Lopéz de Medrano-Rincón-Shaw defined Chern-Schwartz-MacPher-son cycles for an arbitrary matroid
M
{M}
and proved by an inductive geometric argument that the unsigned degrees of these cycles agree with the coefficients of
T
(
M
;
x
,
0
)
T({M};x,0)
, where
T
(
M
;
x
,
y
)
T({M};x,y)
is the Tutte polynomial associated to
M
{M}
. Ardila-Denham-Huh recently utilized this interpretation of these coefficients in order to demonstrate their log-concavity. In this note we provide a direct calculation of the degree of a matroid Chern-Schwartz-MacPherson cycle by taking its stable intersection with a generic tropical linear space of the appropriate codimension and showing that the weighted point count agrees with the Gioan-Las Vergnas refined activities expansion of the Tutte polynomial.