"Who", asked a BBC poll, "is the greatest thinker of the millennium?" Karl Marx topped the list.² Another survey, this time of the USA's Library of Congress — the world's largest library — found that, with nearly 4000 works, Karl Marx was the sixth most written about individual ever (Jesus Christ came first and Lenin third).³ For all his celebrity, Karl Marx remains an enigma; in the words of Engels's eulogy, the "best hated" man of his times, and one difficult to overlook: for some a genius, for others a monster. His legacy is an elusive riddle, either an Orwellian nightmare or a world rid of exploitation and oppression; his ideas are either bankrupt or immanently relevant.