ciety. As we have seen, Marx's socialism is based entirely on his conclusions as to the future development of certain tendencies of capitalism. If those tendencies are abolished, even though with the basic principle of capitalism itself, or modified along with that principle, what warrant have we to say that socialism is inevitable? It is upon those tendencies that we are dependent for the conditions which are a prerequisite to socialism, according to Marx, and with the abolition of those tendencies the conditions which will bring socialism may never arise. The questions to be answered, therefore, are: Is capitalism going to be supplanted by some other system, or is it merely going to be limited or modified? And if it is to be supplanted what will take its place? After Capitalism, what?
In what relation does the existence or non-existence of a middle class stand to the possibility or inevitability of Socialism? It is generally assumed that, according to Marx, all the middle class must disappear and society become divided into a handful of capitalistic millionaires on the one hand and poor workingmen on the other before a socialist form of society can supplant our present capitalist system. There is, however, no warrant for such an assumption. Marx nowhere says so expressly. Nor is there anything in Marx's historico-philosophical views, that is, in his Materialistic Conception of History, from which such a conclusion could rightfully be drawn. All that that theory implies is that the evolution of society depends entirely on the development of its economic forces. And in those passages of his great work where Marx speaks of the evolution of society from Capitalism to Socialism, it is only the social forces of production and distribution that claim his attention. But Marx is no fatalist. He does not believe that society develops automatically without the aid of the human beings who compose it, or of the social classes
