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

In reality the bourgeoisie has only one method of solving the housing question after its own fashion — that is, of solving it in such a way that the solution constantly reproduces the question anew. This method is called “Haussmann.”

By “Haussmann” I mean here not merely the specifically Bonapartist manner of the Parisian Haussmann — breaking long, straight, broad streets right through the closely built workers’ quarters and lining them on both sides with big luxury buildings, the intention being, besides the strategic aim of making barricade fighting more difficult, to form a specifically Bonapartist building proletariat dependent on the government and to turn the city into a pure luxury city. By “Haussmann” I mean the practice, which has now become general, of making breaches in the working-class quarters of our big towns, particularly those centrally situated, whether this is occasioned by considerations of public health and beautification, or by the demand for big centrally located business premises, or by the needs of traffic, such as railways, streets and so on. However different the occasion may be, the result is everywhere the same: the most scandalous alleys and lanes disappear, to the accompaniment of lavish self-glorification by the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success — but they spring up again at once somewhere else, and often in the immediate neighbourhood.

In The Condition of the Working Class in England I gave a description of Manchester as it looked in 1843 and 1844. Since then, by railways running through the middle of the town, by the laying out of new streets, and by the erection of large public and private buildings, some of the worst districts described there have been broken through, opened up and improved, others done away with altogether; although many — apart from the sanitary inspection, which has since become stricter — are in the same or an even worse structural condition than then. On the other hand, thanks to the enormous expansion of the town, whose population has grown by more than half since then, districts that were then still airy and clean are now just as built over, just as dirty and overcrowded as the most notorious parts of the town were then. Here is just one example. In my book I described, on page 80 and following, a group of houses lying in the valley bottom of the river Medlock which, under the name of Little Ireland, had for years been the blot on Manchester. Little Ireland disappeared long ago; on its site there now stands, on a high foundation, a railway station; the bourgeoisie pointed boastfully to the happy and final abolition of Little Ireland as to a great triumph. Then last summer there came a great flood — as indeed the embanked rivers in our big towns cause greater floods from year to year, for easily explicable reasons. And then it turned out that Little Ireland had not been abolished at all, but merely moved from the south side of Oxford Road to the north side, and is still flourishing. Let us hear the Manchester Weekly Times of 20 July 1872, the organ of the radical bourgeois of Manchester:

“The misfortune that befell the inhabitants of the low-lying valley of the Medlock last Saturday will, it is to be hoped, have one good result: that public attention will be drawn to the obvious mockery of all the laws of hygiene that has been tolerated there for so long under the noses of the town officials and the town’s sanitary committee. A strong article in our daily edition yesterday disclosed, though still too feebly, the disgraceful state of some of the cellar dwellings near Charles Street and Brook Street which were reached by the flood. A close examination of one of the courts named in that article enables us to confirm all the statements made there and to declare that the cellar dwellings in this court should have been closed long ago — or rather, they should never have been tolerated as human dwellings. Squire’s Court is formed by seven or eight dwelling houses at the corner of Charles Street and Brook Street, over which the passer-by, even at the lowest point of Brook Street, under the railway arch, may walk day after day without suspecting that human beings live in caves in the depths beneath him. The court is hidden from public view, accessible only to those whom misery compels to seek shelter in its tomb-like seclusion. Even when the waters of the Medlock, mostly stagnant and dammed up between weirs, do not rise above their usual level, the floors of these dwellings can be only a few inches above their surface; any heavy shower of rain is capable of forcing disgusting putrid water up out of the drains or sewer pipes and poisoning the dwellings with the pestilential gases that every flood leaves behind as a souvenir.… Squire’s Court lies even lower than the uninhabited cellars of the houses standing in Brook Street… twenty feet below the street, and the poisoned water forced up out of the drains on Saturday reached to the roofs. We knew this and therefore expected to find the court uninhabited, or occupied only by officials of the sanitary committee washing down and disinfecting the stinking walls. Instead we saw a man in a barber’s cellar dwelling shovelling a heap of rotting filth that lay in a corner on to a wheelbarrow. The barber, whose cellar had already been fairly well swept out, sent us further down to a row of dwellings of which he said that if he could write he would write to the press and insist on their being closed. So we came at last to Squire’s Court, where we found a handsome, healthy-looking Irishwoman busy with her washing. She and her husband, a private night-watchman, had lived in the court for six years; they had a large family. In the house they had just left, the flood had risen right up to the roof, the windows were broken, the furniture a heap of ruins. The occupant, it was said, had been able to keep the house in a tolerable state as regards smell only by whitewashing it with lime every two months.… In the inner court, which our reporter now reached for the first time, he found three houses built with their back walls against those just described, two of which were inhabited. The stench there was so abominable that the healthiest man must have become seasick in a few minutes.… This repulsive hole was inhabited by a family of seven persons, who had all slept in the house on Thursday evening (the day of the first flood). Or rather, as the woman corrected herself, not slept, for she and her husband had been vomiting from the stench for most of the night. On Saturday they had had to carry their children out, wading through water up to their chests. She too was of the opinion that the hole was too bad for a pig, but she had taken it because of the cheap rent — 1½ shillings a week — since her husband had often been without earnings lately because of illness. The impression made by this court, and by its inhabitants penned up in it as in a premature grave, is one of utter helplessness. We must say, by the way, that according to our observations Squire’s Court is only a picture — perhaps an exaggerated one — of many other localities in that district whose existence our sanitary committee cannot justify. And if these localities are allowed to remain inhabited, the committee takes upon itself a responsibility, and the neighbourhood the danger of infectious epidemics, whose weight we will not examine further.”

This is a striking example of how the bourgeoisie solves the housing question in practice. The breeding-places of disease, the infamous holes and cellars in which the capitalist mode of production confines our workers night after night, are not abolished; they are merely — moved! The same economic necessity that produced them in the first place produces them in the second. And as long as the capitalist mode of production exists, it is folly to want to solve the housing question, or any other social question affecting the fate of the workers, separately. The solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, in the appropriation of all the means of life and of labour by the working class itself.