I don't know, reading the quote you've included in this comment - it seems a lot less "totalizing" than you're saying, considering the quote itself uses the loose terms "closer to the camp of" or "a common defense used by". There's already nuance and wiggle room there, so, I'm not sure how you're immediately launching into a pretty sanctimonious and totalizing statement that "cultural Marxism" admits zero daylight between extremes.

Could you help me understand why you feel "cultural Marxism" is so, totally, totalizing?

Not OP, but you'd have to have blinders on to not see the political left increasingly branding everyone they disagree with as evil / Nazis / white supremacists. That's what happened above, and you're rationalizing it here.

If you think the political left increasingly branding "everyone" as evil / Nazis / white supremacists is bad - wait till you hear about people claiming the "political left" all brand people as evil / Nazis / white supremacists.

I remember when the political right branded everyone as a communist.

> Could you help me understand why you feel "cultural Marxism" is so, totally, totalizing?

It simply means that the ideology won’t stop until it has transformed all of culture. The progress thus far has been academia -> journalism -> tech companies. It’s coming for the rest of society. There is no area of life or society that this ideology does not claim to address.

You missed “sanctified” - the ideology resists criticism. Do you not see that this is the way religion used to be?

> It simply means that the ideology won’t stop until it has transformed all of culture. The progress thus far has been academia -> journalism -> tech companies. It’s coming for the rest of society. There is no area of life or society that this ideology does not claim to address.

So let me get this straight: You're railing against an ideology that you claim has progressed through a large section of society, and you think it is bad, and you think, presumably, that society ought to not be like that, at least in these many areas. And your criticism of that ideology is that it claims to address many areas of society?

> You missed “sanctified” - the ideology resists criticism. Do you not see that this is the way religion used to be?

You missed the bit where I used the word "sanctimonious".

There is no such thing as "cultural marxism", it's a term manufactured by modern libertarians to distract people with a fake culture war while they're robbed blind by corrupt politicians. Like "virtue signalling". It's also a red flag that someone is racist and ignorant, and should be called out in the same way as flat earth, climate denial or any other range of denialist mindsets.

Marxism is a basis for critical theory. The critical theory that made a species jump from academia to the mainstream has its roots in the ideas of Gramsci and Marcuse, among others.

I call it “cultural Marxism” because unlike plain old Marxism, it has relatively little to say about the redistribution of wealth and other economic interests. In this way it’s made itself innocuous to corporate America, which would otherwise mobilize its immune system to reject the ideas outright.

Case in point: I recently sat through some corporate training on privilege that did not, once, mention wealth or economic privilege.

What's Marxist about it, then?

Marxism is about the politics of the underclass - the revolutionary struggle to achieve a just society by upending the inequities of Capitalism. So the proletarian uprising wrests control of society from the bourgeoisie.

Cultural Marxism redefines the oppressed and oppressor along the lines of identity rather than economy. This makes it much more palatable to a capitalist society.

Ah, so it's just like Marxism, except without any of the discussion of Capitalism? And its an ideology about identity, which you feel sets it clearly apart from other ideologies?

The commenter did none of those things. They simply pointed out that the defense is often used by actual white supremacists.

"I didn't do it". That's how you know they did it.

The irony of this whole section of the thread in the context of racism...

And if someone sees you making an OK hand sign, that's a secret white supremacist gesture and you should be fired.