Critical Theory does not take sides a priori except that the intellectuals who founded it have enormous blind spots for the flaws of Marxist thinking, and are hypercritical of liberal capitalism. So it kind of does take sides, even though it says it isn’t supposed to. (It also jettisons some of the most important controls that keep reason grounded, while saying that it is based entirely on reason…it’s rather a weird beast.)

But, anyway, I have no issue with someone saying Critical Theory is Marxist. The differences are not large enough for it to matter in most cases, at least with early Critical Theory. There might be some important distinctions to draw with Postmodern Critical Theory.

But aside from the similarity in name, that Critical Race Theory inherits enough from Critical Theory is NOT obvious to me. I know Methodists are Christian because they adopt a majority of Christian doctrine, and say so. But Critical Legal Studies jettisoned some ideas from Critical Theory and adopted some others, and Critical Race Theory explicitly rejects class as an organizing principle (central to Marxism, of course) while adopting race instead. So I don’t think the parallel is very good. I think you need to spell out in detail which parts of CRT (and which CRT you mean, the academic foundations or the modern social movement that says it “isn’t CRT” when challenged but has no other name for itself and is happy to accept the label when lauded) are Marxist in order to establish the claim.

I know BLM’s leaders say they are Marxist. BLM also says it’s a “decentralized political movement”. So I kinda don’t care very much what the self-styled leaders say because leaders aren’t terribly relevant for a decentralized movement. Anyway, this was an aside the whole time, I think, and we can just drop it. I don’t think it matters; I mentioned it as a point of logical argumentation more than as an issue whose truth or falsity matters much to the overall discussion.