EDIT: Taking a class in economics and thinking everything has a monetary value attached to it, or that homo economicus actually exists would obviously be just as bad.
edit - Folk keep framing stuff in the economic dogma-battles of the superpowers in the 19th and 20th century, but to me the problem is 14th century economics combined with 21st century logistics. Retaining a caste system in a world of global networks can give you a fucking big pyramid and systemise abuse on an unprecedented scale with the money that flows in from those outside the structure.
[0] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxalite
[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxalite%E2%80%93Maoist_insur...
[2] http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-09-27/news...
Edited to include a reference to "backward" - a term used in official language.
Seems to me too few people take classes in anything these days, let alone Marxist sociology.
Popper compared Marx to Freud, in that both people spawned a theory of knowledge that is very good at explaining what has already happened but horrifyingly bad at telling you how things will be tomorrow, and how to change those things. Almost sixty years after this observation nothing has changed. We now recognize Freud as pseudoscience, but Marxism remains unfortunately persistent. Marxists like to talk about how well Marx predicted the nature of the class struggle and stuff like that, but in a theory which sees everything in terms of class struggle, this is not a scientific prediction at all.
And they typically do him a dis-service. I find when "Marxists" speak of such things, "bad" is synonymous with capitalism just as "capitalism" is synonymous with bad.
When Marxists talk about it being 'scientific socialism,' they are contrasting with 'utopian socialism.' Scientific socialism takes the approach of examining the world, making changes, seeing how those work out, and then re-examining the theory. You can see how that relates to the scientific method.
Marxism is not scientific, as it does not attempt to falsify one of its core axioms—that the class struggle is over a local optimization game. A central committee can actually do a pretty good job of adjusting the ratio of copper tubing to copper wiring, but the actual challenge turns out to be making people want to invent things like graphene.
Regardless, you're not engaging with my core point, which is that 'scientific' in this context means something specific, not whatever you happen to think scientific means. Nobody is claiming Marxism is falsifiable, that's a red herring.
And that's exactly why you should learn about it, Marx analysis of economic conditions is pretty much spot on. What conclusions you draw from that analysis is a different topic. And of course all the work is interesting for historic purposes, it's pretty much impossible to understand the history of the 20th century without (at least some of) it.
I also haven't met (or read) anybody for a long time who actually believed Marx' idea of class struggle by force of nature leading to a communist society, where do you still find those people?
This is why my stomach turns when Popper is mentioned. The idea of falsifiability and testable statements being the essence of science is the best known guiding principle in scientific methodology. Having articulated this wonderful idea, he just couldn't help but muddy the water and misuse it to peddle his political and social views.
EDIT: I forgot to give an example of a falsifiable prediction in Marxism: the outcome of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the transitional socialist state leading to communism. It was actually falsified successfully by Soviet Union et al.
That's debatable, given the modifications to Marxism made in Leninism -- the actual "Communist" states all were based on Leninism, rather than Marxism. The advanced democratic capitalist states that had the foundations which Marx saw as essential for the transition to socialism on the way to communism have generally transitioned in the direction of socialism since Marx's time, though in a rather gradual way. At least in the direction of the natural progression beyond the model of political-economic system that Marx and other 19th century socialists critiqued under the name "capitalism", Marx seems to have been very broadly correct -- as to whether that eventually leads to communism is, well, something that we're probably several generations away from seeing.
I think that its a lot more likely that something like the modern mixed economy -- evolving with productivity in a way that increasing has a greater domain of social support and responsiveness -- will be dominant for a very long term. OTOH, I can envision that happening in a way where the social support is delivered in a way based on private property (e.g., through a mechanism like basic income) with social goods delivered more through the market than directly by the state. With sufficient productivity (and hence, goods being less scarce) this would in many ways resemble communism (while still having features of socialism and capitalism.)
Whether it is "honest" or not is largely beside the point, which is that it is a deliberate attempt to short-circuit what in Marx's theory was an essential step on the road from feudalism through developed capitalism and then socialism and finally to communism, and that a such a short-circuiting effort cannot be an empirical test -- whether it succeeds or fails -- of Marx's theory (well, except insofar as its success would refute at least one element of Marx's theory.)
Perhaps Marxism could be studied as a specimen of a certain mindset, like intellectual design: "learn about it", not "learn it". One problem is so many people (millions!) have had Marxism shoved in the throats. No wonder it tends to go out the other way. (Sorry for the graphic image.)