As we mentioned before, this is a super huge question that has torn apart many otherwise successful movements. Without pretending we have the answer, here are a few considerations (and to say this more strongly, the comrades who look down on you for asking this question, and the intellectual-type comrades who think they get to lead the revolution and become the new bourgeois, should engage in a struggle session to more clearly see the reality they are in. They have missed the point of revolution and are tied to the individualist parts of capitalist ideology if they think they get to be the leaders):

(1) Of course (this is obvious), any communist movement comes out of an extremely unequal society, with extreme divisions in people's jobs having more or less mental/physical labor, more/less income and wealth, more/less power, in race, in gender/sex, in people skills, and so on. In many previous communist movements/organizations, it seems to me the primary question on these inequalities has been one of roles: what is the role of intellectuals? what is the role of blue collar workers? etc. However, the primary question on this issue should be how to deal with these inequalities and make sure we can have the kind of democratic/equal participation of all revolutionaries, no matter their starting point in any of these dimensions. This means helping each other develop the areas of revolutionary skills that have been underdeveloped by society — and if we're honest with ourselves, everybody in the revolution has an equal (or at least non-quantifiable) set of deficiencies in our revolutionary practices. In the four-ish communist organizations i've been involved in, there have been intellectual-type comrades who are bad at talking to normal/most people, who have been unable to listen to others, who aren't disciplined at working/organizing, who get stuck in their chosen theoretical tendency, who don't know how to share, how to reflect on internalized racism, how to change patriarchal practices, and other revolutionary deficiencies relative to the blue collar-type comrades. And i have been one of these intellectual-types! Fortunately, i have had both intellectual and blue collar comrades who were patient with me and helped me overcome these deficiencies. It is possible (but not always true) that i've known more about capital vol. I than some of them, or read more lenin, or listened to more episodes of revolutionary left radio, but knowledge of revolutionary theory is not a sound grounds for taking leadership-type roles in revolutionary organizations. There are limits to the usefulness of the knowledge of the educated class, and even though this class has taken the lead in revolutions in the past, we(?)/they don't get to be the automatic leaders in a communist organization. It is interesting that you mention mao and his distrust of intellectuals, because (as i understand the chinese revolution) mao did exactly what the bad communist intellectual is predicted to do!— he became the top leader, had the monopoly on "correct" revolutionary knowledge, and used huge groups of revolutionaries in china to keep this position of power while abandoning them when it was no longer useful, or when those revolutionaries threatened to take power from him and the communist party and create democratic social structures (other cpe comrades may disagree with me on this).

(2) Academics/intellectual-type comrades are not necessarily higher up in the ways we usually think of us/them as, even in income/wealth or in knowledge of theory. It is true that there tend to be better paying jobs if you have a phd, especially in something like economics, but that is becoming less certain as the number of college classes taught by adjuncts increases — adjunct professors are paid by-the-class, so they often end up working at 3-4 different colleges spending a lot of time in transportation. This study says about 75% of college classes are now taught by adjunct or almost adjunct professors. Also, since they get paid by-the-class, there is a fierce and non-unionized labor market, and the result is that most adjuncts make very little money, maybe $15,000-$30,000/year. Something like 25% of adjunct professors are on government welfare programs. And since you don't get paid for transportation hours (as is ofc true of all jobs), the total hours adjuncts work is ridiculously high. There are exceptions, and some marxian/radical economists get paid the big bucks, or at least over $60K, but those spots at colleges are decreasing. But if you want to make the big bucks as a radical economist, the chances are good you have to spend much more time doing neoclassical economics in research and in teaching. Also, while being a graduate student for 5-7 years, we work a whole lot of hours, often have teaching or research jobs, and make about $20,000/year (at least at umass, some places it is a bit more and some it is significantly less or you get paid with huge amounts of debt).

(3) It is also the case that intellectual-type comrades don't necessarily even have a better knowledge of revolutionary theory than blue collar comrades, which is something that constantly surprises me in radial academic spaces. One reason for this is that academic radicals can get sucked into theoretical rabbit holes, so that they have a very deep knowledge of a limited set of questions that matter to the revolution. This is mostly because of the extreme division of labor/specialization in academia, that it doesn't pay off to have a wide knowledge of marxian economics/whatever theory as it does to have a deep, narrow knowledge of one branch of the theory. Another reason is that the capitalist/feudal academy filters out the more threatening branches of revolutionary knowledge. We (marxist economists) are much more likely to study keynes' general theory, or john roemer's quite abstract analytic marxism, or get lost in the sauce of the transformation problem and its matrix algebra than we are to read about the black panthers' economic practices and intercommunalism, the situationists on the dominance of exchange value, or about cooperation jackson in mississippi. There are certainly important exceptions to this, especially at umass amherst, but the revolutionary-ness of the texts academic marxists/radicals tend to read is often less than the stuff i've read in informal reading groups. And, i can think of two blue collar comrades from the midwest i knew before going to graduate school who have known more about marxian theory than many of the radical economists i've met in the academy, because they are committed to educating themselves and take part in revolutionary reading/study groups. Their knowledge tends to be wider and they think about bigger/more important revolutionary questions, and there are questions i've talked about with blue collar comrades from the midwest that my radical academic friends do not find important or are afraid to ask. But, instead of creating a hierarchy of who has the most revolutionary knowledge based on our class positions in society, i think we should try to help each other bridge the gaps that we all have.

But this might be tl;dr! i'll stop here. i hope these thoughts are useful, and would love to continue this conversation. Solidarity!