Larry:
Actually, I haven't met any Marxist intellectuals, with or without quotation marx, in a long time. There was once a time when most of my best friends were Red Diaper Babies, and some of them ended up as spokespersons for the CPUSA. They never used Marxist rhetoric -- on the contrary, they sounded like militant trade unionists. I did get recruited once into a group that turned out to be a front for the Communist Revolutionary Party ("Maoists"), led by Bob Avakian. You still see those guys, now with gray whiskers, pushing leaflets in the Haight-Ashbury. Now, they did use Marxist rhetoric, as did some of the Trotzkyists I have met. All about "capitalist contradictions," "phases of the revolution," and I believe even "surplus value." It all sounds sort of quaint now.

But I'm afraid I still think Lenin was a Marxist. And even Stalin. Just as I cannot deny that Torquemada was a Catholic. I just don't think of "Marxist"-- or "Christian," for that matter, as titles of honor -- so far as I'm concerned, they are just names given to people who adopt and claim those respective creeds.

But then, who am I?