Amazing that an idea bigger and more pernicious than Nazism got its start with one man, Karl Marx!
That make me think. Since my life's experience has made me agree with Ecclesiastes, ]Ecclesiastes 1:9,10]
'there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.' I know from my own research in other areas that the argument can be made that Socialism in a rudimentary form can be deduced from the policies of
the Gracchi Brothers in ancient Rome.
Who Were the Gracchi Brothers of Ancient Rome? https://www.thoughtco.com/gracchi-brothers-tiberius-gaius-gracchus-112494 But Karl Marx? plenty of antecedents.
Influences on Karl Marxhttp://self.gutenberg.org/articles/Influences_on_Karl_Marx IE,
1 German philosophy
1.1 Immanuel Kant
1.2 G. W. F. Hegel
1.3 Ludwig Feuerbach
1.4 The rupture with German Idealism and the Young Hegelians
2 English and Scottish political economy
2.1 Adam Smith and David Ricardo
3 French socialism
3.1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau
3.2 Charles Fourier and Henri de Saint-Simon
3.3 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
4 Other influences
4.1 Engels
4.2 Charles Darwin
4.3 Antique materialism
4.4 Lewis Morgan
If this isn't
offTopic,I don't know what is.
Cheers.