To make it clear, I'm not a Marxist, but I don't think that it's inherently evil or outlandish to be a Marxist either. It's simply a philosophical position that I disagree with. So, there's no emotion when I (and many others) use the term, it merely denotes an ideological position like "liberal" or "conservative" does.
Yeah, I've been involved in coalitions where some of the members were Marxist. That doesn't make labelling generic leftist action as “Marxist” any less of a false label and attempt to to use the emotional loading of “Marxist” in the wider society as a technique of poisoning the well against leftism generally.
> It's not poisoning the well to call someone a term that they voluntarily adopt for themselves.
It is, on the other hand, poisoning the well to use a label adopted by a small subset of a broader group to refer to actions of the broader group generally, when that is done specifically because of the negative emotional loading in the target audience of the label I question. Which is, at best, what is at play with the use of the term “Cultural Marxism”.
Welcome to the synecdoche of online discourse, where the masses are responsible for everything done by the extreme fringe. Why deal with substantive arguments when there's a weak man [0] close at hand?
[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapo...
Were that true, it would still be poisoning-the-well through guilt-by-association in naming, since Marxism and leftism are not equivalent, and Marxism (largely, though not entirely, as a result of guilt-by-association with Leninism) has strong emotional loading in most of the West, particularly the US.
It would be like calling the same thing on the Right (which absolutely does exist, also: everyone with a viewpoint they are trying to advance uses cultural institutions in that effort to the extent they are able) cultural Fascism.