is that, while concentration of capital undoubtedly takes place, it does not take place in all the capitalist industries, and is, on the whole, extremely slow. He also cites another series of statistical data apparently showing that the tendency in the distribution of incomes in modern society is not, as is supposed to be assumed by Marxists, towards a wiping out of moderate incomes, leaving only a small minority with large revenues and the bulk of society with only workingmen's wages, but, on the contrary, the tendency is towards an increase of the number of persons whose income is derived from the possession of property. From this he argues that the middle-class does not disappear, but on the contrary is growing.
The likelihood of the growth of the middle-class in numbers while capital was undergoing a steady, though slow, process of concentration, would seem of such doubtful nature as to raise a suspicion as to the character of the statistics. Bernstein saw this, and he, therefore, hastens to allay our suspicions by the following observation: The corporation—says he—tends to neutralize to a large extent the tendency towards centralization of wealth through the concentration of undertakings. The corporation permits of a widespread splitting up of already concentrated capital, and makes superfluous the acquisition of capitals by individual magnates for the purposes of the concentration of industrial undertakings. Wherefore, he opines, the opinion, "prevailing among socialists," that the centralization of wealth runs parallel to the concentration of industrial undertakings is erroneous.
In the book which Kautsky has written in reply to Bernstein, "Bernstein and the Social Democratic Program,"[1] he shows that Bernstein's statistics are unreliable and incomplete, and that the conclusions he draws from them are unjustified. We shall not enter here upon a detailed discussion of these statistics, as this would be beyond the
- ↑ Karl Kautsky, Bernstein und das Sozialdemokratische Programm. Eine Antikritik. Stuttgart, 1899.
