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CLASS AND POWER in EUROPE (5 of 5)

Rising food production and an increase in real wages were not conditions conducive to political upheaval or to the revolution that Karl Marx had believed would one day come. Among the Social Democrats, traditionally Marxist, was movement aimed at winning gradual economic gains and political reforms. One representing this point of view was Eduard Bernstein. Those believing in overthrowing capitalism were losing to the reformers. Karl Marx adjusted his view on revolution after arriving in London in 1849. In 1852, in an article for the New York Daily Tribune, he wrote of universal suffrage giving power to the British working class. In 1872 at the Hague in the Netherlands he said:

We know that the institutions, the manners and customs of various countries must be considered, and we do not deny that there are countries like England and America, and, if I understood your arrangements better I might add Holland, where the worker may attain his goal by peaceful means. But not in all countries is this the case.

With workers gaining economically rather than capitalism falling apart, a violent revolution, the kind that had overthrown dynasties in China, was not likely. The revolutions in China were often preceded by a catastrophe such as famine. In 1900 Europe was on a path toward another kind of catastrophe: a war made more terrible by industrialization and the new mass armies of modern times. And this would be bring revolution to the war's less economically advanced participant: Russia.