It is May the Fourth, a day known to pun-loving fans of the Star Wars franchise and one that marks the coming of the neoliberal Sith. In 1979, Dame Darth Thatcher rose to vengeance on a date, which, if not consistently followed by May 5, would bring the good more sorrow than the creation of Jar Jar Binks.

May 5, 1818, is the birthdate of Karl Heinrich Marx. This is a fact the Marxist remembers, but one seldom proper for her to publicly relay. After all, Crikey is not an On-This-Day type of publication and Marx was hardly a Happy Birthday type of chap. Still, you only turn 200 once.

So hats off to you, Charlie, and let’s say no to candles. We will wait for history to extinguish the delusion that all you wrote was “wrong”.

One may call Marx “wrong” only after reading him. He is read by a few, but overwhelmingly dismissed, and even taught, by those who just couldn’t be bothered.

The man who gave the last part of his working life to the question of capital and the first to the question of being is “wrong” for all the wrong reasons. Here are three of the wrongest

1. Marx was an idealist with far too much faith in the natural virtue of people

No. Marx was a materialist who had only a little to say about natural human virtue — or vice, for that matter. It is not human nature that shapes social existence, but social existence that shapes the effing human. You want to read guys whose economic theses hinge on belief in natural human virtues, try John Locke, Adam Smith or David Ricardo.

2. Marx wrote things ages ago so who cares?

By the year of Marx’s birth, Locke and Smith were long dead. David Ricardo’s last laissez-faire lines had been written. These thinkers continue to directly inform both policy elites and the economic hobbyist who believes that capitalism is “natural”, has a “natural” point of balance and isn’t really anything but a system of natural and equal exchange.

3. The Soviet Experiment

Yeah, it’s not a good look. But (a) Marx did say that communism was a historical stage attainable after capitalism (b) state capitalism (as Lenin himself called it) spared the USSR the bother of the Great Depression (c) nowhere in all the work of Marx and Engels is there anything resembling a blueprint for Stalinism (d) the thought of nuclear proliferation — and a US hegemon with weapons manufacture as its post-war strategy for economic dominance — never occurred to Karl.

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Classical economics has failed us. True freedom for all, whose precondition, Marx wrote, was freedom for each, eludes us. The crisis tendency of capitalism the bloke took pains to explain is, surely and often, quite plain. When it is so evident that “human nature” makes far less of a dent in the average day than immense institutions, all of them in service to capital, maybe this 200-year-old philosopher-economist is worth a crack. If only to prove him “wrong”.