Anything that you learned about Marx that wasnt in a book, or wasn’t written by someone with a deep admiration of Marx, probably needs to be unlearned.

Another common refrain I’d hear about Marx was that his theories never considered “human nature” when his philosophical legacy, dialectical materialism, is literally a scientific study of human action and development. What’s scary is he wrote books like Value, Price, and Profit where he proves that inflation isn’t caused by rising wages, yet when prices go up all we hear about is increase in demand due to rising wages, blah blah. He proved this stuff to be bs all those years ago, but the ruling class doesn’t have a better excuse for conspiring against the workers. It turns out that the logic of capital always goes against workers, who could have predicted?

That’s what makes him so dangerous, his theories and methods aren’t that complicated for any worker, because we live a lot of this stuff and think about it, but we doubt it too. Studying Marx removes the doubt. He’s not easy to read but he’s not like unnecessarily obtuse, just have to do some studying before diving into Capital, but if read with a group for support, that’s probably the best book I’ve ever read.

In any case! If you want to read more, start with Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Engels. Engels is easier to read but the two authors are almost inseparable theoretically.

It appears so because he was usually writing about Europe specifically. My version of Das Kapital ends with his correspondence with a Russian revolutionary, where he says pretty much that - she asks him if Russia should necessarily go through a capitalist phase before socialism, and he answers Das Kapital is about the western european history specifically, and each place has its own specific history. He tells her about how the development of russian rural communes of the time had the potential to turn Russia into a powerhouse to rival any capitalist country.