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It's easy to understand in the colonial world. Countries were colonized so the colonizer could gain control over their natural resources. Brutal systems of cash-crop agriculture were introduced which displaced indigenous agrarian systems based on communal farmland and repatriated the profits back to the home country. Marxism explained all that and could be meshed with nationalism.
I was recently working on "Honor and Values" in Vietnam which had a lengthy history of repelling foreign invaders. Ho Chi Minh could extent that to the struggle for independence. We weren't even aware of this national narrative used to invoke resistance. And had we been, there was no way to plug anti-communism into it to get Vietnamese to fight on behalf of the Republic of Vietnam (Saigon government).
