This is Jeffrey Tucker. It's my great pleasure to be here on the phone with Brian Kaplan,
Professor of Economics at George Mason University, who was so gracious to write the foreword
to our new edition of Pictures of the Socialistic Future by Organ Richter, written in the late
19th century, a novel about socialism. Thank you so much for being with us today, Dr. Kaplan.
Thanks very much for having me, Jeff.
So I wonder if you would kind of give us a rundown, first of all, about the plot.
This is a novel.
Yes.
It is a dystopian novel.
It begins with the assumption of power in Germany by the Social Democratic Party.
It's told from the perspective of a rank-and-file member of the party who at first is overjoyed
that his party is finally going to be delivering socialism to the German public.
And then chapter by chapter we see what happens and his reaction and at first he's willing
to defend some really horrible things, but over the course of the book things just go
so badly that even he starts to doubt and by the end he's basically worried that his
own friends are going to arrest him or worse.
You know it's spooky on a number of levels, I mean first of all it's just a beautiful
forecast right of what happens under socialism.
Yes, I mean it's beautiful because I think of the time people would have said you were
being very unfair. The most dramatic forecast in the book is that the victorious socialism
in Germany will lead to mass migration, to escape from socialism and that the government
will then respond by shooting anyone who tries to leave. And he predicted this 70 years before
the wall and got it right.
Yeah, so that aspect of it is spooky and dramatic, but as you mentioned, the fact that he kind
of justifies all these things as you're going through chapter by chapter.
Right, right.
Richter's narrator, not Richter himself, of course.
Right, right.
Richter's narrator.
So I learned from it, I don't know, let me ask you this.
Did you gain any insight into the minds of those people who defend the results of socialistic
policies by reading the novel?
Yeah.
I think you do.
I mean, again, you know, partly what you see is the slippery slope and how once you wind
up defending one thing that seems kind of minor at first, you wind up defending another
thing that's a bit worse, and by the end you're defending horrible things.
But the other thing that you see is that many of the things that we regard as very far down
the slippery slope of socialism were things that were widely accepted as being okay.
So just sort of the analogy of the citizens of a country are like the soldiers in an army and soldiers in an army are not allowed to desert when there's a war. Therefore, the citizens of a country are not allowed to flee when socialism eats them. This kind of reasoning seems to have been very deeply rooted from socialism from the earliest ages. You really get that out of this book.
Yeah. Yeah. What do you what do you make of the the economic content of the book, the economic analytics?
I mean, it's very good. It's basically a pretty mainstream economist story about what will happen under socialism, in particular the kind of socialism where you have very serious equality.
I mean, what's interesting about this book is that he does show the socialists taking equality much more seriously than they actually did in the end.
So, in this book, for example, the Prime Minister is expected to repair his own clothing because it would be an offense to socialism if there was some other lesser person who had to go and handle his tailoring.
Right, shine his shoes, I think, was the example. Wasn't there a big scandal?
So, you see basically the effects of actually having true equality in this book, and they're
played out very quickly.
You see them very quickly, how the incentives are terrible, and then questions like what
about who wants to take out the garbage, and since the socialists in the novel aren't even
willing to offer people extra pay for less pleasant jobs, the result is you basically
One thing I thought was particularly realistic was you get the sense that the party really
had no idea what it was going to do.
It's like they're given this great gift of an opportunity to impose socialism and only
then the improvisation begins.
Well what does that mean?
Right. There's a great quote from Lenin, which I believe is accurate, where he supposedly
said, the point of the revolution is to seize power. Afterwards, we'll figure out what
to do with it. So, look, we know we want power, we know we can do great things with it, and
there's no time to talk about what exactly that might be. Just let us have the power
and then you'll see what we have in mind.
So the narrator's thinking through the meaning of what socialism in practice means day by
and so I mean the state imposes a kind of nationalized cook shops and he says well
of course you got to have that you can't have various meals people some be people
eating well some people eating not so well right and it also undermines the
communal spirit when you have people eating and families so we not only do
they basically go and split up families and put kids into boarding schools in
order to make sure they're brought they're properly raised as citizens of
of the Socialist Society, but you also don't even want them eating together, because otherwise
that will undermine socialism. Of course, this eventually becomes a key part of Maoism, with
the Maoist communes, where they actually do have everyone eating in common in order to
undermine the family and basically isolate the individual and then integrate them as
a cog into the machine of this group.
Well, that's extraordinary. I thought maybe that was a bit of an exaggeration on the part
Right. It was an exaggeration relative to what happened in Germany, but eventually this is a very key part of Maoism, and this is one of the earliest horrors that people in China say, well, let's at least get rid of this, and it's so dehumanizing for everyone to have to go and sit in this common mess hall all the time, and you really aren't allowed to go and have your own little group where you talk to, and you don't have to worry about everybody else.
Reducing human well-being, right? It's never like an equality upwards. It's always an equality downwards.
Right. Well, what's interesting is that the narrator and especially his wife at the beginning assume that the equalization will happen upwards.
So basically, they seem to be middle class, roughly. And then they imagine that with the redistribution, they're going to go and get a much nicer apartment,
or at least they'll get half of an apartment of a rich person. And instead, it turns out that they're evicted.
And then they're told to go to move to some worse apartment and a couple of poor families get their apartment.
There's this view that there's all these rich people who are going to get our share and forgetting what about all the people who are poorer than you and they're going to want their piece out of you.
Some parts of the book struck me as funny, but then there were some parts I had to actually put it down like, I don't know, it just gave me the chills when they started taking the furniture, for example.
Oh yeah, it's very striking, the violation and the way that the guy's wife had this view of everything is going to be better and then she sees both her family being torn apart and then the symbols of the family, the home and the furniture and all of these other things being communized.
Um, Richter even zeroes in on the point that, um, the furniture is not just random chairs and sofas and things. It's like everything in the house sort of means something to the people who own it, didn't it?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
That was gripping, wasn't it?
Oh, yeah, yeah, very much.
Yeah. Um, what did you make of the, uh, the socialist dance? Do you want to, do you want to mention that?
The socialist?
The dance, they have these community organized dances, right? So, am I right? There's a
moment there where there's a problem that people are permitted to choose a dance partner.
Oh, yes, yes. Tell me more. I think people are stuck with you more than me.
Yeah. Well, this part made me laugh. So, yeah, you have to, it's a random choice of dance
partners and that leads to inequality. So you have to have some sort of lottery for
for the choice of dance partners and then people lose interest in the dance.
Yeah, so it's foreshadowing Harrison Bergeron.
Yeah, that part was funny.
I guess there's really no history of that in real socialism, I suppose, but that impulse
to equality still survives, doesn't it, in some ways even in the United States?
Right, and again, I don't remember anything specifically about that dancing.
in the Maoist communes or, you know, as a last resort check to Khmer Rouge, wouldn't
surprise me if things of that sort, you know, or something quite similar did actually go
on.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I should give you credit for this book.
The reason the Mises Institute has it out at all is that you discovered it first at
Liberty Fund's site, it was in HTML, right?
And then you wrote a blog post about it.
That's right.
Actually, I remember hearing about this book about 20 years ago, an lecture by Ralph Reiko,
and all that I heard was there was some German guy who wrote a dystopian novel about socialists
taking over Germany and then shooting people trying to flee the country, and I thought
that was kind of interesting, and I read this article that he wrote for the Review of Austrian
Economics, I think the very first issue, actually, on Eugen Richter, but then I never did anything
else with it, but then when the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall was coming
I was saying, why don't you go and try to track down this book and see whether my memory
of Rayco Summary was correct.
And when I found the book online, wow, this book is just so good and it's amazing and
it really gives a very different perspective on what socialism is all about because we
tend to think of it as this wonderful idealistic movement that then got taken over by thugs.
So, you're taking over what was corrupted. And Richter's story is, no, these guys were very bad from the beginning.
They were idealistic, but their ideal was totalitarian.
And it's just hard for people today to look back and imagine that there were people who heard about totalitarianism and got tears in their eyes and thought, what a lovely idea, I would die for that. That's really how it was.
Tell me about Richter. It's not a name that we know. We know about Bastiat, we know about Adam Smith, we know about even Turgot and Menger, but Richter is not a name that comes up very much.
Basically, he was the most prominent German politician and journalist of libertarian persuasion in the late 19th century.
He was actually involved in a whole series of parties with various German names.
There was a tendency for multi-party systems, so there'd often be one party and then they'd rebrand and change the name, and then there'd be some splits, so he actually was involved with a number of different parties.
But throughout his lifetime, he was basically known as the most consistent libertarian in German politics, to the point where he was not only anti-socialism, he was anti-Bismarck, he was basically against the German Empire,
And this seems to be, am I right, that this is pretty much the only work that's in print right now in English by Rick?
Oh, right. I was looking at this other stuff and as far as I can tell it is the only one.
He had one other fairly successful popular book, The Name Escapes Me, but I don't think it was ever translated.
As far as I understand, Pictures of the Socialistic Future actually sold quite well in the English translation.
So it wasn't just an obscure academic book in its day and it wasn't just for Germany.
It actually made its way to the English speaking world and did well.
It's strange to me that it seems to be a case in our generation and in the case as an instance of lost knowledge.
Which both, Victor, this novel, the German liberalism generally?
Yes, I mean, German liberalism, it's kind of easy to see why the knowledge is lost because
they were so crushed.
So, basically, by the time of World War I, the social democrats had control of the, well,
they were at least close to control of parliament and the Kaiser had the actual reigns of power
with the military.
and then after the war the socialists really got power and then they held that for a little
while and then there was some chaos and the Nazis took over and then World War II and
then you had the split between West and East Germany and in the course of this whole story
German liberalism was pretty much forgotten even though they were really the only voices
who were against everything that happened afterwards and the only people I'd say who
were in no way tainted with any of the evils of Nazism or Communism that came later on.
Right. What an excellent point, right? We need to revise our list of heroes and villains in history, don't we? I mean, guys like Richter should be famous to everybody.
Yes. And it's also striking that Richter was also a very vocal opponent of Bismarck's persecution of the socialists. So he really was the kind of consistent liberal who would say,
I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
So during a period when the socialists were, they were never actually banned under Bismarck's anti-socialist laws,
but they were harassed quite a bit.
And Richter was standing up for them this whole time and saying,
look, these guys are wrong, they have terrible ideas, but stop persecuting them
and let's go and try to defeat them fair and square through free discussion.
And by the time that they actually got the anti-socialist laws were off the books. They weren't actually repealed, they were just allowed to lapse.
But by that point, the socialists basically had very little gratitude for Richter and then when it went about their merry business,
it was like, well, now that we no longer have to worry about this, we're not going to say, we're not really planning on extending in the same favors later on.
When you read about guys like Richter in their lives, do you feel a sense of solidarity with them?
You know, guys like Richter and Turgeau and these other great libertarians in history, like,
you know, a sense of identifying with their lives and the struggle that they have.
Absolutely. I mean, you know, just the courage that they have and the insight and just the way
that they've been so vindicated by history despite being not all that successful in their time.
It's a very compelling story and one where in your darkest moments you can think, well maybe in a hundred years someone will read one of my things and they'll think it was good and they'll tell people that I was right although ignored and that could be my consolation prize.
Well we just have to hope there are people like Brian Kaplan a hundred years from now to celebrate people like Brian Kaplan today, right?
We can only hope.
You know, I have to tell you that this book, as we prepared it, you know, of course we
had copy editors and typesetters and everybody who was involved in it was thrilled to read
it and came to me and said, wow, this is a fantastic piece of work, where did you find
it?
Yeah, I mean, pretty much all my friends who have read it have also been very interested
in it.
And don't forget the cover designer.
The cover designer did a really great job.
I love this cover.
Yeah, the cover design, it's fantastic, yeah, it's perfect.
It's also available in EPUB. I also have to tell you that after I read it, I felt like
I hated socialism all over again. For the first time almost. It intensified my opposition
to all kinds of socialism.
Right. Especially the narrative changes. When you read this book, you see it's not some
noble ideal that got corrupted. You see it was a bad idea from the beginning. When you
You have that story, you have a very different feeling towards it. Then it's no longer some
very decent people whose ideas were twisted in ways they never would have imagined, said
it was some very rotten people who got a lot of favorable press at the time and then never
really got the condemnation of history that they should have when their ideas were put
into practice.
Well, you know, another thing about the book that we should mention, Richter gets right
Right, the decline in health under socialism, right?
So the grandfather who's taken away to go to the old folks' home, you know, declines
very quickly.
Right, right.
And, of course, the daughter who's taken to one of the, you know, whatever you want
to call it, the children's detention centers or the socialist boarding schools is, I guess,
the favorite way.
She did not do very well not to give away the whole story.
Yeah, I guess we shouldn't give away the whole story.
But she's, what, seven or eight or something like that, and the mother, it's just such
a tragic moment, you know, the mother decides to bring her some special clothes, I think
that she makes.
Right, I mean, it also makes me think how, you know, under real socialism, elite socialists
would never have let this stuff happen to their own kids, but of course all the other
people who have to live under the system really did see stuff like this happen.
And then this, the decline of the narrator's wife into a kind of, I guess she's labeled
as afflicted with a kind of psychosis, laid in the book.
Right, I think all you said is his wife, his wife.
Yeah, what did I say?
Right, I mean, it's psychosis or just natural, horrible depression as a result of all the
So under real existing socialism, one of the most striking things that you find is a decline
in the vital statistics of the population.
So they can lie about GDP, they can lie about a lot of things, but when you see how long
people live and you see that actually shrinking, as I guess it did in Russia, right?
Right.
Again, of course, you can lie about life expectancy, too, and it's very likely they did. In the case of Cuba, I've never seen a really good critique of Cuban health statistics, but I think it's very reasonable to doubt many of the health statistics they offer, why exactly should we believe them on this, given life and everything else.
Yeah, but it's something I suppose that nobody ever anticipated.
Well, of course, Rick did. I mean, I'd also say Mises anticipated this when he talked about what would actually happen to people under socialism.
They'll be very poor and poor people are sick. Poor people are not healthy.
We don't have too many novels, libertarian novels, on our side, or pro-capitalist novels or anti-socialist novels.
At least it's not as many as probably we'd like. Would you consider this one of the better examples of fiction?
Absolutely. In terms of other ones, I think many dystopian novels, even if the author
himself is not libertarian, they have a very libertarian feel because you see the state
out of control doing stuff to people and you realize, look, if the state couldn't do any
of this stuff, then none of this bad stuff would be happening. So 1984, while Orwell
is far from libertarian, I see 1984 as a very libertarian book. And on the other hand, Atlas
Alice Shrugged is sort of a strange combination of a dystopian with a utopia novel where you've got 700 pages of dystopia or maybe even 900 pages of dystopia followed by things suddenly getting better at the very end.
Again, not to give the plot of Alice Shrugged away either.
I'm a huge fan of Garrett Garrett's novels, sort of pro-capitalistic novels, because they both make an economic point and it's good literature.
and I would consider this Richter book to be good literature too, do you?
Oh yeah, yeah, I mean it's a very fun read, something that you could give to high school students too
and yet professors can get a lot out of it. Yeah, I mean in terms of the, right obviously,
the deepest lesson I learned is, you know, Richter's book made me realize there's really sort of three
stories about why socialism turned out so badly and, you know, the first one, you know, I would
I would attribute to Lord Acton, even though he died before socialism really took off anywhere,
and that is the all-power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
So, on this story, socialists are decent people, they get in power, but for all their idealism,
even they'll do bad things when you give them absolute power. So that's one story, the Acton story.
Then you've got what I'll call the Hayek story of the worst get on top.
So this one is more of a selection story, where the original socialists are nice people, but
once they actually get power, then the psychopaths and sadists manage to muscle their way to the top
and then they push everybody else out, and then they start doing terrible things in the
name of the ideals.
So that's another story, the Hayek story.
And Richter's story is really quite different from either of these two.
I call it a born bad story.
One where the original socialists, the founders, were actually bad people with bad ideas.
Not that they were corrupt, but sincerely bad is a good way of thinking about it.
And then the evolution of the ideas, for the most part, is pretty much what you should
Well, Brian, let me express my gratitude to you for having alerted me to the existence
Let me thank you for approaching me and getting this published. To me this was just a thrill.
It was only a little bit of work and to go and see this book revived and actually being read makes me very happy.
That's fantastic. Thank you so much and I look forward to working with you in the future.
Thanks a lot, Jeff. Appreciate it.