The problem is that people get sucked into communism due to its success and the fact that Capital is crucial reading. Capital is also difficult reading that requires pre-Marx prerequisites, and The Communist Manifesto is really short. So people read The Communist Manifesto, which is really all Engels, and pretend to have read or understood Capital.

No need to get hung up on Communism. We have wonderful traditions of class politics in the US, pre- and early-Soviet Russia, Spain, Italy, Germany, India. You can almost entirely avoid that century of cargo-culted Bolshevik word salad.