ABSTRACT
Social democratic parties were formed and grew as workers' parties. Industry creates workers, but workers' class consciousness, another prerequisite for the formation of socialist labor movements, is created by the aristocracy. The old theory went wrong in accepting industrialization not merely as a necessary but as a sufficient condition explaining the development of socialist labor movements. Massive socialist labor movements, then, grew, in countries where the government was dominated by forces more or less hostile to socialism and to labor, while no such movements have grown in countries governed in the name of workers and of socialism. Socialists who once predicted the inevitable victory of social democratic labor movements were right if that victory is seen as tantamount to the defeat of the aristocracy, a thousand-year-old ruling class, but they were wrong when they equated their victory with the defeat of capitalism.
