Courtesy of Nick Mamatas and Ken Macleod, a highly entertaining interview with the ghost of Karl Marx, conducted by historian Donald Sassoon.

Donald Sassoon: Well, Dr Marx, you are all washed up, aren’t you? Fifteen years ago your theories ruled half the world. Now what's left? Cuba? North Korea?

Karl Marx: My ‘theories’ — as you put it — never ‘ruled.’ I had followers I neither chose nor sought, and for whom I have no more responsibility than Jesus had for Torquemada or Muhammad for Osama bin Laden. Self-appointed followers are the price of success. Most of my contemporaries would love to be as washed up as you think I am. I wrote that the point was not to explain the world, but to change it. And how many eminent Victorians have done so?

. . . In reality my work has never been as important as it is now. Over the last 40 years or so it has conquered the academy in the most advanced countries in the world. Historians, economists, social scientists, and even, to my surprise, some literary critics have all turned to the materialist conception. The most exciting history currently produced in the US and Europe is the most ‘Marxistic’ ever. Just go to the annual convention of the American Social Science History Association, which I attend regularly as a ghost. There they earnestly examine the interconnection between institutional and political structures and the world of production. They all talk about classes, structures, economic determination, power relations, oppressed and oppressors. And they all pretend to have read me — a sure sign of success.

See, this is what I’m talking about.