Brief: Demonic Karl Marx ATTACKS Private Property and DESTROYS Religion
Matthew examines how Karl Marx has long been framed as a demonic threat to religion and private property — a tactic that sidesteps Marx’s actual critique of capitalism. J. Edgar Hoover, Ronald Reagan, and a raft of Evangelical blowhards cast communism as satanic and civilization-ending, a narrative now accelerating through Trump-era rhetoric, and Project 2025.
Capital is difficult to rebut directly, so detractors often attack Marx himself, calling him godless or deranged. Jordan Peterson and Paul Kengor treat Marx’s horny gothic teenage poems as literal evidence of demonic influence—which is much more interesting to them than taking surplus value, alienation, or commodity fetishism seriously.
But the OG distorter of Marxist economics is the Catholic Church, beginning with Pius IX, who Red-Scared the 19th C faithful with a now-famous trick: conflating personal property with bourgeois private property. Marx targeted only the latter — profit-generating property — which the Church depended on then and still does today.
Full show notes at https://www.conspirituality.net/episodes/brief-demonic-karl-marx
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Hello, everyone.
Matthew here.
This brief is called The Demonic Karl Marx Attacks Your Private Property.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
This is Conspirituality, where we investigate the roots and intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
You can follow myself, Derek, and Julian on Blue Sky individually.
Our podcast is on Instagram and threads under our handle Conspirituality pod.
And you can support our Patreon.
You can also find me personally on YouTube and TikTok at antifascistat.
The America we live in today must awaken to the danger.
A tidal wave of lawless tyranny is now surging forth from the criminal and subversive underworlds.
It breaks with abrasive effect against the foundations of our republic.
Our national conscience, our heritage of freedom, the entire cause of decency are being severely tested by these deadly enemies.
Crime has a partner in forming the common denominator of a breakdown in moral behavior.
It is the influence of godless communism.
So that's J. Edgar Hoover at a speech in 1962 at Valley Forge as he accepts the George Washington Award from the Right Wing Freedoms Foundation.
Now, this is from the same year.
It's probably a more familiar voice.
There is no halfway between communism and capitalism.
Karl Marx, who developed the basic theories of communism, was a sick man most of his life.
Sick in body and spirit.
That's from a documentary called The Truth About Communism, also from 1962.
Now, nothing if not consistent, here's President Reagan 21 years later, 1983, giving his evil empire speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida.
A number of years ago, I heard a young father, a very prominent young man in the entertainment world, addressing a tremendous gathering in California.
It was during the time of the Cold War, and communism and our own way of life were very much in people's minds, and he was speaking to that subject.
And suddenly, though, I heard him saying, I love my little girls more than anything, and I said to myself, Oh no, don't.
You can't say that.
But I had underestimated him.
He went on, I would rather see my little girls die now, still believing in God, than have them grow up under communism and one day die no longer believing in God.
Per the New York Times, this speech received a standing ovation as the orchestra played Onward Christian Soldiers.
Oh, and the young father he's talking about, who would rather see his children dead than read, is evangelical heartthrob Pat Boone.
Now, in a bit, I'll look at how it was the Catholics, with moistened fingers in the air, feeling the political winds change in the 19th century.
They began to tag Marxism back then as a destroyer of religion.
Although the material concern, as we will see, was more about the Marxist challenge to the morality of the rent-seeking papal states.
But for over 150 years, reactionary Catholicism has gone on to underwrite many waves of anti-Marxist thought, from endorsing apparitions of the Virgin Mary, who pops up here and there to warn children about the horrors of communism, to Senator Joe McCarthy and his sponsor, Cardinal Spellman, in the 1950s, to Red Scare Overtones in the satanic panic of the 1980s.
Today, the loudest marketers of this view are the evangelicals.
Here's David Jeremiah, founder of Turning Point, one of the largest Christian media networks in the world.
Marxism is anti-God.
Karl Marx hated Christianity, which he saw as a source of oppression.
To him, religion was the opium of the people.
For communism to succeed, loyalty to the church had to be replaced by loyalty to the state.
Now, this view filters down to the innumerable foot soldiers in the broader evangelical movement, like this Church of God international guy.
We have two paths ahead of us, two paths forced upon us, and the people of this country have to pick the path of God.
Because if they do not pick the path of God, this country is going to descend into a sea of blood.
This country is going to descend into a sea of violence.
This country is going to descend into godless communism.
All of this stands behind the Trump administration's rhetorical war against the horrors of socialism, as House Resolution 58 put it.
Now, this resolution, sponsored by Representative Maria Salazar, stays away from the religious argument against socialism because that work is taken up by NSPM 7, which is the presidential memo in which anti-fascism is conflated with anti-Christianity.
We covered it previously on this podcast.
The godlessness of socialism is also a low-key theme throughout Project 2025, which was spearheaded by Catholic fanatics like Kevin Roberts.
So here's what I want to do with this episode.
Here's my thesis.
We are 177 years past the publication of the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels.
We are 157 years past the publication of volume one of Capital.
And in all of that time, Marx's basic indictment of the nature, logic, progress, and ethics of the capitalist mode of production is still here, still being studied and theorized on by countless people who either suspect or know that capitalism is deeply immoral or that it can't be sustained or both.
The most common defenses against and deflections from this indictment also haven't changed.
These include the claim that Marxism is nihilistic, godless, incompatible with religion, intent on destroying human faith in general and Christianity in particular, and this is because its founder was psychiatrically disturbed or even demonically possessed.
These defenses against Marx's evaluation of capitalism work in three overlapping ways, as far as I can tell.
The crudest way is the ad hominem bit, where a number of right-wing pseudobiographers have misread Marx's early Gothic poetry as literal confession and claimed that he was under satanic influence.
So I'll get to that in a moment.
The trickier defense involves never faithfully reflecting what Marx actually wrote about commodities, labor, and capital.
Now, the more sophisticated but also understandable defense involves missing the fact, intentionally or not, that Marx is criticizing Christianity not really as an atheist, but on its own terms, as if he is concerned about the Christian heresies of idolatry and blasphemy.
Arguably, he was rescuing an older vision of Christianity from its evil doppelganger of capitalism.
So today I'll focus on two of these defenses, one that comes from today's pseudo-Christian manosphere and one from the OG manosphere, the 19th century Catholic Church.
And for all you nerds out there, the citations will be available on our podcast website since they won't all fit on the pod servers, but I'll link to the podcast website in the notes and then you can find the episode.
But I'll just flag here that I'm leaning heavily on the work of the liberation theologian Enrique Duscell.
He was the Argentinian anti-colonialist historian and thinker.
He died in 2023 and his book, The Theological Metaphors of Marx, was first published in Spanish back in 1993, but only published in English translation last year.
Through a meticulous timeline and a close reading of Marx's work, Ducelle shows that as the reactionary churchmen have said, Marx indeed held a militant and consistent atheism.
But why?
It was necessary for Marx to enable him to clearly see what he considered to be the idolatrous fetishistic religion adopted by capitalist metaphysics, in which the divinity is self-generating money in a world where human relations are broken in sacrifice to the relationship between things.
Chapter 2, Demonic Marx.
Okay, let's look first at how Marx is framed as demonic or under satanic influence.
In 1836 or 37, we don't exactly know, Karl Marx wrote a poem called The Pale Maiden.
Now, it wasn't published until 1929.
This is about 40 years after his death.
And in this poem, a pious young woman falls hopelessly in love with a knight who does not return her feelings.
Tormented by desire and guilt, she mourns her fate.
Quote, thus heaven I've forfeited.
I know it full well.
My soul, once true to God, is chosen for hell.
He was so tall, alas, of stature divine, his eyes so fathomless, so noble, so fine, he never bestowed on me his glances at all, lets me pine hopelessly till the end of the soul.
So here's a poem in which the pale maiden, the narrator, openly confronts the contradiction between the religious promise of happiness if she keeps her faith and the bitter reality of human yearning.
Now, the poem ends in tragedy several verses later because she flees into the night and she drowns.
And unmoved, the knight takes another lover.
So nature remains indifferent to the pale maiden's agony and death.
This is a romantic era love poem with a mid-level cringe factor.
So what's the story behind it?
Well, it was written by an 18 or 19 year old hard-drinking rousedabout college student tortured by love.
Karl Marx and Jenny von Vestfalen had been childhood friends in Triar, despite their class differences.
Jenny was from an aristocratic family and she was four years older.
She actually rejected a Prussian lieutenant for the petty bourgeois Marx.
And so they had this illicit love for each other that faced fierce opposition from her pietistic relatives, but also his family.
They endured seven years of separation and Jenny battled depression and Marx was off studying in Berlin and he was very poor.
And they couldn't marry until 1843.
And I think they were horny as hell.
Marx fancied himself a poet.
I mean, Marx's secret love was poetry.
So that's Professor Paul Kengor in June of 2024.
Kengor teaches political science.
He doesn't teach poetry at the private Christian Grove City College in Pennsylvania, where he serves as the senior director of the Institute for Faith and Freedom.
So he's teeing up to, quote, the pale maiden in conversation with a very excitable Jordan Peterson.
How much of it is there?
How much poetry?
Well, there's quite a bit, and it's deeply disturbing stuff.
All right.
A lot of it is about the devil, quite literally about the devil.
It's chilling, right?
Thus heaven I've forfeited.
I know it full well.
My heart, once true to God, is chosen for hell.
Right, right.
1837 Lucifer from Milton.
Yeah, 1837, that one was.
It was one of his first published writings.
He would have only been 19 years old at that time.
I want you to notice here that Kengor recites this line as though it is an autobiographical statement from Marx himself and not a line given to a character called the pale maiden.
He doesn't seem to consider that this poem might be, in fact, a poem.
Now, Peterson has Kengor on to discuss his 2020 book, The Devil and Karl Marx, Communism's Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration.
I think you can imagine what it's about.
And they open with this discussion of his poetry.
Kengor pivots after this part to a poem published in 1841 called The Player, in which a demonic fiddler, driven by violent, hellish inspiration, plays with frantic intensity that reflects a kind of inner torment.
And as he's playing, he seduces a young woman into a shared delirium, but she unknowingly, during this delirious phase, drinks poison.
And as he clings to her in despair, she dies in his arms, sealing their doom together.
So here is Kengor quoting from it.
Another one.
So it's called The Player, and it was 1841.
And here he puts himself, it appears, in the form of this kind of mad violinist who's like frenetically, maniacally sawing away at the violin, and he's summoning up the powers of darkness.
And he's doing this in front of his love interests.
And the love interests.
Yeah, right.
And the love interest, Robert Paine says, appears to be his girl at the time, Jenny, the girl that he would end up marrying.
And he's summoning up the powers of darkness.
And she's saying, why are you doing this?
It's like a Faustian bargain.
More and Faust and Gerrit and Mephistopheles in a moment.
But just to sort of set the table for people who are shocked by what I said about him writing about the devil.
So here's what he says in the player.
Here's just one stanza.
He tells the girl, Look now, my blood-dark sword shall stab unerringly within thy soul.
The hellish vapors rise and fill the brain, till I go mad and my heart is utterly changed.
See the sword, the prince of darkness sold it to me, for he beats the time and gives the signs.
Ever more boldly I play the dance of death.
Now, you heard Kengor reference the Marx biographer Robert Paine, who he credits with unearthing the deep, dark secrets of Marx's demonic poetry in his 1971 biography.
But I think Kengor should also credit Paine for his one-dimensional reading of these works.
Here are some choice quotes from Paine.
Quote, there were times when Marx seemed to be possessed by demons, when rage overflowed in him and became poison, and he seemed to enter into a nightmare.
Quote, he had the devil's view of the world and the devil's malignity.
Sometimes he seemed to know that he was accomplishing works of evil.
This is kind of incredible for a biographer who's working from, you know, even primary, but mostly secondary sources, 1, you know, 10 years after the guy's death.
Amazing insights into the guy's personality and psychology.
So what's the point, though?
Like, what does this poetry criticism have to do with Marx's philosophy?
Paine alludes to it with the sentence, sometimes the same words seem to burn through the interminable pages of Marx's work on economic theory.
So all the fire and passion and destructiveness of his Faustian poetry was later reflected in Capital, a book in which, quote, one by one, the perversities of capitalism were described, but it did not offer any workable alternative.
It attempted to destroy, but not to build, unquote.
Now, to Paine's credit, he does make some begrudging effort to faithfully record Marx's actual thoughts on capitalism and its fatal problems.
But Kengor makes no such effort because for him, Karl Marx is a pervert whose ideology stemmed from personal misery and a fatal spiritual flaw.
So he offers a religious critique in which Marx's ultimate objective is not to undermine capitalism, but rather the evil or demonic transformation of society as a whole.
Kengor calls him a remarkable monster possessed by spirits of wickedness.
But how demonic was Marx really?
Kengor is a Christian polycywonk who thinks Ronald Reagan was a genius and is super happy that Michael Knowles of the Daily Wire wrote the foreword to his book.
So I don't expect more than a grade school understanding of these little poems from him.
But Peterson cites Goethe in his writing, and he built his early career on Jungian psychology with its archetypes and myths and symbols of self-transformation through the conflict of opposites.
And here, somehow, I wonder why Peterson is missing the clues that one would think he would most easily pick up on, given all his concern for angry and frustrated young men.
That these poems are written by a 19-year-old who cannot wait to have sex with his lifelong crush.
Marx is pumping out bars about illicit desire, demonic temptation, guilt, self-loathing, and religious dread.
The beloved is both muse and victim.
He has a fear that his own passion might poison her.
And all of these themes so obviously align with the social pressures surrounding the illegal engagement between Marx and Jenny, which crossed class lines and angered both families.
Marx was sublimating this tension into Gothic and melodramatic imagery, but Peterson and Kengor's freshman-level academic malpractice serves a very important purpose, to show that Marx's youthful engagement with Gothic imagery was proof of his literal alignment with demons.
So the more they yammer about how demonic Marx was as a teenager, the less they have to talk about what the actual grown-up Marxist theory is that they say is destroying the world.
So as I mentioned in Kengor's book and his conversation with Peterson, there's no attempt to even summarize what Marxism says.
So there's this blend of conspiratuality and ad hominem attack in which exactly nothing is said about basic and crucial concepts like surplus value, socialized labor versus privatized profit, what capital actually is, or what commodity fetishism is.
And that's really important because the omission of this last issue is just high irony.
They are accusing Marx of theological perversion, but they don't realize that this is what Marx is accusing them and all apologists for capitalism of.
He's saying that they're all duped by a larger magic.
And the big blind spot here is the notion of the fetish, which Dussell says allows Marx to point out that Peterson and Kengor are the real idolaters.
Now, the fetish is not an easy idea, so I think it's best to approach it from a common misunderstanding of Marx that's easier to pick apart.
Now, this misunderstanding is everywhere now, but it got its first enormous bump from Pope Pius IX in 1846.
Chapter 3, The Private Property of the Universal Church.
In 1846, Pope Pius IX put out an encyclical called Qui Pluribus.
The encyclical is one of Pius IX's shots over the bow of modernity.
And in it, he rails against the dangers of rationalism, pantheism, and communism.
Now, the Pope doesn't say much about communism directly, except that it is, quote, an unspeakable doctrine, most opposed to the very natural law.
For if this doctrine were accepted, the complete destruction of everyone's laws, government, property, and even of human society itself would follow.
You know, big if true, but put a pin in property and how it's proximal to natural law in this statement, because together these are doing a lot of work.
Now, about the year 1846, this is two years before the manifesto is published, but Pius IX can smell it in the air.
In fact, the opening of the manifesto flags this hypervigilance that's ready to strangle socialism in the cradle at Christmastime.
Quote, a specter is haunting Europe, Marx and Engels wrote, the specter of communism.
All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exercise this specter.
Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies, unquote.
So these are all the people who are scared of communism but don't really know what it's about.
So they go on to say that since there are so many misconceptions out there about the ideology, it's time for a manifesto.
So here it is.
Now, sure enough, the manifesto contains this sentence in the second chapter.
Quote, the theory of the communists may be summed up in the single sentence, abolition of private property.
Sounds scary.
And so the next year, 1849, Pius IX digs in a little deeper in his encyclical called Nostis et Nobiscum.
Quote, As regards this teaching and these theories, it is now generally known that the special goal of their proponents is to introduce to the people the pernicious fictions of socialism and communism by misapplying the terms liberty and equality.
The final goal shared by these teachings, whether of communism or socialism, even if approached differently, is to excite by continuous disturbances workers and others, especially those of the lower class, whom they have deceived by their lies and deluded by the promise of a happier condition.
They are preparing them for plundering, stealing, and usurping first the churches and then everyone's property.
After this, they will profane all law, human and divine, to destroy divine worship and to subvert the entire ordering of civil societies.
Now, there's an irony here I have to point out, but then I want to move on to a key misunderstanding of property.
Now, the irony is, you know, Pius IX writing that somehow the people are deceived by the lies of the communists and deluded by the promise of a happier condition.
And this is quite an accusation coming from the head of a church that promises eternal life to those who fulfill its sacraments and keep up with tithing.
I mean, after all, this was one of Marx's most famous ambivalent statements.
Quote, religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.
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.
That's from an essay called Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, and that was published in 1844, but only available in German until the 1920s when it appeared in French, and then it didn't make it to the broader English world until the 1950s.
I'll come back to this on Monday in the Patreon bonus.
Now, here's the key line going back up to Pius IX's encyclical.
Quote, Marx and Engels are preparing the working class for plundering, stealing, and usurping first the church's and then everyone's property.
So here the Pope manages to blend and conflate two orders of property, the private and the personal, as a function of conflating the church with everyone.
Because if he had read the Communist Manifesto passage, he would have found the crucial distinction that every reactionary after him has ignored as well and had to ignore in order to dodge the moral challenge it poses.
Quote, the distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property.
But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.
In this sense, the theory of the communists may be summed up in the single sentence, abolition of private property.
We communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as a fruit of a man's own labor, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity, and independence.
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property.
Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form?
No, there's no need to abolish that.
The development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it and is still destroying it daily.
I hope that lands because there's been about 150 years of bullshit about what property means in socialism based on cherry-picking that paragraph.
The distinction between personal property and private property, Marx makes, relates to the fact that any commodity, any object, can have a double nature.
It can be something you make or trade for use yourself, so that's the use value, or it can be something you sell for profit or extract rent from another person you contract to use it.
So that's the exchange value.
So let me give an example.
There's a huge difference between baking bread for yourself and your neighbor to eat versus baking bread to dominate the bread market.
Your relationship with bread completely changes in a way that begins to dehumanize you and everyone you are selling it to if the purpose of baking bread is to dominate the bread market.
Marx's argument is that a commodity made for personal or communal use has direct and intimate human meaning.
It's connected to the needs, skill, care, and material life of the person who holds it.
But if that same object enters the market, its meaning shifts.
Its primary purpose becomes its value in exchange, not the satisfaction of human needs.
And this has a number of really bad downstream effects.
So first of all, that commodity becomes independent of its creator.
Now, maybe you already hear the theological argument revving up here.
The social relation of I bake bread and you eat bread becomes a relation between things.
In other words, I own a bread factory to bake bread that competes with other loaves of bread for the purpose of earning me a private profit on the labor of my bakers.
The next thing it does is that it makes the bakery owner no longer responsible for thinking of people's needs.
The bakery owner is thinking about what the market can yield.
Next, the bread is no longer just the sensuous reality of bread.
It sits on the rack with a price tag on it, and that price tag turns it into an idea, something magical that can produce wealth.
And this is where the bread becomes an image of itself.
The word Marx uses is fetish.
And we'll see on Monday how Dussell compares this to idolatry in religious thought.
The bakers hired by the bakery owner also lose contact with the product and joy of their work.
That's called alienation.
All of those are downstream effects of private property.
When the baker keeps the bread market profit, that can become capital that he reinvests in another bakery.
So he makes money not from the instances of his own labor, but because he appropriates what's called surplus value for himself.
And that is the one and only type of private property that Marx and Engel are targeting.
Now, why do you suppose it was in the interest of Pius IX to steamroll over this distinction and conflate the church's private property with everyone else's personal property?
I bet you can't guess.
Prior to the 1870 reunification of Italy, the Vatican was one of the major territorial landholders in central Italy, presiding over approximately 44,000 kilometers square of something called the patrimony of St. Peter, which was established after the decline of Byzantine rule in the 8th century.
So this was a vast network of churches, monasteries, convents, agricultural estates, forests, and villages that generated rental income and other revenues through taxes on produce, leases, tithes, and tenant farming.
In daily on-the-ground relations in the feudal period, this often meant that entire towns in Italy were basically papal company towns.
Papal delegates appointed governors, oversaw budgets, roads, schools, and utilities while imposing tributes and overriding local authorities in tax policy.
Now, nailing down financials, solid financials for what this meant in 1848 looks like it's a lifelong academic project.
But what I did find is that in the late 17th century, yearly papal revenues were on the order of 2 to 2.5 million scudi.
That was the denomination of the time.
It's hard to translate this into USD, but this is somewhere around 50 million US dollars.
And that was going on while public debt had ballooned to many times that, well over 10 times the annual income.
So what does that mean?
It means that at that time, the Catholic Church was a religious institution that was also an emergent modern capitalist state.
The church relied on rents to survive, but it was also ensnared in debt to the extent that it was ultimately dwarfed by Europe's emerging empires.
And this is why church political history of the 19th and early 20th century involves a lot of popes attempting to hold on to capital assets by striking one deal after another with larger powers.
Pius IX tried to energize papal state economy by granting papal prizes to domestic producers of wool, silk, and other export materials.
And he also improved transportation via roads, viaducts, bridges, seaports, and new railways linking to northern Italy, which facilitated the movement of industrial goods.
But the papal states never engaged in the heavy industry that came to shape modern political power.
So the bottom line is it's impossible to imagine any 19th century pope accepting the Marxist assessment of private property being immoral.
The papal states were nothing without their power to extract rents.
Now today, Pope Leo faces the same sticky contradiction.
Recent budgets under Leo XIV show annual income in the hundreds of millions of euros for the Vatican, and roughly one quarter to one third comes from donations and other spiritual contributions, but the rest comes from return on investments, real estate and church-run services such as museums, universities, and hospitals.
When we look at financial reports from 2023 to 2025, we see the Vatican's income is just under a billion per year, and it consists of 30% spiritual contributions and 65% capital asset returns.
So this is real estate investment, revenue from universities, hospitals, and media, and tourism, such as the Vatican Museums.
The Vatican's asset management arm currently oversees more than 5,400 properties worldwide.
This includes commercial buildings, shops, offices, and residences.
No one knows the total income of the global church.
Serious estimates suggest that annual spending by Catholic entities worldwide runs well into the hundreds of billions of dollars, but precise global figures are unavailable.
But in relation to Vatican income streams, the global streams are reversed by proportion, with 70% coming in on the donation plate and 30% generated by capital assets.
So given this financial reality and the church's continued existential dependence on privatized capital that generates rents, Pope Leo's fondness for liberation theology, in which that Marxist distinction between private property and personal property is actually appreciated and elevated, now runs in conflict with the reality of the church that he adds up.
To really stand against the dictatorship of an economy that kills, as he put it in his first major writing, Delexite, Leo would have to begin the process of divesting the Catholic Church from its rent-seeking assets so that it could exist a little bit more like, well, the historical Jesus.
But history will struggle against Leo.
As Marx quipped in the 1867 German preface to Volume 1 of Capital, quote, the English established church will more readily pardon an attack on 38 of its 39 articles than on 1 39th of its income.
Nowadays, atheism is culpable, a relatively slight sin as compared with criticism of existing property relations.
Okay, Peterson and Kengor think Marx is demonic.
The old-timey Catholic Church thinks that socialism is coming for church assets.
In the Monday bonus on Patreon, I'll spend more time diving into how Enrique Ducelle analyzes that Marx is not inimical to religion in the ways that these goobers imagine.
In fact, Ducelle shows that Marx uses religious themes throughout his work to create what we might call a negative theology.
In brief, Marx's theological use of metaphor is negative and anti-fetishistic, and its primary emphasis is identifying that which is not God.
And he finds evidence of the not God in forms of religion that sanctify capitalism.
So this method of negative theology aligns with the ancient Hebrew theological tradition, which focuses more on the absence on what is not God than on affirming what God might be.