The Housing Question

Contents

1. Preface to the Second Edition (1887) 27 min 9

   Engels explains the origin of the three articles of 1872–73 in the housing shortage of the German boom after the French indemnity, and why he reprints them: Proudhonism is dead among the Latin workers, but its ideas still matter historically and petty-bourgeois socialism survives in Germany, even in the party’s Reichstag group. He then turns the book’s theme on its head: in Germany many domestic workers own a cottage and a plot, and this “blessing” lets employers pay wages below the cost of living, underpinning cheap German exports. But domestic industry is also dragging the countryside into the industrial revolution, so that the coming ruin of the small peasants by machinery will spread revolution across Germany — the country where the decision will be fought out.

2. I Part I: How Proudhon Solves the Housing Question 54 min 17

   Engels answers Mülberger’s Proudhonist articles. The housing shortage is an old evil sharpened by rapid urban growth, a secondary effect of capitalism rather than the core of exploitation: the tenant faces the landlord as a buyer, not as a worker, and rent is an ordinary commodity transaction. Proudhon jumps from economics into law and “eternal justice” instead of explaining facts; his nostalgia for the worker’s “hearth and home” is reactionary, since only the uprooted proletariat can make the social revolution, and modern industry now makes leisure and culture possible for all. Mülberger’s plan — redeeming rents as instalments on the purchase price — would leave mobile workers owning absurd fractions of dwellings, is already practised by manufacturers like Dollfus to tie workers down, and his abolition of interest would neither touch exploitation nor abolish rent. For now, the shortage could be relieved by requisitioning existing dwellings.

3. II.1 Part II: How the Bourgeoisie Solves the Housing Question — I 37 min 13

   The bourgeoisie’s interest in housing comes from fear of epidemics bred in the slums. Engels takes Emil Sax’s book as representative of bourgeois housing reform, which wants to keep capitalism while abolishing its consequences, and so blames the ignorance of capitalists and the vices of workers. In fact the housing shortage is a necessary institution of a society of wage-labour, unemployment and crowded towns. Sax’s cure — making workers owners of their houses — would chain them to one place, make them easy prey for usurers in strikes and crises, and, once general, lower their wages by the rent saved. Sax himself retreats: the cottage system works only in the country, and the bourgeois solution founders on the antithesis of town and country, which only the abolition of capitalism can overcome.

4. II.2 Part II: How the Bourgeoisie Solves the Housing Question — II 40 min 13

   Engels examines what has actually been done. Employer housing in France and England is old, small in scale and a means of control; the Mulhouse workers’ town was a Bonapartist subsidy scheme; the London building companies housed under 15,000 people; the English building societies are petty-bourgeois savings and speculation clubs serving clerks and the best-paid workers. State help is no better: English sanitary laws are left unenforced by corrupt local councils, and public loans are a drop in the ocean. The state is the organised power of the possessing classes; and the Prussian state, a Bonapartist balance between nobility, bourgeoisie and proletariat sinking into speculation and corruption, will not solve the housing question either.

5. II.3 Part II: How the Bourgeoisie Solves the Housing Question — III 9 min 3

   The bourgeoisie’s only real method is “Haussmann”: breaking streets through working-class districts, which removes the slums only to recreate them elsewhere. Engels shows how Manchester’s “Little Ireland,” cleared for a railway station, reappeared across Oxford Road, as a flood of 1872 revealed in the horrifying cellar dwellings of Squire’s Court. Housing cannot be solved separately; the solution is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production.

6. III.1 Part III: Supplement on Proudhon and the Housing Question — I 14 min 4

   Replying to Mülberger’s answer, Engels defends his tone and his label “Proudhonist.” He denies that Proudhon’s principles drive the Latin workers’ movement: the Commune’s economic measures followed practical need and the ideas of German socialism, and the Blanquists adopted the dictatorship of the proletariat. Mülberger’s own words — that the housing question concerns the middle classes even more than the proletariat, whose interests are identical with theirs, and that “class politics” is ridiculous — prove him a petty-bourgeois socialist.

7. III.2 Part III: Supplement on Proudhon and the Housing Question — II 24 min 5

   Engels restates the economics of rent: letting a house is selling its use value piecemeal, and high returns come from rising ground-rent, not from any legal title. Mülberger, like Proudhon, translates economics into law and then condemns it by “justice.” Scientific socialism instead proves from economic development that a revolutionary class and productive forces are arising. Engels sketches a materialist account of law — custom becomes law, law needs the state, jurists turn it into a self-justifying system measured by “justice” — and compares justice in social science to phlogiston in chemistry.

8. III.3 Part III: Supplement on Proudhon and the Housing Question — III 13 min 4

   Mülberger’s jeremiad over homeless workers is reactionary because it wants to restore individual home-ownership. Against Mülberger’s claim that abolishing the antithesis of town and country is utopian, Engels cites Liebig: cities rob the soil of its nutrients, and only a dispersed population and the union of industry and agriculture can end both urban squalor and rural isolation. He exposes Mülberger’s contradictions about interest and expropriation, notes that collective ownership would not exclude rent, and refuses to decide in advance whether expropriation will be with or without compensation.

9. III.4 Part III: Supplement on Proudhon and the Housing Question — IV 13 min 3

   Engels sums up: Mülberger’s four positive proposals all come from Proudhon’s Idée générale, and he has answered none of the five objections that matter. Proudhon’s remedies are no better for the peasants; Germany’s great estates should rather be worked by associated labourers to show small peasants the advantages of co-operation. Engels has no wish to “solve” the housing question in detail — only to show that there are houses enough — and concludes that ready-made practical panaceas belong to the movement’s infancy; practical socialism means knowing the capitalist mode of production.