Marxist Metaethics and neo-Marxism
The concept of Cultural Marxism has become something of a problem for the right. While there is plenty of reason to believe in it as a generalisation about certain academic circles, it has long since been designated a far-right conspiracy theory. To make sense of it without resorting to any conspiracies, it is necessary to extract the precise elements which create conceptual continuity between orthodox Marxism and the neo-Marxist theorists of Critical Theory and postmodern identity politics. They are not just an intellectual tradition applying Marxist axioms to "culture", but a single moral community, a culture built on Marxist moral principles.
There is undeniably a continuity in the academic tradition that tracks from Marx to intersectionalism, but what binds its followers together, is not immediately tangible to those not obsessively acquainted with their character and history. While those who pursue the intellectual history of the left from the outside are well aware that most of the more prominent of them (Marcuse, Adorno, Althusser, de Beauvoir, Foucault) were either Stalinists or Maoists, the post-Soviet left have kept insisting that they weren't in any way even Marxists of a general kind.
What has made the entire project so difficult to address is that it has been bathed in an opaque cloud of the densest jargon and "bullshit", making putting the lot together in public debate a painful and often embarrassing act which receives the same treatment as the search for Pepe Silvia. However, what binds them together is no more complex than three axiomatic beliefs:
that morality is a historically contingent social system determined by class domination;
that overthrowing it and transgressing it are moral imperatives;
that all disagreement is the product of false consciousness.
This is explicitly the view Marx held on all moral propositions. It is morally indiscriminate and pursues unending revolution unto a totalising social singularity. The result of putting it into practice systematically is the famous declaration of the students of the May '68 revolt, "it is forbidden to forbid". By framing this in clear, simple terms, it exposes the entire architecture of the moral code which guides all modern leftist behaviour. If anybody believes in the moral axioms stated above, they are a cultural Marxist. This is a test which can pass Popper's principle of falsification, turning the concept into a useful, clear, concise, and unambiguous test which avoids reflecting the dishonest accusatio via negativa that is Neoliberalism.
Each moral community has values which it holds inviolable. For religious communities, these values are to be found in their holy texts. But for modern secular atheists, or even religious Modernists, morality lies elsewhere. For liberals, it is the maximisation of "liberty", though they are divided over the nature of its meaning and the role of the state. There are those who believe that the state may only grant negative rights, enforcing one's right not to be interfered with. And there are also those who believe it has a duty to provide positive rights in order to facilitate a positive freedom, a freedom to do as one wishes. Often, liberals are utilitarians, seeking the greatest good for the greatest number, sometimes they think some things are simply wrong or right in themselves. There are those who believes that morality ought to serve a race or a primordial culture, and there are those who believe morality derives from that which builds the best character.
Marxism has a different, quite specific moral scheme. It is these metaethical principles which are used to determine what is right and wrong at every instance. The more potent the means of inserting interpretations of class domination into the interpretation of an utterance, action, or social arrangement, the greater one's power of asserting one's dominance over others by accusing them of the crime of upholding these "systems" of domination. By introducing new classes into one's social ontology, one introduces new dominance hierarchies into the social analysis, increasing the number of ideas which require attack, and increasing the list of mores and norms demanding transgression. Hence the inclusion of sex, race and sexuality. Feminism itself was invented by a male socialist, and all of its forms since the 20th century were prefigured by Friedrich Engels's On the Origin of the Family. This proliferation of classes and oppression dynamics is designed to increase the scope and dimension of the revolutionary project.
By imposing generalisations and associations onto a cultural artefacts like literature and social etiquette, you may designate moral value on it in virtue of its symbolic capacity to signal complicity with or against the revolutionary system. This constant introduction of new means of transgressing and condemning creates a perpetual cultural revolution, increasing in fervour and instability with each passing iteration, and the more banal the topic under scrutiny (knitting, for example), the lower the cost of activism for the activist.
Foucault introduced the most radical instantiation of this project, by taking Marx's concept of false consciousness to its logical conclusion - all knowledge is contingent on class domination. What this has resulted in, is the "lived experience" paradigm, whereby opposition to ignorance and prejudice is radically dismissed as coming from outside the epistemic realm from which those facts can be perceived, and in preservation of the revolutionary ethic, the downtrodden are the ones who really know the oppression of the system, and will rise up and destroy the ruling classes if they are given but a chance. By introducing new classes, you introduce new ways of saying "counterrevolutionary", and in a post-Leninist world, Leninist language needs to find a less worn-out substitute - "house-negritude" or "internalised misogyny", or other ways of stripping a person of their blackness, their feminism, their gayness, or their womanhood.
By making Marx's suppositions totalising and absolute, Foucault inevitably advocated for the destruction and overturning of all moral precepts found in "bourgeois" society, including the notion that children should not be sexually molested by adults, and the notion of procedural justice, which he believed should be replaced by a spontaneous, public, violent, mob-based lynching, with no grounds for defence, argument or reasoning (page 1 of this book). If that is beginning to sound familiar, it should also be beginning to sound frightening.
Vast proportions of the courses taught in almost every Western university are based in the thought of Foucault. He is never criticised, and is always treated as a genius whose praise can never be dealt in excess. All criticism is treated as paranoid, far-right delusion, and any notion that his private morality might have anything to do with his social theories, which are often grounded on wild, unfounded generalisations from anecdote, and occasionally total factual fabrications, are treated as naive or cynical ad hominems.
In the case of South Africa, and of post Western colonial societies in general, the effect that this has on racial dialogue is to indulge the most excessive and bloodthirsty fantasies of racial superiority and revenge from blacks, while condemning any criticism from whites as an effort to preserve racial domination. In South Africa, where morality, hope and principle go to die, in the most prestigious university in the land, a globally ranked research university no less, the Vice Chancellor has come out in support of a student who was allowed to pass their Honours thesis with a paper arguing for genocide as a solution to South Africa's "settler-colonial" question. Not a single black academic gave the tiniest jot of criticism of this, and the half-hearted apology, not followed up by any disciplinary action or even moral admonition, was treated as a cowardly retreat from the righteous support of "decolonisation", which everybody understands is a moral imperative, but which nobody can define, allowing genocidaires to masquerade as picaresque academic provocateurs.
So what are we to make of all of this? Well, my position is quite simple. Since there are few left-wingers who will condemn all instances of genocidal rhetoric, and a prominent number of them who offer conditional defences of it, and even entire fields of academia who systematically deny it when it is committed by a band waving a red flag, it is without a doubt the precise moral equivalent of fascist racial metaphysics, and must be heartily condemned wherever it appears.