Marxism was first theorized by Karl Marx, a German, and looks at everything through an economic viewpoint. It basically focuses on the economic realities of human culture. According to Marxism, our primary goal as human beings is to obtain and keep economic power through all our social and political activities. "Economics is the base on which the superstructure of social/political ideological realities is built". There are many key terms in Marxist theory. Economic conditions are called material circumstances and all the aspects of society and politics are called the historical situation. A term also used is praxis which "dictates that theoretical ideas can be judged to have value only in terms of their concrete applications, that is, only in terms of their applicability to the real world". Marxism also has a lot to deal with divisions in society; there are "haves" and "have-nots" or the bourgeoisie and the proletariats. Other interpretative theories and people in general will not admit to this difference and instead attribute divisions to racial, ethnic, or religious ideas. To a Marxist, this is an ideology not a natural way of seeing the world. Marxism often deals with the bad effects of capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. Marxism often correlates with human psychology in the way that it studies human behavior and motivation in psychological terms. Unlike psychoanalysis, Marxism deals with the material/historical forces that shape our psychology. Marxists claim that family conflicts and psychological wounds are the result of ideological forces exemplified in the culture.
