ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author turns to generalizations about mass socialist labor parties, he shall base these on the history of the social democratic parties of ten European countries—specially Britain, Germany, and Austria and also Switzerland, the three Low Countries and the three Scandinavian countries. He excludes them from consideration because the history differed significantly from that of the other social democratic parties of Western Europe. The policies the author ascribes to the socialist movements and parties collectively have not been equally adhered to by all of them or by all factions within each of them. In France and Italy, industrialization had advanced later and more slowly than in the rest of Western Europe. As a result, anarcho-syndicalism remained strong until First World War. It was a radical ideology accepted by early labor movements as a response to small-scale, decentralized industry and to labor's weakness in largely agrarian societies.
