A Hitch about Marx

Christopher Hitchens is writing about religion. So what else is new? To me this is:

Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, to take two very salient examples, looked upon religion as virtually ineradicable - the former precisely because he did identify it with secular yearnings that would be hard to satisfy...

Yes, Marx did see secular yearnings as operative within religion, calling it 'the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions'. But new to me is that he looked upon religion as 'virtually ineradicable'. In the same place as the heart and soul stuff, Marx also wrote:

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

OK, this is the young Marx - 1843. Did he change his mind? Not as far as I know. It is true that Marx saw the achievement of a communist utopia as a drawn out and difficult process. And it is also true that some absurd notions are misattributed to him regarding his thinking about the shape and characteristics of such a future utopia. But, early and late, Marx seems to have anticipated a future society in which economic and social relations would be more or less transparent, and religious belief would disappear as a result. He writes in volume 1 of Capital:

The religious reflex of the real world can... only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature.

It is possible, of course, to question these anticipations. One could think that certain permanent aspects of the human condition - mortality, for example, and grief - might sustain religious belief even in the best of feasible worlds. And one might wonder whether there aren't limits to societal transparency, given how easily people fall into misunderstanding one another even in the smallest matters. But Marx did look forward to a time of 'intelligible and reasonable relations' and a human self-consciousness freed from illusions. This was an integral part of his mature thought, embodied (negatively) in the doctrine of commodity fetishism, in which he criticized capitalist society for being opaque to its members.