matic step against a bourgeoisie which they are to annihilate by sheer weight of numbers-for victory belongs to the big battalions-to imagine two armies in perfect alignment and perfect order, one of which, continually adding to its recruits, crushes the other with its weight, all this is merely the conception of a Prussian corporal. But contrary to Karl Marx' proposition, the recruits do not go to swell the proletariat army, the army they join is that of the capitalists. The proletariat army invented by Karl Marx, merely consists of candidates for the other army. The most active and sterling elements in the ranks of the proletariat are intending deserters many of whom have already acquired interests in the opposing camp. The skeleton units in that camp are formed entirely out of deserters, at whose head are the majority of the actual leaders of socialism, the most unassuming of whom become members of the lower middle class, while others become rich, substantial bourgeois like Bebel. Karl Marx and Engels based their theory upon two postulates-that the number of those interested in individual property would quickly and constantly diminish, and that the proletariat of the greater industrial system would be in a progressively miserable condition. It is necessary to the realisation of socialist evolution that industry and capital be concentrated in a small number of hands, and that the masses of wage earners become more and more miserable and be deprived of all personal property. This is the process set forth in Karl Marx' and Engels' "Communistic Manifesto" and confirmed by the Erfurt Congress of 1891. CHAPTER I BERNSTEIN AND THE CONCENTRATION OF CAPITAL AND OF INDUSTRY Increase in the number of capitalists in England and in Prussia-Increase of small industries in Germany. ECONOMISTS who have ventured to make a few timid observations upon the theory outlined in the last chapter, or upon the iron law of wages, have been declared to be the "enemies of the workman." This was considered an all-sufficient argument, like Molière's tart and Molière's cream. But a German Socialist, Bernstein, who, as executor of Engels' will, presented some guarantee of orthodoxy, had the misfortune to be exiled from Germany for complicity in an illegal agitation. He spent eleven years in Switzerland and eleven in England, and made a comparison in those countries between economic facts and the allegations of Marx and Engels-"a great misfortune, as Bebel said at the Lübeck Congress. It was indeed a misfortune for those Socialists who accept Marx's fallacies as indisputable dogmas. Bernstein, observing what went on before his eyes, formed the conviction that these fallacies were erroneous, and had the audacity to publish this discovery.1 While Karl Marx based his theory of the social revolution entirely upon the concentration of capital in an increasingly limited number of hands, and the increase of a progressively wretched number of the proletariat, Bernstein replies by showing that the number of capitalists, so far from diminishing, is increasing, and that the new capitalists disclaim the struggle between classes even while they remain supporters of it in theory. Consequently, the social revolution is not a fatal consequence of the 1 "Die Voraussetzungen des Socialismus und die Aufgaben der Social Demokratie.' |