The early socialists
It was typical for post-serfdom countries with sluggish or simply weak industries to try to build up a flourishing banking industry, because all that is needed is offices with filing cabinets and safes, not complicated production chains. As soon as capital was attracted, infrastructure projects such as railways could also be realized. It is not surprising that a whole series of radical socialist books appeared during this phase, which often also complained of a satanic conspiracy by better-off circles, Freemasons and especially Jewish bankers.
The Rothschild family really worked for the House of Hessen and the British crown. It became a propagandistic enemy for socialist conspiracy propaganda. In 1812, James Mayer Rothschild came from Frankfurt to Paris and started the banking house “De Rothschild Frères”, which subsequently raised important capital for France’s wars and colonial expansions. James Mayer’s father was recruited by the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel and then passed on as a service provider for the British crown. It is very likely that noble lines and secret service structures related to Britain controlled the Rothschilds. The stereotypical prejudices of the time said that Jews were mainly concerned with profits and their small communities and otherwise had no iron loyalty to any of the major European powers. In addition to their locations in France and Germany, the Rothschilds also had locations in Austria, Italy and Britain. This made it possible to disguise cash flows from the British crown and obtain valuable, even secret, information.
In France there were also the Jewish Pereire brothers with their bank Crédit Mobilier, the Société Générale and the Crédit Lyonnais. The banking sector became increasingly dominant, while even in 1851 only 1.5 million people worked in companies with more than ten employees. Three million were employed in smaller workshops. In 1815 there was almost only agriculture. In Paris the business of luxury goods for wealthy customers flourished. From the point of view of the British secret services, it was obvious to choose the following tactic to cause unrest in France: socialist propaganda mixed with conspiracy propaganda against Jewish bankers and “satanic” Masonic lodges. In 1806, Napoleon ordered the convening of the “Grand Sanhedrin” in Paris, a kind of supervisory board for Jews, following the example of the ancient Roman Empire, and in 1808 organized the “Consistoire central des Israélites de France,” the corresponding administrative authority. The consistory system made Judaism a recognized religion and placed it under state control. In the older wave of best-selling conspiracy books, the authors’ connections to British aristocratic elites in connection with secret services are very clear and, as the Austrian researcher Oberhauser showed in 2021, more and more details can be reconstructed using original sources. With the next big wave of socialist conspiracy books, the picture is more blurred, as we are no longer dealing with chairmen of the Royal Society or Jesuits with powerful British hosts, but with a colorful mix of authors. Not everyone whose statements play into the hands of the British necessarily and consciously worked for the British secret service. Which pamphlets and books We will probably never be able to find out in which (secret) printing works copies were made in order to artificially subsidize them and make them successful, due to a lack of written documents.
Sources:
Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World.
The Campaigns of Napoleon, David Chandler
Alphonse Toussenel’s “The Jews, Kings of the Age”
The socialist French journalist Alphonse Toussenel published the book “The Jews, Kings of the Age: A History of Financial Feudalism” in 1846. The big hook is James de Rothschild, who was able to acquire the railway line from Paris to Belgium. Toussenel warned urgently that Jews would strive for world domination. The book seems rather reserved compared to other works from France. There is a blanket complaint that in the new capitalism there is an individual price tag everywhere:
Before the law granted the Jews the railways, every traveller could travel freely on the highway, on the king’s sidewalk. Now that all means of transport, i.e. railways, canals, rivers, belong to the Jews, no one can cross them without paying tribute to them.
If there had been no Jews in France at all, the same resentment would probably have arisen among the population. Many still worked as farmers or in small businesses and were unable to build up wealth, while wealthy circles divided up the various markets. Since only a few tens of thousands of Jews lived in France at the time, the average citizen did not know any of them and never met one. But everyone travelled from time to time or was dependent on the transport of goods, and had to pay accordingly.
Who holds the monopoly of banking and transport, the two branches of trade? The Jew. Who has the monopoly on gold and mercury? A Jew. Who will soon hold the monopoly on coal, salt and tobacco? The same Jew. Who has the advertising monopoly? The Saint-Simonians, lackeys of the Jews. Who has the monopoly on newspaper printing? A Jew accused by the public prosecutor of stamp fraud. If air could be monopolized and sold, tomorrow there would be a Jew monopolizing it.
Toussenel could just as well have written “capitalist” instead of “Jew” to vent his anger. Then he would not have sounded much different from Karl Marx of the same era. In the communist idea of a functioning society, transport, heavy industry, wholesale trade and banking/monetary systems are in state hands, i.e. under the administration of councils or a single party, and not in the hands of a king or a capitalist entrepreneur. Toussenel may have imagined that this would work in the real world, but the reality in socialist states in the 20th century was characterized by inefficiency and shortages. The means of transport (especially private cars) in the USSR were inferior to the capitalist West and were based largely on purchased Western technology. Many goods were rarely available to the average citizen. The press was in the hands of the party. And no one was allowed to exert political influence outside of the pre-established channels. In capitalism, everything has a price tag, but people often had the money to buy goods and services. Toussenel sarcastically says that in (Jewish) capitalism even the air we breathe would be sold off and monopolized if this were technically feasible. In capitalist countries people laughed that there would soon be a shortage of sand in the desert if communism spread there. Did Toussenel think that the problems could be controlled if Jewish bankers could be gotten rid of from France because local bankers were more patriotic or their institutions were easier to nationalize? Did he really believe that greed was a characteristic that was specifically Jewish or more pronounced among Jews? That Jewish entrepreneurs did immoral things because of their Jewish religion or ethnic roots? Or was Toussenel’s anti-Semitism more of a means to an end, to stir up sentiment against bankers? Was it a legal loophole because he did not dare to directly attack the French government and legal system? It was not permitted to call for a violent overthrow of the existing order, for a new revolution with the aim of establishing a socialist system. His fixation on the Rothschilds and Jews in general was a way of increasing discontent in the population. The more people participated in the corresponding activism, the more people like Toussenel would have tried to direct this potential anger against all major entrepreneurs and the state. In 1849 he published an appeal to the Parisian workers, to free themselves from “Jewish despotism”. The text accuses the Jews of worshipping a dark god. For Toussenel, it was a way to agitate past the censors. For the government, his activism was not particularly threatening, but perhaps served as a pressure relief valve for the frustrated working class. The company “Compagnie des chemins de fer du Nord” (NORD) belonged to the French and British arms of the Rothschild banking family and was subsequently expanded further and further. But in 1938, the NORD and other private railways were nationalized. Certainly, some observers found it suspicious that a single bank had such dominance and that a British branch was also involved. But the railway was hardly evidence of a Jewish world conspiracy. Everyone knew that the political situation in France was shaky and that, theoretically, a new government could nationalize private sector projects at any time. The German poet Heinrich Heine, who had a Jewish family background, visited the Paris bank of his friend Baron James de Rothschild in 1841 and wrote afterwards:
Money is the god of our time, and Rothschild is its prophet.
Jews had suffered for many centuries in Europe from discrimination that was primarily controlled by the nobility and the church. This is why Freemasonry, to which Heine belonged, seemed so attractive, because here the Old Testament tradition of antiquity was honored and members who had reached the third degree were considered equals, at least in the lodge. Socialist ideas seemed partly exciting to Heine, partly dangerous. In Paris, James de Rothschild openly helped finance the “French Invasion of Spain” because a revolt in Spain threatened the rule of King Ferdinand VII. Ferdinand’s mother was from the House of Bourbon, which had been overthrown in the course of the French Revolution. Ferdinand was recognized as his son by Charles IV and Charles’ mother was Maria Amalia of Saxony from the circle of the Welfs, Wettins and Reginars. James de Rothschild had the infamous Ferrières Castle built near Paris in 1855, which became the family’s permanent residence. According to conventional historiography, when he died, Rothschild had the largest private financial assets of the time. It is more likely that this was the money of the British crown.
Proudhon
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809 to 1865) was a left-wing French economist and sociologist who is considered one of the most important early socialists. He got into difficulties with his ideas and projects under Napoleon III. He was involved in a dispute with Karl Marx over theoretical details, which further divided the socialist movement. He considered Jews to be an inferior race of people who were incapable of economic productivity, metaphysical conceptualization and statehood of their own. Jews were always parasites, an “enemy of the human race”. Therefore, there were only two options: “This race must be banished to Asia or destroyed. By iron or by fire or by expulsion, the Jew must disappear.” As a child, Proudhon was unable to afford basic things like books or shoes for school, which caused him great difficulties and often made him the object of ridicule from his wealthier classmates. While working in a printing works, he met the socialist Charles Fourier, who wanted to have his new work “Le Nouveau Monde Industriel et Sociétaire” reproduced there. The two became friends and discussed the great authors of the revolution such as Rousseau, Voltaire and Diderot. Proudhon travelled all over the country in search of employment without much success. In 1840 he published his first work, “What is property?” Even today he has followers who are on the left-wing anarchist spectrum and who quote his slogans such as “Property is theft.” Rousseau had already explained this long before:
“The first man who, after fencing in a piece of land, thought to say: ‘This is mine’ and found people who were simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes could someone have saved humanity by pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch and shouting to his fellow men: Do not listen to this deceiver, you are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all and the earth itself to no one.”
At that time, people also freed themselves from the spiritual chains of the classical monarchy and the Catholic Church. It was, of course, an organized fraud that noble lines and better-off citizens could take something and cement their claim with ritual and bureaucratic fuss. It was of course irritating for the average Frenchman even after the revolution when a few rich and super-rich circles owned the railways, the best land and the banks. If you trace the chain of individual trading steps back, so the thinking goes, you will find no ultimate justification for the arbitrary appropriation of property. But France had to remain an empire in order not to be conquered or taken over by force by other empires. The French concept of property also dates back to the old Roman Empire. If it were given up in favor of socialist experiments, it would not be possible to defend the land in communal ownership or in communal administration against external enemies, which is a classic empire. The experiment would quickly end. The socialist states of the Eastern Bloc in the 20th century were all classic empires and vassals. One could say that the role of the nobility and clergy was simply taken over by the Socialist Party. Others compared these states to mega-corporations that also controlled the police and the judiciary. At best, Proudhon’s writings could be used to swindle the poor, frustrated French. But he could not design a defensible new order. Later in life, he even became successful as a senior employee of a company in Lyon and became a Freemason. He did not advocate the idea of violent overthrow (the authorities would have arrested him for that) and he deplored nationalism and militarism; precisely what had saved France from rival powers. His concept of freedom was for a long time naive:
To be governed is to be observed, controlled, spied on, directed, legislated, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached to, controlled, valued, censored, and bossed around by creatures who have neither the right, wisdom, nor virtue to do so. To be governed is to be noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, rated, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, prohibited, reformed, corrected, punished in every operation, in every transaction. It is to be taxed, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, cheated, robbed under the pretext of public utility and in the name of the general interest;
Later in his life he became much more conservative and moderate in his views.
Drumont’s “Jewified France”
Edouard Drumont, a French journalist from the right-wing spectrum who represented partly anarchist ideas, published the work “La France Juive” in 1886, of which hundreds of thousands of copies were sold. There was also a German edition under the title “Das verjudete Frankreich”. Drumont vaguely suggested that Jews and Freemasons were secretly controlling France. Since Freemasonry was already widespread, ritually referred to a few Old Testament elements from antiquity, and James de Rothschild was a powerful banker in France, this conspiracy hypothesis seemed plausible to readers. As already mentioned, Jews in Masonic lodges were given the feeling that they were on the same level as non-Jewish lodge brothers and were working on a new world. Drumont preached a racial theory according to which Jews were seriously different from the rest of humanity due to their parasitic characteristics. Drumont even described the founder of the Illuminati, Weishaupt, as a Jew, in order to imply that this conspiracy was behind the French Revolution. In 1889, Drumont founded a French “anti-Semitic league” and a corresponding newspaper. The model was the German anti-Semitic league of the left-wing anarchist Wilhelm Marr. Marr had attended schools in the aristocratic strongholds of Hanover and Braunschweig and then completed training in the north. In February 1879, Marr’s propaganda pamphlet “The Victory of Judaism over Germanism” was published in Berlin. He believed that France and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland were ruled by Jews. His student was Theodor Fritsch, of all people, who became very successful on the right-wing spectrum and supplied the public with books and pamphlets well into the Nazi era, including German translations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the magazine articles published by Henry Ford under the title “The International Jew”. Édouard Drumont was elected for the French parliamentary elections in May 1898. Drumont represented Algiers in the Chamber of Deputies from 1898 to 1902. He was sued for accusing a member of parliament of accepting a bribe. Drumont was accused of accepting money from the wealthy Jewish banker Édouard Alphonse de Rothschild to pass a law that the banker wanted. Drumont had many followers. He reached the peak of his fame during the Dreyfus affair, in which he was the fiercest accuser of Alfred Dreyfus.
Henri Roger Gougenot des Mousseaux
Henri Roger Gougenot des Mousseaux came from a noble family and was chamberlain of the French Bourbon king Charles X. In 1869, Gougenot des Mousseaux published the work for which he is still known today: the polemic “Le Juif, le judaïsme et la judaïsation des peuples chrétiens.” In this work, he relied on the traditional, Christian-based anti-Judaism of authors such as Théodore Ratisbonne. He believed that Freemasonry was a trap set up by anti-Jewish conspirators to recruit and manipulate Christians. In 1921, the prominent National Socialist Alfred Rosenberg translated Gougenot des Mousseaux’s work into German under the title “The Jew, Judaism and the Judaization of the Christian Peoples.” It should be emphasized again: Gougenot des Mousseaux came from the exploitative nobility and served directly a king from the House of Bourbon. The serfdom of the peasants was not ended until the French Revolution in 1779. The nobility, together with the Catholic Church, had been the greatest, most brazen exploiters in France that one could imagine. Nevertheless, Gougenot des Mousseaux presented the Jews per se as the exploiters par excellence. Other great powers such as Britain, Austria and Russia were still ruled by exploitative nobility, with the British increasingly striving for world domination with the help of science, military, trade and espionage. For Gougenot des Mousseaux, however, a small group of Jews was reaching for world domination with a few loans and costumes in lodges. When the ordinary French citizen heard that the political upheavals were accompanied by Freemasonry and that individual figures such as James De Rothschild had become very rich, the conspiracy hypothesis seemed plausible. Britain officially created modern Freemasonry in 1717, even though it had already been developed in Scotland. The Old Testament elements in the lodge rituals are more or less a gateway into the spiritual world of antiquity. This gateway usually seems inconspicuous and harmless to Christians. The tiny Jewish empire of antiquity pales in comparison to ancient Egypt, whose symbolism plays an important role in Freemasonry. Ancient Greek and Roman elements are also represented in Freemasonry. Even if someone only has a superficial knowledge of antiquity, it should be clear to them that at that time there was a wide range of very similar religions, cults and even exclusive secret societies that were dedicated to apparent “mysteries”. Judaism in antiquity originally had many gods and then made the step towards monotheism. Elements such as the Kabbalah were also nothing unusual. After the Roman Empire had infiltrated and taken over Christianity through secret services, it was adapted to the traditions of antiquity, while the important mystery cults were retained. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the great European aristocratic houses established themselves and continued mystery cults. In addition, in 1717 the British colonial empire under the Hanoverian King George I gave Freemasonry a strong science-friendly component and developed the secret society parallel to the elite scientific community “Royal Society”. Nevertheless, Gougenot Des Mousseaux and Rosenberg declared Freemasonry to be a Jewish-Kabbalistic conspiracy:
Freemasonry, which arose from the mysterious doctrines of the Kabbalah, is nothing other than the modern form of occultism, whose prince is the Jew, the centuries-old master of the Kabbalah.
The Jew is therefore by nature, and we say necessarily the soul, the real master of Freemasonry, of which the well-known dignitaries are usually nothing more than the deceitful and deceived heads of the order.
Of course, the noble Gougenot Des Mousseaux does not lament in his book the death and destruction that the Bourbons and the Catholic Church had brought upon people over the centuries. War, the Inquisition, the exploitation of the peasants and the ancient mystery cults of the nobility are not mentioned. Instead, he tells a fantasy story about how a few Jews needed a human sacrifice to make Easter a success:
“Tobias went out into the street before evening and met a boy of more than two years, whose name was Simon. The child was lured, kidnapped and carefully hidden, because the parents and the B The people immediately went in search of the child. What had become of the child? Who had carried out the theft? We must look for it among the Jews! That was the message. But night fell. The Jews led the child into an anteroom, and one of them, Moses, who was considered to know the time of the Messiah’s arrival, put it on his knees. Here it was tortured. Samuel tied a cloth around its neck to suppress its screaming, others held its hands and legs while Moses performed the circumcision. Immediately afterwards he set about torturing the child and tearing off pieces of its flesh. Then everyone did what Moses had done: the flowing blood was collected in bowls. But the cloth wrapped around the child’s neck had come loose, and a scream coming from the throat, which had been somewhat freed, alarmed the Jews. They pressed their hands over the child’s mouth and it seemed almost dead. Moses had Samuel sit down on his left. The two men spread the victim’s arms in the shape of a cross and the Jews, armed with nails, now reveled in the pleasure of being able to crucify him. Thus we have killed Jesus, the God of the Christians! Thus shall our enemies be overthrown forever. And the child breathed his last sigh after more than an hour of torment. The Jews immediately washed the blood from his body and sprinkled their houses with this water, glad to be able to wash their hands and faces with it as well . . .”
Not only are Jews greedy for such individual satanic rituals, but they generally intend to bring about the death of Christians. Gougenot des Mousseaux admits that he cannot provide any valid evidence of satanic ritual murders, but it is enough for him that such mythical stories have gone viral:
However, if these words are clear, if the facts are countless, if they come from all times and all countries, and if history, with its accuracy and lavish abundance of details, seems to give us photographs; the Jew denies it.
Next, in his work of 1869, Gougenot des Mousseaux refers to the narratives that had already been circulating in manipulative conspiracy books since the 1790s.
Some clumsiness that occurred under the watchful eye; several breaches of trust that slipped out in the drunken state of imminent triumph; clear admissions, investigations; All this, together with our personal documents, allows us to form a very definite opinion about the nature and power of the activities of the high secret societies in which the Christians are united as the flock under the hand of the Jew. In this Germany, where the Jews and the societies that help them have long since placed themselves at the forefront of the efforts to unite the peoples and to form an empire, with the aim of later being able to easily substitute the other form of government, the form of a cosmopolitan republic; in this Germany, the “Munich Historical and Political Papers” published the complaints of a mason in 1862 on the occasion of Alban Stolz’s pamphlet on Freemasonry. The documents, it is said, were presented to King William . . . and the author, who is entirely devoted to the Protestant cult, describes in them as the greatest danger to throne and altar “the power that the Jews have managed to acquire with the help of Freemasonry, a power that has today reached its peak.” In Germany, he tells us – and we leave him the full responsibility for his words – “there exists a secret society with Masonic forms, which is under the control of unknown leaders. The members of this association are mostly Jews, their degrees and their systems have Christian symbols only as an external form and serve all the better to conceal their true activity. The Jews use Christianity only for mockery and to increase the darkness of their machinations.”
In addition to Satanism and the infiltration of social institutions, Jews would also (metaphysically) engage in biological warfare:
Since 1832, Jews have been almost completely spared [from epidemics], even when they lived in the dirtiest parts of the city. The entire Middle Ages testifies to the immunity of Jews during plague epidemics, which often provided a pretext for persecution. Regarding the plague of 1346, the historian Tschudi reports that this disease did not affect Jews in any country. The Jews, says The Internationale in London, live in an unhealthy environment, and at the time of the cholera, when all the inhabitants of the same part of the city fell ill with the disease, the Jews miraculously escaped this scourge. Frascator shows us that the Jews were completely spared from the typhus epidemic of 1505. were constantly spared; Rau confirms the same about the year 1824; Ramazzini says the same about the fever epidemic in Rome in 1691; Deguer shows us that the Jews were spared from dysentery in Nimes in 1736; Eisenmann claims that tans are rare among Jewish children; according to Wawruch, no tapeworm infections are found among German Jews.”
For centuries, the explanation was that Jews had poisoned the wells. It is no longer possible to reconstruct what percentage of Jews died from epidemics. During the “Black Death,” the popes publicly declared several times that Jews were not responsible. Nevertheless, Christians organized pogroms in the hope that this would solve the epidemic problem. In 1349, King Charles IV declared that not only the property of Jewish plague victims should fall to the administration of the city of Frankfurt, but also the property of Jews who were killed. Very soon afterwards, all of Frankfurt’s Jews (around 60) were beaten to death or burned in their houses. In the Middle Ages, the nobility and the church dominated the ordinary population. There were special laws for Jews, such as the “Jewish Regal” or the “Protection of Jews,” which was nothing other than extortion of protection money. Under Rudolf of Habsburg, the Jewish Regal was interpreted as royal serfdom, which gave rise to the right to expropriate Jews without compensation if necessary. In 1356, Charles IV transferred the Jewish Regal (i.e. the right to extort protection money) to the electors. The emergence of individual Jewish court factors (also disparagingly called court Jews), who carried out certain transactions for the nobility, and the establishment of Jewish banks were interpreted by some early socialists as a reversal of power relations. However, it is a classic beginner’s mistake (or an attempt at concealment) to simply take the ownership structures of corporations and private banks from the 1700s and 1800s officially listed in the documents as fact without assessing the probability that there were secret (noble) ownership structures and that it was just a front company. For a secret service, establishing front companies is one of the essential techniques and therefore the history of capitalism is much more complicated than historians realize.
Mikhail Bakunin
The socialist Mikhail Bakunin came from a noble family, his father was a career diplomat. He surrounded himself with representatives of the Enlightenment movement, studied for three semesters in Berlin and then became friends with Arnold Ruge in Dresden, who had dealings with the Italian revolutionary fighter Mazzini. Mazzini was supported by the Welfs. Instead of studying, Bakunin became more and more of an activist until the Russian authorities ordered him back to Russia, which he refused, and so he went to Switzerland with Georg Herwegh. Between 1869 and 1870 he was in cahoots with the Russian revolutionary Sergey Nechayev. He got his start in Freemasonry in a Scottish Rite lodge under the Grand Orient of France. Then in Florence he learned about the Masonic and revolutionary structures of Garibaldi and Mazzini, after which he converted to atheism. Bakunin was also enamored with the idea of a Jewish world conspiracy. He had apparently read anti-Semitic bestsellers of early socialism, because he expressed identical ideas about inherently parasitic Jews who wanted to exploit the working, non-Jewish population through central banks. This was no longer the old-fashioned anti-Semitism, but the modern, new, politicized kind. He wrote to the Bologna Department of the International:
“This whole Jewish sphere is one single exploitative sect, a kind of blood-sucking people, a kind of organic destructive collective parasite which not only crosses the boundaries of states but also the boundaries of political opinion. This [Jewish] sphere is now, at least for the most part, under the control of Marx and Rothschild.”
Karl Marx – the conspiracy theorist
The name Karl Marx does not initially spring to mind as a classic conspiracy theorist, but the influence of the early French socialists on him is unmistakable and he did not just preach that Jews were secretly plotting the exploitation of people, but he preached that all capitalist entrepreneurs and traders were constantly plotting the exploitation of people. He wanted to shed his Jewish roots and saw banking as overlapping with specifically Jewish behavior, worshiping money as a god and making money with money (“usury”), which was the worst form of exploitation. The high capitalists without Jewish roots were at least essentially Jewish because they allowed the special Jewish greed to rub off on them. n described Marx’s explanation of what was wrong with the world as a mixture of anti-Semitic drivel from student cafés mixed with the old ideas of Rousseau. Capital is parasitic, blood-sucking. Even children are not safe from vampires. It is reminiscent of all the myths about Jewish blood rituals on children and the chatter of the early French socialists. We also find in Marx the same kind of contacts as in the propaganda operations of the British secret service in connection with the French Revolution. On June 30, 1869, Marx was elected a member of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce. The president of the organization was the British Crown Prince Albert Edward (later King Edward VII). Marx’s mentor was his father-in-law, Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, whose father in turn was the closest confidant of the Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel from the ranks of the Guelphs, who had occupied the British throne since 1714. Ferdinand was a very high-ranking Freemason and member of the Order of the Illuminati. At Marx’s funeral was Carl Schorlemmer, a communist chemistry professor from the Royal Society who had been involved in the revolutionary activities in Baden in 1848. During his summer holidays he had regularly visited Marx and Engels in London. Also present at the funeral was Ray Lankester, a British zoologist and biologist from the Royal Society with degrees from Cambridge and Oxford. Early industrial capitalism did ruthlessly exploit workers, even children. But many entrepreneurs risked their own money and were able to create added value with clever new ideas, rather than just profiting from existing assets or the labor of others. If a moneylender took the right risk, the right capital could be made available to someone with new ideas. In the USA in particular, there was an explosive production power and more and more attractive products that more and more people could afford. For Marx, the ideas of the French Revolution were far from enough. He called the USA “a great democratic republic,” but even there, according to his logic, capitalism would ultimately end in misery and collapse due to mutual exploitation. His current followers in particular suspect a right-wing global conspiracy everywhere and the ordinary middle class is deeply mistrusted. Marx knew full well that his revolutionary agitation could not work: the workers and peasants were not nearly educated enough to overthrow an existing system and replace it with a functioning, socialist one. A crash course in Marx’s rambling theory would not change that. Beneath all the philosophical gibberish was nothing but cheap conning.
The Prussian government agent Karl Marx, Wolfgang Waldner. Karl Marx, A Psychography, Arnold Künzli. The Makers of Modern Italy Mazzini, Cavour, Garibaldi. Three Lectures Delivered at Oxford. J. A. R. Marriott
