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PhilGoetz comments on Is altruistic deception really necessary? Social activism and the free market - Less Wrong Discussion
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There a lot of wrong with that paragraph. The main problem is that's based on the lies. The lie that the political spectrum being well partitionated into left and right. After that none of the Democratic presidential candidates are Marxists the suggestion that they are is deeply flawed. In 2008 the Democrats outraised the Republicans. They got more money for corporate donors. In the election Obama had more economic professors as economic advisors than McCain who had a bunch of supply side advisors which happens to be a strain of thought not believed to represent the truth by mainstream economists.
In 2008 Berny Sanders isn't raising money from corporate donors. On the other hand he supports the status quo enough to pledge to support Hillary Clinton should she be elected, even when people like Ralph Nader think that giving away a lot of power to influence change.
On thing that most economists agree on is that free trade is great. The leading Republican presidential candidate doesn't believe in free trade. It was disgust in 1988 of how US politicians allow free access to US market to foreign actions and then talked that it the issue might motivate him to run for office in the future.
Lastly it was Marx who came up with the idea of seeing everything as a struggle of capitalism vs. marxism. It's worth noting that you are advocating for marxist ideas.
But if Marxists actually are out there struggling to overthrow capitalism, recognizing that is simply recognizing reality.
On of the tenets of Marxism is to see every conflict as the struggle between the capitalist class and the workers class. That's wrong. There are a lot of conflicts that are not driven by the fight of the two classes.
Apart from that corporate Democrats that outraise Republicans simply aren't Marxist in any meaningful sense.
The identity politics Democrats engage in is fundamentally Marxist. Plug in dichotomy, identify oppressor and oppressed end of the dichotomy, rinse, lather, repeat. Collectivism. Class consciousness, False consciousness.
Not marxists economically, but ideologically. And even while they're not marxists economically, they are certainly anticapitalist, as most problems are attributed partially to capitalism, and the solutions to those problems are less capitalism and more government control of markets.
To that extend the OP is a Marxist. He's focusing on the dichomtomy.
Ideologically postmodernism leads to the acceptance that Black people can live in a Black community and don't have to integrate into White society. Ideologically today's left puts value on protecting native cultures and doesn't believe in pushing modern Western cultural values on other societies.
That's very much against Marx idea that everything is supposed to come together.
Today's left considers that everybody is entitled to his own identity and there no need for individuals to integrate into the collective norms of identity. There's no belief that there one correct identity and that if history finally advances to communism everybody will have that collective identity.
Diversity ideologically valued when Marx didn't value it.
Seems to me that you and ChristianKl disagree on how many specific details can one remove from Marx and still call the result "fundamentally Marxist". Specifically, whether you can remove "class struggle" and replace it with any "X struggle" (such as gender struggle or race struggle or otherkin vs non-kin struggle).
I suspect that you could both more or less agree that identity politics uses similar rhetorical tools as Marxism, only replacing class struggle with other values of X. And that the thing you disagree at is whether the rhetorical tools themselves should be called "Marxist"; because for you "Marxism" is in the rhetorical tools themselves, while for ChristianKl "Marxism" is the specific application of those tools to the class struggle.
Or I may be completely wrong here, but this was the first impression.
It seems worth distinguishing "has something in common with Marx's ideas" from "is fundamentally Marxist", especially as "Marxist" is a pretty inflammatory term because of the horrors perpetrated in the name of Marxism in the 20th century.
So, what are these ideas you're calling fundamentally Marxist? I think it comes down to this: "Sometimes one group of people has more power and resources than another, and acts in ways that harm the worse-off group. We should frame such situations in terms of conflict between the two groups, even though some people in the worse-off group may not see it that way."
I'm not sure I'd want to endorse those ideas, but they seem to me to fall far short of justifying the description as "fundamentally Marxist".
Advocating more regulation of markets is not at all the same thing as opposing capitalism. I think you are confusing capitalism with, I dunno, libertarianism or something.
Capitalism means having lots of privately owned industry and trade. Anyone who isn't advocating large-scale nationalization, or something more drastic than that, is not being anticapitalist in any useful sense.