It is well known that socialism is an ideology that ignores the individual and focuses all its attention on the collective. Marx, the preeminent socialist economic theoretician, divided individuals into classes based on the function they have in producing economic value; Lenin, Mao, and others have iterated their own versions of Marxist class theory.
Wherever socialists have carried their ideology to its completion, the result has been the same in terms of the people: in Mao’s China and Stalin’s Soviet, tens of millions of people were starved to death or otherwise killed by the regime; in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, one-quarter of the country’s 8 million people were annihilated in the name of the state’s ideology.
