[1010] For the evolution of Marxism see Sombart’s lively volume Sozialismus und soziale Bewegung im 19 Jahrhundert (6th ed., 1908), and also Georges Sorel, La Décomposition du Marxisme (1908).
[1011] Labriola, Socialisme et Philosophie, p. 29. Others declare more unmistakably still that “these obscure formulæ [the writer is thinking of surplus labour] lead to equivocation and must be banished from the science altogether.” (Sorel, Revue internationale de Sociologie, 1900, p. 270.)
[1012] M. Sorel says of the revolutionary movement that everything connected with it is very improbable. (Décomposition du Marxisme.)
[1013] The Italian syndicalist Arthur Labriola (Revue socialiste, 1899, vol. i, p. 674) writes as follows: “While we Marxians are trying to repatch the master’s cloak political economy is making some headway every day. If we compare Marx’s Kapital with Marshall’s Principles—chapter by chapter, that is to say—we shall find that problems which required a few hundred pages in the Kapital are solved in a few lines by Marshall.” B. Croce (Materialismo storico ed Economia marxistica, 1900, p. 105) writes thus: “I am strongly in favour of economic construction along Hedonistic lines. But that does not satisfy the natural desire for a sociological treatment of profits, and such treatment is impossible unless we make use of the comparative considerations suggested by Marx.” Lastly, Sorel, in Saggi di Critica del Marxismo (1903, p. 13) says: “It is necessary to give up the attempt to transform socialism into a science.”
[1014] Especially in that passage to which Bernstein calls attention: “According to the law of value not merely must one devote the socially necessary amount of time to the production of each commodity, but each group of commodities must have such extra effort spent upon it as the nature of the commodity or the character of the demand requires. The first condition of value is utility or the satisfaction of some social need—that is, value in use raised to such a degree of potentiality as shall determine the proportion of total social labour to each of the various kinds of production.” (Kapital, vol. iii.)
Bernstein adds: “This admission makes it impossible to treat the themes of Gossen, of Jevons, and of Böhm-Bawerk as so many insignificant irrelevancies.” (Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus.)
[1015] “The surplus-value theory may be true or it may be false, but that will make no difference to the existence of surplus labour. Surplus labour is a fact of experience, demonstrable by observation, and requires no deductive proof.” (Bernstein, loc. cit., p. 42.) That Marx did not treat it with quite the same indifference is evident from the fact that the whole theory is developed, not incidentally in the course of the work, but at the very opening of the book.
[1016] In the book already quoted, which was published in 1899.
[1017] Sorel, Les Polémiques pour l’Interprétation du Marxisme, in the Revue internationale de Sociologie, 1900.
[1018] Sorel, Décomposition du Marxisme, p. 33.