In the comments, Ergo raised a good question about the moral judgment of Marxist dictators versus Marxist intellectuals. So I’d like to sketch an answer to the question: Why and how is the Marxist intellectual morally worse than the Marxist dictator?
The key point is that the Marxist intellectual willfully makes possible all the brutal rights-violations of the Marxist dictator. That’s no accident, it’s the explicit end of his intellectual work. How so?
At least in the case of Soviet Russia, the Marxist intellectuals did all that — with exactly the consequences I’ve outlined. Without their help, Soviet Russia would not have lasted for all those decades. In fact, it never would have even come into existence.
While I do think that the Marxist intellectual must evade more than the dictator — if only for the simple reason that he’s called upon to think more in the course of his work — I don’t think the magnitude of his evil is a solely function of the magnitude of his evasion. (A hermit in the woods may evade all day long, but I wouldn’t call him evil, for the simple reason that the scale of his destruction is so small. He’s just immoral.)
To be valid, the moral judgment should integrate mind and body by asking: What does the evasion accomplish in reality? So we need to pay attention to the scale of the destruction of values involved. In the case of the Marxist intellectual, he did not just make the mass murder of Stalin possible, he also made that of Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot possible. He also promoted socialism in Europe and America — with substantial success.
However, and this is critical, the fact that the Marxist intellectual is more evil than the Marxist dictator does not mean that the dictator is not fully evil. The dictator is absolutely 100% morally black, without the slightest shred of good in him. My point is rather that the evil of the Marxist intellectual is of broader scope. Despite his veneer of civility, he is a danger to every living creature on the planet. By leveraging people’s ordinary altruism into even just some sympathy for socialism, he is teaching them to submit to the yoke of whatever dictator might arise, while also encouraging the rise of that dictator. (And yes, that does require more evasion than just driving the yoke.) Without that intellectual legwork, the dictators wouldn’t stand a chance.
I haven’t covered all the possible angles on this topic, not even all those raised by David Kelley in Truth and Toleration. In particular, I haven’t touched upon the argument that any given Marxist intellectual is just one voice in a loud chorus, nor upon the point that the intellectual persuades others while the dictator forces them. Still, I hope that the above comments constitute at least a clarifying start.