Evaluation
The historian Arveds Švābe describes the New Current as "connected to the political awakening of the Latvian working class, its first organizations, and the propagandization of socialist ideas.". Most historians point to what the painter Apsīšu Jēkabs called "the beginning of a cleft between the Latvian farmer and his farm hand" in the 1870s, and by 1897 there were 591 656 landless peasants in what is now Latvia (compared to 418 028 smallholders and their dependents). Their partial urbanization led to a growing proletariat, fertile ground for the ideas of western European socialism, and this coincided with a loss of momentum for the Young Latvians, whose ideas had been enfeebled by national romanticism as a gulf grew between the bourgeoisie and the poor, the leading nationalists of the era having been arrested and exiled. Rainis smuggled German Marxist literature into Latvia in two pieces of luggage in 1893: the work of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Karl Kautsky. This "luggage with the dangerous contents," as the historian Uldis Ģērmanis called it, was the seed of the Latvian Social Democratic Party.
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—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
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