>It's at the end of his interview with Feed, which ran on the list.
Yeah, I've popped the relevant bit at the bottom of this note.
Hardly much of a renunciation, though. Whether one is a socialist or not is hardly a question worth asking any more - which is probably why Lamb has stopped asking. There really ain't a socialist left to belong to any more. And there's something sadly contradictory (as many of this convocation are well aware, I'm sure) in proclaiming one's socialism from a position of impotently atomic solitude.
As for Hitch's claim that socialism doesn't condition his work any more, in a time when capitalism is busy divesting itself of the political identities and expectations of liberalism, I suggest there's plenty of useful work to be done in defending liberalism and pointing to the retreat of the formalisms and material compromises which not only constitute liberalism, but legitimate capitalism. And most of his work is still about unaccountable elites, systemic and systematised lying, consequently unwitting constituencies, and the slaughter and theft which invariably attends such developments.
Which has gotta be done, eh?
Not nearly as usefully yours, Rob. ________________________________________________
FEED: Where do you stand politically?
HITCHENS: I don't have any identifiable political allegiance at the moment, though I'm barely ready even to say that. My political training and allegiance was with the left, and I'm sure it shows. That's how I learned to argue and what to look for. But that of course came from the particular left tradition that was so involved in a lot of argument within the left, when there was such a thing as an intra-left argument, which there hardly is anymore.
FEED: I remember Brian Lamb on C-Span used to ask you, "Are you still a socialist?"
HITCHENS: I was very glad he didn't do that the other day when I went on with him. He used to begin every time we came on. I knew he hoped that one day I'd say, "Okay, okay, you win." And I knew that even if that day ever came I wouldn't be glad that it had. It's a question I'm quite happy to postpone at the moment. It doesn't condition anything I do anymore. I would certainly say that.