The movement advocates political revolution, as opposed to capitalist counter-revolution, in the countries with
deformed workers states. Such political revolutions are envisioned to overthrow undemocratic governments of bureaucratic privilege, replacing them with governments based on workers' democracy while maintaining state-owned property relations. Academics have identified certain factors that have mitigated the rise of political revolutions. Many historians have held that the rise and spread of
Methodism in Great Britain prevented the development of a revolution there. In addition to preaching the Christian Gospel,
John Wesley and his Methodist followers visited those imprisoned, as well as the poor and aged, building hospitals and
dispensaries which provided free healthcare for the masses. The sociologist William H. Swatos stated that "Methodist enthusiasm transformed men, summoning them to assert rational control over their own lives, while providing in its system of mutual discipline the psychological security necessary for autonomous conscience and liberal ideals to become internalized, an integrated part of the 'new men' ... regenerated by Wesleyan preaching." The practice of
temperance among Methodists, as well as their rejection of
gambling, allowed them to eliminate
secondary poverty and accumulate capital. The spread of the Methodist Church in Great Britain, author and professor Michael Hill states, "filled both a social
and an ideological vacuum" in English society, thus "opening up the channels of social and ideological mobility ... which worked against the polarization of English society into rigid social classes." The historian
Bernard Semmel argues that "Methodism was an antirevolutionary movement that succeeded (to the extent that it did) because it was a revolution of a radically different kind" that was capable of effecting social change on a large scale. ==Application==