Was socialism really radical and revolutionary in these years? On the whole, it was not. 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 grew less inclined to follow radical programs for several reasons. As they gained the right to vote and to participate politically in the nation-state, workers focused their attention more on elections than on revolutions. As workers won real, tangible benefits, this furthered the process. And workers were not immune to patriotic education and indoctrination during military service. Nor were workers a unified social group. Perhaps most important of all, workers’ standard of living rose gradually but substantially after 1850. The quality of life in urban areas improved dramatically as well. For all these reasons, workers became more moderate.

The growth of labor unions also reinforced this trend toward moderation. In the early stages of industrialization, unions were generally prohibited by law; they were considered subversive bodies to be hounded and crushed. From this sad position, workers struggled to escape.

Great Britain led the way in 1824 and 1825, when it granted unions the right to exist — though generally not the right to strike. After the collapse of Robert Owen’s attempt to form one big national union in the 1830s (see "The Early British Labor Movement" in Chapter 21), new and more practical kinds of unions appeared. Limited primarily to highly skilled workers, these “new model unions” concentrated on winning better wages and hours through collective bargaining and compromise. This approach helped pave the way to the full acceptance of unions in Britain in the 1870s, and after 1890, unions for unskilled workers developed.

German unions did not receive basic rights until 1869, and until the Anti-Socialist Laws were repealed in 1890, they were frequently harassed by the government as socialist fronts. As a result, in 1895, Germany had only about 270,000 union members in a male industrial workforce of nearly 8 million. Then, with almost all legal harassment eliminated, union membership skyrocketed, reaching roughly 3 million in 1912.

This great expansion both reflected and influenced the changing character of German unions. Increasingly, union activists focused on bread-and-butter issues — wages, hours, working conditions — rather than on fomenting socialist revolution. 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 in fact, if not in name, thoroughgoing revisionists. Revisionism was an effort by various socialists to update Marx’s doctrines to reflect the realities of the time. Thus, the socialist Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932) argued in 1899 in his Evolutionary Socialism that many of Marx’s predictions had been proved false. Therefore, Bernstein argued, socialists should reform their doctrines and tactics. They should combine with other progressive forces to win continued evolutionary gains for workers through legislation, unions, and further economic development.2

Moderation found followers elsewhere. In France, the socialist leader Jean Jaurès (1859–1914) formally repudiated revisionism in order to establish a unified socialist party, but he remained at heart a gradualist and optimistic secular humanist. Questions of revolution or revisionism also divided Russian Marxists.

By the early twentieth century, socialist parties had clear-cut national characteristics. Russians and socialists in the Austro-Hungarian Empire tended to be the most radical. The German party talked revolution and practiced reformism; it was greatly influenced by its enormous trade-union movement. The French party talked revolution and tried to practice it, unrestrained by a trade-union movement that was both very weak and very radical. In Britain, the socialist but non-Marxist Labour Party, reflecting the well-established union movement, was formally committed to gradual reform. In Spain and Italy, Marxist socialism was very weak. There 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” behind the façade of international unity. This helps explain why, when war came in 1914, almost all socialist leaders and most workers supported their national governments and turned away from international solidarity.