[WS:] I am not sure about it. If there is any truth in it, is likely because marxism often sounds very much like a cult. The words of the Prophet are the ultimate test of The Truth, everything else is false prophecy or heresy. I do not know that many academics who are comfortable with cults. Of course, there are others who flatly reject marxism, but they do it for reasons that have nothing to do with misreading or not wanting to be associated with it.
Another observation - there is a certain tendency in modern academia to put intellectual property rights before any other consideration. This entails attributing ideas to people as they were the sole creators of them and no one else could possibly come up with a similar idea. Hence we have a proliferation of "effects" named after a whole bunch of academic celebrities, which are in fact empirical observations or generalizations of such observations that any competent scholar sufficiently knowledgeable in the subject matter can make. It bothers me because I am not favor of intellectual property rights nor do I care for celebrity cults of any kind. I prefer a medieval approach in which scholars simply took what seemed true to them without bothering to attribute it to a particular writer. Or, for that matter, Newton's comment that if he saw further it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants.
Wojtek