Whenever I speak to a Marxist, I feel like a Religious Studies researcher, or an anthropologist of religion, speaking to a Christian.  

For me, not only is Marxism a religion - it's the religion.  It's the religion by which all other religions are measured.  Something is a religion if and only if, and to the extent that, it resembles Marxism. 

(And that's not a bad thing.  I love religion.  And I also love communists.) 

I see an unbroken line of tradition from the earliest Hebrew prophets - Amos, for instance - to contemporary communist movements.  From the beginning of this civilizational progression, Marxism was always in a process of becoming, of entelechy.  It always existed as potential; in Marx it reaches its entelechy or fulfillment - or at least until something else supersedes Marxism.  (I think Nietzsche attempted something like this, but he mostly failed.)

The ancient Israelites, or the Akkadians or the Babylonians or the Edomites for that matter, tended to attribute all of their military victories and losses to the pleasure or displeasure of their Gods.  For instance, if a campaign failed, the rituals performed in the Temple must have been displeasing somehow and would have to be revised.  If a military campaign succeeded, the sacrifices must have been presented in the proper way.  The priest(ess), performing his or her ritual, was thus a kind of proto-scientist, conducting an experiment, finding out what would work.  Of course, sometimes this process can backfire, in the "true believer" effect: a failed ritual can paradoxically cause its performers to believe in its efficacy all the more strongly, so as to avoid cognitive dissonance (see the work of Leon Festinger and Eric Hoffer).  In either case, the truth of the movement is determined retroactively by the granting or withholding of divine providence.

Similarly, if a communist movement fails to produce the desired society, then it was not "true" communism.  (For more on this concept of "truth" see here.)  Like the ancients, the Marxists too perform their rituals, hoping history will smile on them.  The "experiments" of the early religions led to these current communist movements.

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