orizing. Yet it passed almost without any appreciable results: the question of Revisionism was not settled, although it should have been if it were a question of soundness of argument. Thirdly, we must notice the fact which we have already mentioned as the reason for the failure of the Revisionist movement: the fact that notwithstanding its great literary influence the Revisionist movement was absolutely barren of practical results as far as the socialist movement was concerned.
All of these facts and circumstances is proof positive that there must have been something in the development of modern economic life which caused the appearance of the revisionist movement as an intellectual endeavor to take cognizance of and explain this development. It is also clear that this development, whatever it may be, was not, or at least not fully, reflected in our statistics, which accounts for the fact that neither side could prove its case conclusively by the aid of statistics, and the consequent distrust of all statistics. What was that something in the development of modern economic life, and how does it affect the Marxian theory?
The trouble with Bernstein and the rest of the Revisionist writers is that they do not go below the surface of things, and therefore do not know what "struck them," to use an inelegant but adequate colloquialism. Bernstein talks of the "new middle-class," the "wide distribution of incomes," the large number of stockholders in the big corporations or "trusts," and the influence of corporations on the centralization of wealth, but nowhere does he examine these things systematically or in any way analyze them so as to see their real significance in modern economic life, or even their exact meaning. Nowhere does their connection with the theoretical system which he criticizes appear. That is why his book makes the impression of the rambling talk of a man who does not know his own mind. The truth of the matter is he did not know his own problem. He had a vague feeling that there was a problem demanding
