State Social Reform 789congress founded the Second International. At its congresses, socialists
discussed strategies for pushing governments toward reform and for coor
dinating international action (for example, to achieve a shorter workday),
while debating differences over doctrine and strategy.
During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, mass socialist par
ties developed in France, Germany, Italy, and Belgium. By the end of the
first decade of the twentieth century, every Western European state had
working-class representatives in their national assemblies.
Socialists proclaimed themselves internationalists. Contending that
workers in different nations shared common interests, they believed a rev
olution would put the working class in power. But socialists remained
divided. For Marxist adherents of his “scientific socialism,” emancipation
of the workers from capitalism could only be achieved by the conquest of
the state through revolution and the subsequent establishment of a social
ist society. Reform socialists believed that political participation could win
concrete reforms that would improve conditions of life for workers until
socialists could take power. Reformists participated in the political pro
cess, even at the cost of being accused by revolutionary socialists of prop
ping up “bourgeois” regimes by doing so. Legislation in many countries
had brought improvement in conditions of work, however unevenly felt. The
extension of the franchise also offered hope that progress might come with
out a revolution that, given the strength of states, seemed to even some
revolutionaries to be increasingly unlikely.