sidered its disappearance of such great importance in the movement of society towards socialism. That is, in so far as he considered such disappearance of any moment in itself, outside of its being a mere indication of the movement of the economic forces of society. For it must always be borne in mind that it is the development of the economic forces that is the real power working for socialism, and any influence which any class or group of men may have on that movement, except as an expression of such development, is merely secondary.
In the first section of this chapter we stated that the development of corporate methods of doing business brought a new factor into the development of capitalism which apparently worked at cross-purposes with those tendencies of capitalistic development which, according to Marx, were to result in the destruction of the middle classes of capitalist society. We also stated there that this presented to Marx-students the problem of harmonizing the. Marxian prognosis as to the tendencies of development of capitalism with this new factor, and that the Revisionists were not equal to the task, and therefore came to the conclusion that Marx's prognosis was wrong. We interrupted the argument in order to give in the second section a characterization of the different social classes of the capitalist society which Marx had before him, in order to understand his position with reference to them. This was necessary in order that the reader may get the full meaning of the argument that we are going to present here in an endeavor to show that the Marxian prognosis of the development of capitalism and its ultimate fate, as well as the delineation of the social system which is going to take its place, need no revision, any more than any other part of his theoretical system. We shall now, therefore, return to our revisionist friends, and particularly to their leader, Eduard Bernstein.
