I refer to the international revolutionary movement that finds its chief expression in the federated Socialist parties.

The majority of the best-known spokesmen of this movement agree that social reform is advancing; yet most of them say, with Kautsky, that control of the capitalists over industry and government is advancing even more rapidly, partly by means of these very reforms, so that the _Machtverhaeltnisse_, or distribution of political and economic power between the various social classes, is even becoming less favorable to the masses than it was before.

The one thing they feel is that no such capitalist society will ever be willing to ameliorate the condition of the non-capitalists to such a degree that the latter will get an increasing _proportion_ of the products of industry or of the benefits of legislation, or an increased influence over government.

The capitalists will never do anything to disturb radically the existing balance of power.
While Socialists have not always conceded that the capitalists will themselves undertake, without compulsion, large measures of political democracy and social reform,--even of the capitalistic variety,--nearly all of the most influential are now coming to base their whole policy on this now very evident tendency, and some have done so for many years past.

For instance, it has been clear to many from the time of Karl Marx that it would be necessary for capitalist society itself to nationalize or municipalize businesses that become monopolized, without any reference to Socialism or the Socialists.
"These private monopolies have become unbearable," says Kautsky, "not simply for the wage workers, but for all classes of society who do not share in their ownership," and he adds that it is only the weakness of the bourgeois (the smaller capitalist) as opposed to capital (the large capitalist) that hinders him from taking effective action.