a take I've seen multiple times (and I don't mean to vague but I wasn't able to find an example for this post) from communists here is that academics in particular are unable to produce worthwhile or marxist analyses. There is a double standard at play here in which certain professions and means of intellectual production are seen as irredeemably contaminated (the case of academia and adjacents), and everything else remains unscrutinized. Generally speaking academics are under the same essential ideo-economic pressures as any other profession; there is no line of work in which identifying as a communist and acting on explicit and uncompromising marxist terms will not receive punishment. Focusing on intellectual production, I'd even argue academics experience certain freedoms not available for other avenues, such as social media, where many attempt to contribute to x or y conversation (like I am) and the medium imposes constraints on form and content that are more actively hostile to sustained theoretical argument than anything academic publication requires, e.g. the demand for immediate legibility, for compression into whatever unit circulates, for the affective register that drives engagement. But some people act like academic production is uniquely precluded from value to the broad communist movement or even tainted.
If one could call it that, the marxist "canon" has been built upon, in significant proportion, bourgeois, flawed, and non-materialist sources. This is possible because capitalism as an object is internally heterogeneous and the possibility of its negation and overcoming only exists in the gaps between its parts; no matter how much the ideological and implicit mechanisms work to maintain itself, its inherent contradictions breed the subjective agents that will overthrow it. The philosophy of dialectical materialism argues that consciousness is a reflection of reality, which entails that there are kernels of truth and moments of useful argumentation in any given academic work, no matter the conditions of its production, as long as it has a basis in the observations of reality. Engels used Morgan, Lenin used Clausewitz, Gramsci used Machiavelli, etc. To deny, not even the usefulness, but the possibility itself of usefulness in academic production, effectively perpetuates an ignorance of the world and a negation of reality. It is analogous to the leftcom refusal to work within the worker's unions.
