FREDERICK ENGELS THE HOUSING QUESTION PROGRESS PUBLISHERS M o s c o w 1970 First Printing 1954 Second Printing 1955 Third Printing 1970

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Preface to the Second Edition



    The following work is a reprint of three articles which I wrote in 1872 for the Leipzig Volksstaat.[2] Just at that time the French milliards[3] came pouring down on Germany: public debts were paid off, fortresses and barracks built, stocks of weapons and war materiel renewed; the available capital no less than the volume of money in circulation was suddenly enormously increased, and all this just at a time when Germany was entering the world arena not only as a "united empire," but also as a great industrial country. These milliards gave its young large-scale industry a powerful impetus, and it was they above all that were responsible for the short period of prosperity, so rich in illusions, which followed on the war, and for the great crash which came immediately afterwards, in 1873-74, by which Germany proved itself to be an industrial country capable of holding its own on the world market.

    The period in which a country with an old culture makes such a transition from manufacture and small-scale production to large-scale industry, a transition which is, more over, accelerated by such favourable circumstances, is at the same time predominantly a period of "housing shortage." On the one hand, masses of rural workers are suddenly drawn into the big towns, which develop into industrial centres; on the other hand, the building arrangement of these old towns does not any longer conform to the conditions of the new large-scale industry and the corresponding traffic; streets are widened and new ones cut through, and railways are run right across them. At the very time when workers are streaming into the towns in

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masses, workers' dwellings are pulled down on a large scale. Hence the sudden housing shortage for the workers and for the small traders and small manufacturing businesses, which depend for their custom on the workers. In towns which grew up from the very beginning as industrial centres this housing shortage is as good as unknown; for instance, Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, Barmen-Elberfeld. On the other hand, in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, the shortage took on acute forms at the time, and has, for the most part, continued to exist in a chronic form.

    It was therefore just this acute housing shortage, this symptom of the industrial revolution taking place in Germany, which filled the press of the day with tractates on the "housing question" and gave rise to all sorts of social quackery. A series of such articles found their way also into the Volksstaat. The anonymous author, who revealed himself later on as A. Mülberger M. D. of Wurttemberg, considered the opportunity a favourable one for enlightening the German workers, by means of this question, on the miraculous effects of Proudhon's social panacea. When I expressed my astonishment to the editors at the acceptance of these peculiar articles, I was challenged to answer them, and this I did. (See Part One: How Proudhon Solves the Housing Question.) This series of articles was soon followed by a second series, in which I examined the phillanthropic bourgeois view of the question, on the basis of a work by Dr. Emil Slax. (See Part Two: How the Bourgeoisie Solves the Housing Quetion.) After a rather long pause Dr. Mülberger did me the honour of replying to my articles,[4] and this compelled me to make a rejoinder (see Part Three: Supplement on Proudhon and the Housing Question), whereby both the polemic and also my special occupation with this question came to an end. That is the history of the origin of these three series of articles, which have also appeared as a separate reprint in pamphlet form. The fact that a new reprint has now become necessary I owe undoubtedly to the benevolent solicitude of the German government which, by prohibiting the work, tremendously increased its sale, as usual, and I hereby take this opportunity of expressing my respectful thanks to it.

    I have revised the text for this new edition, inserted a few additions and notes, and have corrected a small economic error in the first part,[5] as my opponent, Dr. Mül-

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berger, unfortunately failed to discover it. During this revision it was borne in on me what gigantic progress the international working-class movement has made during the past fourteen years. At that time it was still a fact that "for twenty years the workers speaking Romance languages have had no other mental pabulum than the works of Proudhon,"[*] and, in a pinch, the still more one-sided version of Proudhonism presented by the father of "anarchism," Bakunin, who regarded Proudhon as "the school master of us all," notre maître a nous tous. Although the Proudhonists in France were only a small sect among the workers, they were still the only ones who had a definitely formulated programme and who were able in the Commune to take over the leadership in the economic field. In Belgium, Proudhonism reigned unchallenged among the Walloon workers, and in Spain and Italy, with a few isolated exceptions, everything in the working-class movement which was not anarchist was decidedly Proudhonist. And today? In France, Proudhon has been completely disposed of among the workers and retains supporters only among the radical bourgeois and petty bourgeois, who as Proudhonists also call themselves "Socialists," but against whom the most energetic fight is carried on by the socialist workers. In Belgium, the Flemish have ousted the Walloons from the leadership of the movement, deposed Proudhonism and greatly raised the level of the movement. In Spain, as in Italy, the anarchist high tide of the seventies has receded and swept away with it the remnants of Proudhonism. While in Italy the new party is still in process of clarification and formation, in Spain the small nucleus, which as the Nueva Federación Madrileña remained loyal to the General Council of the International, has developed into a strong party,[6] which -- as can be seen from the republican press itself -- is destroying the influence of the bourgeois republicans on the workers far more effectively than its noisy anarchist predecessors were ever able to do. Among Latin workers the forgotten works of Proudhon have been replaced by Capital, the Communist Manifesto and a number of other works of the Marxist school, and the main demand of Marx -- the seizure of all the means of production in the name of society by a proletariat risen to sole politi-

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    * See p. 36 of this book. --Ed.

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cal power -- is now the demand of the whole revolutionary working class in the Latin countries also.

    If therefore Proudhonism has been finally supplanted among the workers of the Latin countries also, if it -- in accordance with its real destination -- only serves French, Spanish, Italian and Belgian bourgeois radicals as an expression of their bourgeois and petty-bourgeois desires, why revert to it today? Why combat anew a dead opponent by reprinting these articles?

    First of all, because these articles do not confine themselves to a mere polemic against Proudhon and his German representative. As a consequence of the division of labour that existed between Marx and myself, it fell to me to present our opinions in the periodical press, and, therefore, particularly in the fight against opposing views, in order that Marx should have time for the elaboration of his great basic work. This made it necessary for me to present our views for the most part in a polemical form, in opposition to other kinds of views. So also here. Parts One and Three contain not only a criticism of the Proudhonist conception of the question, but also a presentation of our own conception.

    Secondly, Proudhon played much too significant a role in the history of the European working-class movement for him to fall into oblivion without more ado. Refuted theoretically and discarded practically, he still retains his historical interest. Whoever occupies himself in any detail with modern socialism must also acquaint himself with the "surmounted standpoints" of the movement. Marx's Poverty of Philosophy appeared several years before Proudhon put forward his practical proposals for social reform. Here Marx could only discover in embryo and criticize Proudhon's exchange bank. From this angle, therefore, this work of mine supplements, unfortunately imperfectly enough, Marx's work. Marx would have accomplished all this much better and more convincingly.

    And finally, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois socialism is strongly represented in Germany down to this very hour. On the one hand, by Katheder-Socialists[7] and philanthropists of all sorts, with whom the wish to turn the workers into owners of their dwellings still plays a great role and against whom, therefore, my work is still appropriate. On the other hand, a certain petty-bourgeois socialism finds

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representation in the Social-Democratic Party itself, and even in the ranks of the Reichstag group. This is done in the following way: while the fundamental views of modern socialism and the demand for the transformation of all the means of production into social property are recognised as justified, the realisation of this is declared possible only in the distant future, a future which for all practical purposes is quite out of sight. Thus, for the present one has to have recourse to mere social patchwork, and sympathy can be shown, according to circumstances, even with the most reactionary efforts for so-called "uplifting of the labouring class." The existence of such a tendency is quite inevitable in Germany, the land of philistinism par excellence, particularly at a time when industrial development is violently and on a mass scale uprooting this old and deeply-rooted philistinism. The tendency is quite harmless to the movement, in view of the wonderful common sense of our workers, which has been demonstrated so magnificently precisely during the last eight years of the struggle against the Anti-Socialist Law,[8] the police and the courts. But it is necessary clearly to realize that such a tendency exists. And if later on this tendency takes on a firmer shape and more clearly defined contours, as is necessary and even desirable, it will have to go back to its predecessors for the formulation of its programme, and in doing so it will hardly be able to avoid Proudhon.

    The essence of both the big bourgeois and petty-bourgeois solutions of the "housing question" is that the worker should own his own dwelling. However, this is a point which has been shown in a very peculiar light by the industrial development of Germany during the past twenty years. In no other country do there exist so many wage workers who own not only their own dwellings but also a garden or field as well. Besides these workers there are numerous others who hold house and garden or field as tenants, with in fact fairly secure possession. Rural domestic industry carried on in conjunction with kitchen-gardening or smaII-scale agriculture forms the broad basis of Germany's new large-scale industry. In the West the workers are for the most part the owners of their dwellings, and in the East they are chiefly tenants. We find this combination of domestic industry with kitchen-gardening and agriculture, and therefore with a secure dwelling, not only wher-

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ever hand weaving still fights against the mechanical loom in the Lower Rhineland and in Westphalia, in the Saxon Erzgebirge and in Silesia, but also wherever domestic industry of any sort has established itself as a rural occupation; as, for instance, in the Thuringian Forest and in the Rhön area. At the time of the discussion of the tobacco monopoly, it was revealed to what great extent cigar making was already being carried on as a rural domestic industry. Wherever distress spreads among the small peasants, as for instance a few years ago in the Eifel area,[9] the bourgeois press immediately raises an outcry for the introduction of a suitable domestic industry as the only remedy. And in fact both the growing state of want of the German small-allotment peasants and the general situation of German industry urge a continual extension of rural domestic industry. This is a phenomenon peculiar to Germany. Only very exceptionally do we find anything similar in France; for instance, in the regions of silk cultivation. In England, where there are no small peasants, rural domestic industry depends on the work of the wives and children of the agricultural day-labourers. Only in Ireland can we observe the rural domestic industry of garment making being carried on, as in Germany, by reaI peasant families. Naturally we do not speak here of Russia and other countries not represented on the industrial world market.

    Thus, as regards industry there exists today a state of affairs over wide-spread areas in Germany which appears at first glance to resemble that which prevailed generally before the introduction of machinery. However, this is so only at first glance. The rural domestic industry of earlier times, combined with kitchen-gardening and agriculture, was, at least in the countries in which industry was deve loping, the basis of a tolerable and, here and there, even comfortable material situation for the working class, but at the same time the basis of its intellectual and political nullity. The hand-made product and its cost determined the market price, and owing to the insignificantly small productivity of labour, compared with the present day, the market as a rule grew faster than the supply. This held good at about the middle of the last century for England, and partly for France, particularly in the textile industry. In Germany, however, which was at that time only just recovering from the devastation of the Thirty Years' War[10]

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and working its way up under most unfavourable circumstances, the situation was of course quite different. The only domestic industry in Germany producing for the world market, linen weaving, was so burdened by taxes and feudal exactions that it did not raise the peasant weavers above the very low level of the rest of the peasantry. Nevertheless, at that time the rural industrial worker enjoyed a certain security of existence.

    With the introduction of machinery all this was altered. Prices were now determined by the machine-made product, and the wage of the domestic industrial worker fell with this price. However, the worker had to accept it or look for other work, and he could not do that without becoming a proletarian, that is, without giving up his little house, garden and field, whether hiis own or rented. Only in the rarest cases was he rea!dy to do this. And thus the kitchen gardening and agriculture of the old rural hand weavers became the cause by virtue of which the struggle of the hand loom against the mechanical loom was everywhere so protracted and has not yet been fought to a conclusion in Germany. In this struggle it appeared for the first time, especially in England, that the same circumstance which formerly served as a basis of comparative prosperity for the worker -- the fact that he owned his means of production -- had now become a hindrance and a misfortune for him. In industry the mechanical loom defeated his hand loom, and in agriculture large-scale cultivation drove his small-scale cultivation from the lists. However, while the collective labour of many and the application of machinery and science became the social rule in both fields of production, the worker was chained to the antiquated method of individual production and hand labour by his little house, garden, field and hand loom. The possession of house and garden was now of much less advantage than the possession of complete freedom of movement (vogelfreie Beweglichkeit ). No factory worker would have changed places with the slowly but surely starving rural hand weaver.

    Germany appeared late on the world market. Our large-scale industry dates from the forties; it received its first impetus from the Revolution of 1848, and was able to develop fully only after the revolutions of 1866 and 1870 had cleared at least the worst political obstacles out of its way. But to a large extent it found the world market already

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occupied. The articles of mass consumption were supplied by England and the elegant luxury articles by France. Germany could not beat the former in price or the latter in quality. For the moment, therefore, nothing else remained but, following the beaten path of German production up to that time, to edge into the world market with articles which were too petty for the English and too shoddy for the French. Of course the favourite German custom of cheating, by first sending good samples and afterwards inferior articles, soon met with sufficiently severe punishment on the world market and was pretty well abandoned. On the other hand, the competition of over-production has gradually forced even the respectable English along the downward path of quality deterioration and so given an advantage to the Germans, who are unbeatable in this sphere. And thus we finally came to possess a large-scale industry and to play a role on the world market. But our large-scale industry works almost exclusively for the home market; (with the exception of the iron industry, which produces far beyond the limits of home demand), and our mass export consists of a tremendous number of small articles, for which large-scale industry provides at most the necessary half-finished products, while the small articles themselves are supplied chiefly by rural domestic industry.

    And here is seen in all its glory the "blessing" of house and landownership for the modern worker. Nowhere, hardly excepting even the Irish domestic industries, are such in famously low wages paid as in the German domestic industrie. Competition permits the capitalist to deduct from the price of labour power that which the family earns from its own little garden or field. The workers are compelled to accept any piece wages offered them, because otherwise they would get nothing at all and they could not live from the products of their agriculture alone, and because, on the other hand, it is just this agriculture and landownership which chains them to the spot and prevents them from looking around for other employment. This is the basis which maintains Germany's capacity to compete on the world market in a whole series of small articles. The whole profit is derived from a deduction from normal wages and the whole surplus value can be presented to the purchaser. That is the secret of the extraordinary cheapness of most of the German export articles.

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    It is this circumstance more than any other which keeps the wages and the living conditions of the German workers also in other industrial fields below the level of the West European countries. The dead weight of such prices for labour, kept traditionally far below the value of labour power, depresses also the wages of the urban workers, and even of the workers in the big cities, below the value of labour power; and this is all the more the case because poorly-paid domestic industry, has taken the place of the old handicrafts in the towns as well, and here too depresses the general level of wages.

    Here we see clearly that what at an earlier historical stage was the basis of relative wellbeing for the workers, namely, the combination of agriculture and industry, the ownership of house, garden and field, and certainty of a dwelling place, is becoming today, under the rule of large-scale industry, not only the worst hindrance to the worker, but the greatest misfortune for the whole working class, the basis for an unexampled depression of wages below their normal level, and that not only for separate districts and branches of enterprise but for the whole country. No wonder that the big and petty bourgeoisie, who live and grow rich from these abnormal deductions from wages, are enthusiastic over rural industry and the workers owning their own houses, and that they regard the introduction of new domestic industries as the sole remedy for all rural distress!

    That is one side of the matter, but it also has its reverse side. Domestic industry has become the broad basis of the German export trade and therefore of the whole of large-scale industry. Due to this it spread over wide areas of Germany and is extending still further daily. The ruin of the small peasant, inevitable ever since his industrial domestic production for his own use was destroyed by cheap confection and machine products, as was his animal husbandry, and hence his manure production also, by the dissolution of the mark system, the abolition of the common mark and of compulsory crop rotation -- this ruin forcibly drives the small peasant, fallen victim to the usurer, into the arms of modern domestic industry. Like the ground rent of the landlord in Ireland, the interest of the mortgage usurer in Germany cannot be paid from the yield of the soil but only from the wages of the industrial peasant. However, with the expansion of domestic industry one peas-

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ant area after another is being dragged into the present day industrial movement. It is this revolutionizing of the rural areas by domestic industry which spreads the industrial revolution in Germany over a far wider territory than was the case in England and France. It is the comparatively low level of our industry which makes its extension in area all th emore necessary. This explains why in Germany, in contrast to England and France, the revolutionary working-class movement has spread so tremendously over the greater part of the country instead of being confined exclusively to the urban centres. And this in turn explains the tranquil, certain and irresistible progress of the movement. It is perfectly clear that in Germany a victorious rising in the capital and in the other big cities will be possibIe only when the majority of the smaller towns and a great part of the rural districts have become ripe for the revolutionary change. Given anything like normal development, we shall never be in a position to win working-class victories like those of the Parisians in 1848 and 1871,[11] but for just that reason we shall also not suffer defeats of the revolutionary capital by the reactionary provinces, such as Paris suffered in both cases. In France the movement always originated in the capital; in Germany it originated in the areas of big industry, of manufacture and of domestic industry; the capital was conquered only later. Therefore, perhaps in the future also, the initiative will continue to rest with the French, but the decision can be fought out only in Germany.

    Now, this rural domestic industry and manufacture, which due to its expansion has become the decisive branch of German production and thus revolutionizes the German peasantry more and more, is however itself only the preliminary stage of a further revolutionary change. As Marx has already proved (Kapital, Vol. I, 3rd edition, pp. 484-95*), at a certain stage of development the hour of its downfall owing to machinery and factory production will sound for it also. And this hour would appear to be at hand. But in Germany the destruction of rural domestic industry and manufacture by machinery and factory production means the destruction of the livelihood of millions of rural producers, the expropriation of almost half the

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    * Karl Marx, Capital, Moscow 1954, Vol. I. pp. 470-80. --Ed.

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German small peasantry; the transformation, not only of domestic industry into factory production, but also of peasant farming into large-scale capitalist agriculture, and of small landed property into big estates -- an industrial and agricultural revolution in favour of capital and big land ownership at the cost of the peasants. Should it be Germany's fate to undergo also this transformation while still under the old social conditions it will unquestionably be the turning point. If the working class of no other country has taken the initiative by that time, Germany will certainly strike first, and the peasant sons of the "glorious army" will bravely lend assistance.

    And with this the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois utopia, which would give each worker the ownership of his own little house and thus chain him in semi-feudal fashion to his particular capitalist, takes on a very different complexion. In lieu of its realization there appears the transformation of all the small rural house-owners into industrial domestic workers; the destruction of the old isolation and with it the destruction of the political nullity of the small peasants who are dragged into the "social whirlpool"; the extension of the industrial revolution over the rural areas and thus the transformation of the most stable and conservative class of the population into a revolutionary hotbed; and, as the culmination of it all, the expropriation of the peasants engaged in home industry by machinery, which drives them forcibly into insurrection.

    We can readily allow the bourgeois-socialist philanthropists the private enjoyment of their ideal so long as they continue in their public function as capitalists to realize it in this inverted fashion, to the benefit and advancement of the social revolution.

London, January 10,1887.



Printed in the newspaper Der Sozialdemokrat, Nos. 3 and 4, January 15 and 22, 1887 and in the book: F. Engels, Zur Woh- nungsfrage, Hottingen-Zürich. 1887

Printed according to the text of the book                   Translated from the German

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P a r t  O n e

How Proudhon
Solves the Housing Question





    In No. 10 and the following issues of the Volksstaat may be found a series of six articles on the housing question. These articles are worthy of attention only because, apart from some long-forgotten would-be literary writings of the forties, they are the first attempt to transplant the Proudhonist school to Germany. This represents such an enormous step backward in comparison with the whole course of development of German socialism, which delivered a decisive blow precisely to the Proudhonist ideas as far back as twenty-five years ago,[*] that it is worth while answering this attempt immediately.

    The so-called housing shortage, which plays such a great role in the press nowadays, does not consist in the fact that the working class generally lives in bad, overcrowded and unhealthy dwellings. This shortage is not something peculiar to the present; it is not even one of the sufferings peculiar to the modern proletariat in contradistinction to all earlier oppressed classes. On the contrary, all oppressed classes in all periods suffered rather uniformly from it. In order to put an end to this housing shortage there is only one means: to abolish altogether the exploitation and oppression of the working class by the ruling class. What is meant today by housing shortage is the peculiar intensification of the bad housing conditions of the workers as a result of the sudden rush of population to the big cities; a

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    * In Marx: Misère de la Philosophie. Bruxelles et Paris, 1817 [The Poverty of Philosophy ]. -- [Note by Engels.]

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colossal increase in rents, still greater congestion in the separate houses, and, for some, the impossibility of finding a place to live in at all. And this housing shortage gets talked of so much only because it is not confined to the working class but has affected the petty bourgeoisie as well.

    The housing shortage from which the workers and part of the petty bourgeoisie suffer in our modern big cities is one of the innumerable smaller, secondary evils which result from the present-day capitalist mode of production It is not at all a direct result of the exploitation of the worker as worker by the capitalist. This exploitation is the basic evil which the social revolution wants to abolish by abolishing the capitalist mode of production. The cornerstone of the capitalist mode of production is, however, the fact that our present social order enables the capitaiist to buy the labour power of the worker at its value, but to extract from it much more than its value by making the worker work longer than is necessary to reproduce the price paid for the labour power. The surplus value produced in this fashion is divided among the whole class of capitalists and landowners, together with their paid servants, from the Pope and the Kaiser down to the night watchman and below. We are not concerned here with how this distribution comes about, but this much is certain: that all those who do not work can live only on the pickings from this surplus value, which reach them in one way or another. (Compare Marx's Capital, where this was propounded for the first time.)*

    The distribution of this surplus value, produced by the working class and taken from it without payment, among the non-working classes proceeds amid extremely edifying squabblings and mutual swindling. In so far as this distribution takes place by means of buying and selling, one of its chief methods is the cheating of the buyer by the seller; and in retail trade; particularly in the big cities, this has become an absolute condition of existence for the seller. When, however, the worker is cheated by his grocer or his baker, either in regard to the price or the quality of the merchandise, this does not happen to him in his specific capacity as a worker. On the contrary, as soon as a certain

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    * Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I. --Ed.

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average measure of cheating has become the social rule in any place, it must in the long run be adjusted by a corresponding increase in wages. The worker appears before the shopkeeper as a buyer, that is, as the owner of money or credit, and hence not at all in his capacity as a worker, that is, as a seller of labour power. The cheating may hit him, and the poorer class as a whole, harder than it hits the richer social classes, but it is not an evil which hits him exclusively, which is peculiar to his class.

    And it is just the same with the housing shortage. The expansion of the big modern cities gives the land in certain sections of them, particularly in those which are centrally situated, an artificial and often enormously increasing value; the buildings erected in these areas depress this value, instead of increasing it, because they no longer correspond to the changed circumstances. They are pulled down and replaced by others. This takes place above all with centrally located workers' houses, whose rents, even with the greatest overcrowding, can never, or only very slowly, increase above a certain maximum. They are pulled down and in their stead shops, warehouses and public buildings are erected. Through its Haussmann in Paris, Bonapartism exploited this tendency tremendously for swindling and private enrichment. But the spirit of Haussmann has also been abroad in London, Manchester and Liverpool, and seems to feel itself just as much at home in Berlin and Vienna. The result is that the workers are forced out of the centre of the towns towards the outskirts; that workers' dwellings, and small dwellings in general, become rare and expensive and often altogether unobtainable, for under these circumstances the building industry, which is offered a much better field for speculation by more expensive dwelling houses, builds workers' dwellings only by way of exception.

    This housing shortage, therefore, certainly hits the worker harder than it hits any more prosperous class, but it is just as little an evil which burdens the working class exclusively as is the cheating of the shopkeeper, and, as far as the working class is concerned, when this evil reaches a certain level and attains a certain permanency, it must similarly find a certain economic adjustment.

    It is largely with just such sufferings as these, which the working class endures in common with other classes, and particularly the petty bourgeoisie, that petty-bourgeois so-

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ciaIim, to which Proudhon belongs, prefers to occupy itself. And thus it is not at all accidental that our German Proudhonist seizes chiefly upon the housing question, which, as we have seen, is by no means exclusively a working-class question; and that he declares it to be, on the contrary, a true, exclusively working-class question.

    "The tenant is in the same position in relation to the house-owner as the wage-worker in relation to the capitalist."

    This is totally untrue.

    In the housing question we have two parties confronting each other: the tenant and the landlord, or house-owner. The former wishes to purchase from the latter the temporary use of a dwelling; he has money or credit, even if he has to buy this credit from the house-owner himself at a usurious price in the shape of an addition to the rent. It is a simple commodity sale; it is not a transaction between proletarian and bourgeois, between worker and capitalist. The tenant -- even if he is a worker -- appears as a man with money; he must already have sold his commodity, a commodity peculiarly his own, his labour power, to be able to appear with the proceeds as the buyer of the use of a dwelling or he must be in a position to give a guarantee of the impending sale of this labour power. The peculiar results which attend the sale of labour power to the capitalist are completely absent here. The capitalist causes the purchased labour power first to produce its own value but secondly to produce a surplus value, which remains in his hands for the time being, subject to distribution among the capitalist class. In this case, therefore, an excess value is produced, the sum total of the existing value is increased. In a renting transaction the situation is quite different. No matter how much the landlord may overreach the tenant it is still only a transfer of already existing, previously produced value, and the total sum of values possessed by the landlord and the tenant together remains the same after as it was before. The worker is always cheated of a part of the product of his labour, whether that labour is paid for by the capitalist below, above or at its value; the tenant only when he is compelled to pay for the dwelling above its value. It is therefore a complete misrepresentation of the relation between landlord and tenant to attempt to make it

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equivalent to the relation between worker and capitalist. On the contrary, we are dealing here with a quite ordinary commodity transaction between two citizens, and this transaction proceeds according to the economic laws which govern the sale of commodities in general, and in particular the sale of the commodity "landed property." The building and maintenance costs of the house or of the part of the house in question enter first into the calculation; the value of the land, determined by the more or less favourable situation of the house, comes next; the relation between supply and demand existing at the moment decides in the end. This simple economic relation expresses itself in the mind of our Proudhonist as follows:

    "The house, once it has been built, serves as a perpetual legal title to a definite fraction of social labour although the real value of the house has been paid to the owner long ago more than adequate!y in the form of rent. Thus it comes about that a house which, for instance, was built fifty years ago, during this period covers the original cost price two, three, five, ten and more times over in its rent yield."

    Here we have at once Proudhon in his entirety. First, it is forgotten that the rent must not only pay the interest on the building costs, but must also cover repairs and the average amount of bad debts and unpaid rents as well as the occasional periods when the house is untenanted, and finally must pay off in annual instalments the building capital which has been invested in a house, which is perishable and which in time becomes uninhabitable and worthless. Secondly, it is forgotten that the rent must also pay interest on the increased value of the land upon which the building is erected and that, therefore, a part of it consists of ground rent. Our Proudhonist immediately declares, it is true, that since this increment is brought about without the landowner having contributed anything, it does not equitably belong to him but to society as a whole. However, he overlooks the fact that he is thereby in reality demanding the abolition of landed property, a point which would lead us too far if we went into it here. And finally he overlooks the fact that the whole transaction is not at all one of buying the house from its owner, but of buying only its use for a certain time. Proudhon, who never bothered himself about the real, the actual conditions under

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which any economic phenomenon occurs, is naturally also unable to explain how the original cost price of a house is under certain circumstances paid back ten times over in the course of fifty years in the form of rent. Instead of examining this not at all difficult question economically and establishing whether it is really in contradiction to economic laws, and if so how, Proudhon resorts to a bold leap from economics into jurisprudence: "The house, once it has been built, serves as a perpetual legal title" to a certain annual payment. How this comes about, how the house becomes a legal title, on this Proudhon is silent. And yet that is just what he should have explained. Had he examined this question he would have found that not all the legal titles in the world, no matter how perpetual, could give a house the power of obtaining its cost price back ten times, over the course of fifty years, in the form of rent, but that only economic conditions (which may have obtained social recognition in the form of legal titles) can accomplish this. And with this he woulid again be where he started from.

    The whole Proudhonist teaching rests on this saving leap from economic reality into legal phraseology. Every time our good Proudhon loses the economic hang of things -- and this happens to him with every serious problem -- he takes refuge in the sphere of law and appeals to eternal justice.

    "Proudhon begins by taking his ideal of justice, of 'justice éternelle,' from the juridical relations that correspond to the production of commodities; thereby, it may be noted, he proves, to the consolation of all good citizens, that the production of commodities is a form of production as ever lasting as justice. Then he turns round and seeks to reform the actual production of commodities, and the actual legal system corresponding thereto, in accordance with this ideal. What opinion should we have of a chemist, who, instead of studying the actual laws of the molecular changes in the composition and decomposition of matter, and on that foundation solving definite problems, claimed to regulate the composition and decomposition of matter by means of the 'eternal ideas,' of 'naturalité and affinité' ? Do we really know any more about 'usury,' when we say it contradicts 'justice éternelle,' 'équité éternelle,' 'mutualité' éternelle,' and other 'vérites éternelles' than the fathers of the church did when they said it was incompatible with 'grâce éternel-

page 22

le,' 'foi éternelle,' and 'la volonté éternelle de Dieu'? " (Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 45.)[*] Our Proudhonist does not fare any better than his lord and master:

    "The rent agreement is one of the thousand exchanges which are as necessary in the life of modern society as the circulation of the blood in the bodies of animals. Naturally, it would be in the interest of this society if all these exchanges were pervaded by a conception of right, that is to say, if they were carried out everywhere according to the strict demands of justice. In a word, the economic life of society must, as Proudhon says, raise itself to the heights of economic right. In reality, as we know, exactly the opposite takes place."

    It is credible that five years after Marx had characterized Proudhonism so summarily anid convincingly precisely from this decisive angle, one can still print such confused stuff in the German language? What does this rigmarole mean? Nothing more than that the practical effects of the economic laws which govern present-day Isociety run contrary to the author's sense of justice and that he cherishes the pious wish that the matter might be so arranged as to remedy this situation. Yes, if toads had tails they would no longer be toads! And is then the capitalist mode of production not "pervaded by a conception of right," namely, that of its own right to exploit the workers? And if the author tells us that that is not his conception of right, are we one step further?

    But let us go back to the housing question. Our Proudhonist now gives his "conception of right" free rein and treats us to the following moving declamation:

    "We do not hesitate to assert that there is no more terrible mockery of the whole culture of our lauded century than the fact that in the big cities 90 per cent and more of the population have no place that they can call their own. The real nodal point of moral and family existence, hearth and home, is being swept away by the social whirlpool. . . . In this respect we are far below the savages. The troglodyte has his cave, the Australian his clay hut, the Indian his own hearth, but the modern proletanan is practically suspended in mid-air." etc.

    In this jeremiad we have Proudhonism in its whole reactionary form. In order to create the modern revolution-

---

    * Karl Marx, Capital, Moscow 1954, Vol. I, pp. 84-85. --Ed.

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ary class of the proletariat it was absolutely necessary to cut the umbilical cord which still bound the worker of the past to the land. The hand weaver who had his little house, garden and field along with his loom was a quiet, contented man, "godly and honourable" despite all misery and despite all political pressure; he doffed his cap to the rich, to the priest and to the officials of the state and inwardly was altogether a slave. It is precisely modern large-scale industry which has turned the worker, formerly chained to the land, into a completely propertyless proletarian, liberated from all traditional fetters, a free outlaw; it is precisely this economic revolution which has created the sole conditions under which the exploitation of the working class in its final form, in capitalist production, can be overthrown. And now comes this tearful Proudhonist and bewails the driving of the workers from hearth and home as though it were a great retrogression instead of being the very first condition of their intellectual emancipation.

    Twenty-seven years ago I described, in The Condition of the Working Class in England, the main features of just this process of driving the workers from hearth and home, as it took place in the eighteenth century in England. The infamies of which the land and factory owners were guilty in so doing, and thie deleterious effects, material and moral, which this expulsion inevitably had on the workers concerned in the first place, are there also described as they deserve. But could it enter my head to regard this, which was in the circumstances an absolutely necessary historical process of development, as a retrogression "below the savages"? Impossible! The English proletarian of 1872 is on an infinitely higher level than the rural weaver of 1772 with his "hearth and home." And will the troglodyte with his cave, the Australian with his clay hut or the Indian with his own hearth ever accomplish a June insurrection or a Paris Commune?

    That the situation of the workers has on the whole become materially worse since the introduction of capitalist production on a large scale is doubted only by the bourgeois. But should we therefore look backward longingly to the (likewise very meagre) fleshpots of Egypt,[12] to rural small-scale industry, which produced only servile souls, or to "the savages"? On the contrary. Only the proletariat created by modern large-scale industry, liberated from all

page 24

inherited fetters including those which chained it to the land, and herded together in the big cities, is in a position to accomplish the great social transformation which will put an end to all class exploitation and all class rule. The old rural hand weavers with hearth and home would never have been able to do it; they wou1d never have been able to conceive such an idea, not to speak of desiring to carry it out.

    For Proudhon, on the other hand, the whole industrial revolution of the last hundred years, the introduction of steam power and large-scale factory production which substitutes machinery for hand labour and increases the productivity of labour a thousandfold, is a highly repugnant occurrence, something which really ought never to have taken place. The petty-bourgeois Proudhon aspires to a world in which each person turns out a separate and independent product that is immediately consumable and exchangeable in the market. Then, as long as each person receives back the full value of his labour in the form of another product, "eternal justice" is satisfied and the best possible world created. But this best possible world of Proudhon has already been nipped in the bud and trodden underfoot by the advance of industrial development, which long ago destroyed individual labour in all the big branches of industry and which is destroying it daily more and more in the smaller and even smallest branches, which is setting social labour supported by machinery and the harnessed forces of nature in its place, and whose finished product, immediately exchangeable or consumable, is the joint work of the many individuals through whose hands it has had to pass. And it is precisely this industrial revolution which has raised the productive power of human labour to such a high level that -- for the first time in the history of mankind -- the possibility exists, given a rational division of labour among all, of producing not only enough for the plentiful consumption of all members of society and for an abundant reserve fund, but also of leaving each individual sufficient leisure so that what is really worth preserving in historically inherited culture -- science, art, forms of intercourse -- may not only be preserved but converted from a monopoly of the ruling class into the common property of the whole of society, and may be further developed. And here is the decisive point: as soon as the

page 25

productive power of human labour has risen to this height, every excuse disappears for the existence of a ruling class. After all, the ultimate basis on which class differences were defended was always: there must be a class which need not plague itself with the production of its daily subsistence, in order that it may have time to look after the intellectual work of society. This talk, which up to now had its great historical justification, has been cut off at the root once and for all by the industrial revolution of the last hundred years. The existence of a ruling class is becoming daily more and more a hindrance to the development of industrial productive power, and equally so to that of science, art and especially of forms of cultural intercourse. There never were greater boors than our modern bourgeois.

    All this is nothing to friend Proudhon. He wants "eternal justice" and nothing else. Each shall receive in exchange for his product the full proceeds of his labour, the full value of his labour. But to calculate this in a product of modern industry is a complicated matter. For modern industry obscures the particular share of the individual in the total product, which in the old individual handicraft was obviously represented by the finished product. Further, modern industry eliminates more and more individual exchange, on which Proudhon's whole system is built up, namely, direct exchange between two producers each of whom takes the product of the other in order to consume it. Consequently a reactionary streak runs through the whole of Proudhonism; an aversion to the industrial revolution and the desire, sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly expressed, to drive the whole of modern industry out of the temple -- steam engines, mechanical looms and the rest of the business -- and to return to old, respectable hand labour. That we would then lose nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our productive power, that the whole of humanity would be condemned to the worst possible labour slavery, that starvation would become the general rule -- what does all that matter if only we succeed in organizing exchange in such a fashion that each receives "the full proceeds of his labour," and that "eternal justice" is realized?

    Fiat justitia, pereat mundus!

    Let justice be done though the whole world perish!

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    And the world would perish in this Proudhonist counter-revolution if it were at all possible to carry it out.

    It is, however, self-evident that, even with social production conditioned by modern large-scale industry, it is possible to assure each person "the full proceeds of his labour," so far as this phrase has any meaning at all. And it has a meaning only if it is extended to purport not that each individual worker becomes the possessor of "the full proceeds of his labour," but that the whole of society, consisting entirely of workers, becomes the possessor of the total product of their labour, which product it partly distributes among its members for consumption, partly uses for replacing and increasing its means of production, and partly stores up as a reserve fund for production and consumption.

*     *     *

    After what has been said above, we already know in advance how our Proudhonist will solve the great housing question. On the one hand, we have the demand that each worker have and own his own home in order that we may no longer be below the savages. On the other hand, we have the assurance that the two, three, five or tenfold repayment of the original cost price of a house in the form of rent, as it actually takes place, is based on a legal title, and that this legal title is in contradiction to "eternal justice." The solution is simple: we abolish the legal title and by virtue of eternal justice declare the rent paid to be a payment on account of the cost of the dwelling itself. If one has so arranged one's premises that they already contain the conclusion, then of course it requires no greater skill than any charlatan possesses to produce the result, prepared beforehand, from the bag and proudly point to unshakable logic whose result it is.

    And so it happens here. The abolition of rented dwellings is proclaimed a necessity, and couched in the form of a demand that every tenant be turned into the owner of his dwelling. How are we to do that? Very simply:

    "Rented dwellings will be redeemed. . . . The previous house-owner will be paid the value of his house to the last farthing. Whereas rent represents, as previously, the tribute which the tenant pays to the perpetual title of capital, from the day when the redemption of rented dwellings is proclaimed the exactly fixed sum paid by the

page 27

tenant will become the annual instalment paid for the dwelling which has passed into his possession. . . . Society. . . transforms itself in this way into a totality of free and independent owners of dwellings."

    The Proudhonist finds it a crime against eternal justice that the house-owner can without working obtain ground rent and interest out of the capital he has invested in the house. He decrees that this must cease, that capital invested in houses shall no longer yield interest; nor ground rent either, so far as it represents purchased landed property. Now we have seen that the capitalist mode of production, the basis of present-day society, is in no way affected hereby. The pivot on which the exploitation of the worker turns is the sale of his labour power to the capitalist and the use which the capitalist makes of this transaction, the fact that he compels the worker to produce far more than the paid value of his labour power amounts to. It is this transaction between capitalist and worker which produces all the surplus value afterwards divided in the form of ground rent, commercial profit, interest on capital, taxes, etc., among the diverse varieties of capitalists and their servitors. And now our Proudhonist comes along and believes that if we were to prohibit one single variety of capitalists, and at that of capitalists who purchase no labour power directly and therefore also cause no surplus value to be produced, from making profit or receiving interest, it would be a step forward! The mass of unpaid labour taken from the working class would remain exactly the same even if house-owners were to be deprived tomorrow of the possibility of receiving ground rent and interest. However, this does not prevent our Proudhonist from declaring:

    "The abolition of rented dwellings is thus one of the most fruitful and magnificent aspirations which has ever sprung from the womb of the revolutionary idea and it must become one of the primary demands of the Social-Democracy."

    This is exactly the type of market cry of the master Proudhon himself, whose cackling was always in inverse ratio to the size of the eggs laid.

    And now imagine the fine state of things if each worker, petty bourgeois and bourgeois, were compelled by paying annual instalments to become first part owner and then full owner of his dwelling! In the industrial districts in Eng-

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land, where there is large-scale industry but small workers' houses and each married worker occupies a little house of his own, there might possibly be some sense in it. But the small-scale industry in Paris and in most of the big cities on the continent is supplemented by large houses in each of which ten, twenty or thirty families live together. Supposing that on the day of the world-delivering decree, when the redemption of rent dwellings is proclaimed, Peter is working in an engineering works in Berlin. A year later he is owner of, if you like, the fifteenth part of his flat consisting of a little room on the fifth floor of a houe somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Hamburger Tor. He then loses his job and soon afterwards finds himself in a similar flat on the third floor of a house in the Pothof in Hanover with a wonderful view of the courtyard. After five months' stay there he has just acquired 1/36 part of this property when a strike sends him to Munich and compels him by a stay of eleven months to assume ownership of exactly 11/180 of a rather gloomy abode on the street level behind the Ober-Angergasse. Subsequent removals, such as nowadays are so frequent with workers, saddle him further with 7/360 of a no less desirable residence in St. Gallen, 23/180 of another one in Leeds, and 347/56223, figured out exactly in order that "eternal Justice" may have nothing to complain about, of a third flat in Seraing. And now, of what use are all these shares in flats to our Peter? Who is to give him the real value of these shares? Where is he to find the owner or owners of the remaining shares in his various one-time flats? And what exactly are the property relations regarding any big house whose floors hold, let us say, twenty flats and which, when the redemption period has elapsed and rented f1ats are abolished, belongs to perhaps three hundred part owners who are scattered all over the world? Our Proudhonist will answer that by that time the Proudhonist exchange bank will exist, which will pay to anyone at any time the full labour proceeds for any labour product, and will therefore pay out also the full value of a share in a flat. But in the first place we are not at all concerned here with the Proudhonist exchange bank since it is nowhere mentioned in the articles on the housing question, and secondly it rests on the peculiar error that if someone wants to sell a commodity he will necessarily always find a buyer for its full value, and thirdly it went bankrupt in England more than once under the name of Labour Exchange Bazaar,[13] before Proudhon invented it.

    The whole conception that the worker should buy his dwelling rests again on the reactionary basic outlook, already emphasized, of Proudhonism, according to which the conditions created by modern large-scale industry are morbid excrescences, and society must be brought forcibly, that is, against the trend which it has been following for a hundred years, to a condition in which the old stable handicraft of the individual is the rule, and which, generally speaking, is nothing but an idealized restoration of small scale enterprise, which has gone and is still going to rack and ruin. Once the workers are flung back into these stable conditions and the "social whirlpool" has been happily removed, the worker can naturally again make use of property in "hearth and home," and the above redemption theory appears less absurd. Proudhon only forgets that in order to accomplish all this he must first of all put back the clock of world history a hundred years, and that if he did he would turn the present-day workers into just such narrow minded, crawling, sneaking servile souls as their great-great-grandfathers were.

    As far, however, as this Proudhonist solution of the housing question contains any rational and practically applicable content it is already being carried out today, but this realization does not spring from "the womb of the revolutionary idea," but from the big bourgeois themselves. Let us listen to an excellent Spanish newspaper, La Emancipacion,[29] of Madrid, of March 16, 1872:

    "There is still another means of solving the housing question, the way proposed by Proudhon, which dazzles at first glance, but on closer examination reveals its utter impotence. Proudhon proposed that tenants should be converted into buyers on the instalment plan, that the rent paid annually be booked as an instalment on the redemption payment of the value of the particular dwelling, so that after a certain time the tenant would become its owner. This method, which Proudhon considered very revolutionary, is being put into operation in all countries by companies of speculators who thus secure double and treble the value of the houses by raising the rents. M. Dollfus and other big manufacturers in Northeastern France have carried out this system not only in order to make money but, in addition, with a political idea at the back of their minds.

    "The cleverest leaders of the ruling class have always directed their efforts towards increasing the number of small property owners in order to build an army for themselves against the proletariat.

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The bourgeois revolutions of the last century divided up the big estates of the nobility and the church into small allotments, just as the Spanish republicans propose to do today with the still existing large estates, and created thereby a class of small landowners which has since become the most reactionary element in society and a permanent hindrance to the revolutionary movement of the urban proletariat. Napoleon III aimed at creating a similar class in the towns by reducing the denominations of the individual bonds of the public debt, and M. Dollfus and his colleagues sought to stifle all revolutionary spirit in their workers by selling them small dwellings to be paid for in annual instalments, and at the same time to chain the workers by this property to the factory once they worked in it. Thus the Proudhon plan, far from bringing the working class any relief, even turned directly against it."[*]

    How is the housing question to be settled, then? In present-day society, just as any other social question is settled: by the gradual economic levelling of demand and supply, a settlement which reproduces the question itself again and again and therefore is no settlement. How a social revolution would settle this question not only depends on the circumstances in each particular case, but is also connected with much more far-reaching questions, one of the most fundamental of which is the abolition of the antithesis between town and country. As it is not our bask to create utopian systems for the organisation of the future society, it would be more than idle to go into the question here. But one thing is certain: there is already a sufficient quantity of houses in the big cities to remedy immediately all real "housing shortage," provided they are used judiciously. This can naturally only occur through the expropriation of the present owners by quartering in their houses homeless

---

    * How this solution of the housing question by means of chaining the worker to his own "home" is arising spontaneously in the neighbourhood of big or rapidly rising American towns can be seen from the following passage of a letter by Eleanor Marx-Aveling Indianapolis, November 28, 1886: "In or rather near, Kansas City we saw some miserable little wooder; shacks, containing about three rooms each, still in the wilds, the land cost 600 dollars and was just big enough to put the little house on it; the latter cost a further 600 dollars, that is, together, 4,800 marks, for a miserable little thing, an hour away from the town, in a muddy desert." In this way, the workers must shoulder heavy mortgage debts in order to obtain even these dwellings, and now become the slaves of their employers for fair. They are tied to their houses, they cannot go away, and must put up with whatever working conditions are offered them. [Note by Engels to the 1887 edition.]

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workers or workers overcrowded in their present homes. As soon as the proletariat has won political power, such a measure prompted by concern for the common good will be just as easy to carry out as are other expropriations and billetings by the present-day state.

*     *     *

    However, our Proudhonist is not satisfied with his previous achievements in the housing question. He must raise the question from the level ground into the sphere of higher socialism in order that it may prove there also an essential "fractional part of the social question":

    "Let us now assume that the productivity of capital is really taken by the horns, as it must be sooner or later, for instance, by a transitional law which fixes the interest on all capitals at one per cent, but mark you, with the tendency to make even this rate of interest approximate more and more to the zero point, so that finally nothing more will be paid than the labour necessary to turn over the capital. Like all other products, houses and dwellings are naturally also in cluded within the purview of this law. . . . The owner himself will be the first one to agree to a sale because otherwise his house would be umused and the capital invested in it simply useless."

    This passage conbains one of the chief articles of faith of the Proudhonist catechism and offers a striking example of the confusion prevailing in it.

    The "productivity of capital" is an absurdity that Proudhon takes over uncritically from the bourgeois economists. The bourgeois economists, it is true, also begin with the proposition that labour is the source of all wealth and the measure of value of all commodities; but they likewise have to explain how it comes about that the capitalist who advances capital for an industrial or handicraft business receives back at the end of it not only the capital which he advanced but also a profit over and above it. In consequence they are compelled to entangle themselves in all sorts of contradictions and to ascribe also to capital a certain productivity. Nothing proves more clearly how completely Proudhon remains enmeshed in the bourgeois ideology than the fact that he has taken over this phrase about the productivity of capital. We have seen at the very beginning that the so-called "productivity of capital" is nothing but the quality attached to it (under present-day social rela-

page 32

tions, without which it would not be capital at all) of being able to appropriate the unpaid labour of wage-workers.

    However, Proudhon differs from the bourgeois economists in that he does not approve of this "productivity of capital," but, on the contrary, discovers in it a violation of "eternal justice." It is this productivity which prevents the worker from receiving the full proceeds of his labour. It must therefore be abolished. But how? By lowering the rate of interest by compulsory legislation and finally reducing it to zero. Then, according to our Proudhonist, capital will cease to be productive.

    The interest on loaned money capital is only a part of profit; profit, whether on industrial or commercial capital, is only a part of the surplus value taken by the capitalist class from the working class in the form of unpaid labour. The economic laws which govern the rate of interest are as independent of those which govern the rate of surplus value as could possibly be the case with laws of one and the same form of society. But as far as the distribution of this surplus value among the individual capitalists is concerned, it is clear that for industrialists and merchants who have in their businesses large amounts of capital advanced by other capitalists the rate of profit must rise -- all other things being equal -- to the same extent as the rate of interest falls. The reduction and final abolition of interest would, therefore, by no means really take the so-called "productivity of capital" "by the horns." It would do no more than re-arrange the distribution among the individual capitalists of the unpaid surplus value taken from the working class. It would not give an advantage to the worker as against the industrial capitalist, but to the industrial capitalist as against the rentier.

    Proudhon, from his legal standpoint, explains the rate of interest, as he does all economic facts, not by the conditions of social production, but by the state laws in which these conditions receive their general expression. From this point of view, which lacks any inkling of the interconnection between the state laws and the conditions of production in society, these state laws necessarily appear as purely arbitrary orders which at any moment could be replaced just as well by their exact opposites. Nothing is, therefore, easier for Proudhon than to issue a decree -- as soon as he has the power to do so -- reducing the rate of interest to one

page 33

per cent. And if all the other social conditions remain as they were, this Proudhonist decree will simply exist on paper only. The rate of interest will continue to be governed by the economic laws to which it is subject today, all decrees notwithstanding. Persons possessing credit will continue to borrow money at two, three, four and more per cent, according to circumstances, just as before, and the only difference will be that rentiers will be very careful to advance money only to persons with whom no litigation is to be expected. Moreover, this great plan to deprive capital of its "productivity" is as old as the hills; it is as old as -- the usury laws which aim at nothing else but limiting the rate of interest, and which have since been abolished everywhere because in practice they were continually broken or circumvented, and the state was compelled to admit its impotence against the laws of social production. And the reintroduction of these medieval and unworkable laws is "to take the productivity of capital by the horns"? One sees that the closer Proudhonism is examined the more reactionary it appears.

    And when thereupon the rate of interest has been reduced to zero in this fashion, and interest on capital therefore abolished, then "nothing more would be paid than the labour necessary to turn over the capital." This is supposed to mean that the abolition of interest is equivalent to the abolition of profit and even of surplus value. But if it were possible really to abolish interest by decree, what would be the consequence? The class of rentiers would no longer have any inducement to loan out their capital in the form of advances, but would invest it for their own account in their own industrial enterprises or in joint-stock companies. The mass of surplus value extracted from the working class by the capitalist class would remain the same; only its distribution would be altered, and even that not much.

    In fact, our Proudhonist fails to see that already now, in commodity purchase in bourgeois society, no more is paid on the average than "the labour necessary to turn over the capital" (it should read, necessary for the production of the commodity in question). Labour is the measure of value of all commodities, and in present-day society -- apart from fluctuations of the market -- it is absolutely impossible that in the aggregate more should be paid on the average for commodities than the labour necessary for their production.

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No, no, my dear Proudhonist, the difficulty lies elsewhere. It is contained in the fact that "the labour necessary to turn over the capital" (to use your confused terminology) is simply not fully paid for! How this comes about you can look up in Marx (Capital, Vol. I, pp. 128-60).[*]

    But that is not enough. If interest on capital [Kapitalzins ] is abolished, house rent [Mietzins] is abolished with it; for, "like all other products, houses and dwellings are naturally also included within the purview of this law." This is quite in the spirit of the old Major who summoned his one-year volunteer recruit and declared:

    "I say, I hear you are a doctor; you might report from time to time at my quarters; when one has a wife and seven children there is always something to patch up."

    Recruit: "Excuse me, Major, but I am a doctor of philosophy."

    Major: "That's all the same to me; one sawbones is the same as another."

    Our Proudhonist behaves the same way: house rent [Mietzins] or interest on capital [Kapitalzins], it is all the same to him. Interest is interest; sawbones is sawbones. We have seen above that the rent price [Mietpreis], commonly called house rent [Mietzins], is composed as follows: 1) a part which is ground rent; 2) a part which is interest on the building capital, including the profit of the builder; 3) a part which goes for repairs and insurance; 4) a part which has to amortize the building capital inclusive of profit in annual deductions according to the rate at which the house gradually depreciates.

    And now it must have become clear even to the blindest that "the owner himself would be the first to agree to a sale because otherwise his house would remain unused and the capital invested in it would be simply useless." Of course. If the interest on loaned capital is abolished no house-owner can thereafter obtain a penny piece in rent for his house, simply because house rent [Miete] may be spoken of as rent interest [Mietzins] and because such "rent interest" contains a part which is really interest on capital. Sawbones is sawbones. Whereas the usury laws relating to ordinary interest on capital could be made ineffective only by circumventing them, yet they never touched the rate of

---

    * See Karl Marx, Capital, Moscow 1954, Vol. I, pp. 164-94. --Ed.

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house rent even remotely. It was reserved for Proudhon to imagine that his new usury law would without more ado regulate and gradually abolish not only simple interest on capital but also the complicated house rent [Mietzins ] for dwellings.[15] Why then the "simply useless" house should be purchased for good money from the house-owner, and how it is that under such circumstances the house-owner would not pay money himself to get rid of this "simply useless" house in order to save himself the cost of repairs -- about this we are left in the dark.

    After this triumphant achievement in the sphere of higher socialism (Master Proudhon called it suprasocialism) our Proudhonist considers himself justified in flying still higher:

    "All that still has to be done now is to draw some conclusions in order to cast complete light from all sides on our so important subject."

    And what are these conclusions? Things which follow as little from what has been said before as the worthlessness of dwelling houses from the abolition of interest. Stripped of the pompous and solemn phraseology of our author, they mean nothing more than that, in order to facilitate the business of redemption of rented dwellings, the following is desirable: 1) exact statistics on the subject; 2) a good sanitary inspection force; and 3) co-operatives of building workers to undertake the building of new houses. All these things are certainly very fine and good, but, despite all the vociferous phrases in which they are enveloped, they by no means cast "complete light" into the obscurity of Proudhonist mental confusion.

    One who has achieved such great things has the right to address a serious exhortation to the German workers:

    "Such and similar questions, it would seem to us, are well worth the attention of the Social-Democracy. . . . Let it seek to clarify its mind, as here on the housing question, so also on other and equally important questions, such as credit, state debts, private debts, taxes," etc.

    Thus, our Proudhonist here confronts us with the prospect of a whole series of articles on "similar questions," and if he deals with them all as thoroughly as with the present "so important subject," the Volksstaat will have

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copy enough for a year. But we are in a position to anticipate -- it all amounts to what has already been said: interest on capital is to be abolished and with that the interest on pubiic and private debts disappears, credit will be gratis, etc. The same magic formula is applied to any and every subject and in each particular case the same astonishing result is obtained with inexorable logic, namely, that when interest on capital has been abolished no more interest will have to be paid on borrowed money.

    They are fine questions, by the way, with which our Proudhonist threatens us: credit ! What credit does the worker need besides that from week to week, or the credit he obtains at the pawnshop? Whether he gets this credit free or at interest, even at the usurious interest charged by the pawnshop, how much difference does that make to him? And if he did, generally speaking, obtain some advantage from it, that is to say, if the cost of production of labour power were reduced, would not the price of labour power be bound to fall? But to the bourgeois, and in particular to the petty bourgeois, credit is an important matter, and it would be a very fine thing for the petty bourgeois in particular if credit could be obtained at any time, and besides without payment of interest. "State debts!" The working class knows that it did not make them, and when it comes to power it will leave the payment of them to those who contracted them. "Private debts!" -- see credit. "Taxes!" A matter that interests the bourgeoisie very much but the worker only very little. What the worker pays in taxes goes in the long run into the cost of production of labour power and must therefore be compensated for by the capitalist. All these things which are held up to us here as highly important questions for the working class are in reality of essential interest only to the bourgeois, and still more so to the petty bourgeois; and, despite Proudhon, we maintain that the working class is not called upon to safeguard the interests of these classes.

    Our Proudhonist has not a word to say about the great question which really concerns the workers, that of the relation between capitalist and wage-worker, the question of how it comes about that the capitalist can enrich himself by the labour of his workers. True enough, his lord and master did occupy himself with it, but introduced absolutely no clearness into the matter. Even in his latest writings he

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has got essentially no farther than he was in his Philosophy of Poverty,[16] which Marx so strikingly reduced to nothingness in 1847.

    It was bad enough that for twenty-five years the workers of the Latin countries had almost no other socialist mental nourishment than the writings of this "Socialist of the Second Empire," and it would be a double misfortune if the Proudhonist theory were now to inundate Germany too. However, there need be no fear of this. The theoretical standpoint of the German workers is fifty years ahead of that of Proudhonism, and it will be sufficient to make an example of this one question, the housing question, to save further trouble in this respect.

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P a r t  T w o

How the Bourgeoisie
Solves the Housing Question


I

    In the section on the Proudhonist solution of the housing question it was shown how greatly the petty bourgeoisie is directly interested in this question. However, the big bourgeoisie is also very much interested in it, even if in directly. Modern natural science has proved that the so-called "poor districts," in which the workers are crowded together, are the breeding places of all those epidemics which from time to time afflict our towns. Cholera, typhus, typhoid fever, smallpox and other ravaging diseases spread their germs in the pestilential air and the poisoned water of these working-class quarters. Here the germs hardly ever die out completely, and as soon as circumstances permit they develop into epidemics and then spread beyond their breeding places into the more airy and healthy parts of the town inhabited by the capitalists. Capitalist rule cannot allow itself the pleasure of generating epidemic diseases among the working class with impunity; the consequences fall back on it and the angel of death rages in its ranks as ruthlessly as in the ranks of the workers.

    As soon as this fact had been scientifically established the philanthropic bourgeois became inflamed with a noble spirit of competition in their solicitude for the health of their workers. Societies were founded, books were written, proposals drawn up, laws debated and passed, in order to stop up the sources of the ever-recurring epidemics. The housing conditions of the workers were investigated and

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attempts made to remedy the most crying evils. In England particularly, where the largest number of big towns existed and where the bourgeoisie itself was, therefore, running the greatest risk, extensive activity began. Government commissions were appointed to inquire into the hygienic conditions of the working class. Their reports, honourably distinguished from all continental sources by their accuracy, completeness and impartiality, provided the basis for new, more or less thoroughgoing laws. Imperfect as these laws are, they are still infinitely superior to everything that has been done in this direction up to the present on the Continent. Nevertheless, the capitalist order of society reproduces agailn and again the evils to be remedied, and does so with such inevitable necessity that even in England the remedying of them has hardly advanced a single step.

    Germany, as usual, needed a much longer time before the chronic sources of infection existing there also reached the acute stage necessary to arouse the somnolent big bourgeoisie. But he who goes slowly goes surely, and so among us too there finally has arisen a bourgeois literature on public health and the housing question, a watery extract of its foreign, and in particular its English, predecessors, to which it is sought fraudulently to impart a semblance of higher conception by means of fine-sounding and unctuous phrases. The Housing Conditions of the Working Classes and Their Reform, by Dr. Emil Sax, Vienna, 1869,[17] belongs to this literature.

    I have selected this book for a presentation of the bourgeois treatment of the housing question only because it makes the attempt to summarize as far as possible the bourgeois literature on the subject. And a fine literature it is which serves our author as his "sources"! Of the English parliamentary reports, the real main sources, only three, the very oldest, are mentioned by name; the whole book proves that its author has never glanced at even a single one of them. On the other hand, a whole series of banal bourgeois, well-meaning philistine and hypocritical philanthropic writings are enumerated: Ducpétiaux, Roberts, Hole, Huber, the proceedings of the English congresses on social science (or rather social bosh), the journal of the Association for the Welfare of the Labouring Classes in Prussia, the official Austrian report on the World Exhibition in Paris, the official Bonapartist reports on the same

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subject, the Illustrated London News, Über Land und Meer, and finally "a recognized authority," a man of "acute practical perception," of "convincing impressiveness of speech," namely -- Julius Faucher ! All that is missing in this list of sources is the Gartenlaube, Kladderadatsch and the Fusilier Kutschke.[18]

    In order that no misunderstanding may arise concerning the standpoint of Herr Sax, he declares on page 22:

    "By social economy we mean the doctrine of national economy in its application to social questions; or, to put it more precisely, the totality of the ways and means which this science offers us for raising the so-called(!) propertyless classes to the level of the propertied classes, on the basis of its 'iron' laws within the framework of the order of society at present prevailing."

    We shall not go into the confused idea that generally speaking "the doctrine of national economy," or political economy, deals with other than "social" questions. We shall get down to the main point immediately. Dr. Sax demands that the "iron laws" of bourgeois economics, the "framework of the order of society at present prevailing," in other words, that the capitalist mode of production must continue to exist unchanged, but nevertheless the "so called propertyless classes" are to be raised "to the level of the propertied classes." Now, it is an unavoidable preliminary condition of the capitalist mode of production that a really, and not a so-called, propertyless class, should exist, a class which has nothing to selI but its labour power and which is therefore compelled to sell its labour power to the industrial capitalists. The task of the new science of social economy invented by Herr Sax is, therefore, to find ways and means -- in a state of society founded on the antagonism of capitalists, owners of all raw materials, instruments of production and means of subsistence, on the one hand, and of propertyless wage-workers, who call only their labour power and nothing else their own, on the other hand -- by which, inside this social order, all wage-workers can be turned into capitalists without ceasing to be wage-workers. Herr Sax thinks he has solved this question. Perhaps he would be so good as to show us how all the soldiers of the French army, each of whom carries a marshal's baton in his knapsack since the days of the old Napoleon, can be turned into field marshals without at the same time ceasing to be privates. Or how it could be brought about

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that all the forty million subjects of the German Reich could be made German kaisers.

    It is the essence of bourgeois socialism to want to maintain the basis of all the evils of present-day society and at the same time to want to abolish the evils themselves. As already pointed out in the Communist Manifesto, the bourgeois Socialists are desirous of "redressing social grievances, in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society"; they want "a bourgeoisie without a proletariat." We have seen that Herr Sax formulates the problem in exactly the same fashion. Its solution he finds in the solution of the housing problem. He is of the opinion that "by improving the housing of the labouring classes it would be possible successfully to remedy the material and spiritual misery which has been described, and thereby -- by a radical improvement of the housing conditions alone -- to raise the greater part of these classes out of the morass of their often hardly human conditions of existence to the pure heights of material and spiritual well-being." (Page 14.) Incidentally, it is in the interest of the bourgeoisie to gloss over the fact of the existence of a proletariat created by the bourgeois relations of production and determining the continued existence of these relations. Therefore Herr Sax tells us (page 21) that the expression labouring classes is to be understood as including all "impecunious social classes," "and, in general, people in a small way, such as handicrafbsmen, widows, pensioners (!), subordinate officials, etc.," as well as actual workers. Bourgeois socialism extends its hand to the petty-bourgeois variety. Whence the housing shortage then? How did it arise? As a good bourgeois, Herr Sax is not supposed to know that it is a necessary product of the bourgeois social order; that it cannot fail to be present in a society in which the great labouring masses are exclusively dependent upon wages, that is to say, upon the quantity of means of subsistence necessary for their existence and for the propagation of their kind; in which improvements of the machinery, etc., continually throw masses of workers out of employment; in which violent and regularly recurring industrial fluctuations determine on the one hand the existence of a large reserve army of unemployed workers, and on the other hand drive the mass of the workers from time to time on to the streets unemployed; in which the workers are crowded

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together in masses in the big towns at a quicker rate than dwellings come into existence for them under the prevailing conditions; in which, therefore, there must always be tenants even for the most infamous pigsties; and in which finally the house-owner in his capacity as capitalist has not only the right but, by reason of competition, to a certain extent also the duty of ruthlessly making as much out of his property in house rent as he possibly can. In such a society the housing shortage is no accident; it is a necessary institution and can be abolished together with all its effects on health, etc., only if the whlole social order from which it springs is fundamentally refashioned. That, however, bourgeois socialism dare not know. It dare not explain the housing shortage as arising from the existing conditions. And therefore it has no other way but to explain the housing shortage by moralizing that it is the result of the wickedness of man, the result of original sin, so to speak.

    "And here we cannot fail to recognize -- and in consequence we cannot deny" (daring conclusion!) -- "that the blame. . . rests partly with the workers themselves, those who want dwellings, and partly, the much greater part, it is true, with those who undertake to supply the need or those who, although they have sufficient means at their command, make no attempt to supply the need, namely, the propertied, higher social classes. The latter are to be blamed. . . because they do not make it their business to provide for a sufficient supply of good dwellings."

    Just as Proudhon takes us from the sphere of economics into the sphere of legal phrases, so our bourgeois Socialist takes us here from the economic sphere into the moral sphere. And nothing is more natural. Whoever declares that the capitalist mode of production, the "iron laws" of present-day bourgeois society, are inviolable, and yet at the same time would like to abolish their unpleasant but necessary consequences, has no other recourse but to deliver moral sermons to the capitalists, moral sermons whose emotional effects immediately evaporate under the influence of private interest and, if necessary, of competition. These moral sermons are in effect exactly the same as those of the hen at the edge of the pond in which she sees the brood of ducklings she has hatched out gaily swimming. Ducklings take to the water although it has no beams, and capitalists pounce on profit although it is heartless. "There is no room for sentiment in money matters," was already

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said by old Hansemann, who knew more about it than Herr Sax.

    "Good dwellings are so expensive that it is absolutely impossible for the greater part of the workers to make use of them. Big capital . . . is shy of investing in houses for the working classes . . . and as a result these classes and their housing needs fall mostly a prey to the speculators."

    Disgusting speculation -- big capital naturally never speculates! But it is not ill will, it is only ignorance which prevents big capital from speculating in workers' houses:

    "House-owners do not know at all what a great and important role. . . is played by a normal satisfaction of housing needs; they do not know what they are doing to the people when they offer them, as a general rule so irresponsibly, bad and harmful dwellings, and, finally, they do not know how they damage themselves thereby." (Page 27.)

    However, the ignorance of the capitalists must be supplemented by the ignorance of the workers before a housing shortage can be created. After Herr Sax has admitted that "the very lowest sections" of the workers "are obliged (!) to seek a night's lodging wherever and however they can find it in order not to remain altogether without shelter and in this connection are absolutely defenceless and helpless," he tells us:

    "For it is a well-known fact that many among them (the workers) from carelessness, but chiefly from ignorance, deprive their bodies, one is almost inclined to say, with virtuosity, of the conditions of natural development and healthy existence, in that they have not the faintest idea of rational hygiene and, in particular, of the enormous importance that attaches to the dwelling in this hygiene." (Page 27.)

    Here however the bourgeois donkey's ears protrude. Where the capitalists are concerned "blame" evaporates into ignorance, but where the workers are concerned ignorance is made the cause of their guilt. Listen:

    "Thus it comes (namely, through ignorance) that if they can only save something on the rent they will move into dark, damp and in adequate dwellings, which are in short a mockery of all the demands of hygiene. . . that often several families together rent a single dwelling, and even a single room -- all this in order to spend as little as possible on rent, while on the other hand they squander their in come in truly sinful fashion on drink amd all sorts of idle pleasures."

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    The money which the workers "waste on spirits and tobacco" (page 28), the "life in the pubs with all its regrettable consequences, which drags the workers again and again like a dead weight back into the mire" lies indeed like a dead weight in Herr Sax's stomach. The fact that under the existing circumstances drunkenness among the workers is a necessary product of their living conditions, just as necessary as typhus, crime, vermin, bailiff and other social ills, so necessary in fact that the average figures of those who succumb to inebriety can be calculated in advance, is again something that Herr Sax cannot allow himself to know. My old primary school teacher used to say, by the way: "The common people go to the pubs and the people of quality go to the clubs," and as I have been in both I am in a position to confirm it.

    The whole talk about the "ignorance" of both parties amounts to nothing but the old phrases about the harmony of interests of labour and capital. If the capitalists knew their true interests, they would give the workers good houses and improve their position in general; and if the workers understood their true interests they would not go on strike, they would not go in for Social-Democracy, they would not play politics, but would be nice and follow their betters, the capitalists. Unfortunately, both sides find their interests altogether elsewhere than in the sermons of Herr Sax and his countless predecessors. The gospel of harmony between capital and labour has been preached for almost fifty years now, and bourgeois philanthropy has expended large sums of money to prove this harmony by building model institutions; yet, as we shall see later, we are today exactly where we were fifty years ago.

    Our author now proceeds to the practical solution of the problem. How little revolutionary Proudhon's proposal to make the workers owners of their dwellings was can be seen from the fact that bourgeois socialism even before him tried to carry it out in practice and is still trying to do so. Herr Sax also declares that the housing problem can be completely solved only by transferring property in dwellings to the workers. (Pages 58 and 59.) More than that, he goes into poetic raptures at the idea, giving vent to his feelings in the following outburst of enthusiasm:

    "There is something peculiar about the longing inherent in man to own land; it is an urge which not even the feverishly pulsating

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business life of the present day has been able to abate. It is the unconscious appreciation of the significance of the economic achievement represented by landownership. With it the individual obtains a secure hold; he is rooted firmly in the earth, as it were, and every enterprise (!) has its most permanent basis in it. However, the blessings of landownership extend far beyond these material advantages. Whoever is fortunate enough to call a piece of land his own has reached the highest conceivable stage of economic independence, he has a territory on which he can rule with sovereign power; he is his own master; he has a certain power and a sure support in time of need; his self-confdence develops and with this his moral strength. Hence the deep significance of property in the question before us. . . . The worker, today helplessly exposed to all the vicissitudes of economic life and in constant dependence on his employer, would thereby be saved to a certain extent from his precarious situation, he would become a capitalist and be safeguarded against the dangers of unemployment or incapacitation as a result of the credit which his real estate would open to him. He would thus be raised from the ranks of the propertyless into the propertied class." (Page 33.)

    Herr Sax seems to assume that man is essentially a peasant, otherwise he would not falsely impute to the workers of our big cities a longing to own land, a longing which no one else has discovered in them. For our workers in the big cities freedom of movement is the prime condition of existence, and landownership can only be a fetter to them. Give them their own houses, chain them once again to the soil and you break their power of resistance to the wage cutting of the factory owners. The individual worker might be able to sell his house on occasion, but during a big strike or a general industrial crisis all the houses belonging to the workers affected would have to be put up for sale and would therefore find no purchasers or be sold off far below their cost price. And even if they all found purchasers, Herr Sax's whole grand housing reform would have come to nothing and he would have to start from the beginning again. However, poets live in a world of fantasy, and so does Herr Sax, who imagines that a landowner has "reached the, highest stage of economic independence," that he has "a sure support," that "he would become a capitalist and be safeguarded against the dangers of unemployment or incapacitation as a result of the credit which his real estate would open to him," etc. Herr Sax should take a look at the French and our own Rhenish small peasants. Their houses and fields are loaded down with mortgages, their harvests belong to their creditors before they are reaped,

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and it is not they who rule with sovereign power on their "territory" but the usurer, the lawyer and the bailiff. That certainly represents the highest conceivable stage of economic independence -- for the usurer! And in order that the workers may bring their little houses as quickly as possible under the same sovereignty of the usurer, our well meaning Herr Sax carefully points to the credit which their real estate can secure them in times of unemployment or incapacitation instead of their becoming a burden on the poor rate.

    In any case, Herr Sax has solved the question raised in the beginning: the worker "becomes a capitalist" by acquiring his own little house.

    Capital is the command over the unpaid labour of others. The little house of the worker can therefore become capital only if he rents it to a third person and appropriates a part of the labour product of this third person in the form of rent. But the house is prevented from becoming capital precisely by the fact that the worker lives in it himself, just as a coat ceases to be capital the moment I buy it from the tailor and put it on. The worker who owns a little house to the value of a thousand talers is, true enough, no longer a proletarian, but it takes Herr Sax to call him a capitalist.

    However, this capitalist streak of our worker has still another side. Let us assume that in a given industrial area it has become the rule that each worker owns his own little house. In that case the working class of that area lives rentfree; housing expenses no longer enter into the value of its labour power. Every reduction in the cost of production of labour power, that is to say, every permanent price reduction in the worker's necessities of life is equivalent "on the basis of the iron laws of the doctrine of national economy" to a depression of the value of labour power and will therefore finally result in a corresponding drop in wages. Wages would thus fall on an average as much as the average sum saved on rent, that is, the worker would pay rent for his own house, but not, as formerly, in money to the house-owner, but in unpaid labour to the factory owner for whom he works. In this way the savings of the worker invested in his little house would in a certain sense become capital, however not capital for him but for the capitalist employing him.

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Herr Sax thus lacks the ability to turn his worker into a capitalist even on paper.

    Incidentally, what has been said above applies to all so-called social reforms which can be reduced to saving schemes or to cheapening the means of subsistence of the worker. Either they become general and then they are followed by a corresponding reduction of wages or they remain quite isolated experiments and then their very existence as isolated exceptions proves that their realization on an extensive scale is incompatible with the existing capitalist mode of production. Let us assume that in a certain area a general introduction of consumers' co-operatives succeeds in reducing the cost of the means of subsistence for the workers by 20 per cent. Hence in the long run wages would fall in that area by approximately 20 per cent, that is to say, in the same proportion as the means of subsistence in question enter into the budget of the workers. If the worker, for example, spends three-quarters of his weekly wage on these means of subsistence, wages would in the end fall by 3/4 X 20 = 15 per cent. In short, as soon as any such saving reform has become general, the worker's wages diminish by as much as his savings permit him to live cheaper. Give every worker an independent income of 52 talers, achieved by saving, and his weekly wage must finally fall one taler. Therefore: the more he saves the less he will receive in wages. He saves, therefore, not in his own interest but in the interest of the capitalist. What else is needed "to stimulate" in him . . . "in the most powerful fashion . . . the primary economic virtue, thrift"? (Page 64.)

    Moreover, Herr Sax tells us immediately afterwards that the workers are to become house-owners not so much in their own interest as in the interest of the capitalists:

    "However, not only the working class but society as a whole has the greatest interest in seeing as many of its members as possible bound (!) to the land" (I should like to see Herr Sax himself even for once in this posture). ". . . All the secret forces which set on fire the volcano called the social question which glows under our feet, the proletarian bitterness, the hatred, . . . the dangerous confusion of ideas . . . must all disappear like mist before the morning sun when . . . the workers themselves enter in this fashion into the ranks of the propertied class." (Page 65.)

    In other words, Herr Sax hopes that by a shift in their proletarian status, such as would be brought about by the

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acquisition of a house, the workers would also lose their proletarian character and become once again obedient toadies like their forefathers, who were also house-owners. The Proudhonists should lay this thing to heart.

    Herr Sax believes he has thereby solved the social question:

    "A juster distribution of goods, the riddle of the Sphinx which so many have already tried in vain to solve, does it not now lie before us as a tangible fact, has it not thereby been taken from the regions of ideals and brought into the realm of reality? And if it is carried out, does this not mean the achievement of one of the highest aims, one which even the Socialists of the most extreme tendency present as the culminating point of their theories? " (Page 66.)

    It is really lucky that we have worked our way through as far as this, because this shout of triumph is the "summit" of the Saxian book. From now on we once more gently descend from "the regions of ideals" to flat reality, and when we get down we shall find that nothing, nothing at all, has changed in our absence.

    Our guide takes us the first step down by informing us that there are two systems of workers' dwellings: the cottage system, in which each working-class family has its own little house and if possible a little garden as well, as in England; and the barrack system of the large tenement houses containing numerous workers' dwellings, as in Paris, Vienna, etc. Between the two is the system prevailing in Northern Germany. Now it is true, he tells us, that the cottage system is the only correct one, and the only one whereby the worker can acquire the ownership of his own house; besides, he argues, the barrack system has very great disadvantages with regard to hygiene, morality and domestic peace. But, alas and alack! says he, the cottage system is not realizable in the centres of the housing shortage, in the big cities, on account of the high cost of land, and one should, therefore, be glad if houses were built containing from four to six flats instead of big barracks, or if the main disadvantages of the barrack system were alleviated by various ingenious building devices. (Pages 71-92.)

    We have come down quite a bit already, haven't we? The transformation of the workers into capitalists, the solution of the social question, a house of his own for each worker -- all these things have been left behind, up above

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in "the regions of ideals." All that remains for us to do is to introduce the cottage system into the countryside and to make the workers' barracks in the cities as tolerable as possible.

    On its own admission, therefore, the bourgeois solution of the housing question has come to grief -- it has come to grief owing to the contrast between town and country. And with this we have arrived at the kernel of the problem. The housing question can be solved only when society has been sufficiently transformed for a start to be made towards abolishing the contrast between town and country, which has been brought to its extreme point by present-day capitalist society. Far from being able to abolish this antithesis, capitalist society on the contrary is compelled to intensify it day by day. On the other hand, already the first modern utopian Socialists, Owen and Fourier, correctly recognized this. In their model structures the contrast between town and country no longer exists. Consequently there takes place exactly the opposite of what Herr Sax contends: it is not that the solution of the housing question simultaneously solves the social question, but that only by the solution of the social question, that is, by the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, is the solution of the housing question made possible. To want to solve the housing question while at the same time desiring to maintain the modern big cities is an absurdity. The modern big cities, however, will be abolished only by the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, and when this is once set going there will be quite other issues than supplying each worker with a little house of his own.

    In the beginning, however, each social revolution will have to take things as it finds them and do its best to get rid of the most crying evils with the means at its disposal. And we have already seen that the housing shortage can be remedied immediately by expropriating a part of the lurury dwellings belonging to the propertied classes and by compulsory quartering in the remaining part.

    If now Herr Sax, continuing, once more leaves the big cities and delivers a verbose discourse on working-class colonies to be established near the towns, if he describes all the beauties of such colonies with their common "water supply, gas lighting, air or hot-water heating, laundries, drying-rooms, bath-rooms, etc.," each with its "nursery,

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school, prayer hall (!), reading-room, library . . . wine and beer hall, dancing and concert hall in all respectability," with steam power fitted to all the houses so that "to a certain extent production can be transferred back from the factory to the domestic workshop" -- this does not alter the situation at all. The colony he describes has been directly borrowed by Mr. Huber from the Socialists Owen and Fourier and merely made entirely bourgeois by discarding everything socialist about it. Thereby, however, it has become really utopian. No capitalist has any interest in establishing such colonies, and in fact none such exists anywhere in the world, except in Guise in France, and that was built by a follower of Fourier, not as profitable speculation but as a socialist experiment.[*] Herr Sax might just as well have quoted in support of his bourgeois project-spinning the example of the communist colony "Harmony Hall" founded by Owen in Hampshire at the beginning of the forties and long since defunct.[20]

    In any case, all this talk about building colonies is nothing more than a lame attempt to soar again into "the regions of ideals" and it is immediately afterwards again abandoned. We descend rapidly again. The simplest solution now is "that the employers, the factory owners, should assist the workers to obtain suitable dwellings, whether they do so by building such themselves or by encouraging and assisting the workers to do their own building, providing them with land, advancing them building capital, etc." (Page 106.)

    With this we are once again out of the big towns, where there can be no question of anything of the sort, and back in the country. Herr Sax now proves that here it is in the interest of the factory owners themselves that they should assist their workers to obtain tolerable dwellings, on the one hand because it is a good investment, and on the other hand because the inevitably "resulting uplift of the workers . . . must entail an increase of their mental and physical working capacity, which naturally is of . . . no less . . . advantage to the employers. With this, however, the right point of view for the participation of the latter in the solu-

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    * And this one also has finally become a mere site of working class exploitation. (See the Paris Socialiste of 1886[19].) [Note by Engels to the 1887 edition.]

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tion of the housing question is given. It appears as the outcome of a latent association, as the outcome of the care of the employers for the physical and economic, mental and moral well-being of their workers, which is concealed for the most part under the cloak of humanitarian endeavours and which is its own pecuniary reward because of its successful results: the producing and maintaining of a diligent, skilled, willing, contented and devoted working class. (Page 108.)

    The phrase "latent association"[21] with which Huber attempts to endow this bourgeois philanthropic drivel with a "loftier significance," does not alter the situation at all. Even without this phrase the big rural factory owners, particularly in England, have long ago realized that the building of workers' dwellings is not only a necessity, a part of the factory equipment itself, but also that it pays very well. In England whole villages have grown up in this way, and some of them have later developed into towns. The workers, however, instead of being thankful to the philanthropic capitalists, have always raised very considerable objections to this "cottage system." Not only are they compelled to pay monopoly prices for these houses because the factory owner has no competitors, but immediately a strike breaks out they are homeless because the factory owner throws them out of his houses without any more ado and thus renders any resistance very difficult. Details can be studied in my Condition of the Working Class in England, pp. 224 and 228.* Herr Sax, however, thinks that these objections, "hardly deserve refutation." (Page 111.) But does he not want to make the worker the owner of his little house? Certainly, but as "the employers must always be in a position to dispose of the dwelling in order that when they dismiss a worker they may have room for the one who replaces him," well then, there is nothing for it but "to make provision for such cases by stipulating that the ownership shall be revocable." (Page 113.)**

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    * See K. Marx and F. Engels, On Britain, pp. 287, 291-92. --Ed.
    ** In this respect too the English capitalists have long ago not only fulfilled but far exceeded all the cherished wishes of Herr Sax. On Monday, October 14, 1872, the court in Morpeth for the establishment of the lists of parliamentary electors had to adjudicate a petition on behalf of 2,000 miners to have their names enrolled on the list of parliamentary voters. It transpired that the greater [cont. onto p. 52. -- DJR] number of these miners, according to the regulations of the mine at which they were employed, were not to be regarded as lessees of the dwellings in which they lived but as occupying these dwellings on sufferance, and could be thrown out of them at any moment without notice. (The mine-owner and house-owner were naturally one and the same person.) The judge decided that these men were not lessees but servants, and as such not entitled to be included in the list of voters. (Daily News, October 15,1872.) [Note by Engels.]

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    This time we have stepped down with unexpected suddenness. First it was said the worker must own his own little house. Then we were informed that this was impossible in the towns and could be carried out only in the country. And now we are told that ownership even in the country is to be "revocable by agreement"! With this new sort of property for the workers discovered by Herr Sax, with this transformation of the workers into capitalists "revocable by agreement," we have safely arrived again on level ground, and have here to examine what the capitalists and other philanthropists have actually done to solve the housing question.




II

    If we are to believe our Dr. Sax, much has already been done by these gentlemen, the capitalists, to remedy the housing shortage, and the proof has been provided that the housing problem can be solved on the basis of the capitalist mode of production.

    First of all, Herr Sax cites to us the example of -- Bonapartist France! As is known, Louis Bonaparte appointed a commission at the time of the Paris World Exhibition ostensibly to report upon the situation of the working classes in France, but in reality to describe their situ!ation as blissful in the extreme, to the greater glory of the Empire. And it is to the report of this commission, composed of the corruptest tools of Bonapartism, that Herr Sax refers, particularly because the results of its work are, "according to the authorized committee's own statement, fairly complete for France." And what are these results? Of eighty-nine big industrialists or joint-stock companies which gave information, thirty-one had built no workers' dwellings at all. According to Sax's own estimate the dwellings that were built house at the most from 50,000 to 60,000 people and consist

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almost exclusively of no more than two rooms for each family!

    It is obvious that every capitalist who is tied down to a particular rural locality by the conditions of his industry -- water power, the location of coal mines, iron-ore deposits and other mines, etc. -- must build dwellings for his workers if none are available. To see in this a proof of "latent association," "an eloquent testimony to a growing understanding of the question and its wide import," a "very promising beginning" (page 115), requires a highly developed habit of self-deception. For the rest, the industrialists of the various countries differ from each other in this respect also, according to their national character. For instance, Herr Sax informs us (page 117):

    "In England only quite recently has increased activity on the part of employers in this direction been observable. This refers in particular to the out-of-the-way hamlets in the rural areas. . . . The circumstance that otherwise the workers often have to walk a long way from the nearest village to the factory and arrive there so exhausted that they do not perform enough work is the employers' main motive for building dwellings for their workers. However, the number of those who have a deeper understanding of conditions and who combine with the cause of housing reform more or less all the other elements of latent association is also increasing, and it is these people to whom credit is due for the establishment of those flourishing colonies. . . . The names of Ashton in Hyde, Ashworth in Turton, Grant in Bury, Creg in Bollington, Marshall in Leeds, Strutt in Belper, Salt in Saltaire, Ackroyd in Copley, and others are well known on this account throughout the United Kingdom."

    Blessed simplicity, and still more blessed ignorance! The English rural factory owners have only "quite recently" been building workers' dwellings! No, my dear Herr Sax, the English capitalists are really big industrialists, not only as regards their purses but also as regards their brains. Long before Germany possessed a really large-scale industry they had realized that for factory production in the rural districts expenditure on workers' dwellings was a necessary part of the total investment of capital, and a very profitable one, both directly and indirectly. Long before the struggle between Bismarck and the German bourgeois had given the German workers freedom of association, the English factory, mine and foundry owners had had practical experience of the pressure they can exert on striking workers if they are at the same time the landlords of those workers.

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The "flourishing colonies" of a Greg, an Ashton and an Ashworth are so "recent" that even forty years ago they were hailed by the bourgeoisie as models, as I myself wrote twenty-eight years ago. (The Condition of the Working Class in England. Note on pp. 228-30.[*]) The colonies of Marshall and Akroyd (that is how the man spells his name) are about as old, and the colony of Strutt is even much older, its beginnings reaching back into the last century. Since in England the average duration of a worker's dwelling is reckoned as forty years, Herr Sax can calculate on his fingers the dilapidated condition in which these "flourishing colonies" are today. In addition, the majority of these colonies are now no longer in the countryside. The colossal expansion of industry has surrounded most of them with factories and houses to such an extent that they are now situated in the middle of dirty, smoky towns with 20,000, 30,000 and more inhabitants. But all this does not prevent German bourgeois science, as represented by Herr Sax, from devoutly repeating today the old English paeans of praise of 1840, which no longer have any application.

    And to give us old Akroyd as an example! This worthy was certainly a philanthropist of the first water. He loved his workers, and in particular his female employees, to such an extent that his less philanthropic competitors in Yorkshire used to say of him that he ran his factories exclusively with his own children! True, Herr Sax contends that "illegitimate children are becoming more and more rare" in these flourishing colonies. (Page 118.) Yes, illegitimate children born out of wedlock, for in the English industrial districts the pretty girls marry very young.

    In England the establishment of workers' dwellings close to each big rural factory and simultaneously with the factory has been the rul