This week we hear from Andrew Hartman, a professor of history at Illinois State University. Andrew is currently hard at work on a book about Karl Marx. I asked him to come on the podcast because the name Marx seems to be in the air right now. It’s not just that we’ve come up the centenary of the Russian Revolution. People seem to want to talk about, or at least debate once again, the merit of Marx’s ideas and the form of economic and cultural analysis that he inaugurated. Consider the many books that have recently come out, like China Mieville’s "October," re-assessing the October Revolution and wondering if it inevitably led to Stalinism; consider also the many articles and essays in periodicals not just like Jacobin and the Nation, but also The New York Times, reintroducing Marxist concepts into the national debate as a way to assess and critique what is called neo-liberalism.