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 XX
DISAGREEABLE EXPERIENCES.
MY wife and Agnes sit up until far into the night, busy with their dressmaking in secret. The work in hand is a new dress for Agnes.
As checker, I ought by rights to denounce the pair of them to the proper authorities for over-production, and for exceeding the maximum hours of labour. Fortunately, however, they are not amongst the fifty persons forming the section which it is my business to control.
The two are even more talkative than usual when engaged in this work of dressmaking. As far as I can make out, they have not been able to find what they
wanted at any of the magazines, and so they are altering and adapting some other garments to their fancy. They vie with each other in girding at the new State magazines. Show-windows, puffing, and advertising, sending out lists of prices; all this sort of thing, it seems, has entirely ceased. There is an end to all talk, they complain, of what novelties are to be had, and also to all gossip about prices. The salesmen appointed by the State are all as short in their manner as the officials on State railways always have been. All competition between shops has naturally ceased, and for any certain given article you have to go to one certain magazine, and to no other. This is a necessity of the organisation of production and consumption.
It is, of course, a matter of the most perfect indifference to the salesman whether you buy anything or not. Some of these salesmen scowl as soon as the shop-door is opened, and they have to rise from some thrilling book, or they get interrupted in some other pleasant occupation. The greater the variety of goods you wish to look at, the more questions you ask as to their make and durability, the greater does the ire of the salesman become. Rather than fetch any article from another part of the magazine, he tells you at once they have not got it in stock.
If you wish to purchase ready-made clothing (in this connection I may remark that all private dressmaking and the like, at home, outside of the maximum eight hours day, is prohibited), the outlook is generally a very poor one. The trying-on reminds you of the dressing-up of recruits in barracks, the tailor being profuse in his assurances that the number which corresponds to your measurement must of necessity fit you well. If any garment which has been made to
order turns out to be tight here, or baggy there, it needs all the eloquence you are master of to convince the tailor that the garment really is so. If you do not succeed in convincing him, you have either to take the article as it is and make the best of it, or to fight the State in an action at law.
Going to law is now a very cheap affair. As resolved at the Conference of Erfurt in October, 1891, all law is now gratis. As a necessary result of this, the number of judges and lawyers has had to be increased tenfold. But even this large addition is far from sufficing for the requirements, as the actions brought against the State for the inferiority of the goods it supplies, for the wretched condition of the dwellings, the bad quality of the food, the abruptness and rudeness of its salesmen and other officials are as the sand upon the sea-shore.
With the limitations caused by the prescribed eight hours, the courts find it utterly impossible to get through the cases set down in the calendar. Not that lawyers and barristers can be reproached with any wish to unduly prolong suits. So far from this being the case, there are complaints that since the abolition of all fees, and since their appointment as State officials, lawyers scarcely listen at all to what their clients have to say. There would appear to be too great a tendency to settle all differences summarily and in batches. Hence, many persons who do not find an agreeable excitement in the mere fact of going to law, prefer, even in spite of the law’s gratuitousness, to put up with any injustice rather than subject themselves to all the running about, loss of time, and vexation of bringing an action.
It is very sad to have to notice that dishonesty is
on the increase, even though gold and silver have quite disappeared. My office as checker lets me into many a secret behind the scenes which I was formerly quite ignorant of. The number of embezzlements is now seven times greater than it used to be. Officials of all grades dispose of goods belonging to the State in consideration of some private favour or service rendered to them personally; or else they neglect, in the due performance of their duties as salesmen, to extract a coupon of the right value from the money-certificates of buyers, in exchange for goods supplied. In order to make good any deficiency which a lack of coupons would betray, recourse is then had to shortness of weight and measurement, adulteration of goods, and so on.
Thefts of money-certificates are also of frequent occurrence. The photographs with which these are all provided have, in practice, not proved a sufficient safeguard against the use of the certificates by other persons. The promises and presents of all kinds made to persons in high positions, who have nice and easy work to give out, or who otherwise possess influence, constitute an evil which extends to the very highest spheres. We never hold a conference with our head checker without our attention being called to some fresh dodge or trick in reference to these matters.
Hitherto I had always consoled myself with the sure belief that things would get better as soon as we had survived the period of transition; but now I can scarcely conceal from myself the fact that they get rapidly worse. One of my colleagues tried to explain the cause of this to-day. His explanation is, that since people find the utter impossibility of improving,
by honest endeavour and in a legitimate way, that position of equality which has been prescribed for all persons alike, their whole effort is now directed to get, in a dishonest way, that which is in no other way attainable.