II.1. Part II: How the Bourgeoisie Solves the Housing Question — I

In the section on the Proudhonist solution of the housing question it was shown how very directly the petty bourgeoisie is interested in this question. But the big bourgeoisie, too, has a very considerable, if indirect, interest in it. Modern natural science has proved that the so-called “bad quarters,” in which the workers are crowded together, are the breeding-places of all those epidemics that from time to time visit our towns. Cholera, typhus and typhoid fever, smallpox and other devastating diseases spread their germs in the pestilential air and the poisoned water of these working-class quarters; there they almost never die out, they develop into epidemics as soon as circumstances permit, and then spread beyond their breeding-places into the airier and healthier parts of the town inhabited by the capitalist gentlemen. Capitalist rule cannot allow itself the pleasure of generating epidemic diseases among the working class with impunity; the consequences fall back on itself, and the angel of death rages among the capitalists as ruthlessly as among the workers.

As soon as this had once been scientifically established, the humane bourgeois burned with noble rivalry for the health of their workers. Societies were founded, books written, proposals drafted, laws debated and decreed, to stop up the sources of the ever-recurring epidemics. The housing conditions of the workers were investigated and attempts made to remedy the most crying evils. Particularly in England, where most of the big towns were and where the fire was therefore burning the big bourgeois’ fingers most fiercely, great activity was developed; government commissions were appointed to investigate the sanitary conditions of the working class; their reports, honourably distinguished above all Continental sources by their accuracy, completeness and impartiality, provided the basis for new laws of more or less drastic effect. Imperfect as these laws are, they are still infinitely superior to everything done in this direction on the Continent so far. And yet the capitalist order of society reproduces the evils that are to be cured with such necessity that even in England the cure has hardly advanced a single step.

Germany, as usual, needed a much longer time for the sources of epidemics, which existed chronically here too, to develop to the acute pitch necessary to rouse the sleepy big bourgeoisie. However, slow and sure; and so with us too there finally arose a bourgeois literature of public health and the housing question — a watery extract of its foreign, particularly English, predecessors, to which the appearance of a higher conception is fraudulently imparted by sonorous and solemn phrases. To this literature belongs: Dr. Emil Sax, Die Wohnungszustände der arbeitenden Klassen und ihre Reform (The Housing Conditions of the Working Classes and their Reform), Vienna, 1869.

I select this book to set out the bourgeois treatment of the housing question only because it attempts to sum up the bourgeois literature on the subject as fully as possible.

And a fine literature it is that serves our author as his “sources”! Of the English parliamentary reports, the real chief sources, only three of the very oldest are mentioned by name; the whole book proves that the author has never looked at even a single one of them. Instead we are presented with a whole series of commonplace bourgeois, well-meaning philistine and hypocritically philanthropic writings: Ducpétiaux, Roberts, Hole, Huber, the proceedings of the English social science (or rather social twaddle) congresses, the journal of the Association for the Welfare of the Working Classes in Prussia, the official Austrian report on the Paris World Exhibition, the official Bonapartist reports on the same, the Illustrated London News, Über Land und Meer, and finally “a recognised authority,” a man of “acute, practical understanding” and of “convincing forcefulness of speech,” namely — Julius Faucher! All that is missing from this list of sources is the Gartenlaube, the Kladderadatsch and Fusilier Kutschke.

So that no misunderstanding may arise about Herr Sax’s standpoint, he declares on page 22: “By social economy we mean the science of political economy in its application to the social questions; more precisely, the sum total of the ways and means which this science offers us, on the basis of its ‘iron’ laws, within the framework of the social order now prevailing, for raising the so-called (!) propertyless classes to the level of the propertied.” We shall not go into the confused notion that “the science of political economy,” or political economy, is concerned with anything other than “social” questions. We shall go straight to the main point. Dr. Sax demands that the “iron laws” of bourgeois economics, the “framework of the social order now prevailing” — in other words, the capitalist mode of production — should remain unchanged, and yet that the “so-called propertyless classes” should be raised “to the level of the propertied.”

Now it is an indispensable precondition of the capitalist mode of production that there should exist a class that is not so-called but really propertyless, which has nothing to sell but its labour-power and is therefore compelled to sell this labour-power to the industrial capitalists. The task of the new science of social economy invented by Herr Sax therefore consists in this: to find the ways and means by which, within a state of society founded on the antagonism between capitalists, owners of all raw materials, instruments of production and means of subsistence, on the one hand, and propertyless wage-workers, who call nothing their own but their labour-power, on the other — by which, within this state of society, all wage-workers can be turned into capitalists without ceasing to be wage-workers. Herr Sax thinks he has solved this problem. Perhaps he will be so good as to show us how all the soldiers of the French army, each of whom since the time of old Napoleon has carried his marshal’s baton in his knapsack, can be turned into field marshals without ceasing to be private soldiers. Or how one can manage to make all forty million subjects of the German Empire into German Emperors.

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 abolish those evils. The bourgeois socialists want, as the Communist Manifesto already says, “to redress social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society”; they want “the bourgeoisie without the proletariat.” We have seen that Herr Sax poses the question in exactly the same way. He finds its solution in the solution of the housing question; he is of the opinion that “by improving the dwellings of the working classes the physical and mental misery described could be successfully remedied, and thereby — by a comprehensive improvement of housing conditions alone — the greater part of these classes could be raised out of the morass of their often hardly humane existence to the pure heights of material and spiritual well-being” (page 14). It may be remarked in passing that it is in the interest of the bourgeoisie to conceal the existence of a proletariat created by the bourgeois relations of production and determining their continued existence. Hence Herr Sax tells us, on page 21, that by the working classes are to be understood, besides the workers proper, all the “impecunious classes of society,” “small people in general, such as artisans, widows, pensioners (!), subordinate officials, etc.” Bourgeois socialism holds out its hand to the petty-bourgeois kind.

Where, then, does the housing shortage come from? How did it arise? As a good bourgeois, Herr Sax may not know that it is a necessary product of the bourgeois form of society; that a society cannot exist without a housing shortage in which the great labouring mass is exclusively dependent on wages, that is, on the sum of means of subsistence necessary for its existence and reproduction; in which new improvements in machinery and so on continually throw masses of workers out of work; in which violent, regularly recurring industrial fluctuations require, on the one hand, the existence of a large reserve army of unemployed workers and, on the other hand, periodically drive the great mass of the workers out of work and on to the streets; in which workers are crowded together in masses in the big towns, and indeed faster than dwellings for them come into existence under present conditions; in which, therefore, tenants must always be found even for the most infamous pigsties; in which, finally, the house-owner, in his capacity as capitalist, has not only the right but, by virtue of competition, to a certain extent also the duty, of ruthlessly extracting the highest rents from his house property. In such a society the housing shortage is no accident; it is a necessary institution, and it can be abolished, together with its effects on health and so on, only when the whole social order from which it springs is fundamentally transformed. But that is just what bourgeois socialism may not know. It may not explain the housing shortage from the circumstances. It therefore has no other means left but to explain it, with moral phrases, from the wickedness of human beings — from original sin, so to speak.

“And here it cannot be overlooked — and consequently cannot be denied” (bold conclusion!) “that the blame… lies partly with the workers themselves, those seeking dwellings, but partly, and by far the greater part, with those who undertake to satisfy the need, or who, though they command the necessary means, do not undertake it — with the propertied, higher classes of society. The blame on the part of the latter… consists in their not concerning themselves with providing an adequate supply of good dwellings.”

Just as Proudhon took us from economics into jurisprudence, so here our bourgeois socialist takes us from economics into morality. And nothing is more natural. Whoever declares the capitalist mode of production, the “iron laws” of present-day bourgeois society, inviolable, and yet wants to abolish their unpleasant but necessary consequences, has nothing left but to deliver moral sermons to the capitalists — moral sermons whose emotional effect is immediately dissolved into thin air again by private interest and, if necessary, by competition. These moral sermons are exactly like those of the hen on the edge of the pond on which the ducklings she has hatched are merrily swimming about. The ducklings take to the water although it has no beams to stand on, and the capitalists rush after profit although it has no heart. “In money matters sentiment stops,” as old Hansemann said, who knew it better than Herr Sax.

“The good dwellings are so high in price that it is altogether impossible for the greater part of the workers to make use of them. Big capital… shyly holds aloof from dwellings for the working classes… and so these classes, with their need for housing, fall for the most part a prey to speculation.” Abominable speculation — big capital, of course, never speculates! But it is not ill will, it is only ignorance, that prevents big capital from speculating in workers’ houses: “The house-owners do not know at all what a great and important part a normal satisfaction of the need for housing… plays; they do not know what they are doing to people when, as a rule, they offer them such irresponsibly bad and harmful dwellings; and finally they do not know how they are harming themselves by it” (page 27).

The ignorance of the capitalists, however, needs the ignorance of the workers to produce the housing shortage together with it. After Herr Sax has admitted that the “very lowest strata” of the workers, “in order not to remain altogether without shelter, are obliged (!) to look for a night’s lodging wherever and however they can, and are in this respect completely defenceless and helpless,” he tells us: “For it is a well-known fact how many among them” (the workers) “out of carelessness, but chiefly out of ignorance, deprive their bodies of the conditions of natural development and healthy existence — one is almost tempted to say with virtuosity — by not having the slightest notion of rational hygiene, and in particular of the enormous importance which the dwelling has in it” (page 27). But now the bourgeois ass’s ear pokes out. While with the capitalists the “blame” evaporated into ignorance, with the workers ignorance is only the occasion for blame. Listen: “So it comes about” (namely through ignorance) “that, if only they can save a little on rent, they move into dark, damp, inadequate dwellings, in short dwellings that mock all the requirements of hygiene… that often several families together rent a single dwelling, indeed a single room — all in order to spend as little as possible on housing, while beside this they squander their income in a truly sinful manner on drink and all sorts of vain pleasures.”

The money the workers “waste on brandy and tobacco” (page 28), the “public-house life with all its lamentable consequences, which like a leaden weight keeps dragging the working class back into the mire,” in fact lies like a leaden weight on Herr Sax’s stomach. That under the given circumstances drunkenness among the workers is a necessary product of their conditions of life, just as necessary as typhus, crime, vermin, bailiffs and other social diseases — so necessary that the average number of those who will fall victim to drink can be calculated in advance — this, again, Herr Sax may not know. My old elementary schoolmaster, by the way, used to say: “The common people go to the gin-shop and the gentry go to the club”; and since I have been in both, I can bear witness to the truth of it.

The whole talk about the “ignorance” of both parties comes down to the old phrases about the harmony of the interests of capital and labour. If the capitalists knew their true interest, they would provide the workers with good dwellings and improve their position generally; and if the workers understood their true interest, they would not strike, would not go in for social democracy, would not meddle in politics, but would nicely follow their superiors, the capitalists. Unfortunately both parties find their interests somewhere quite different from where Herr Sax and his countless predecessors preach them to be. The gospel of the harmony between capital and labour has now been preached for some fifty years; bourgeois philanthropy has spent heavy money on proving this harmony by model institutions; and, as we shall see later, we are today exactly as far as we were fifty years ago.

Our author now proceeds to the practical solution of the question. How little revolutionary Proudhon’s proposal to make the workers owners of their dwellings was, is shown by the very fact that bourgeois socialism had already tried to carry out this proposal in practice before him, and is still trying. Herr Sax, too, declares that the housing question can be completely solved only by transferring the ownership of the dwelling to the workers (pp. 58 and 59). More than that, he falls into poetic rapture at the idea and breaks out in the following burst of enthusiasm:

“There is something peculiar about the longing for landed property inherent in man, an urge which even the feverishly pulsating economic life of the present has not been able to weaken. It is the unconscious feeling of the importance of the economic achievement represented by landed property. With it a man acquires a secure hold; he is, as it were, firmly rooted in the soil, and every household (!) has in it its most durable basis. But the blessed power of landed property reaches far beyond these material advantages. Whoever is fortunate enough to call such property his own has reached the highest conceivable stage of economic independence; he has a domain over which he can rule as sovereign, he is his own master, he has a certain power and a secure support for times of need; his self-confidence grows, and with it his moral strength. Hence the profound significance of property in the present question. The worker, today helplessly exposed to the vicissitudes of the market and in constant dependence on his employer, would thereby be removed to a certain degree from this precarious situation; he would become a capitalist and be secured against the dangers of unemployment or incapacity for work by the real-estate credit that would consequently be open to him. He would thereby be raised from the propertyless into the propertied class” (page 63).

Herr Sax seems to assume that man is essentially a peasant; otherwise he would not attribute to the workers of our big towns a longing for landed property which nobody else has ever discovered in them. For our big-city workers freedom of movement is the first condition of life, and landed property can only be a fetter to them. Get them houses of their own, chain them once again to the soil, and you break their power of resistance to the wage cuts of the factory owners. The individual worker may be able to sell his little house now and then; but in a serious strike or a general industrial crisis all the houses belonging to the workers affected would have to come on to the market for sale, and so would find no buyers at all or be sold off far below cost. And if they all found buyers, Herr Sax’s whole great housing reform would have dissolved into nothing again and he could start all over from the beginning.

However, poets live in a world of imagination, and so does Herr Sax, who imagines that the landowner has “reached the highest conceivable stage of economic independence,” that he has “a secure support,” that he “would become a capitalist and be secured against the dangers of unemployment or incapacity for work by the real-estate credit that would consequently be open to him,” and so on. Let Herr Sax take a look at the small peasants of France and of our Rhineland: their houses and fields are loaded with mortgages over and over, their harvest belongs to their creditors before it is cut, and on their “domain” it is not they who rule as sovereigns but the usurer, the lawyer and the bailiff. That is indeed the highest conceivable stage of economic independence — for the usurer! And so that the workers may bring their little houses under the same sovereignty of the usurer as quickly as possible, the well-meaning Herr Sax considerately points them to the real-estate credit open to them, which they can use in unemployment and incapacity for work instead of becoming a burden on poor relief.

In any case Herr Sax has now solved the question posed at the beginning: the worker “becomes a capitalist” by acquiring a little house of his own.

Capital is command over the unpaid labour of others. The worker’s little house therefore becomes capital only when he lets it to a third person and in the form of rent appropriates a part of the product of that third person’s labour. By the fact that he lives in it himself, the house is prevented from becoming capital, 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 worth a thousand thalers is certainly no longer a proletarian, but one has to be Herr Sax to call him a capitalist.

But our worker’s capitalism has yet another side. Let us suppose that in a given industrial district it has become the rule that every worker owns his own little house. In that case the working class of that district lives rent-free; housing costs no longer enter into the value of its labour-power. Every reduction in the cost of production of labour-power, however, that is, every lasting reduction in the price of the worker’s necessaries of life, amounts “on the basis of the iron laws of political economy” to a depression of the value of labour-power, and therefore in the end results in a corresponding fall in wages. Wages would thus fall on average by the average amount of rent saved; that is, the worker would pay the rent for his own house, but not, as before, in money to the house-owner, but in unpaid labour to the factory owner for whom he works. In this way the worker’s savings invested in his little house would indeed become capital, after a fashion — but capital not for him, but for the capitalist who employs him.

So Herr Sax does not manage, even on paper, to turn his worker into a capitalist.

Be it remarked in passing that what has been said above applies to all so-called social reforms that amount to saving or to cheapening the worker’s means of subsistence. Either they become general, and then a corresponding fall in wages follows them; or they remain quite isolated experiments, and then their mere existence as isolated exceptions proves that their realisation on a large scale is incompatible with the existing capitalist mode of production. Let us suppose that in some district the general introduction of consumers’ co-operatives succeeds in making the workers’ food 20 per cent cheaper; then in the long run wages there would have to fall by approximately 20 per cent, that is, in the same proportion as the food in question enters into the workers’ subsistence. If the worker spends, for example, on average three-quarters of his weekly wage on this food, wages will in the end fall by 3/4 × 20 = 15 per cent. In short, as soon as any such saving reform has become general, the worker receives less wages in the same proportion as his savings allow him to live more cheaply. Give every worker an independent income of 52 thalers saved up, and his weekly wage must in the end fall by one thaler. Therefore: the more he saves, the less wages he receives. He saves, then, not in his own interest but in that of the capitalist. What more is needed “to stimulate most powerfully in him the first economic virtue, thrift…” (p. 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 that of the capitalists: “Yet not only the working class but society as a whole has the greatest interest in seeing as many as possible of its members bound (!) to the soil” (I should like to see Herr Sax in that posture for once)… “All the secret forces that kindle the volcano called the social question, which glows beneath our feet — proletarian bitterness, hatred… dangerous confusions of ideas… they must disperse like mist before the morning sun when… the workers themselves pass by this road into the class of the propertied” (p. 65). In other words, Herr Sax hopes that by a shift in their proletarian position, such as the acquisition of houses would bring about, the workers will also lose their proletarian character and become once again obedient, cringing creatures like their forefathers, who also owned houses. The Proudhonists may take this to heart.

With this Herr Sax believes he has solved the social question: “Does not the juster distribution of goods, the riddle of the Sphinx which so many have tried in vain to solve, thus lie before us as a tangible fact? Is it not thereby removed from the regions of ideals and brought into the realm of reality? And when it is realised, is not one of the highest aims attained, which even the socialists of the most extreme tendency set up as the summit of their theories?” (p. 66). It is a real piece of luck that we have worked our way up to here. For this cry of jubilation forms the “summit” of Herr Sax’s book, and from now on it is gently downhill again, out of “the regions of ideals” on to flat reality; and when we arrive at the bottom we shall find that nothing, absolutely nothing, has changed in our absence.

Our guide makes us take the first step downhill 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 in England; and the barracks system of large buildings containing many workers’ dwellings, as in Paris, Vienna and so on. Between the two stands the system usual in north Germany. Now the cottage system, he says, is the only right one, and the only one under which the worker could acquire ownership of his house; the barracks system, moreover, has very great disadvantages for health, morals and domestic peace — but unfortunately, unfortunately, the cottage system is impracticable precisely in the centres of the housing shortage, in the big towns, because of the dearness of land, and one must be glad if there, instead of great barracks, houses of four to six dwellings are built, or if the chief defects of the barracks system are remedied by all sorts of architectural contrivances (pp. 71–92). We have come down a good way already, haven’t we? The transformation of the workers into capitalists, the solution of the social question, a house belonging to every worker as his own — all this has remained up above in “the regions of ideals”; all we now have to do is introduce the cottage system in the country and make the workers’ barracks in the towns as tolerable as possible.

The bourgeois solution of the housing question has thus admittedly come to grief — come to grief on the antithesis between town and country. And here we have arrived at the heart of the question. The housing question can be solved only when society has been transformed sufficiently to set about abolishing the antithesis between town and country, which present-day capitalist society has carried to the extreme. Far from being able to abolish this antithesis, capitalist society must on the contrary sharpen it more every day. The first modern utopian socialists, Owen and Fourier, on the other hand, already recognised this correctly. In their model buildings the antithesis between town and country no longer exists. So the opposite of what Herr Sax asserts takes place: it is not the solution of the housing question that at the same time solves the social question, but only the solution of the social question, that is, the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, that at the same time makes possible the solution of the housing question. To want to solve the housing question while preserving the modern big towns is an absurdity. The modern big towns, however, will be done away with only by the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, and once that is under way, the issue will be quite other things than providing every worker with a little house of his own.

To begin with, however, every social revolution will have to take things as it finds them and remedy the most crying evils with the means at hand. And we have already seen that the housing shortage can be remedied immediately by expropriating part of the luxury dwellings belonging to the propertied classes and by quartering people in the remainder.

When Herr Sax, in what follows, leaves the big towns again and discourses at length on workers’ colonies to be set up beside the towns; when he describes all the beauties of such colonies, with their common “water supply, gas lighting, air or hot-water heating, wash-houses, drying rooms, bathrooms and the like,” with “kindergarten, school, prayer room (!), reading room, library… wine and beer room, dance and music hall in all propriety,” with steam power conducted into all the houses so as to be able “to move production back to a certain extent from the factories into the domestic workshop” — this changes nothing in the matter. The colony as he describes it is borrowed directly by Herr Huber from the socialists Owen and Fourier and merely made thoroughly bourgeois by stripping it of everything socialist. That, however, makes it utopian in earnest. No capitalist has any interest in setting up such colonies, and indeed none exists anywhere in the world except at Guise in France; and that one was built by a Fourierist, not as a profitable speculation but as a socialist experiment. Herr Sax might just as well have cited in support of his bourgeois project-mongering the communist colony “Harmony Hall,” founded by Owen in Hampshire at the beginning of the forties and long since defunct.

However, all this talk of colonisation is only a lame attempt to fly up again into “the regions of ideals,” and it is at once dropped again. We now go briskly downhill once more. The simplest solution now is “that the employers, the factory owners, help the workers to suitable dwellings, whether by building them themselves or by encouraging and supporting the workers in building for themselves, by placing land at their disposal, advancing the building capital, etc.” (p. 106). With this we are out of the big towns again, where none of this can be thought of, and transported back to the country. Herr Sax now proves that here it is in the interest of the factory owners themselves to help their workers to tolerable dwellings, on the one hand as a good investment, on the other because the “raising of the workers” which unfailingly “results” from it “must bring with it an increase in their physical and mental capacity for work, which naturally… benefits the employer no less.… With this, however, the right point of view for the participation of the latter in the housing question is also given: it appears as the outflow of the latent association, of the employers’ concern — mostly hidden under the cloak of humanitarian endeavours — for the physical and economic, mental and moral welfare of their workers, a concern which pays for itself financially through its results, the attracting and securing of an efficient, skilled, willing, contented and devoted body of workers” (p. 108).

The phrase “latent association,” with which Huber tried to foist a “higher meaning” on bourgeois-philanthropic drivel, changes nothing in the matter. Even without this phrase the big rural factory owners, particularly in England, long ago realised that building workers’ dwellings is not only a necessity, a part of the factory plant itself, but also pays very well. In England whole villages have arisen in this way, some of which have later developed into towns. The workers, however, instead of being grateful to the humane capitalists, have from the first raised very considerable objections to this “cottage system.” Not only do they have to pay monopoly prices for the houses, because the factory owner has no competitors; with every strike they are at once homeless, because the factory owner turns them out without more ado, and so makes any resistance very difficult. The details can be read in my Condition of the Working Class in England, pp. 224 and 228. But Herr Sax thinks such things “hardly deserve refutation” (p. 111). And does he not want to give the worker ownership of his little house? Certainly; but since “the employers would have to be in a position to dispose of the dwelling at all times, so as to have room for the replacement when they dismiss a worker,” then — well, then “provision would have to be made for such cases by agreeing on the revocability of the ownership!” (p. 113).

This time we have come down unexpectedly fast. First it was: the worker’s ownership of his little house; then we learn that this is impossible in the towns and practicable only in the country; now we are told that even in the country this ownership is to be only “revocable by agreement”! With this new sort of property for the workers discovered by Herr Sax, with this transformation of them into capitalists “revocable by agreement,” we have happily arrived on level ground again, and here we have to examine what the capitalists and other ⟨philanthropists⟩ have really done to solve the housing question.