I love unraveling the bullshit the powerful use to trick us into thinking it’s in our best interest.

You would likely very much appreciate Marx then, as it is his work that plainly showed the most fundamental way in which the capitalists (the ruling class then and now) exploit the masses and how that exploitation is the basis for the existence of the capitalist class. It’s very much the foundation for why it is even a necessity for, as you said, the powerful to trick us about what our interests actually are. But you don’t have to read his work directly to get a basic and general understanding of what he said. The same way you don’t have to read Darwin in order to develop a basic and general grasp of evolution. However, in both cases you do have to engage with some of the actual material on the topic so as not to come away with a false understanding of it, e.g. a creationist’s cartoonish understanding of natural selection (“my grandpa wasn’t a gotdamned monkey!”) or a right-winger’s ridiculous notions of communism (“the tankies want to steal my toothbrush!”)

Spoken like a true commie

Indeed it is, hence it being absolutely correct.

Lemmygrad isn’t “hated” by most of the wider lemmyverse. There’s just a loud and obnoxious minority of people that will rail and rant about lemmygrad. They loudly rant about lemmygrad because they aren’t used to seeing their worldview get challenged and by its very nature as a radical leftist community, lemmygrad is a challenge to the typical background liberal perspective.

It’s no surprise we all end up seeing a lot of threads about “those mean tankies at lemmygrad” (and hexbear too) made by people who can’t take their worldview getting questioned, or even shown to be flawed, or just not standing up to their own scrutiny, and who get mad when that happens. There are also of course people with ideological reasons to demonize leftwing politics and will spread shit for that reason alone. But overall, I don’t think most people care enough except to think “oh yeah that’s that instance with those radical lefties, they’re weird but they do make some great memes sometimes.”