In his conception of the classless society, Marx secularised the conception of messianic time. And he did well to.

Additional Thesis to Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History, found in a handwritten draft, and originally forming the eighteenth thesis.

The Theses were written following news of the Hitler-Stalin pact in August 1939. Benjamin read them aloud to his friend Soma Morgenstern. Morgenstern recounted her recollections of this event later in a letter to Scholem, recording that she asked Benjamin whether his faith – now betrayed – in the Soviet project 'was related to the Jewish belief in the redemption of the world through a Messiah'. She records Benjamin as replying, she says, 'not without irony': 'you might go farther and say that Karl Marx and all that nineteenth century socialism is but a different form of messianic faith'.  (via)

Only for the sake of the hopeless are we given hope.

Benjamin, study of Goethe's Elective Affinities