Page:Karl Radek - The Development of Socialism from Science to Action.djvu/12

 ranks of the workers' movement and hope nourished by this hatred that it would soon crumble as the result of the blows of the Social Revolution. This mood of the working class was increased by the long drawn-out crisis which existed in the economic life of Europe during the 80's. But this was only an interruption in the process of the reformistic falsifying of Communism which had been going on since the establishment of the capitalistic states in the 70's. As soon as the workers had somewhat recovered from the blows dealt them, as soon as they were a little stronger and the fiercest forms of capitalist persecution disappeared, the process of diluting and falsifying Communism took on the wildest range. The rapid economic development, the period of prosperity of Capitalism, as it everywhere in the last ten years of the preceding century gained a foothold, especially in the domain of the electric and the metal industry, contributed to this. Since the 80's, thanks to the development of American agriculture, the prices of grain fell, and now wages began to rise under the influence of an active movement of business. The front ranks of the workers saw before them a path strewn with roses. The Governments were obliged to cease their persecutions, they began to promise social reforms. The workers everywhere won representation in the Parliaments; the aristocracy of the working class earned good wages; and so the idea became a fixed one to them: the Revolution is a superseded phase in bourgeois development. The working class will force the bourgeosie to make more and more concessions, which will finally change the economic system of Capitalism into a system which shall exist for the advantage of the workers. This decision found expression first in opportunistic parliamentary practice, in the policy of the parliamentarian labor leaders, who hoped by flirting with the bourgeoisie, by limiting their demands, by giving up revolutionary propaganda to be able gradually to better the condition of the workers. Then this tendency found its theoretical expression in the doctrine of reformism (revisionism), as coined by Bernstein in Germany, Sarante and Jaures in France, Treves and Turati in Italy.