Firstly Marx and Das Kapital are not the Soviet Union. The USSR was an attempt to make communism work, much the way that the United States was is was (is no longer) an attempt to make democracy work.
US constitutional framers made a lot of mistakes and concessions: failing to end slavery and the chattel status of women, using first-past-the-post elections and embracing a two party system, using the electoral college as an intentional sabotage of popular democracy by which the ownership class could undermine a popular vote creating early precedence the US is only a democracy as far as oligarchs can control it.
So when railroad barons in the 19th century were able to assure they got to choose who got to run in the primaries, even then, the people got to vote for elite-picked officials, and public-serving governance was already sabotaged.
At the time of the Great Depression (1929-1939), communism was looking pretty good to the people because we were living in cardboard boxes and eating flour paste and shoe leather and Hoover and the industrialists thought this was fine. (š¶š„) So if you notice a lot of things going on today seem familiar and rhyme with history, yeah, youāre totally right. This isnāt our first rodeo.
In fact, our industrialists balked when FDR pushed the New Deal, which was a stopgap to give capitalism another chance. Some of our oligarchs were already looking to overturn democracy for fascism. Even then, a PragerU-style an anti-communism campaign (delayed a bit by WWII) was created and pushed onto kids. The stuff on YouTube isnāt new. Itās the same stuff put on reels and shown to me when I was in school in the late 70s / early 80s, just updated and available faster.
Letās also remember the Red Scare started with Wilson, who sought to isolate and sabotage communism in the Soviet Union weeks after the October Revolution much the way the monarchist coalition of Europe turned on France after its revolution in 1789. So communism never really had a chance but to establish ad hoc hierarchies which leads to corruption.
Iām not a political scientist. I canāt say how well the Marxist model can work, but that it hasnāt really ever had a chance what with industrialists hating on it the way monarchists hated on democracy. But then, here in the States, democracy never had a chance because it was sabotaged from the beginning. But we do know from both stories that plutocrats and aristocrats will always try to reinstall itself and sabotage efforts to partition and dissipate political power, as it has done continuously for the last few centuries. And whenever they seize power, public serving governance is the first casualty of corruption
(I talk about some of the easy fixes our framers could have made in the US to make democracy here more robust. Brains smarter than mine have come up with robust election reform packages that have been made and updated for decades now, with a snowflakeās chance in Hell of actually getting pushed through state and federal legislatures. Short of change by force, the US is already fucked.)
Yes, awful things happened in the USSR. But we actually talk about those while weāre still refusing the discuss the awful things still happening in the USA. We donāt like to talk about the people we donāt like to regard as people, and what we continue to do with them. And I think itās just as tankie to disregard the wrongdoing done by the US as it is by the USSR, by post-Soviet Russia or by China. Or by anyone, really. Weāre all the baddies.
And that said Iām not going to throw out Marx because of Russia any more than Iām going to throw out Hume because of America.