> This article on Perry Anderson http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200603/marxist .
> I can't say that Cockburn and Hitchens are on the same terrain as writers
> (or have the same intellectual breadth). (I just read *For Marx*, so I
> wasn't thrilled at his dig at Althusser though.)
He calls him a 'neo-Stalinist charlatan'. I wonder what his definition of 'neo-Stalinist is' (perhaps this is a job for Mr Doss). If he includes as 'Stalinist' anyone who was a member of a Communist Party affiliated to the USSR, I guess - though what is the 'neo'? Althusser saw his work as an attack on Stalinism with the PCF and associated 'marxist humanism' with Soviet leadership who wanted to sweep 'Stalinism' under the carpet while maintaining its bureacratic legacy. Gregory Elliot's book on Althusser 'The Detour of Theory' gives a good political background.
The meaning of Stalinist shifted a little in the British New Left, with EP Thompson (for example) using it to describe an intellectual tradition that did not necessarily imply political agreement with Stalin or attachment to the USSR - and so, he suggested, certain elements of Trotskyism were Stalinist despite the political antagonism. (In his essay 'Socialist Humanism'.) I think Thompson's polemical essay on Althusser has been hugely influential on the latter's reception ever since. Of course, today, even someone like EP Thompson can be called Stalinist by the likes of Tony Judt, and it seems to mean 'anyone who is now or has ever been a member of a Communist Party'.
Mike Beggs