Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/722

7OO THE ECONOMIC JOL'RNAL tion is given of the presumably vast increase in production by the society of the future, ensuring to the disposal of every one any article he required. Since, however, this exposition, literally understood, takes into view conditions wholly utopian, and therefore outside discussion, the only reasonable meaning is that which we have above imputed to it. But in any case', the standpoint of the Eise?ach programme, according to which the income of each person should be sub- stantially equal to the work done by him, is abandoned at Gotha. And not to the advantage of the new programme ! For, according to the principle now to prevail, the social tribunal determines what measure of individual needs is to be regarded as 'rational,' the satisfaction of which to that extent is to be guaranteed. This, it is true, is only the consequence of the Communistic principle strictly carried out; but it is enough to dig the grave of individual liberty in the social state. Compare it for example, I do not say, with Prouclhon's ideal society, where every producer himself, according to his free pleasure, sees to the valuation of the output of his labour, but only with the Zukunftsstaat of Roclbertus. There every one works for a definite number of hours in the service of the State; his output, taken respective to the work (lone, is measured, according to the quantity of mean working-time it contains, by a board of appraisers, and reckoned accordingly to the credit of the producer. He, however, does not receive payment of the same in a definite sum of definite means of subsistence, but in paper-money, certifying he has done so many hours' work; and with this paper-money the owner pur- chases in the State-stores everything he wants, and anything his money will sufi/ce for, for there every commodity is sold at a price which.only corresponds to the labour embodied in it, and is, therefore, purchasable for a corresponding sum of paper-money. How great is the degree of liberty insured to individuals by this social ideal in proportion to that in the Gotha programme ! . . . In the second section we find the familiar principles of the ' International ' repeated, exactly as in the Eisenach programme, but with a more radical bent and a sharper edge turned against the middle-classes in the words, 'The emancipation of labour must be the work of the working-classes, beside whom all other parties are but a reactionary mass.' Thus was the gauntlet flung down in the face of all other parties, be they never so radical politically or socially. All now were simply branded as open or masked advocates of profit on capital and rent on land. The proletariate was to be steadily ?eminclecl that in no direction was