'Marxism is a doctrine of blind confidence that a paradise of universal satisfaction is awaiting us just round the corner. Almost all the prophesies of Marx and his followers have already proved to be false, but this does not disturb the spiritual certainty of the faithful, any more than it did in the case of chialistic sects: for it is a certainty not based on any empirical premisses or supposed 'historical laws', but simply on the psychological need for certainty. In this sense Marxism performs the function of a religion, and its efficacy is of a religious character. But it is a caricature and a bogus form of religion, since it presents its temporal eschatology as a scientific system, which religious mythologies do not purport to be.'
Main Currents of Marxism: Volume III, The Breakdown, p. 526.
Marx very famously expressed, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” Marxism really was this, and he decided that what society really needed was a mechanical heart, a mechanical soul - which is not an incoherent belief system insomuch as it is an untenable belief system.
It is not shocking that an ideology which grounds itself within absolute opposition to religion would find itself grounded within a sort of religious fundamentalism, yet lacking the very sort of metaphysical and moral conceptualizations that allow such ideas to naturally propagate.
