Comment 14 by godsbelow :

Comment 12 by david2 :

I like Hitch, but I can't understand why he still clings to the "Marxist" label? Affirming a "materialist conception of history", and opposing superstitious and religious rot, does not, in my eyes, make one a "Marxist".

I think a large part of the reason Hitchens still calls himself a Marxist is because he attributes his intellectual development to Marxist dialectic. There are a couple of interviews he did a few years back in which he elaborates (I can't find them at the moment). If I understand him correctly, even though he doesn't rely on Marxist arguments anymore, he relies on techniques of argument learnt from Marxist dialectic, so he regards himself as a Marxist in this capacity.

Thanks for the response. If you can find and post these interviews I'd be very interested in them.

Here, in a nutshell, is my difficulty. I consider myself a "Nietzschean", and by that term I simply mean that I find in Nietzsche more insight and honesty about issues that interest me than I do any other major thinker i'm aware of. But Nietzsche was no dogmatist nor systemizer, so I have no difficulty in rejecting or being very sceptical about many things he says. I don't think "Marxists" have the same freedom. They are committed to certain propositions that (in my view) simply aren't true, and without these propositions, most of the distinctiveness of the edifice collapses. It's like well-meaning vicars who no longer believe in the resurrection of Jesus, in my eyes they're not Christians, it's that simple!