NO, KARL. YOU WEREN’T RIGHT.

Though he wrote dispatches for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, its historical rival, The New York Times has been very nice to Karl Marx this week on the eve of his 200th birthday this Saturday. It ran a piece Monday by philosopher Jason Barker headed: “Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!”

In the early ’90s, after the collapse of Soviet Communism, that headline would have been laughed out of the paper. Have things really changed so much since capitalism’s first big financial trauma following its supposed final triumph?

Marx is customarily marked down for his predictions: that capitalism would grind itself into the ground as a matter of scientific necessity (it hasn’t, at least not yet); that communism would first appear in advanced nations like Britain and Germany (it didn’t); that once in place, communism would lead to a withering away of the state (wrong again, as any former subject of Stalin, Brezhnev or Mao will tell you).

But subtracting marks from Marx for incorrect prediction is only fair if you do the same for other economists. Adam Smith believed the joint-stock company — the precursor of the most successful form of economic organization in the planet’s history, the modern corporation — couldn’t possibly work. And though he wrote in the 1770s, just as the Industrial Revolution was, as you might say, picking up steam, he missed the coming transformation almost completely.

In other ways Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels were very prescient. Their Communist Manifesto describes a hyper-capitalism of big, aggressive companies, “intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations,” and wave after wave of new technologies that repeatedly upend how people live. The transatlantic cable was still two decades away then, but theirs is still a very familiar world — all the way down to Marx’s own existence as a gig-economy journalist.

That’s not quite what Professor Barker has in mind, however. His point, rather, is, that “…educated liberal opinion is today more or less unanimous in its agreement that Marx’s basic thesis — that capitalism is driven by a deeply divisive class struggle in which the ruling-class minority appropriates the surplus labour of the working-class majority as profit — is correct.”

Having worked in a university for four decades, I’m reasonably familiar with educated liberal opinion. It is very, very hard on capitalism. The word itself is almost never used except in denunciation (though of course the system being denounced is what pays the denouncers’ usually comfortable salaries). “Profit” is a similarly dirty word, used only in condemnation — even in business schools, which these days are as likely to push the “social economy” as they are regular old-fashioned for-profit free enterprise.

That said, do most educated liberals still really buy into Marxian notions of class struggle? Most understand that “workers,” who now rely more on brains than brawn, don’t produce output all on their own. Rather, it’s jointly produced. Take away the managers, entrepreneurs and maybe even owners and you won’t get any output, just as if you remove most “workers,” you’ll lose most output. My guess is that even liberal educated opinion appreciates that if the organizers of production don’t get a share of the output, they won’t continue organizing.

Nor does liberal opinion buy the idea of social classes locked in a death struggle. Some people in Canada talk like Don Cherry, others like Justin Trudeau. It’s true that where you start out is a big influence on where you end up. But Canadian society is full of people who started from humble origins and did very well. Don Cherry is an example. Nor are our main social divides any longer between old-fashioned capitalists and factory workers. In fact, the usual complaint is there aren’t any factory workers any more — which, if you’ve ever experienced factory work, you might actually regard as not such a bad thing.

Liberal educated opinion does seem fixated on income classes these days and feels very guilty that many of its adherents are in the top classes. They aren’t volunteering to move down but, quite rightly, they want to make sure people born at the bottom can move up. Of course, that’s something all educated opinion — and uneducated opinion — wants.

How do you make it happen? Marx’s Communist Manifesto includes a top-10 list of policies, many of which are pure Maoism, and history proved pretty emphatically those didn’t work. But No. 2 is “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax,” which many capitalist democracies have. And No. 10 is “Free education for all children in public schools, Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc., etc.” “Etc., etc.,” is vague but all the rest has been done, and more.

Apart from all that, the best route to social mobility is through a vibrant capitalist economy. I doubt Marx was right for his time. He’s certainly not right for this time.

DO MOST EDUCATED LIBERALS STILL REALLY BUY INTO MARXIAN NOTIONS OF CLASS STRUGGLE?