Rejecting the authority of academic economists essentially requires recognizing the ideological roots of neoclassical economics. Marx and Engels extrapolated from classical economists like Smith and Ricardo, who also assumed labor theory of value, when formulating Marxist economic theory. Starting in the late 19th/early 20th century - around the same time Engels and Lenin would have been writing about the contemporary emergence of oligopolistic capitalism and imperialism - neoclassical economists would end up rejecting labor theory of value and develop an alternative subjective theory of value, necessarily a rejection of one of the foundational premises of Marxist economics and itself a foundational premise of orthodox economics as it's typically taught in universities.

The framing shifts from workers and capitalists to households and firms - distinctions between people of different economic classes (in terms of relationships to the means of production) are blurred, and distinctions between wants and needs are for the most part blurred as everything is modeled as a commodity and everything is subject to the logic of markets, cost-benefit calculations, and rational selfish expected utility-maximization or profit maximization, unless explicitly stated otherwise. What Marx called "labor power", the capitalist or liberal economist calls "human capital". The firm profits, not the capitalists (i.e. households whose income doesn't come from a wage) who extract rent, interest, and dividends from the firm. Consumer preferences are assumed to be unchanging and exogenous (marketing? propaganda? what are those?).

This is the same underlying logic - especially that of "economics imperialists" like Gary Becker who use these models to answer questions that other social scientists would normally be answering - which if abused can produce odious concepts like "sexual market value", or arguments in favor of price-gouging during moments of heightened scarcity. This is also why many neoliberals don't see a problem with the US's hellish health insurance system - they ignore the psychological toll of having to make difficult cost-benefit calculations, a concept beyond an understanding of consumer behavior that models consumer choice by solving the first-order conditions from a constrained optimization problem.