of this last point will immediately suggest itself if the reader will recollect what we said in the second section of this chapter on the psychological and ideological effects of the different kinds of property and the different occupations. But we shall discuss this more at length further below.
As we have already stated, however, in the first section of this chapter, the real strength of Bernstein's argument does not lie in the statistical data with which he attempts to prove his alleged facts, but in the social phenomenon which he observed and which seems to counteract the evolutionary tendencies of capitalism described by Marx. The real meat of his argument lies in the third point mentioned above. The real question is: how does the modern development of that social economic factor, the substitution of corporate in the place of individual economic action on the part of the capitalists, react on the fortunes of that class. Our inquiry must not, however, be limited to the question of the division of income within that class, but also as to how, in what manner and under what circumstances, this division is being effected. We must find out not only how much each capitalist gets as his share of surplus-value created by the working class, but how his share is determined and what he must do in order to get it. Into what relations does his getting it, and the manner in which he gets it, bring him to his fellow-capitalists, the other classes of society, and society at large, that is, the social organization as a whole.
Bernstein says, in discussing the importance of the Marxian theory of value, that the fact of the creation by the working class of surplus-value, and its absorption by the capitalist class being provable empirically as a fact (to his satisfaction, of course) it makes no difference by what economic laws it is brought about. This may be good enough reasoning when one starts out from so-called "ethical" premises, but is absolutely inadequate from the scientific historico-economic point of view. We have already sufficiently pointed out the great importance of the difference which does exist, in its purely economic bearings, and now we wish to
