Exploring (mostly Cultural) Marxism in today's Left

It strikes me that much of your criticism here is not really aimed at Marxism, since it applies much more widely. You could say the same about any ideology - you gave the example of Islam; but remember that one Solzhenitsyn's own examples was Christianity.Of course, you will tell us that 'Christians' who justify inhumanity with Christianity are not True Christians. But, as you yourself just pointed out, anti-Stalin Marxists will tell us that Stalin and his ilk were not True Marxists. I'm not seeing a difference.

{p.14} Marx was an avowed enemy of all gods, a man who had bought his sword from the prince of darkness at the price of his soul. He had declared it his aim to draw all mankind into the abyss and to follow them laughing.Could Marx really have bought his sword from Satan?His daughter Eleanor says that Marx told her and her sisters many stories when they were children. The one she liked most was about a certain Hans Rckle. Is it normal for a father to tell his little children horrifying stories about selling one's dearest treasures to the Devil? Robert Payne in his book Marx also recounts this incident in great detail, as told by Eleanor - how unhappy Rckle, the magician, sold the toys with reluctance, holding on to them until the last moment. But since he had made a pact with the Devil, there was no escaping it. Marx's biographer continues, When Marx had finished Oulanem and other early poems in which he wrote about having a pact with the Devil, he had no thought of socialism. He even fought against it. He was editor of a German magazine, the Rheinische Zeitung, which "does not concede even theoretical validity to Communist ideas in their present form, let alone desire their practical realization, which it anyway finds impossible.... Attempts by masses to carry out Communist ideas can be answered by a cannon as soon as they have become dangerous...."

(p. 8) One of the rituals of the Satanist church is the b[l]ack mass, which Satanist priests recite at midnight. Black candles are put in the candlesticks upside down. The priest is dressed in his ornate robes, but with the lining outside. He says all things prescribed in the prayer book, but reads from the end toward the beginning. The holy names of God, Jesus, and Mary are read inversely. A crucifix is fastened upside down or trampled upon. The body of a naked woman serves as an altar. A consecrated wafer stolen from a church is inscribed with the name Satan and is used for a mock communion. During the black mass a Bible is burned. All those present promise to commit the seven deadly sins, as enumerated in Catholic catechisms, and never to do any good. An orgy follows.

Marx did not often speak publicly about metaphysics, but we can gather his views from the men with whom he associated. One of his partners in the First International was Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian anarchist, who wrote: Bakunin does more than praise Lucifer. He has a concrete program of revolution, but not one that would free the poor from exploitation. He writes: Marx, along with Bakunin, formed the First International and endorsed this strange program. Marx and Engels said in The Communist Manifesto that the proletarian sees law, morality, and religion as "so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests."Bakunin reveals that Proudhon, another major Socialist thinker and at that time a friend of Karl Marx, also "worshiped Satan." Hess had introduced Marx to Proudhon, who wore the same hair style typical of the nineteenth-century Satanist sect of Joanna Southcott.Proudhon, in The Philosophy of Misery, declared that God was the prototype for injustice. He exclaims, Proudhon declares God to be evil because man, His creation, is evil. Such thoughts are not original; they are the usual content of sermons delivered in Satanist worship.Marx later quarreled with Proudhon and wrote a book to refute his Philosophy of Misery. But Marx contradicted only minor economic doctrines. He had no objection to Proudhon's demonic anti-God rebellion.
17Heinrich Heine, the renowned German poet, was a third intimate friend of Marx. He too was a Satan fancier. He wrote: "Marx was a great admirer of Heinrich Heine... . Their relationship was warm, hearty."Why did he admire Heine? Perhaps for Satanist thoughts like the following: Would any decent man be an intimate friend of one who thinks like this?But Marx and his entourage thought alike. Lunatcharski, a leading philosopher who was once minister of education of the U.S.S.R., wrote in Socialism aid Religion that Marx set aside all contact with God and instead put Satan in front of marching proletarian columns.It is essential at this point to state emphatically that Marx and his comrades, while anti-God, were not atheists, as present-day Marxists claim to be. That is, while they openly denounced and reviled God, they hated a God in whom they believed. They challenged not His existence, but His supremacy.When the revolution broke out in Paris in 1871, the Communard Flourens declared, "Our enemy is God. Hatred of God is the beginning of wisdom."Marx greatly praised the Communards who openly proclaimed this aim. But what has this to do with a more equitable distribution of goods or with better social institutions? Such are only the outward trappings for concealing the real aim - the total eradication of God and His worship. We saw the evidence of this in such countries as Albania, and today in North Korea, where all churches, mosques, and pagodas have been closed. [My emphasis. Also want to note that Wurmbrand is nave about Islam as well as the RCC]
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Marx's Devilish PoetryWe see this clearly in Marx's poetry. In "Invocation of One in Despair" and "Human Pride" man's supreme supplication is for his own greatness. If man is doomed to perish through his own greatness, this will be a cosmic catastrophe, but he will die as a godlike being, mourned by demons. Marx's ballad "The Player" records the singer's complaints against a God who neither knows nor respects his art. This emerges from the dark abyss of hell, bedeviling the mind and bewitching the heart, and his dance is the dance of death." The minstrel draws his sword and throws it into the poet's soul.Art emerging from the dark abyss of hell, bedeviling the mind ... This reminds us of the words of the American revolutionary Jerry Rubin in Do It: In his poem "Human Pride," Marx admits that his aim is not to improve the world or to reform or revolutionize it, but simply to ruin it and to enjoy its being ruined: Marx adopted Satanism after intense inner struggle. He ceased writing poems during a period of severe illness, a result of the tempest within his heart. He wrote at that time about his vexation at having to make an idol of a view he detested. He felt sick.The overriding reason for Marx's conversion to communism appears clearly in a letter of his friend Georg Jung to Ruge: it was not the emancipation of the proletariat, nor even the establishing of a better social order. Jung writes: Were these poems the only expressly Satanist writings of Karl Marx? We do not know, because the bulk of his works is kept secret by those who guard his manuscripts.

Though a Jew, he wrote a pernicious anti-Jewish book called The Jewish Question. In 1856, he wrote in The New York Tribune an article entitled "The Russian Loan," in which we read: Did Hitler say anything worse than this?
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(Strangely, Marx also wrote to the contrary, in The Capital, Volume I, under the heading "The Capitalist Character of Manufacture": "In the front of the chosen people it was written that they are the property of Jehovah.")Many other Jewish Communists imitated Marx in their hatred of Jews. Ruth Fisher, renowned German Jewish Communist leader and a member of Parliament, said: "Squash the Jewish capitalists, hang them from the lamp posts; tread them under your feet." Why just the Jewish capitalists and not the others remains an unanswered question.Marx hated not only the Jews, but also the Germans: "Beating is the only means of resurrecting the Germans." He spoke about "the stupid German people ... the disgusting national narrowness of the Germans" and said that "Germans, Chinese, and Jews have to be compared with peddlers and small merchants." He called the Russians "cabbage-eaters." The Slavic peoples were "ethnic trash." He expressed his hatred of many nations, but never his love.Marx wrote in his new year's roundup of 1848 about "the Slavic riffraff," which included Russians, Czechs, and Croats.These "retrograde" races had nothing left for them by fate except "the immediate task of perishing in the revolutionary world storm." "The coming world war will cause not only reactionary classes and dynasties, but entire reactionary peoples, to disappear from the face of the earth. And that will be progress." "Their very name will vanish."Neither Marx nor Engels were concerned about the destruction of millions of people. The former wrote, In contrast, Hitler, who desired only the enslavement and not the destruction of these nations, was much more humane than Marx.Engels wrote in the same vein: Marx, the man who posed as a fighter for the proletariat, called this class of people "stupid boys, rogues, asses.Engels well knew what to expect from them. He wrote, "The democratic, red, yes, even the Communist mob, will never love us."Marx identified black people with "idiots" and constantly used the offensive term "nigger" in private correspondence.He called his rival Lassalle "the Jewish nigger" and made it very clear that this was not intended as an epithet of disdain for just one person. Marx even championed slavery in North America. For this, he quarreled with his friend Proudhon, who had advocated the emancipation of slaves in the U.S. Marx wrote in response, Marx also wrote, "The Devil take the British! - In spite of such denunciations, there are plenty of British, as well as American, Marxists.

So what do Karl's views on theology really have to do with the idea that the majority of people should be organised enough to leverage their power over the wealthy few?

It supposes that the wealthy few are leveraging their wealth against the interests of the many and therefore calls for the many to leverage their number against the few.The wealthy are so blatantly manipulating our democracies that I cannot fathom how you think it's a 'false and destructive analysis'. It would help if you'd argue it, rather than just assert it.