Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/216

 212 fications of old dogmas, withdrawals of old forecasts. The goal remains, for it is the creation of such self-evident truths as this: That he who controls the economic conditions of liberty, controls liberty itself, and that association is better than separation, and co-operation than competition. But the path is trod by succeeding generations for diverse reasons. One generation follows it because it is harassed by misery, another, because it is illumined by reason; and these diverse motives exist side by side in the movement, their relative strength constantly fluctuating.

Thus, to-day we have what is called the revisionist movement—which, however, is not always so much a departure from Marx as from Marxians. I have shown elsewhere in this book why I do not accept some of Marx's explanations—for, after all, he was a commentator on Socialism, not the inspired instrument through which the Socialist faith was revealed. In his book the English title of which is Evolutionary Socialism —the book which originated the revisionist movement in Germany—Mr. Bernstein parts company with Marxists on the following points amongst others. He denies that there is an imminent prospect of the breakdown of bourgeois society; he asserts that in the working of capitalism there is not a decreasing number of capitalists, all of them large, but that there is an increasing number of all kinds of capitalists;