I've always been critical of conservative anti-intellectualism, where one just writes off any and every liberal and leftist academic alike carte-blanche and characterizes it all as brainwashing, often without actually reading the material or having much of a real counter argument to any of it, appeals to "common sense" to justify ignorance or prejudice, defaulting to the conspiracy theory that everything you don't like is Marxism or Post-Modernism while wielding those terms in the most sloppy way possible.

By another token though, after familiarizing myself more and more with the Marxist sphere, it is striking just how many Marxists explicitly belong to an ivory tower group of academics and media professionals who (1) mostly just seem to talk to each other and otherwise be part of a book selling and media clout chasing cottage industry and (2) sometimes are so heavy on jargon and abstraction that it's nearly impossible for most of the working class to remotely understand them, and with even a fairly steeped "self-taught intellectual" like myself feeling lost past a point.

This isn't because the working class is "stupid", but because (1) they don't have the leisure time to invest in this stuff; my own "intellectual" engagements have been in many ways a result of my own past leisure time afforded to me by my middle class free rider family history and (2) half the Marxist dialogue genuinely is a useless circle jerk that presents nothing that can actually relate to or be helpful for working people, so much as a philosophical mindfuck conjoined with weirdo art school stuff and aesthetics; they're weirdo nihilists.

There's also an anarchist equivalent for a lot of Marxist theories, but it's not necessarily common or popular to be aware of that or admit it. The age-old sectarian conflict between Anarchism and Marxism is way played out. Of course, a share of anarchists contributes to that themselves, especially with post-left trends since the 90's where people run with radical liberalism and some of the less savory interpretations of postmodernism, capitulate to capitalism, or reduce anarchism to a lifestyle brand. By another token though, every modern Marxist who isn't stuck in the 1920's still already is tacitly in partial agreement with postmodernists, and half of Marxist praxis devolves into liberalism itself anyways.

I bill myself as an "independent leftist" on my Substack because I am engaged in dialectical engagement with and criticism of both Anarchism and Marxism, and I'm uncomfortable with the culty aspects of joining a camp or someone's little splinter group. Joining Substack last month itself reinforces my perception about leftist academic bubbles and media cottage industries too - it's an algorithm by and for precisely the types I speak of; relatively cozy industry professionals who likely don't know what it's like to be working poor at a grocery store for a living. Some of them I like too! But it is what it is.