Leninism, Stalinism and Trotskyism In A Nutshell

Of the three well known Russian Revolutionaries, Leon Trotsky is probably the least well known apart from the fact that he was name checked in a Strangler song and was killed by an ice pick.
Now that Tony Blair has come out as a former Trotskyite, interest has grown in the man and what he stood for and how it differed from Marxism explained here.
Fact is, Marxism is the idea put forward by Karl Marx of a community (hence the name Communism) which is ruled by the people for the benefit of all while Leninism, Stalinism and Trotskyism are the interpretations of the ways of achieving Marxism. 
A quick review of the Russian Revolution is required so we have Lenin, Stalin and Trotksy at the head of the Bolshevik Party who disposed the Royals and found themselves in charge and wondering what to do next. 
Lenin was the boss and he, Stalin and Trotsky decided what was required in order to achieve Communism would be the need to set up a ruling Party, named the Vanguard, to oversee the installation of Communism and which would then fade away in time to leave the workers in charge.
So far, everybody on the same Marxism page but now comes the difference because Marx said for Communism to succeed, it would need to spread around the capitalist nations of the World but Lenin wanted to ensure Communism was settled in Russia before spreading the ideal out to other countries, this is called Permanent Revolution as in a domino effect where there would always been one country following another into Communism.
Trotsky didn't want to wait and wanted to strike while the iron was hot and spread it far and wide while Stalin wanted to keep it only in Russia and to turn the vanguard party into a permanent Government.
Lenin and Trotsky therefore were together for the Permanent Revolution but Stalin was against the idea but they managed to keep the far more authoritarian Stalin subdued until Lenin died in 1924 and Stalin grabbed power, exiled Trotsky to Kazakhstan and executed almost all of the Party's Trotskyists in what become known as the Great Purges and effectively removed all of Trotsky's influence.
Stalinism took over and to stop Trotsky's continued criticism of Stalin's rule, after several assassination attempts, he succeeded and he died in his Mexican home from a pick axe to the head in 1940.
Trotskyism then is the idea by Leon Trotsky that the Marxist theory should be spread around the World rather than only one state.

Consequences Of Russian Revolution 100 Years Ago Today

As revolutions go, the French one is second only to the Russian one for world wide consequences and it all began 100 years ago today when the Russians marched in protest in Saint Petersburg (then known as Petrograd) demanding the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II over the Russian involvement in WW1, the monarchy's crackdown on demonstrations and bread shortages.
The protests would lead to the rise of the Communists and the eventual overthrow of the Government by the Bolshevik Party comprising of leaders Stalin, Lenin and Trotsky who would form the Soviet Union and spread Communism throughout Eastern Europe and Asia.
Trotsky wanted to spread Communism around the World but on the death of the brains behind the revolution, Vlaidimir Lenin, the erratic Stalin took over the reigns, had Trotsky assasinated and began his reign of authoritarian rule which ended with the death toll attributed to Stalin at 50 million excluding wartime casualties.
Communism and the fight by the West against its growth became the defining feature of the middle and late 20th Century and continues today with the rise of China to Superpower status and it all began by protests a century ago.  

You Say You Want A Revolution?

During everything else that has been happening recently,the Oxfam report on Global Poverty seemed to have slipped by unnoticed so the revelation that eight people own more wealth than the poorest half of humanity did not receive the shock that it should have.
The eight multi-billionaires named who own more wealth than 3.6 billion human beings in 2017, are Bill Gates, Amancio Ortega, Warren Buffet, Carlos Slim Helu, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and Michael Bloomberg.
That eight men have bank accounts with such unimaginable wealth in them while there are others literally starving to death is obscene but it does show that Capitalism is working exactly how it was intended and the inequality is maintained by Global Governments guiding the money to the top but forgetting about the part where it trickles downwards afterwards.
In the same report Oxfam state 154,000 children die each week due to extreme poverty which is a disgusting and deplorable state of affairs but something that we have become accustomed and just seem to accept as 'the way things are'. 
History shows us that at some point, the masses rise up and overthrow the rich and powerful and 2017 is one hundred years since such an event happened in Russia when an economic crisis was one of the reasons Lenin and the Bolsheviks rode the wave of suffering and injustice of the masses ending with them overthrowing the decision makers.
The revolution of the Russian poor and downtrodden sparked not only a rebellion in their own nation but threatened to sweep across the Globe, especially as one of the other reasons the masses turned was because of WW1 which was being fought at the time and was little more than a scrap over the colonial carve of Africa in the interests of further wealth and power of the Europeans rulers.
The end result of the Bolshevik revolution was that it not only succeeded in overthrowing the existing order in their own country, but also succeeded in threatening to do likewise throughout Europe.
There have been rumblings of discontent for a while now and the rich and powerful should take heed that the Russian, French and Cuban Revolutions to name just three may be in the history books but the discontent and hardship that caused them remains festering today and with each passing year and with each report that highlights the obscene inequality amongst the top and the bottom, the more is the likelihood that another Lenin, Castro or Robespierre will emerge from the bubbling, disconsolate masses.

Those Trotsky Marxist Socialist Commie Types

Those not inclined towards Jeremy Corbyn have got themselves into a bit of a quandary over what to call those who support the current Labour leader, labeling them Communist, Socialist, Marxist or Trotskyists but even those on the left are unsure which box they fall into.
Many of the new recruits to the left's cause from the younger generation seem to like the term 'communist' which is shunned by anyone over 40 as it reeks of the USSR and leads to uncomfortable conversations about Stalin and Chairman Mao in the same way that being far right sets you up alongside Hitler.
Whereas Socialism and Communists have many of the same goals and sprang from the same ideal, they have very different ideas of how to get there, the Communist Correspondence Committee in 1846 sought a purge of Socialists from their party such was the differences between them.
For me the definitions from the early 20th century are now mostly redundant in the modern world, Communists, Socialists, Marxists and Trotskyists are in most cases no longer the same thing in a choice of different flavors although there are some who will argue otherwise but in general left and right will suffice.
The question should be then are you left or right and that is easy to determine with my handy guide which breaks it down as you wear a beret, you hold your fist in the air occasionally, you call everyone brother or sister, you have had at some point owned something with a picture of a guy named Che on it, you have sympathy for strikers or you drink latte.
If you have said yes to any of the above then welcome brother/sister, hang up your beret and grab your Che mug and let's share a latte and discuss the junior doctor strike.
If you said no to all the above then you are probably a selfish right wing capitalist pig dog who had pictures of Margaret Thatcher on your wall and own a book of Hitler quotes.

Socialism Making Inroads In USA

If the Bernie Sanders presidential bid has shown anything, it is that America is suddenly awash with Socialists, millions of them in fact.
In a nation that has long been resistant to Socialism’s call, deliberately or ignorantly confusing it with its bigger brother Communism, it seems a bit strange that suddenly they are loud and proud about their beliefs but where did they come from and what do they mean by socialism?
Polls show that the vast majority of people who call themselves 'Socialist' are under the age of 30 which may go some way to explain it.
It was the same age group of Americans who said that they looked positively upon the message of Occupy Wall Street, that the 1% has flourished at the expense of the 99%. The collapse of Capitalism in America with the record levels of inequality, scant economic opportunities and a $19 trillion debt has not gone unnoticed and it was the youth who took up the stand and in looking for a fairer way of running society discovered Socialism.
The largest factor though was the length of time since the collapse of Soviet Communism which has allowed younger Americans to identify Socialism with the social democratic nations of Western Europe, all of which suffer from less economic inequality and its attendant woes than the United States.
With Socialism and Communism interchangeable above the more ignorant over 30s (and still very much ignorant about it today it appears) the minds of the under 30s are not muddied by such things as Stalin, Lenin or Castro and see content Socialist nations such as the Scandinavians in Western Europe and say they want some of that.   
They see the declining economic conditions in America, where only the rich are rewarded and that appears to be the key to why today there are now Socialists by the millions in America.
For many of them Capitalism was tried and failed horrendously and the under 30s are looking for a new way and though late to the party, young Americans seem immune to the tales of the USSR bogeyman which was used as a stick to beat Socialism and have discovered that Socialism is the place to go.
Even if Bernie doesn't make his way in this time around, in 4 years time, if those tens of millions can collect around a central figure like they have Bernie Sanders and the Socialist ideal can continue to be forced onto the agenda (and Capitalism continues to mess with so many young lives), European style Socialism could be coming soon to America soon enough. 

Comrade Santa

I know that there has been some speculation about Santa's ideological leanings for some time now and i can keep quiet no more, yes, he is a Communist.
Really, it wasn't that hard to work out, he is a big fat guy with a bushy white beard. Remind you of anyone, maybe one of the Marx family?     
Then there was the red suit and the giving stuff away and not selling it for a massive mark-up, it isn't brain brain surgery people, it's all about redistributing the toys. he doesn't even pay his elves, the workshop is owned by all of them including the reindeer and Mrs Claus.
The less subtle clues were the fact that 'Ho, Ho, Ho' is Latin for 'Workers of the World Unite' and if you play the chorus of 'White Christmas' backwards you can clearly hear the phrase 'From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs' repeated over and over.
Then there is the list of all the boys and girls and who are either in the system (nice) in which case there are richly rewarded with presents or outside of it (naughty) and they get nothing.
So yes, for all those who have suspected that he has been brazenly feeding Marxism to the innocent, capitalist offspring, you are right so, you better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout and i'm telling you why. In 11 days Santa Claus is coming to town and he is carrying a hammer and sickle comrade.

Executive Committee Of The Exploiting Class

Almost consistently since i wrote it in 2008, the Marxism in A Nutshell post has been in the most viewed list.
Obviously there is a lot of interest in what the German had to say way back in the mid 19th Century and that has to be a good thing but before we celebrate the downfall of Evil Capitalism (boo) and cheer the arrival of Socialism (huzzah), there are a few more steps we need to take, mostly ridding ourselves of the parties that Marx described as 'the executive committee of the exploiting class' which translates in the 21st Century as politicians in the pocket of those with deep enough pockets to influence the political decision making process.
The bottom line is big companies don't make multi-million pound donations out of any political fervour or love of the political party, they expect something in return.
With that in mind, the Conservative Party held a fund raising Party with an invited list of about 570 of the country’s wealthiest people who paid £1,000 each to gain access to David Cameron and senior Conservative cabinet members and seated with ministers whose portfolios were relevant to the diners financial interests.
According to the seating list leaked to the Guardian newspaper, Iain Duncan Smith who is overseeing welfare cuts, was seated with directors of payday loan company CLC Finance, the housing minister, Kris Hopkins, was seated with two of London’s top property executives and Michael Fallon, the energy minister, dined with directors of a offshore renewable energy firm.
Politicians raising funds by mixing with tycoons with a vested interest in certain areas cannot be healthy, we all remember how the tobacco advertising ban was suddenly put back a couple of years following the Formula One million pound donation to Tony Blair and the Labour Party a few years ago.  
The politicians will always claim to represent the masses but will always carry on like this with  those who can afford it buying influence and you can bet your last tin of beans from the food bank that the influence they are buying will not be beneficial to anyone but themselves. 
Marx was obviously right, the few do hold influence over the many, but we can't throw off our chains just yet because Capitalism has a few more recessions to go yet before enough people realise Capitalism is no friend of the poor and the people who prop it up do not give a rats about anyone or anything except profit making and their bank balance.
I suggest digging out a copy of the Marx book so you are up to speed when the whole house of cards comes fluttering down.

Comrade Santa Is Coming To Town

I know that there has been some speculation about Santa's ideological leanings for some time now and i can keep quiet no more, yes, he is a Communist.
Really, it wasn't that hard to work out, he is a big fat guy with a bushy white beard. Remind you of anyone, maybe one of the Marx family?     
Then there was the red suit and the giving stuff away and not selling it for a massive mark-up, it isn't brain brain surgery people, it's all about redistributing the toys. he doesn't even pay his elves, the workshop is owned by all of them including the reindeer and Mrs Claus.
The less subtle clues were the fact that 'Ho, Ho, Ho' is Latin for 'Workers of the World Unite' and if you play the chorus of 'White Christmas' backwards you can clearly hear the phrase 'From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs' repeated over and over.
Then there is the list of all the boys and girls and who are either in the system (nice) in which case there are richly rewarded with presents or outside of it (naughty) and they get nothing.
So yes, for all those who have suspected that he has been brazenly feeding Marxism to the innocent, capitalist offspring, you are right so, you better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout and i'm telling you why. In 19 days Santa Claus is coming to town and he is carrying a hammer and sickle comrade.

Communism Through Climate Change

There is a posting on the Sky News website regarding Britain sending a spacecraft to the Sun to study it and see what we can learn about how it affects us here on earth and two things made me angry.
The first was amount of commenter's who used the joke about sending it at night to make the line unusable here now and the miserable ones who complained that the £248m that the European Space Agency has coughed up to Britain to build the spacecraft is an obscene use of money in these austere times.
If i had an account with Sky i would have made the point that as we will probably have to leave this planet at some point after we have poisoned it enough so human life is no longer sustainable, that we should find out all we can about our solar system but i never, i wrote it here instead.
Now i imagine that some of the whiny Sky News posters objecting to us researching the Star that gives us life are climate change deniers and it seems that most climate change deniers are also right wing because climate change denial does seem to have become a right wing thing.
To that affect, environmentalism seems to have become associated with left wing thinking and that has led to some American deniers leaping to what they believe is a death knell to Environmentalism, linking anyone who believes the overwhelming evidence that the climate is changing with Communism.
The thinking seems to go that Environmentalism is a left wing cause and the left wing is made up of Marxists wanting to share everything and bring down Capitalism and that my sensible shoe wearing patriotic Americans is Communism.
Now i can't speak for all the tree hugging hippies out there but when i hear about desertification, floods, draughts and extreme weather patterns, my first thought is not how can we use this to bring down TSB Lloyds, it's how we really need to get a grip on this changing climate that is devastating our planet and killing tens of thousands every year.
The useful idiots of the oil companies on the right still seem to stick to the dunderheaded notion that the thousands of climate scientists with their overwhelming stack of evidence are all wrong and this latest ruse to link in their minds wanting to save the planet with the days of the USSR will probably rattle around quite well inside their heads.
Living in a clean, unpolluted World should not be turned into a political tug of war, it is far too important and if what it takes is to shave the rough edges off the Capitalist system, then it is an added bonus but it is not the aim.
Besides, us on the left have the Anarchists, Anti-Capitalists, Trotskyists and the head Communist Obama poised to bring down Capitalism anyway. Get that red flag ready comrades!

Whatever Happend To...

While moving around some of the right wing sites on the internet, you do tend see quite a bit of amusing rhetoric regarding the protests in America. I was reading one recently that urged it's readers to arm themselves and fill their pantries in preparation of the oncoming Anarchist Socialist revolution. Wonderfully insane and i mentioned recently how Communism, Socialism and Marxism are all jumbled together in the minds of the enlightened right wingers who warn of the coming Soviet take over.
Stalin and Lenin are the usual historical bogey men the brickbats are thrown out but for some reason, the third of the revolting trio seems to escaped unscathed.
Apart from a mention by The Stranglers in their song 'No More Heroes', poor old Leon Trotsky hardly ever gets a mention, it's always those other two hogging the hate which is even more stranger when you consider Trotsky was the one who advocated permanent revolution which would have spread Communism worldwide. The other two lightweights were content to hold what they had.
If it wasn't for the occasional joke about ice picks, Trotsky would just never be mentioned and he was as much part of the Russian Revolution as Joseph and Vladimir.
He got one of the main roles in George Orwell's Animal Farm as Snowball who was later forced out of the farm by Napoleon after overthrowing Farmer Jones and yet he is spared the wrath of nutty right wingers who warn that people protesting against banks will lead to a re-run of the Great Purges from Maine to that place down the bottom full of oranges, old people and voting machines that don't work properly.
I say Trotsky should be treated with as much laughingly bad hyperbole as Stalin and Lenin by right wingers who want to scare their readers and i'm sure Barack Obama would agree, and he's a card carry Communist. Apparently.

Socialism In A Nutshell

Rather predictable that the right wing is against the Occupy Wall Street protests that are currently sweeping not only America, but the Western World, but the Fox News team really outdid themselves this weekend.
Not only did they manage to accuse the protesters of being anti-Semitic because they are in support of the 99%, which leaves 1% which is roughly the percentage of Jews in the population, but wheeled out the usual insults of the protesters being anti-Americans, Marxists, Anarchists and Communists.
The Communists and Socialists insults crop up quite a bit in right wing rhetoric and Fox News had a helpful analogy to explain to it's viewers just what a Communist regime would mean for Americans.

Under Capitalism:
10 workers get paid £10 an hour and it takes them 10 hours to make a car. The car gets sold for £10,000. They all get paid £100 each and the remaining £9000 goes to the boss.

Under Communism:
10 workers get paid £10 an hour and it takes them 10 hours to make a car. The car gets sold for £10,000. They all get paid £100 each and the remaining £9000 go to the Authorities.

And now the part Fox failed to mention - Under Socialism:
10 workers get paid £10 an hour and it takes them 10 hours to make a car. The car gets sold for £10,000, They all get paid £100 each and the remaining £9000 is shared amongst them.

So Fox is correct that under Communism, all profits do go to the State as the State owns everything but they neglected to mention that under Socialism, the workers own everything so the profits are shared amongst them. The only difference between Socialism and Capitalism is who is the boss, a board of shareholders who take the profits or the workers who take the profits.

Despite the cries of the Right Wing, Socialism is not the Soviets under Stalin or North Korea, it is simply a system where the financial rewards are more evenly distributed and who wouldn't want that?
Think it wouldn't work in the real world? Department Store John Lewis’s is owned by it's staff, all 70,000 of them, and last year they shared just over £100 million profit between them, each receiving a bonus of nearly seven weeks’ pay. Last year each worker received the equivalent of 10 weeks pay.
Because John Lewis is owned by its staff from the boardroom to the shop floor, each receive the same percentage payout. This year it is equal to 13% of basic salary and that is Socialism in action and this proves that it works.
Now imagine if the banks did this with their tens of billions of pounds of profit, profit that at the moment go to the shareholders. What the Occupy protesters want are the profits of Capitalism to not go to the handful of companies shareholders but to be shared out amongst the people so Society as a whole benfits.
Don't let those who try to discredit the Occupy Protests with their talk of anarchists and Communists wanting to turn the West into North Korea, they are out to protect themselves and their bank balances and they will try to convert as many useful idiots to their cause as possible. Don't be a useful idiot for the right wing.

Communists berating the Capitalists

Kinda funny that Capitalism beat Communism back in the 80s but today it is a Communist country telling the Capitalists to sort their houses out. Ooo the irony.
China has called America short-sighted & demanded the United States address its structural debt problems. Things must be in a bad way when the US is now being lectured by China, arguably one of the most corrupt countries on the planet. Seems to me that the Chinese have played a blinder over the past decade or so, keeping quiet while the Westsern Governments, bankers and financial houses have led us down the path of its own decline.
It even, quite sneakily, helped by lending the US the money to do it so American citizens were up to their eyeballs in debt and waited for the whole thing to implode, as it has.
Now they move in and suggest a new reserve currency.
China may yet overthrow the US and do it without a shot being fired. It just gave America enough rope and it did the rest itself. It obviously already runs the World economy now and it isn't America who, bankrupt and careering downhill fast, are today's USSR of the late 80's early 90's.
You had from 1989 to 2011 when you were the unchallenged World leaders, but the worst aspect of Capitalism, greed, has bled you dry.
Now it looks as though China will usurp America but before those who will inevitably be cheering Americas decline, do they really think China will be any better? They will be just as two faced with their friendly dictators, just as ready to fight amoral wars and just as quick to build up their friends and demonise their enemies as America.
The World could be a very different place in a decades time and the side that lost in the 80s and early 90's, could become the eventual winners. Sneaky guys those Commies.

Full Marxs For Karl

If you walk through London's Highgate Cemetery and listen carefully, you can hear the faint sound of laughter coming from the grave of it's most famous resident.
The world financial system is in meltdown, the Governments are taking a controlling stake in the banks and are considering renationlising the utilities companies while people are contemplating putting their money in tins or under the mattress. Banker is the most hated profession and financial institutions collapse with the money makers losing their positions while the workers are losing their properties.
Could it be that Karl Marx's had been on to something?
His basic point was that capitalism is awful. He predicted that the workers would be exploited and the capitalists would get rich at their expense. The good news was that it would collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions.
Can't argue with his assessment so far, he certainly had Capitalism's number with the call that it was prone to crisis. It is exploitative (seen any of your utility bills recently?) and unstable with regular crashes that see's millions thrown onto the unemployment lines while making many homeless when it all goes wrong, as it has consistently down the decades with calamitous results.
The irony is, as we have seen, that only the Governments are big enough to intervene and sort the mess out by taking control and sidelining the capitalists who made the mess in the first place.
We should recognise that a phase of this particular flawed system has passed and we must think of another one or forever repeat the cycle because it is collapsing under its own weight.

Cuba Taking It Slowly

Despite pilfering all his best lines from Bob the Builder, Obama is continuing his unlikely success of making an American President popular outside of America with his decision to lift a wide range of sanctions against Cuba.
Always looking like a seemingly spiteful act to me, the embargo has lasted almost 50 years and the restrictions have been tightened and relaxed by individual Presidents as Fidel Castro sat around dodging assassination attempts and not shaving as White House residents came and went.
With the thawing of relations between the small Caribbean island and its powerful neighbour 90 miles away, there are going to be some winners and losers.
Cuba under Castro has been useful to the right-wing and American Presidents for decades, with the poverty in which many of its citizens live being the example used for the failure of Castro's socialist experiment.
When Fidel stepped down through ill-health last year, they lost their all purpose bogeyman to who they could always turn until another one handily cropped up somewhere else. Hugo Chavez is presently being lined up for the role but as he always gives better than he gets, he can't be relied upon to just suffer it as Fidel did.
During the last US election there was always mention of the large Cuban voting block in Florida which the political hopefuls had to appease. With a thawing in Cuban-American relations and Fidel no longer in power they stand to lose the status of being a consideration to those on the election trail.
Probably the biggest losers will be the Cubans themselves. Admittedly it is a poor country seemingly stuck in the 1950s but the opening of itself to the outside World will bring with it a new host of problems.
The Cubans will not be able to pick and choose parts of Fidel's Communism that it benefits from and introduce the parts of Western Capitalism that it wants, it will be consumed by privatisation, globalisation and western materialism.
The things that make Cuba a success, the low crime rates, superbly trained medical staff, literacy rates that stand amongst the best in the World and a 6th place for human well-being in the Happy Planet Index, will all suffer a drop in standards.
What Cuba will become if it fully opens itself up to us is just another country with a battalion of Starbucks, McDonald's, fast food outlets and the ebb and flow of the financial markets with its offer of loans and financial opportunities.
Fidel may have won his personal war with America, but Cuba should look at how the former Soviet Union countries imploded after Communism and how the financial system employed by the rest of the World is unravelling before our very eyes as an example of the double edged sword that throwing your lot in with the modern World entails.

Che 50 Years On

There are a few essential things that a student must have when he leaves home and moves into Student accommodation, one of them is the obligatory poster of the left wing pinup, Che Guevara, to hang on the bedroom wall.
Despite being killed by Bolivians in 1967 aged only 39, the iconic image of Che is still as well known today as anytime over the past 50 years even if the story of how he and Fidel Castro overthrew the Cuban dictator Batista is hazy to today's teenagers.
They can quote his famous and defiant last words ("Shoot, coward, you're only going to kill a man") and they can tell you how he risked his life to overthrow a corrupt dictator for the downtrodden Cubans while tending to wounded enemy soldiers although not telling, or possibly just not knowing, how he cold-heartedly signed orders to execute prisoners without trial.
Mostly what they don't see is the irony of the man's image who died for his Communist beliefs, can now be bought on any number of tacky merchandise which would of horrified Che but shows that his image has continued to resonate.
Che's image is kept alive by today's new Socialists such as the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, who has certainly helped to burnish the image as has Bolivian president Evo Morales who also says he is continuing to spread the message carried by Che. Nelson Mandela referred to him as "an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom".
To today's young the image stands for rebellion and a man who stood up for the little guy against a more powerful foe, fighting and dying, for his beliefs while to the generation of older hippies and socialists he also stood for an ideology.
The 50th Anniversary of the Cuban Revolution and the Steven Soderbergh film 'Che' will drive renewed interest in the one time Argentinian medical student and may even fuel some curious reading into Marxist ideologies but the left has yet to find an icon as appealing, romantic or as instantly recognisable as the high contrast black and white photograph of Che Guevara.

Marxism In A Nutshell

According to my friends at the Socialist end of the spectrum, since the finances of the World went down the gurgler, there has been a distinct upturn in the amount of interest in Marxist ideology. I myself have been asked recently about nationalisation and Socialism but there does seem to be an unclear view of what the German was advocating so here it is, in a nutshell, Marxism. Let's see how much of what Marx predicted has come to fruition.

Marx said that humans had progressed through a series of stages, from slaves society through to capitalism and in each stage a dominant class had exploited the labour of the larger class of workers.
In each of these stages, these ruling classes had become corrupt and had been overthrown and a new system implemented. Marx acknowledged that capitalism was a necessary stage of development but it would be corrupted by unfair distribution of the wealth and the political power that went with it.
These captains of industry would reap the profits while paying the workers a pittance. Under capitalism, Marx claimed, workers are not paid fully or fairly for their labour because the top guys siphon off the profit, earning the owners enormous wealth, while the workers struggle by on poor salaries.
Here is the important bit, this wealth also enables the owners to control the government, which would in turn do the bidding of the wealthy and the powerful to the detriment of the poor and the powerless.
He said that the workers, who would make up the majority, would rise up and overthrow their corrupt leaders and install a fairer system which would benefit the workers who would distribute fairly the share of the profits. This he called Communism from the Latin word for 'shared'.

This is only a quick walk through a small part of Marx's philosophy but wealthy owners, poorly paid staff, money buying influence in seats of power, unfair distribution of profits, angry and disillusioned workers. Even the most right wing hackneyed capitalist can't argue that Mr Marx wasn't a million miles off so far with his theory of how things will pan out.