9 The Depressed and Chastened 1870s and 1880s

• The optimism of the 1850s and 1860s was replaced by a more pessimistic tone.
• The rising "isms" of Marxism, Social Darwinism, racism, and antisemitism took on a harsher tone than had been the case in the previous two decades.
• The belief in the beneficial aspects of conflict became starker after the 18th century.
• The assassination of Alexander II in 1881 marked a sharp intensification of internal tensions in Russia and a move to the right-wing dictatorship of Alexander III.

• Marx was known to left-wing activists for his role in the First International, but he was not well known to the general public.
• Marx and Marxist theory gained a lot of attention in the 1870s and 1880s.
• The stock-market crash and depression were seen as confirmations of Marx's predictions.

• It was published by John Wiley & Sons.

• A photograph of Karl Marx in his final years became famous.

• Despite their defense of the Paris Commune, Marx and Engels welcomed Bismarck's victory over France as marking a period of enhanced respect for things German.
• They were obliged to endure some dispiriting years.
• The Social Democratic Party in Germany (SPD, from its German initials; the full German form of this acronym, as with others, can be found in the relevant index entry) grew rapidly until Bismarck introduced legislation that made it nearly impossible for the new party to function openly.
• During the twelve years that the Anti-Socialist Laws were in effect, popular support for the SPD continued to grow.
• After 1890, the party would regain legal status and become the largest, best-organized, and most rapidly growing in Germany.

• The largest socialist party in the world is the SPD.

• The International attracted many socialists who were not even nominally Marxist, including anticapitalists who were emphatically anti-Marxist.

• The unification of socialist groups in Germany was represented by the SPD.
• Marxism competed with a range of socialist tendencies in other countries.
• Marx's fame grew, but it was less impressive than Darwin's after 1859.
• There seemed to be less and less consensus about what Marx really meant when it came to his theory.
• Thousands of publications were written about that issue, both by Marxists and their enemies.

• In late 1917, revolutionaries called themselves Marxists took over Russia.
• There are still debates about what Marx meant.

• Marx was aware of the problem that others had in understanding him.
• Marx was disturbed by the widespread promiscuous uses of his scientific theories, like what Darwin was disturbed by.
• The issues in Marx's case were more complex because of his writing style.
• There were some shifts in his theories over the years, but nothing of the sort.
• "How Marx was understood" is more important than what "Marx really meant" Marxism attracted a wide, growing, and often admiring interest regardless of the problems with the theory.

• Marx considered the language of the Gotha Program to be compromising.
• He wanted a bolder stance.
• Ferdinand Lassalle, the charismatic German socialist who died in a duel at the age of thirty-nine, had left behind a trail of troubling thoughts.
• Marx was angry that Lassalle didn't mention how much his ideas were borrowed from Marx's writings.

• Marx considered dangerous directions and Lassalle's attitude to the Prussian state seemed to follow them.
• The state had to be smashed by a proletarian dictatorship since it was a tool of the bourgeoisie.
• Lassalle thought that the state of Prussia could perform an ethical mission to resolve the conflicts within society by standing above class loyalties.
• Marx and Engels were aware that some of the leaders in the new party were not in agreement with Marx's insistence that capitalism could not be reformed gradually.
• The Anti-Socialist Laws were passed in the parliamentary life of the new German state and these leaders entered in a positive, hopeful spirit.

• The German social democrats were driven away from hopes for peaceful reform by the persecution of the state.
• "Marxist" insisted that class conflict could only be solved by violent revolution and not by parliamentary action.
• The Depressed and Cowarded 1870s and 1880s were both revolutionary and anti-bourgeois.
• The Frenchman's "mutualism" in being more collectivist and more accepting of Europe's industrialization differed from the version of anarchism that Bakunin had.
• Marx rejected terrorist violence as counterproductive.
• Marx integrated revolutionary intransigence into a "scientific" demonstration of the inevitable self-transformation of capitalism into socialism, with revolutionary violence being justified only when capitalism had reached its final stages.

• They believed that the free-market economy was not a perfect, timeless ideal but rather a fleeting stage of human history.
• Marx thought he exposed these selfsatisfied bourgeois gentlemen.
• He took the idea of change in a more sophisticated direction than he did as a theorist.

• Marxism was a synthesis of three intellec tual traditions: German philosophy, French socialism, and the British political economy.

• The comment is simplistic in that the traditions have already influenced one another in many ways.
• Marx built upon a range of theories, just as Darwin did, through the synthesis of three traditions.
• The reception of Darwin's theory is similar to how people tend to understand new ideas in ways that reveal their own intellectual background or psychological agendas.

• French and British Marxists stumbled over unfamiliar German concepts, and they tended to interpret Marx in ways that made sense to French and English admirers, but caused Marx and other Germans to not get it.

• The differences between the two camps had to do with party organization.
• The Marxists wanted to build up disciplined parties of the proletariat in each country, but they also wanted capitalism to do its work.
• The political parties were mostly concerned with parliamentary action and careerism, which made the anarchists distrust them.
• The moment of revolution was not tied to material conditions but was an expression of human will.
• Many people were fascinated by violence because they believed it could awaken the people from their apathy and pessimism.

• Marx's theories were understood by some of his own followers in social Darwinistic ways, and in truth some forms of social Darwinism did have socialistic potential.
• In order to establish a level playing field, a progressive inheritance tax should be instituted and free legal aid offered to the poor, according to the writings of Herbert Spencer.
• The liberal, John Stuart Mill, was concerned about giving the lower classes a fair chance to compete.
• There were few clear or persuasive answers to that question.

• Walter Bagehot, a social Darwinist, emphasized the role of human groups in the struggle for survival, not only in early human history, when humans had formed into tribes, but also in modern times, when they formed nations.
• The success and survival of a people's organization was dependent on its effectiveness.
• There was a lot of talk about German superiority in organization.

• Bagehot's kind of reasoning, emphasizing the group over the individual, was used by some on the socialist left.
• The Russian theoretician of anarchism, Prince Peter Kropotkin, was one of the best known in the late 19th century.
• A man who qualifies as a gentle soul, he was also a reasonably sophisticated observer of the natural world.
• He believed that cooperation within a species was more important to its survival than the fight between individuals of that species.

• His father had 1200 "souls", but the son chose a life of material simplicity and self-awareness.
• He was hounded by the tsarist police and condemned to Siberia, where he spent his time observing wildlife.
• A thin group of intellectuals, mostly from the nobility, were concerned about the poor in Russia.
• One of the basic beliefs of the first socialists was that humans are not like nature's lonely hunters but rather resemble social animals.
• He said that it was not only the basic animal instincts of human beings but also their unique ability to pass knowledge on from generation to generation that made them a social being.
• Marx believed that the kind of productive material abundance that capitalism promised would prevail after capitalism had done its work, but his emphasis was on spirituality and material simplicity.

• The end of mass poverty was assured, but it wasn't the most important part of their brave new worlds.

• The flowering of Russian culture in the nineteenth century added to the cachet of the term, reflecting a largely unprecedented development: Russian intellectuals and artists became widely admired, and came to exercise a lasting impact on western intellectual life.
• The fame of such men as Ivan Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Leonard Dostoevsky, and Alexander Borodin was modest.

• All of these men touched the hearts and minds of non-Russians in western Europe and eventually across the planet.

• The movement came into prominence in the aftermath of Alexander II's reforms and the humiliations of the Crimean war.

• There were differences between the narodniks and their western counterparts.

• In the context of the political and economic revolutions in France and Britain, Western socialist ideology emerged in reaction to liberal individualism and capi talism.

• serfdom, tsarist auto, and other indigenous Russian problems were the main concern of members of the intelligentsia in Russia, who were very much aware of western developments and inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment.

• Herzen's name may be seen as suggestive.
• He was the illegitimate child of a German woman and a wealthy Russian man and spent most of his life in foreign exile.
• He became famous for his celebration of the Russians.
• When he was a young man, he was enamored with all things western, but he was horrified by the failures of the revolutions of 1848.
• He was a fan of Alexander II's reforms, but soon became upset with them.

• Herzen's hope was that Russia could avoid the pains and pitfalls associated with western Europe's capitalist path to modernization, following instead a more cooperative and humane path.
• The narodnik movement was built on the basis of their generous spirit.

• The classes that depended upon the tsar's rule would never consent to the extensive reforms necessary.

• In a country where other forms of propaganda were not allowed, it might be called natural.
• The people could be expected to rise up after a terror attack.

• Young people scattered to the countryside to mingle with peasants taking up Herzen's slogan.
• They encountered incomprehension and distrust, often to the point that peasant leaders called in the authorities.
• The need to do for the people what they did not have the sense to do for themselves became more important after those who emphasized elitist-revolutionary direction.

• The Russian revolutionary movement's tendency towards elitism earned it a fearsome reputation.

• Nechaev was notorious for saying that anything that slowed the revolution was unjust.
• It is a brutal interpretation of the notion that the end is justified.

• Nechaev's willingness to murder conservative tsarist officials but also other revolutionaries who were a danger to the correct revolutionary path provoked widespread revulsion.

• He oversaw a period of tsarist oppression.

• The concept of race and Jews in European society in the 19th century have been traced in previous chapters.
• The way in which Jews were described in the 1870s and 1880s is something that requires special attention.
• The formation of political organizations in western and central Europe was devoted to opposing the rise of that race.
• A program of action to counter the rise of antisemitism went beyond the social exclusion of Jews or the familiar complains about their cultural habits.
• Civil equality was granted to Europe's Jews by the 1870s and the antisemitic parties wanted to reverse it.
• Non-violent legal action was what most of the leaders of those parties demanded at this point, even though more extreme or violent solutions to the Jewish Question were in the background.

• The ism that emerged earlier in the century had a number of similarities with this new one.
• Antisemites saw rising Jews as destructive because they were responsible for the worst excesses of capitalism and liberalism.
• Positive programs for the future and a notion of the Enemy were some of the isms.

• The Jewish element was brought firmly under the control of the state.

• In the western regions of the Russian Empire, where the majority of Europe's Jews lived, violent expressions of hostility to Jews rose in the 1880s.
• The pogroms following Alexander II's assassination were more violent than any anti-Jewish action in Russia or Europe since the 17th century.
• During Alexander II's reign, restrictions on Jewish movement were loosened, but Jews had not gained civil equality in Russia.

• There was no equivalent to western parliaments.

• There were no antisemitic parties in Russia like those in western Europe.

• liberalism and socialism were not part of the active vocabulary of the Russian people.
• After 1890, western concepts flowed into Russia to an unprecedented degree, as did capital investment and modern technology.

• The Jewish rise in Russia was different.
• The Jewish population growth was half again more rapid than that of non-Jews within the empire, with an exaggerated impact in urban areas, to which Jews were moving in disproportionate numbers.
• The proportion of Jews in the population of European Russia continued to rise even after millions of Jews left Russia in the late 1870s.
• The rise of the Jewish population in Russia was economic.
• Russian Jewish equivalents to the Rothschilds of the west emerged in the 1860s and 1870s.
• Although thousands of Jews joined the middle class, most Russian Jews remained poor, even though most of the peasantry did.

• A growing proportion of the Jewish population, especially its youth, had begun to join revolutionary movements as a result of the Jewish rise in Russia.

• Large numbers of Jews were arrested for acts of political terror, including the assassination of the tsar.
• When Jews were known for their political passivity and respect for tsarist authority, such activism would have been unthinkable a half-century earlier.
• The Decembrists, the rebels of December 1824, had no Jews.

• The pogroms after Alexander's assassination have been debated by historians.
• The new tsar ordered the Russian people to "beat the Jews" in order to punish them for their alleged role in the murder of his father.
• Alexander III was both surprised and alarmed by the pogroms, according to scholars.

• He thought that they were part of a bigger plan.
• It would be unlikely that any tsar would have called for the "dark mass" to rise up in violence.
• Alexander III's suspicion that revolutionaries were urging the peasants to attack the Jews was incorrect, but some revolutionaries did applaud the "awakening" of the peasant mass and saw their attacks on the "Jewish exploiters," agents of the propertied nobility, as justified.

• Russia's Jews left the country by the millions after the assassination to escape further violence and tsarist persecution.
• The belief that Jews were out of control in the 1860s and 1870s is closer to modern understanding thanks to the May Laws of 1882.
• The Jewish population explosion and the failure of the Russian economy to absorb it weighed heavily on the decision of Russia's Jews to emigrate.
• Unemployment and urban crowding became unbearable in many areas.
• The areas of the greatest rioting were found there.
• New demands for labor in the New World and the new means of transportation were other factors.
• There was a shift in Jewish mentality in Russia as news of opportunities in America spread.

• There was a rising sense among Jews that a better life was possible.
• Many young Jews joined revolutionary movements because of the sense of belonging.

• The importance of new opportunities and different mentalities was underscored when the treatment of Jews under Nicholas I was harsher.
• The rate of Jewish emigration had begun to rise in the late 1870s before the pogroms and the May Laws.
• In Austrian Galicia, where there were no pogroms and no hostile legislation, but a lot of poverty and overcrowding, Jews moved out in large numbers.
• Millions of people from poor regions of Europe migrated to the New World in this period.
• The Jewish exodus was part of a larger trend.

• Destitute and culturally different Jews moving out of eastern Europe by the millions worsened Jewish-Gentile relations in central and western Europe.
• The antisemitic parties wanted to end civil equality and limit immigration.
• The level of anti-Jewish violence outside of Russia remained low until World War I.
• The stock-market crash of 1873 in Germany involved a number of Jewish scam artists.

• Some Germans were upset by the participation of Jews in the leading ranks of the SPD and other leftwing parties.
• The broader issues of Jews being "overly critical" or "culturally destructive" of a young German nation just establishing its identity were raised by other observers.
• It was felt that Jews were too successful and that non-Christians should not assume such prominent roles in societies that were over 99 percent Christian.

• Critics of the Jews in Germany ranged from the barely respectable and mid dle-brow to the highly prestigious and intellectually sophisticated.
• He insisted that his concerns about the rise of the Jews in Germany had nothing to do with religious bigotry and everything to do with the destructive potential of Jews holding elevated positions in non-Jewish societies.
• The "medieval" charges against Jews were rejected by Marr.

• The popular and prestigious historian at the University of Berlin, Heinrich von Treitschke, leveled his own wounded, angry charges about Jewish cultural destructiveness.
• He was not a racist, but his approach was hortatory and he opposed proposals to strip Jews of civil equality.
• The nationalist fervor of the 1880s caught up with the Jew-hatred of the educated and respectable population, thanks to his critical outburst.
• Extreme nationalism, antisemitism, and other forms of racism were common in most other countries.

• The chap lain to the court of the Kaiser began his own anti-Jewish campaign with the hope of getting the working class away from the social democrats.
• The lower-middle class had more positive reactions to him than workers.
• He attacked Jews mostly from a Christian perspective, describing Judaism as a worn-out faith, and he was suspicious of the many opportunist conversions by Jews, such as that of Heine.
• One of his slogans was "the Social Question is the Jewish Question," which said that the Jews were responsible for the destructive side of capitalism.

• There is a danger of exaggerating the success of German antisemitism at this stage, even though some of the anti-Jewish voices of the 1870s and 1880s were only a few.
• The German antisemitic parties never got more than 5 percent of the vote, were discredited by scandal, and were split into mutually abusive groups.
• The wave of anti-Jewish hostility in Germany gave antisemitism an aura of modernity and intellectual respectability that earlier forms of Jew-hatred lacked, according to some historians.

• In Britain, "scientific racism" and nationalist arrogance were present in the 1870s and 1880s, but the country's Jewish population experienced nothing comparable to the wave of hostility to Jews in Russia and Germany.
• Italian Jews remained prominent in Italian politics from the time of Cavour on, which is especially remarkable given their small numbers.
• Two men of Jewish origin, Sidney Sonnino and Luigi Luzzatti, would serve as Italian prime ministers in the years immediately before World War I. Disraeli faced suspicion or contempt from some elements of British society because of his Jewish origin, but he was also widely admired, covered with honors by the end of his life and a favorite of Queen Victoria.

• People who disliked Disraeli didn't usually do so because they believed he was inferior to Jews.

• France, the first country to give Jews civil equality, was seen by Jews in other countries as a model of tolerance.
• Highly assimilated French Jews rose to prominence in many areas in the course of the century.

• Since 1815, Jews in France have not been blamed for political crises and catastrophes.
• Notable leaders of France's many left-wing sects and theorists were not Jews, nor were they involved in France's revolutions from 1789 to 1871.
• At the same time, theorists of race counted many influential French people, including the above-discussed Gobineau, on the conservative right and Proudhon, on the left.
• Special mention must be made of Ernest Renan, a French writer whose works became among the most widely read in the nineteenth century.

• His publications on the origins of Christianity attracted a wide audience.
• At a time when the implications of Darwin's work for the Old Testament's account of creation were being discussed, Renan offered a secular account of Christ's life, using modern historical techniques that questioned the historical reliability of the Gospels.
• Many Christians were incensed by Renan's image of Christ because it touched upon the basis of the Christian moral vision and therefore presented an immediate danger to social stability.

• Renan's use of the term "race" as a key category of historical analysis may be termed secular, but it was not "scientific" in the way that Darwin's theories were.
• Renan's use of race is compared to Marx's use of class.
• Today's mentalities are outdated and seem to be imprecise.
• The guiding conceptual bases of competing right-wing and left-wing worldviews for the next century might be the concepts of race and class, as they came to be understood in the final decades of the nineteenth century.

• Renan's use of "Semite" in his writings about the ancient Jews and other Middle Eastern peoples, such as the Arabs, involved a kind of racial determinism, unlike the antisemites.
• Renan considered ethical monotheism to be a major step forward for humanity because the Semites brought ethical monotheism to the world.

• The Jews lost their creativity because of their blind attachment to the interpretations of the Talmud.
• Renan believes that the universalistic vision of Christianity was a step forward for humanity and essential to modern European progress.

• Many French Jews were attracted to modern racism in the same way Disraeli was.
• The upward mobility of Jews seemed to be proof that they were superior.

• In Germany, Jews were highly visible during the time of many scandals in the 1880s.
• French authors have long accused Jewish financiers of being powers behind the scenes.
• The savings of many small Catholic investors were wiped out by the collapse of the Union Generale, which was formed to provide Catholic investors with a means to avoid the abundant Jewish and Protestant banks.
• The Rothschilds were accused of being responsible for the collapse.
• The financial collapse in 1889 of the French company that was building the canal in Panama caused the Panama Scandal.
• In the investigation, it was found that 146 The Depressed and Menaced 1870s and 1880s were involved in bribed parliamentary delegates to hide the malfeasance and incompetence of those in charge of the project.

• Jews, Protestants, and secular politicians were thought to be in cahoots by French Catholics.
• The so-called Ferry Laws, passed between 1879 and 1886, provided for secular control over primary education, removing it from Catholic control.
• Many leaders of the Third Republic wanted to prevent priests from filling the minds of France's children with religious dogma and antimodern ideas, which meant modernizing the countryside.

• Anti-Catholic measures were supported by the Jewish population in both Germany and France.
• Catholics in both countries felt attacked by a modern alliance of Jews, atheists, and Protestants.

• Background chapters on the evolution of the narodniks and the early Russian Marxists are included in most of the biographies of the major Bolsheviks.
• Albert S. gives a general overview of Marxism in Russia and the West.

• Much information on the rise of antisemitism in the 1870s and 1880s can be found in the background chapters of books dealing with the Dreyfus Affair.