A pyramid scheme masquerading as a quasi-sociopolitical economic theory, first developed from the various writings of
Karl Marx and Friederich Engels, and later embellished upon by intellectual luminaries such as Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Josef Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and Che Guevara. Often Marxists will attempt to misrepresent their system of ideas as something "progressive"; in
truth the system in practice most resembles a form of secular feudalism.
Marxist societies, being in essence kleptocratic in form, invariably fail once the economy of the nation so ruled has been bled white. Thereafter such a failed nation is said by Marxists to have been instead an example of some form of proto-
fascism; terms such as "Proletarian Bonapartism", "state
capitalism", and other such equivalent nonsense. The equivalent is for Nazis to claim that a true
fascist state has
never existed, that detractors ought to read Mein Kampf to get the true story of what Nazism is truly about, etc (see David Irving).
A common misconception Marxists like to spread is that their system of economic and social management is codified in texts by Marx/Engels, such as
Das Kapital. If one takes the
time to read such texts, it becomes readily clear that not only are they woefully out of
date (referring to issues that were important in the 19th century), but that for the most part the analyses the theory is based on is mostly utter nonsense (see "labour theory of value"). In actual practice both the analyses and theoretical applications of Marxism are meant for people at the bottom of the pyramid scheme to absorb; those at the top use the theory to justify mass thievery, mass
murder and class
genocide.
Marxism as a theory is a precursor to
fascism and, later, Nazism. The
key difference between these two systems is that early Marxists believed people should be robbed, enslaved and murdered based on their class and/or vocational identity; Nazism believes people should be robbed, enslaved and murdered based on their racial or ethnic identity. Otherwise there is virtually no difference, either in structural form or function.