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A political theory which contains all of the characteristics of a religion (and one major world religion in particular):

• Quasi-religious faith started by a dead bloke with a beard.
• According to its own doctrine, it cannot be disproved, and every "observation" therefore proves it correct.
• Contains an "end of Time" scenario, which is apparently "inevitable" (i.e. the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat).
• Different strands of it hate each other and have killed/assassinated each other over it.
• Is based on some extremely flawed pretexts.
• In countries ruled by this dogma, disbelievers and critics risk imprisonment, torture and death.
• Reduced free will -- apparently everything that happens happens due to existing material conditions and not just because somebody wants it to (dialectical materialism).
• States that all members of groups will act according to their collective interest rather than their individual interest -- apparently people are too stupid to think for themselves. "Comrade Wife, I am just nipping off to drink myself silly on white spirit round the back of the tractor factory because it is in my class interest to do so, and not because I am living in a communist distopia where I am expected to work 60 hour weeks for some cabbage and rotten potatoes cooked on my measly coal ration in my shared apartment, and I would quite like to forget it for a while".
• Western left wingers will excuse all its excesses and brutality and will deny the nature of its teachings.
• States founded entirely on its principles will be oppressive, brutal, backwards, and will never develop stable economies.
• Was in a perpetual state of cold/limited war with the West.
• Would desperately like to bring down the west.
• Followers idolise mass murderers who subscribe to it .
• Followers have absolutely no sense of humour and take everything incredibly seriously.
• Followers have a hygiene problem.
• Idols of the "Saints" are paraded around and worshipped.
• Followers don't like the truth to be told.

Happily, very few people subscribe to this theory any more now that the Soviet Union has fallen, and many have since changed their allegiance to radical environmentalism as the new way to bring about the downfall of the West.

Perhaps the most concise knockdown of the theory came from Ronald Reagan: "How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin."

The major Marxist Saints are summarised below:

• Karl Marx: started the whole ball rolling with such seminal titles as "Capital". Laid the foundations on which the later Saints would build. Rumours that he had ever in fact consulted any working-class people to ask their opinions on any of the matters with which he busied himself are utterly unfounded. Just like modern left wingers, he thought he knew best.
• Groucho: Funniest of the Marx Brothers with all the best lines.
• Vladimir Lenin: took the teaching of Marx and applied it to the "I'm going to kill a hell of a lot of people" model of government.
• Joseph Stalin: Lenin's very able successor, who took Lenin's model of government and extended it into his own "I'm going to kill even more people, and threaten the outside world too" paradigm.
• Mao Tse-tung: roly-poly happy-go-lucky Chairman Mao firmly believed that communism was an underlying principle of the universe, and starved tens of millions of peasants as a result. Despite these little policy "accidents", he was also rather a fan of actively killing lots of people as well.
• Pol Pot: applied Marxism to a purely rural model. Educated people were -- you guessed it -- tortured and killed in great numbers after the forced evacuation of the towns. Must be labelled as the most successful Marxist, since he killed a higher proportion of his own population than any of the other Saints.
• Kim Il Sung and the fruit of his loins Kim Jong Il: after being installed as dictator of North Korea, Kim senior waged an aggressive war against the South, with many massacres of civilians thrown in for good measure. After the ceasefire, he busied himself with oppressing and militarising his own people, a mantle ably carried on by his son, who seems to have an unlimited quantity of money to spend on the army, nuclear weapons, and Italian pizza chefs, but doesn't seem to mind the fact that most of his population are starving -- the fact that they are dying proves that they are not sufficiently committed communists.
• Fidel Castro: student gangster (already with a few murders to his name) turned revolutionary, Fidel and his beard deposed the corrupt Batista government -- and replaced it with an even more corrupt and violent one in which -- you guessed it -- people disappeared in the night and never came back. Once he is dead, and independent observers are allowed into Cuba, an awful lot of left-wing journalists (BBC take note) are going to have to eat a lot of their words about exactly what went on in Cuba from 1959 onwards, especially when it comes to the supposedly "fabulous" state of Cuban public health care which even makes the NHS look good...
• Ernesto "Che" Guevara: his face adorning many a soap dodger's T-shirt, Guevara was Fidel Castro's trigger finger who took a personal interest in the torture and execution of his victims when he was not merely watching the executions from his specially installed picture window in his office overlooking the execution yard in Havana. Even Fidel had to tell him to calm down the killing somewhat, and in the end sent him off to spread revolution in South America where he finally met his end after trying to sell his particularly brutal brand of revolution to Bolivian peasants who owned their own land and just really weren't at all interested. Ironically, a huge industry has been built around selling his image to people who really don't have a clue what the guy was like or what he really stood for.