material and economic factors are supreme.

We Marxians are often accused of neglecting the intellectual factor and,
as Deville says, a whole syndicate of factors; but we do not neglect
them. We recognize their existence and their importance, but we do
refuse to waste our revolutionary energy on derivative phenomena when we
are able to see and recognize the decisive, dominant factor, the
economic factor. As Deville says, we do not neglect the cart because we
insist upon putting it behind the horse instead of in front of or
alongside of him, as our critics would have us do. Now, if the economic
factor is the basic factor, it behooves us to understand the present
economic system--Marx's Law of Surplus-Value is the key to this system.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] If this be true the question naturally arises: Why do the
socialists, instead of using economic methods to solve an economic
question, organize themselves into a political party? To answer this
question, we must first see what the State is and what relation it holds
to the economic conditions. Gabriel Deville defines the State thus: "The
State is the public power of coercion created and maintained in human
societies by their division into classes, a power which, being clothed
with force, makes laws and levies taxes." As long as the economically
dominant class retain full possession of this public power of coercion
they are able to use it as a weapon to defeat every attempt to alter the
economic structure of society. Hence every attempt to destroy economic
privilege and establish Industrial Democracy inevitably takes the form
of a political class struggle between the economically privileged class
and the economically exploited class.

II

THE LAW OF SURPLUS-VALUE

The second great idea that we associate with the name of Karl Marx is
the Law of Surplus-Value. Curiously enough this one technical theory is
the only discovery that bourgeois writers and economists give Marx
credit for. If you look up Marx in any ordinary encyclopedia or
reference book you will find they make his fame depend on this theory
alone, and to make matters worse they usually misstate and misrepresent
this theory, while they invariably fail to mention his two other equally
great, if not greater discoveries, the Materialistic Conception of
History and the Class Struggle. I think the reason they give special
prominence to this law of Surplus-Value is that, as it is a purely
technical theory in