Pictures of the Socialistic Future
By Eugene Richter
Eugene Richter (1838-1906) was a member of a generation of classical liberals who died between the turn of the 19th century and the First World War. This generation included the French economist
Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912), the English sociologist
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), the English historian Lord Acton (1834-1902), the English radical individualist Auberon Herbert (1838-1906), the American sociologist William Graham Sumner (1840-1910), and the English radical liberal
Thomas Mackay (1849-1912). What died with the passing of this generation was a form of classical liberalism which was based on a strong defence of individual liberty, property rights and self-ownership, free trade and laissez-faire, and opposition to war and imperialism. The “liberalism” which emerged after the catastrophe of the First World War, if one can indeed call it “liberalism”, turned its back on this generation of classical liberals and all that it believed in–with dire consequences for liberty in the 20th century.Richter was born in Duesseldorf and attended universities in Bonn, Heidelberg and Berlin. In the late 1860s, when the German unified nation state was being created by Prussia through a series of wars against other German states and France, Richter first became a member of the German national parliament (the Reichstag). Over several decades he used Parliament as a platform to voice his unwavering opposition to increasing state expenditure, increases in the size and power of the army and the navy, government abuses of individual freedom, and colonial policy. Richter was faced with two major sources of opposition to his form of classical liberalism. On the one hand there were the conservatives led by Otto von Bismarck who cleverly forged an alliance between traditional conservatives, the military, and the working class with his combination of warfare and welfare expenditure and tariff protection. On the other hand, there were the socialists who wanted to maintain the high level of government expenditure, but shift the balance more towards welfare expenditure. As modern electoral politics emerged in Germany in the late 19th century Richter’s never-ending opposition to all government expenditure increasingly came to be seen as mere dogmatism and pig-headed “Manchesterism” (as free trade and free market ideas were called).Pictures of the Socialistic Future (freely adapted from Bebel) (1891), is Richter’s satire of what would happen to Germany if the socialism espoused by the trade unionists, social democrats, and Marxists was actually put into practice. It is thus a late 19th century version of Orwell’s
1984, minus the extreme totalitarianism which Orwell had witnessed in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia but which was still inconceivable to 19th century liberals. The main point of the book is to show that government ownership of the means of production and centralised planning of the economy would not lead to abundance as the socialists predicted would happen when capitalist “inefficiency and waste” were “abolished”. The problem of incentives in the absence of profits, the free rider problem, the public choice insight about the vested interests of bureaucrats and politicians, the connection between economic liberty and political liberty, were all wittily addressed by Richter, much to the annoyance of his socialist opponents.Richter’s book is part of a series we are putting together online on late 19th century free market criticism of socialism. It now joins those by
Mackay and
Spencer.Little has been written on Richter. There is a brief excerpt from one of his books and a short bio in
Western Liberalism: A History in Documents from Locke to Croce, ed. E.K. Bramsted and K.J. Melhuish (London: Longman, 1978). There is a long chapter on Richter in Ralph Raico,
Die Partei der Freiheit: Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Liberalismus (Stuttgart: Lucius, 1999). See also Ralph Raico, “Eugen Richter and Late German Manchester Liberalism: A Reevaluation,”
The Review of Austrian Economics, vol. 4, 1990, pp. 3-25. Online at
http://www.qjae.org/journals/rae/pdf/R4_1.pdf.
David M. Hart
March 1, 2004
Translator/Editor
Henry Wright, trans.
First Pub. Date
1891
Publisher
London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., Ltd.
Pub. Date
1907
Comments
First published in German. Introduction by Thomas Mackay.
Copyright
The text of this edition is in the public domain.
- Some Press Notices
- Introduction, by Thomas Mackay
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16
- Chapter 17
- Chapter 18
- Chapter 19
- Chapter 20
- Chapter 21
- Chapter 22
- Chapter 23
- Chapter 24
- Chapter 25
- Chapter 26
- Chapter 27
- Chapter 28
- Chapter 29
- Chapter 30
- Chapter 31
- Chapter 32
- Chapter 33
- Chapter 34
- Chapter 35
- Postscript, by Henry Wright
Chapter X
THE NEW CURRENCY.
TRADE is very brisk with the photographers. All persons between the ages of twenty-one and sixty-five years, that is to say, all those who are not inmates of State establishments, have received instructions to have their likenesses taken. This step is an essential part of the Government plan for the introduction of the new currency. The old system of bank-notes
and coins is to be abolished, and so-called money certificates issued instead.
In a leading article on this innovation, the
Onward very truly remarks that the Minister of Exchange has displayed much sagacity and prudence in solving the problem of procuring a means of exchange which shall fulfil all the legitimate duties of such a medium, and at the same time not allow of the resuscitation of a capitalist class. Unlike gold and silver, the new currency possesses no intrinsic value, but it consists simply of orders or cheques drawn on the State as the sole possessor of all articles of sale.
Every labourer in the service of the State receives once a fortnight a series of money certificates in the form of a coupon booklet. The name of each holder is printed on the cover, and with a view to preventing the use of the coupons by other persons, it is enacted that the photograph of every individual holder be attached to his book of coupons. It is evident that that the Government orders regulating the hours of labour for all persons alike, and prescribing for all persons the same scale of remuneration, will prevent the return of social inequalities consequent upon the gradations of faculty possessed by different people, and the use made of these faculties. But, in addition to this, care must be taken to prevent, through inequalities in the scale of consumption, all accumulations of value in the hands of such persons as are of a thrifty turn, or whose requirements are small. This was a self-evident danger, and, if disregarded, would in due time have the effect of producing a capitalist class, which would, by degrees, bring into subjection those less thrifty persons who were in the habit of consuming all their income.
To obviate the misappropriation and misuse of money certificates, it is expressly understood that coupons are not, under any circumstances, to be detached by the holders, but that they only then have their representative value when detached by the State vendors or other similar officials appointed for this purpose.
All payments are to be made on the spot in coupons. Thus, for instance, it is the business of the hall porter, stationed in each house, to detach daily a dwelling’s coupon from the booklet of each person resident in the house.
The new distribution of dwellings is to take place immediately before the opening of the State cookshops, an arrangement by which the further necessity for private kitchens will be obviated. When these are opened, the equivalent for a dinner will be detached by the Government official in the shape of a dinner coupon; that for the allowance of bread (one pound and a half daily, per head), in the shape of a bread coupon, and so on. The several coupons in the booklets represent, of course, different values, very considerable latitude being left to the taste of each holder as to how he likes to employ his coupons. All purchases are to be made at the State magazines and shops, and care is to be taken that the vendors in every case detach none but coupons of exactly the right value.
As each coupon bears the same number as the outside cover, and every holder is entered in the Government registry, it is an easy matter at any time to learn from the collected coupons the way in which each person has expended his income. The Government is thus, at any moment, in a position to observe
whether persons spend their income on dress, or on eating and drinking, or how they spend it; and knowledge of this kind must materially lessen the difficulty of regulating production and consumption.
Every purchaser has the fullest liberty either to apply to his own use such wares as he has obtained in exchange for coupons, or to resign them to the use of other persons. Nay, he may even bequeath things to others. The calumny that has often been hurled at Socialism, that it aims at the distinction of all private property, is thus, as the
Onward pointedly shows, fully refuted, and refuted in a manner that ought to make the enemies and calumniators of Socialism blush with shame. Socialism never wished for more than to see such bounds set to individual caprice as should prevent the formation of private capital, and of a system of plundering.
Those persons who, at the expiration of the fortnight, have not used up all their coupons, get the remnant entered to their credit in the new booklet. But, of course, even here it is necessary to draw the line somewhere, and to concert measures to prevent these successive remnants heaping themselves up to actual capital. A sum of sixty marks is regarded as being more than sufficient to enable its possessor to indulge himself in the gratification of all reasonable desires. Any more considerable savings than sixty marks are forfeited to the State.