Being a Marxist means dealing with actual material conditions, and recentering the human subject, thoughts and experiences, within a material analysis. The materialism that came before, and persists to this day is a kind of analysis that divides everything into categories, hides systematic relations, and hides the human spirit from scientific progress. Marx identified these problems in Theses of Feuerbach in 1844, and spent the rest of his life developing solutions, which went on to found whole social scientific disciplines, and inspire revolutionary change.

Marxism is a revolutionary worldview which centers the human experience as objective. If you think you're a free thinker, but hasn't studied Marx in an intentional and practical way, then you're not. You are defaulting ideological methods that affirm the ruling ideology.

The reason I'm a Marxist is because I want to help get people from that default stage to the next stage, which is Marxism. After that, then maybe we can surpass Marx, and in some ways many Marxists have. But its very difficult to achieve without Marx. In fact someone with less education would probably be more suited to move bast dualist rationalism than virtually any academic. But within Marxism ideas don't matter until they are put into practice in order to prove themselves in the real world, not just old books. The philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it