Just a brief thought. I often describe myself as a marxist. I'm careful to use a small "m". The way I see it, it's a philosophical stance more than a political program – a way of analyzing the world with a focus on economic forms and causes, and with an interest in how ideologies interact with class (and social) consciousness. It is not – and for me, at least, never has been – a set of prescriptions about politics.
In fact, politically, I have tended to lean somewhat libertarian, although as that ideological current gets more and more hijacked by the "tea-party" right in the U.S., I grow less comfortable with the term. Lately, I've been thinking of myself as an anarcho-syndicalist, which is really just code for the libertarian left.
For those who confuse philosophical marxism with, for example, Soviet history, Terry Eagleton makes an important point when he says, "What perished in the Soviet Union was Marxist only in the sense that the Inquisition was Christian."
[This is a "back-post" added 2010-05-23, from handwritten materials]