The Housing Question
III.1. Part III: Supplement on Proudhon and the Housing Question — I
Section summary
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.
In No. 86 of the Volksstaat A. Mülberger reveals himself as the author of the articles criticised by me in No. 51 and following numbers of this paper. In his reply he heaps on me such a series of reproaches, and in doing so so thoroughly shifts all the points of view at issue, that willy-nilly I must answer. I shall try to give my reply — which, to my regret, must move largely on the ground of personal polemic prescribed to me by Mülberger — a general interest by developing once again, and if possible more clearly than before, the points that really matter, even at the risk of being told once more by Mülberger that all this contains “essentially nothing new either for him or for the other readers of the Volksstaat.”
Mülberger complains about the form and content of my criticism. As regards the form, it is enough to reply that at the time I did not know at all from whom the articles in question came. There could therefore be no question of a personal “prejudice” against the author; against the solution of the housing question developed in the articles I was certainly “prejudiced” in so far as I had long known it from Proudhon and my opinion of it was settled.
I will not quarrel with friend Mülberger about the “tone” of my criticism. When one has been in the movement as long as I have, one acquires a fairly thick skin against attacks and therefore easily assumes one in others too. To compensate Mülberger, I shall try this time to bring my “tone” into proper relation with the sensitivity of his epidermis.
Mülberger complains particularly bitterly that I called him a Proudhonist, and protests that he is not one. I must of course believe him, but I shall prove that the articles in question — and they alone were my concern — contain nothing but pure Proudhonism.
But, according to Mülberger, I also criticise Proudhon “frivolously” and do him grave injustice: “The doctrine of the petty bourgeois Proudhon has become a fixed dogma with us in Germany, which many even proclaim without having read a single line of him!” When I regret that for twenty years the Romance-speaking workers have had no other mental nourishment than the works of Proudhon, Mülberger replies that among the Romance workers “the principles, as formulated by Proudhon, form almost everywhere the driving soul of the movement.” This I must deny. In the first place, the “driving soul” of the workers’ movement nowhere lies in “principles” but everywhere in the development of large-scale industry and its effects, the accumulation and concentration of capital on the one side and of the proletariat on the other. In the second place, it is not true that Proudhon’s so-called “principles” play the decisive part among the Latin peoples that Mülberger ascribes to them; that “the principles of anarchy, of the organisation des forces économiques, of the liquidation sociale, etc., have there… become the true bearers of the revolutionary movement.” Not to speak of Spain and Italy, where the Proudhonist universal panaceas have gained any influence only in the form further botched by Bakunin, it is a notorious fact to everyone who knows the international workers’ movement that in France the Proudhonists form a not very numerous sect, while the mass of the workers will have nothing to do with the plan of social reform drawn up by Proudhon under the titles of liquidation sociale and organisation des forces économiques. This was shown, among other occasions, under the Commune. Although the Proudhonists were strongly represented in it, not the slightest attempt was made to liquidate the old society or to organise the economic forces according to Proudhon’s proposals. On the contrary. It is to the highest honour of the Commune that in all its economic measures the “driving soul” was not any set of principles but — simple practical need. And therefore these measures — the abolition of night work for bakers, the prohibition of fines in factories, the confiscation of shut-down factories and workshops and their handing over to workers’ associations — were by no means in the spirit of Proudhon, but certainly in that of German scientific socialism. The only social measure the Proudhonists carried through was — not to seize the Bank of France; and that was partly why the Commune perished. In the same way the so-called Blanquists, as soon as they tried to turn themselves from merely political revolutionaries into a socialist workers’ faction with a definite programme — as was done by the Blanquist refugees in London in their manifesto Internationale et Révolution — did not proclaim the “principles” of Proudhon’s plan for saving society, but, and almost word for word, the views of German scientific socialism on the necessity of political action by the proletariat and of its dictatorship as the transition to the abolition of classes and, with them, of the state — views already stated in the Communist Manifesto and countless times since. And if Mülberger goes so far as to infer from the Germans’ disdain for Proudhon a lack of understanding of the Romance movement “down to the Paris Commune,” let him, as proof of this lack, name the Romance work that has understood and described the Commune even approximately as correctly as the Address of the General Council of the International on the Civil War in France, written by the German Marx.
The only country where the workers’ movement is directly under the influence of Proudhon’s “principles” is Belgium, and precisely for that reason the Belgian movement goes, as Hegel says, “from nothing through nothing to nothing.”
When I consider it a misfortune that for twenty years the Romance workers have lived intellectually, directly or indirectly, only on Proudhon, I find this misfortune not in the entirely mythical rule of Proudhon’s reform recipe — what Mülberger calls the “principles” — but in the fact that their economic criticism of existing society was infected by Proudhon’s utterly false turns of phrase, and their political action was botched by Proudhonist influence. Whether the “Proudhonised Romance workers” or the German workers — who in any case understand German scientific socialism infinitely better than the Romance workers understand their Proudhon — “stand more in the revolution,” we shall be able to answer when we first know what “standing in the revolution” means. One has heard of people who “stand in Christianity, in the true faith, in the grace of God,” and so on. But to “stand” in the revolution, in the most violent of movements? Is “the revolution,” then, a dogmatic religion in which one must believe?
Further, Mülberger reproaches me with having asserted, against the express words of his work, that he declares the housing question to be exclusively a workers’ question.
This time Mülberger is in fact right. I had overlooked the passage in question. Overlooked it unpardonably, for it is one of the most characteristic of the whole tendency of his treatise. Mülberger really does say in so many words:
“Since we are so often and so much reproached with the ridiculous charge of pursuing class politics, of striving for class rule and so on, we emphasise first of all and expressly that the housing question by no means concerns the proletariat exclusively, but on the contrary interests in quite an outstanding degree the real middle class, the small tradesmen, the petty bourgeoisie, the whole bureaucracy.… The housing question is precisely that point of social reform which more than all others seems suited to reveal the absolute inner identity of the interests of the proletariat on the one hand and of the real middle classes of society on the other. The middle classes suffer just as much, perhaps even more, under the oppressive fetter of the rented dwelling as the proletariat.… The real middle classes of society today face the question whether they… will find the strength… in alliance with the youthful and energetic workers’ party, to take part in the process of transforming society, whose blessings will benefit precisely them above all.”
1. “We” do not pursue “class politics” and do not strive for “class rule.” The German Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, however, precisely because it is a workers’ party, necessarily pursues “class politics,” the politics of the working class. Since every political party sets out to win power in the state, the German Social-Democratic Workers’ Party necessarily strives for its own rule, the rule of the working class, and therefore for “class rule.” Moreover, every real proletarian party, from the English Chartists onwards, has always put forward class politics, the organisation of the proletariat as an independent political party, as the first condition, and the dictatorship of the proletariat as the immediate aim of the struggle. By declaring this “ridiculous,” Mülberger places himself outside the proletarian movement and inside petty-bourgeois socialism.
2. The housing question has the merit of not being exclusively a workers’ question, but of “interesting in quite an outstanding degree” the petty bourgeoisie, since the “real middle classes” suffer from it “just as much, perhaps even more” than the proletariat. If anyone declares that the petty bourgeoisie suffers, even in a single respect, “perhaps even more than the proletariat,” he can certainly not complain if he is counted among the petty-bourgeois socialists. Has Mülberger any reason, then, to be dissatisfied when I say: “It is precisely these sufferings which the working class shares with other classes, particularly the petty bourgeoisie, with which petty-bourgeois socialism, to which Proudhon too belongs, prefers to concern itself. And so it is by no means accidental that our German Proudhonist seizes above all on the housing question, which, as we have seen, is by no means exclusively a workers’ question”?
3. Between the interests of the “real middle classes of society” and those of the proletariat there exists “absolute inner identity,” and it is not the proletariat but these real middle classes whom the “blessings” of the coming process of social transformation “will benefit precisely above all.”
The workers, then, will make the coming social revolution “precisely above all” in the interest of the petty bourgeois. And further, there is an absolute inner identity of the interests of the petty bourgeois with those of the proletariat. If the interests of the petty bourgeois are inwardly identical with those of the workers, then those of the workers are identical with those of the petty bourgeois. The petty-bourgeois standpoint is therefore just as legitimate in the movement as the proletarian one. And the assertion of this equality of rights is precisely what is called petty-bourgeois socialism.
It is therefore quite consistent when Mülberger, on page 25 of the pamphlet edition, celebrates “small industry” as the “real buttress of society,” “because by its very nature it unites in itself the three factors: labour — earning — property; because in the union of these three factors it places no barrier whatever in the way of the individual’s capacity for development”; and when he reproaches modern industry above all with having destroyed this nursery of normal human beings and “made out of a vigorous class, constantly renewing itself, an unconscious mass of people that does not know where to turn its anxious gaze.” The petty bourgeois is thus Mülberger’s model human being and small industry Mülberger’s model mode of production. Did I slander him, then, when I classed him among the petty-bourgeois socialists?
Since Mülberger disclaims all responsibility for Proudhon, it would be superfluous to discuss further here how Proudhon’s reform plans aim at turning all members of society into petty bourgeois and small peasants. Nor will it be necessary to go into the alleged identity of the interests of the petty bourgeois with those of the workers. What is necessary is already to be found in the Communist Manifesto (Leipzig edition, 1872, pp. 12 and 21).
The result of our examination, then, is that beside “the legend of the petty bourgeois Proudhon” there now stands the reality of the petty bourgeois Mülberger.