Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"And, whatever the historian can establish in retrospect, for contemporaries the mass of workers was large, was indisputably growing, and threw a dark shadow over the established ordering of society and politics. What indeed would happen if, as a class, they organized politically? This is precisely what happened, on a European scale, suddenly and with extraordinary speed. Whatever democratic and electoral politics allowed it, mass parties based on the working class, for the most part inspired by an ideology of revolutionary socialism (for all socialism was by definition seen as revolutionary) and led by men--and even sometimes by women--who believed in such an ideology, appeared on the scene and grew with startling rapidity. In 1880 they barely existed, with the major exception of the German Social Democratic Party, recently (1875) unified and already and electoral force to be reckoned with. [Hobsbawm: Empire, p. 116-7] The Socialist Workers' Party of Germany was merged from two other parties in 1875. "From 1878 to 1890 the Anti-Socialist Laws banned any grouping or meeting that aimed at spreading socialist principles, but the party still gained support in elections." [Wikipedia]