In my experience, at least here on Lemmy, it’s more frequent interacting with liberals that disavow Marxists and Marxist movements as betraying Marx. These users, though, seem to see Marx as a reformist or an anarchist that was simply misunderstood by the billions of working class revolutionaries over the last century. If Marx were so easy to fully understand without engaging with Marxist theory, then how would it be so easy to misunderstand so broadly?

The truth is that Marx wasn’t betrayed, and that Marxism is neither easy to understand nor impossibly difficult. It takes a bit of effort to begin to really grasp concepts like historical materialism, dialectical materialism, scientific socialism, the withering of the state, and we aren’t taught these concepts in school. However, that doesn’t mean it’s so easy to completely misinterpret Marxism when you run a country explicitly aligned with Marxism, and distribute Marxist works and theory, teach it in schools, etc.

For those who want to read a bit more about Marxism, I made an introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list. I highly recommend giving it a look! And for those who’ve seen it before, it recently got a refresh a few weeks ago!