I am going to call it social marxism rather than Cultural Marxism, and for a few reasons. Cultural Marxism is a specific subset of Critical Theory that draws from Marcuse and Fromm. Most of the hucksters today aren’t actually peddling that, and certainly not in the churches.
Social Marxism is simply a social application of some of Marx’s concepts, like alienation and Hegel’s slave-master dialectic.
Here is Marx’s sociological ideas in a nutshell. It is a universal acid-drip. If you are using language like “alienation” or similar rot, you are a sociological Marxist. This is what the Radical Orthodox guys call an ontology of violence.
Thesis: Hegel cannot escape an alienation that exists between the people and the state.
Hegel’s logic: the Idea becomes a subject; other concepts, like political sentiment, become predicates of the Idea (Marx 65). Marx will take this and de-essentialize it. The substance now is only a Subject.
As demoniac Herbert Marcuse noted,
The distinction between reason (Vernunft) and understanding (Verstand) is the distinction between common sense and speculative thinking (44).
True thought is a triad (Triplizitat). A dynamic unity of opposites.
S is P.
To know what a thing really is we have to get past its immediately given state (S is S). S is S doesn’t tell us much. If we follow out the process S becomes something else, P, but still retains its own identity.
The earlier Hegelian analyses saw society as one of “ever repeated antagonisms in which all progress is but a temporary unification of opposites” (60-61). Only a universal revolution can overcome the universal negativity.
The alienation of labor creates a society split into opposing classes (289).
Division of labor: the process of separating various economic activities into specialized and delimited fields (290).
Key argument: Since the individual, on either Hegelian or Marxian lines, is a “Universal,” then the proletariat can only exist “world-historically;” therefore, the communist revolution is necessarily a world-revolution (292).
Summary: as long as we are milking perceived grievances and positing alienation between power structures (or more particularly, a structure of violence between Rich Capitalist CIS male and Woke PCA Blogger), then we are engaged in Cultural Marxism.
Outlaw Huguenot 