Marxism is a religious creed. This statement has been common among critics of Marx, and since Marxism is an explicit enemy of religion, such a seeming paradox would offend many Marxists, since it clearly challenged the allegedly hard-headed scientific materialism on which Marxism rested. In the present day, oddly enough, an age of liberation theology and other flirtations between Marxism and the Church, Marxists themselves are often quick to make this same proclamation.
Certainly, one obvious way in which Marxism functions as a religion is the lengths to which Marxists will go to preserve their system against obvious errors or fallacies. Thus, when Marxian predictions fail even though they are allegedly derived from scientific laws of history, Marxists go to great lengths to change the terms of the original prediction.
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Marxism also attempts to define and establish particular social and economic standards, and we, who are completing the first decade of the 21st Century know how 'reliable' that can be.
This point about Marxism and religion was also made in 1938, by the eminent Anglo-Australian Catholic writer and publisher F. J. Sheed in his book Communism and Man. Sheed's demonstration - from studying texts like Das Kapital - that Communism's default mode had far more in common with a caricature of Old Testament prophetic frenzy, than with Marx's own trashy jargon about "scientific socialism", is permanently convincing. It's a great shame that most Catholic don't know about it, and if Marxists knew about it, they wouldn't be Marxists.
Thanks for mentioning Frank Sheed's book, RJ. You (and he) hit the nail on the head.
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