Socialism appealed to large numbers of working men and women in the late nineteenth century, and the growth of socialist parties after 1871 was phenomenal. (See “Viewpoints 24.2: Socialist and Anti-Socialist Perspectives.”) Neither Bismarck’s repressive laws nor his social welfare measures checked the growth of the German Social Democratic Party. By 1912 the party, which espoused Marxist principles, had millions of followers and was the Reichstag’s largest party. Socialist parties also grew in other countries, and Marxist socialist parties were linked together in an international organization. In 1864 Karl Marx played an important role in founding the socialist International Working Men’s Association, also known as the First International. Marx presided over its annual meetings, which he used to spread the doctrine of socialist revolution.

The First International collapsed in 1872 over disputes about the use of violence to achieve revolution, but in 1889 socialist leaders came together to form the Second International, which lasted until 1914. Every three years delegates from the different parties met to interpret Marxist doctrines and plan coordinated action. Yet socialism was not as radical and revolutionary in these years as it sometimes appeared. As socialist parties grew and attracted large numbers of members, they looked more and more toward gradual change and steady improvement for the working class and less and less toward revolution. Workers themselves were progressively less inclined to follow radical programs for several reasons. As workers gained the right to vote and won real benefits, their attention focused more on elections than on revolutions. Workers were also not immune to nationalistic patriotism, even as they loyally voted for socialists. Nor were workers a unified social group. Perhaps most important of all, workers’ standard of living rose steadily after 1850, and the quality of life improved substantially in urban areas. Thus workers tended to become militantly moderate: they demanded gains, but they were less likely to take to the barricades in pursuit of them.

The growth of labor unions reinforced this trend toward moderation. In the early stages of industrialization, modern unions were considered subversive bodies and were generally prohibited by law. In Great Britain new unions that formed for skilled workers after 1850 avoided radical politics and concentrated on winning better wages and hours for their members through collective bargaining and compromise. After 1890 unions for unskilled workers developed in Britain.

German unions were not granted important rights until 1869, and until the Anti-Socialist Laws were repealed in 1890 the government frequently harassed them as socialist fronts. But after most legal harassment was eliminated, union membership skyrocketed from only about 270,000 in 1895 to roughly 3 million in 1912. Genuine collective bargaining, long opposed by socialist intellectuals as a “sellout,” was officially recognized as desirable by the German Trade Union Congress in 1899.

The German trade unions and their leaders were thoroughgoing revisionists. Revisionism was an effort by various socialists to update Marxist doctrines to reflect the realities of the time. The socialist Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932) argued in his Evolutionary Socialism in 1899 that Marx’s predictions of ever-greater poverty for workers had been proved false. Therefore, Bernstein suggested, socialists should reform their doctrines and win gradual evolutionary gains for workers through legislation, unions, and further economic development. The Second International denounced these views as heresy. Yet the revisionist gradualist approach continued to gain the tacit acceptance of many German socialists, particularly in the trade unions.

Moderation found followers elsewhere. In France the great socialist leader Jean Jaurès (1859–1914) formally repudiated revisionist doctrines in order to establish a unified socialist party, but he remained at heart a gradualist. Questions of revolutionary versus gradualist policies split Russian Marxists.

Socialist parties in other countries had clear-cut national characteristics. Russians and socialists in the Austro-Hungarian Empire tended to be the most radical. In Great Britain the socialist but non-Marxist Labour Party formally committed to gradual reform. In Spain and Italy anarchism, seeking to smash the state rather than the bourgeoisie, dominated radical thought and action.

In short, socialist policies and doctrines varied from country to country. Socialism itself was to a large extent “nationalized.” This helps explain why almost all socialist leaders supported their governments when war came in 1914.