Perhaps it would help to have the whole quote in context.

That was written in Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, so yes I think it is accurate to say that Marx affirmed the power of religion. He saw it as a construct of the powerful to protect themselves from criticism. If you are suffering, it is because god wants you to suffer. He thought it was necessary and inevitable that people would discard the illusion of religion, and having cast aside that illusion will recognize the real suffering at the hands of the bourgeoisie.

Here is what gets me. People compartmentalize with the likes of Marx and anything accurate he may have said gets thrown out because of his wrongful ENTIRE PACKAGE.

It is cherry picking. If they are going to throw out everthing, be consistent and throw out Newtons lagit laws because he also postulated Alchemy.

The reality is that ANYTHING that becomes dogmatic can lead to the point of protection against criticism. It boils down to egos being protected because of utopia thinking.

Nationalism is as much a religion as theocracy, just as tribal as sports zealots who start fights over a game.

So my only problem is that Marx failed to see the bigger picture in that anything ANYTHING that becomes dogmatic is dangerous.

What Marx did in his attempt to break an abusive utopia was to replace it with another utopia and in turn one monopoly ended up being replaced with another.

The economy sucked at the time of Marx and he saw one class abusing the workers so he became an advocate of workers rights. Fair enough, but his solution merely became another monopoly controlled by Stalin.

The issue once again is that you cannot solve problems with blanket solutions, utopias, "one size fits all" either way. You must always have something in place to be a check so that power, EITHER WAY, cannot become lopsided, EITHER WAY. This is what Marx failed to realize. He merely was the opposite side of the coin in trying to fight the monopoly of his time.

He was right in that religion is a very useful tool to distract people away from the fact that they are being abused. Stalin was merely a state religion and just as abusive as the utopia class warfare that caused the revolution that lead to Stalin in the first place. BOTH were dogmatic and abusive.

Yeah, Marx was a horrible writer. His rambling and meandering style makes him difficult to follow. I will be happy to never read Das Kapital again. I think it is a German thing because I found Hegel to be almost as unreadable.

Yeah, I think Marx believed that religion was a type of shield that had to be broken down before people could see the true problems with society.

The "inverted consciousness of the world" is lifted from Hegel's Phenomenology. Here Marx is arguing that religion creates an inverted world where religion, heaven, gods etc is "real" while the physical world is not. Hegel's concept goes much deeper than that but I do not feel qualified to fully flesh it out. Perhaps someone on here who has a little more background in Hegel and philosophy can explain in greater detail. 

I don't believe Marx was arguing that humans couldn't comprehend reality. Quite the opposite. He was arguing that religion was being substituted for reality, and once religion was out of the way humans could, and indeed would comprehend reality. For example, suppose someone believes that God causes rain. As long as the person continues to believe the false reality that God creates rain, they will never bother to discover the science behind rainfall. Only by questioning the belief and throwing it out can a person comprehend the true reality of rainfall.

Yes, I think Marx was saying that only a symptom was being addressed. Opium is a pain reliever, so if you have a broken leg, opium will make you feel better but your leg is still broken. Marx saw widespread religion as a sign that there was real suffering going on. After all, you take opium because you have pain. So if you see someone taking opium one might logically conclude that the person was in some kind of pain. 

The condition that requires illusions in Marx's mind was the oppression of the people by the bourgeoisie. He believed people were suffering in the economic system and therefore required the illusions created by religion as a man suffering from pain requires opium. They turn to the false happiness provided by religion like the man in pain turns to the false relief of opium rather than solve the underlying problem. 

Yeah, or to stay with Marx's analogy to cure an opium addiction you need to admit that there is a problem causing you pain that needs to be dealt with. The second half is Marx asserting that man is the center of himself. IOW man and the physical world he perceives IS reality as opposed to god, heaven etc. 

Yeah, philosophy is a lot more interesting when you are stoned. I loved it in college. Not so much now. 

so far i have nothing to add, other than to try to remind everybody that there was an ENORMOUS series of ideological steps between marxism and stalinism.  there were two other socialist internationals before lenin's third international, and the second coexisted with and competed with the third.  both claimed "orthodox" marxism.  marx and engels gave birth to HUNDREDS of schools of thought.  even the third international split into bolshevism and menshevism.  then you have the fourth (troskyist) international.  you have left communism, european communism, marxist humanism, and even the anarchists were part of the first international in marx's lifetime.  jacques derrida revamped marxism after the fall of the soviet union.

to say that marxism led to stalinism of necessity is asinine.

well, it's always difficult to answer hypotheticals.  your story is interesting.  i took russian for four years in high school as well, but we were a little podunk school in eastern kentucky so we certainly never took a trip to russia.  i still haven't been there to this day, though i now live in slovakia, and i've been to most of the warsaw pact countries (hungary, poland, and the czech republic multiple times, as well as once to romania) and parts of the former yugoslavia (croatia and macedonia).  my wife is slovak and she's been everywhere i've been, as well as serbia, bulgaria, and albania.  i've had the chance to meet and work with several russian people over the years in central and southeastern europe.

marxism as laid down by marx and engels is actually not very developed as a revolutionary philosophy.  it's heavy on economics and historical materialism.  remember that marx was not concerned with laying down a closed system for the ages.  his philosophy was constantly being revised to meet new developments.  he was a supporter of the paris commune.  he helped form the first international and then promptly turned his back on it in disgust.  he and engels were convinced the revolution was going to break out in england any day and engels even went so far as to designate himself head of military affairs ahead of time.

lenin's goal was to take marx's philosophy and make it applicable in a real revolutionary situation.  it was lenin who emphasized the "dictatorship of the proletariat," a term marx used very rarely and never really elaborated upon.  it was also lenin's idea that the proletariat could never rise above "trade union consciousness" of its own accord, and so it needed a party, commanding absolute loyalty and enforcing absolute discipline (though not, it is to be emphasized, headed by one absolute leader), to be the catalyst for revolution.  that was lenin's true innovation: party leadership, a party over and above the state.  this is why it's fallacious to call marxism-leninism "state-worship," because the state was always a puppet for the party, which could even dissolve the state if necessary.  the head of any "communist" country is not the president or prime minister, but the party general secretary.

you mention "leninism," and i just mentioned "marxism-leninism."  these terms were coined by stalin after lenin's death, and are usually to be understood as euphemisms for stalinism.  lenin didn't consider himself an innovator (though he was), only an applier of marxism.  stalinism magnified and distorted leninism (i.e., lenin's own philosophy as we can glean from his writings) in several ways:

1. it made the state completely impotent.  the government in lenin's time was headed by the sovnarkom (council of people's commisars), and while it was definitely submissive to the party central committee, it still had a great deal of real power--lenin was even its president.  stalin began changing all that even before lenin's death.

2. it steadily concentrated power in the party, first from the general assembly to the central committee, then from the central committee to the secretariat, then to the politburo, then from the politburo to a sort of smaller standing committee, and finally into the hands of the general secretary (stalin).  as time went on, stalin took his cue from hitler and allowed himself to be addressed as "leader" (vozhd), something lenin would never have allowed.

3. finally, even before the beginning of operation barbarossa, the party general secretary took military power for himself, with stalin making major military decisions (once again, probably taking his cue from hitler).  contrast this with lenin, who never made military decisions during the civil war and never appeared in any sort of military uniform.

in lenin's day, it was possible to argue with him without losing your job, much less your head.  trotsky, his right hand man, had been one of his fiercest critics and a member of the menshevik faction between 1905 and 1917.  lenin, while trying to create (without much success) a minor personality cult around marx and engels, abhorred any such cult around himself and rarely allowed his likeness to be displayed.  it was his wish to be cremated, and his widow, nadezhda krupskaya, fought tooth and nail the party's decision to have him embalmed in a grand mausoleum.  this is not to say he was anything close to a liberal, "western" politician, but you'd be hard-pressed to find any such politician anywhere in russian history, even today.

as for "what if" lenin had lived longer, or stalin had not come to power, i don't know.  it's my personal opinion, having studied the lives of both men, that neither lenin nor trotsky would ever have enacted the great purges.  i think, however, trotsky would definitely have instituted collectivization and five-year plans, because these had been his ideas (which stalin had criticized at the time), though i think, because of his demonstrable integrity, they would not have been near as disastrous as in stalin's rule.  i do not think trotsky would have permitted a personality cult, nor would he have concentrated all the power in his office.  he would no doubt have been a military leader, however, since he had formed and led the red army during the civil war (with admirable success, considering his lack of prior military experience).  i also think the soviet union would have been in capable hands under bukharin's leadership.

i'm not sure about your thoughts on russian christianity making it easy for the bolsheviks to take power.  the bolsheviks were originally very iconoclastic and rode to power on the support of the urban proletariat, particularly in moscow and petrograd, and that group wasn't terribly religious.  the religious peasantry, on the other hand, strongly opposed the bolsheviks, until stalin came along, who knew how to deal with them: raise up a god on earth and treat them like cattle.  i don't think christianity had anything to do with the bolsheviks taking power, but it definitely contributed to the seemingly irresistable strength of stalinism.

it's very much in vogue among post-communist scholars today to say that stalinism was a natural and necessary--indeed, inevitable--outgrowth of leninism.  it can never be proved either way, but i think that's gross oversimplification and, frankly, propaganda.  there have been many great political thinkers, who were not sympathetic to the soviet union at all, who would agree with me, the chiefest being hannah arendt.

lenin was much worse.  i remember reading about some radical student at a marxist study group in the '60s saying something like, "if you had to fuck something as awful as naadezhda krupskaya, you'd write an terrible book like imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism as well." his peers were not amused.  i was.

he certainly was not.

well put.  he not only thought that about religion, but about hegelianism as well.  he referred to his system as "hegel turned on his head, or rather, rightside-up" (paraphrase).