Thanks, Sherman Logan. During my college years, I fancied myself a Marxist of sorts. Now, reading your definition “the end stage of history in which human inequality would disappear” and “all would work for the good of all without any need for governments or money” I can see so clearly what an impossible underpining those theories are for establishing governments. It seems that underlying all the “isms” is a population that naively believes a seriously flawed model of human nature, and are then ruthlessly exploited by those who simply want whatever they can get. Am I getting closer?
Works for me.
Except that in the earlier stages of the system it is quite likely that most even of the leaders actually believed their own propaganda, at least on one level of their thinking.
This belief in the ideology tailed off and then vanished with time and the comprehensive failure of the system, leading to the quite remarkable disappearance of Communism in the USSR without a shot once it turned out absolutely nobody was willing to fight and die for the ideology. Lots of people were still willing to kill for the system, of course, if it was in their own personal interest, but nobody at all believed the propaganda anymore.
Somebody once appropriately pointed out that in 1989 there were more committed Marxists employed as professors at Harvard than existed in all of the USSR.