Let's not use the word "essentially" as a weasel word. If you mean to say that Hitchens was a Marxist, that should be based on documented membership in some Marxist organization or some concrete quote avowing allegiance to Marxism. Otherwise we are just casually red-baiting here.

I deplore the way our political culture has taken to shorthanding disagreements by labeling people as Socialists, Marxists and Communists when those movements are politically dead and the concerned individuals are not involved in the pathetic remaining organizations and, come to mention it, don't match to the textbook descriptions of the ideologies.