ABSTRACT
The early social democrats' commitment to elections as the road to power rested on their conviction that their working-class constituency would keep growing. In time, socialist leaders learned that their own and often their opponents' election campaigns served excellently to mobilize the socialist parties' actual and potential. Socialists came to think of democracy as logically related to and even identical with socialism. The changes in the socialist relation with capitalism have also affected the relative positions in the socialist labor movements of their two principal components, the socialist parties and the trade unions. Social democrats for a long time liked to think of themselves as revolutionaries and to employ revolutionary symbolism. It could be appealing to class-conscious workers, the more so the more powerful the aristocracy. Civil liberties for all, equal access to education, legal aid, and medical care are all incompatible with the inequality and claims to superiority that are of the very essence of aristocracy.
