Intellectuals wrestle with the 'truth', but the truth is changing as society and technology evolve. From a historical viewpoint we can criticize Marx but at the time of his thinking there was a conflict between capital and labour as new mechinization of the industrial revolution had concentrated wealth into the hands of factory owners and workers had migrated from rural work to urban factories. In most industrialized economies some degree of socialist ideas were adopted and the mixed economy came to be predominant in the post WW2 era, while Communist USSR and the mixed economies of the west then entered into the conflict that was the Cold War. Today China has a mixed economy and its productivity is demonstrably greater than the neoliberalised crony capitalist west. Humans organise into nation states because only in groups working collectively do humans gain the collective power to contest and acquire the limited resources and labour that are required to become a wealthy dominant economy. Today the conflict between China and its allies, Iran and Russia and N.Korea continues the contest between mixed/socialist economies and the west where today corporate sponsors dominate governments and democracy is frequently a farce. Yes intellectuals often advocate pacifism but they ignore the reality that the wealth of nations is an ongoing and probably unavoidable contest for resources and control of institutions and protocols and when trade fails to act as the medium of competition military conflict is the natural and almost inevitable consequence. To right off intellectuals is probably as dangerous as blindly accepting what they advocate- instead take their ideas and arguments as a starting place from which to question and explore their reasoning- and accept that as time goes by the 'truth' often changes. For example as we now enter the post industrial era of robotics, biotech, nanotech, digital technology and algorithms the concentration of power and wealth is shifting yet again to the owners of algorithms and internet platforms and the new currency of control is data.