They certainly called it one. They certainly wanted it to be one, since the name "science" bestows a veneer of intellectual respectability upon whatever it adorns. It's easy to find certain similarities between what Marx did and what scientists do; to at least some degree he engaged in a process of hypothesis formation and attempted to measure those hypotheses against empirical evidence. He revised his thinking as new data came in. But in spite of all this, Marxism is still not a science, because in its essential properties it differs from what makes a science actually be a science. The whole enterprise is crucially dependent on ethical and non-empirical propositions.
My position is that you simply have to examine individual leftists on a case by case basis to determine if they're actually Marxist or not; it can't be assumed just because of their adherence to feminism or anti-racism or any other leftist position. There are undoubtedly some genuine Marxists among today's leftists today, but I'm quite convinced that they're a minority. If, after a careful accounting of someone's politics, their revealed preference is for a world that is essentially similar to what we have now, except with more women CEOs and more government financial assistance for non-whites, that's not Marxism. That's liberal capitalism with some of the money shuffled around.
As a general note, I find considerations regarding provenance and genealogy to be largely irrelevant to this debate. It has been sometimes argued that Western science grew in some essential manner out of Christianity; science as beginning with the conviction that the divine creation was imbued with a rational order that was intelligible to man. Supposing that were true, does that mean that science is Christian in some essential sense? It seems plain to me that science is neither Christian nor non-Christian, regardless of its origins. Origins certainly can be relevant, but not in every case.
Marxism would have been a science by the standards of the 1800s because the standards of the 1800s were pretty sloppy. It's not until you get to Karl Popper's idea of Falsification in the 1930s that we get the more rigorous definition of science we have today. And then Popper quickly applied the idea of falsification to Marx (among others) to distinguish his pseudoscience from the actually useful science being done in other fields like Physics.
As bad as the naming of "exploitation" is in Marxism, it's still a theory derived from earlier economic theories, that predicts that removing capitalists will result in workers being better off via keeping their "surplus value" that capitalists were taking from them. But it wasn't the result of empirical observation. It was a logical deduction from the Labour Theory of Value, but LTV was disproved towards the end of Marx's career. Similar happened to Marx's theory of history. The failure of Marxists to respond to empirical evidence, by ignoring it, adding epicycles, or abandoning any pretext of caring about empirical evidence by switching to ideas like critical theory, is why it became a pseudoscience.
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