III.2. Part III: Supplement on Proudhon and the Housing Question — II

We now come to a main point. I reproached Mülberger’s articles with falsifying economic relations, in Proudhon’s manner, by translating them into legal terminology. As an example of this I singled out the following sentence of Mülberger’s:

“The house, once built, serves as an eternal legal title to a definite fraction of social labour, even if the real value of the house has long since been more than adequately paid to the owner in the form of rent. Thus it comes about that a house which, for instance, was built fifty years ago has during that time covered its original cost price two, three, five, ten times over in the yield of its rent.”

Mülberger now complains:

“This simple, sober statement of a fact leads Engels to point out to me that I ought to have explained how the house becomes a ‘legal title’ — something that lay quite outside the scope of my task. A description is one thing, an explanation another. When I say, following Proudhon, that the economic life of society should be permeated by a conception of right, I am thereby describing present-day society as one in which, though not every conception of right is lacking, the conception of right of the revolution is lacking — a fact which Engels himself will admit.”

Let us stay for the moment with the house once built. The house, when let, brings its builder ground-rent, repair costs and interest on the building capital he has laid out, including the profit made on it, in the form of rent; and, according to circumstances, the rent paid bit by bit may amount to two, three, five or ten times the original cost price. This, friend Mülberger, is the “simple, sober statement” of the “fact,” which is an economic one; and if we want to know how “it comes about” that it exists, we must carry on the investigation in the economic field. Let us therefore look at the fact a little more closely, so that no child can misunderstand it any longer. The sale of a commodity, as is well known, consists in the owner’s giving up its use value and pocketing its exchange value. The use values of commodities differ, among other things, in that their consumption requires different periods of time. A loaf of bread is eaten in a day, a pair of trousers worn out in a year, a house, let us say, in a hundred years. With commodities that take a long time to wear out, the possibility therefore arises of selling the use value piecemeal, each time for a definite period, that is, of letting it. The piecemeal sale thus realises the exchange value only gradually; for this renunciation of the immediate repayment of the capital advanced and the profit earned on it, the seller is compensated by an increase in price, an interest, the level of which is determined by the laws of political economy and by no means arbitrarily. At the end of the hundred years the house is used up, worn out, uninhabitable. If we then deduct from the total rent paid, 1) the ground-rent together with any increase it has undergone during the period, and 2) the current repair costs laid out, we shall find that the remainder is made up on average of 1) the original building capital of the house, 2) the profit on it, and 3) the interest on the capital and profit as they gradually fell due. Now at the end of this period the tenant has no house, it is true, but neither has the house-owner. He has only the site (if it belongs to him) and the building materials on it, which are no longer a house. And if the house has meanwhile “covered its original cost price five or ten times over,” we shall see that this is due solely to an increase in ground-rent; as is no secret to anyone in places like London, where the landowner and the house-owner are mostly two different persons. Such colossal increases in rent occur in rapidly growing towns, but not in a farming village, where the ground-rent for building sites remains almost unchanged. It is a notorious fact that, apart from increases in ground-rent, house rent brings the house-owner on average not more than 7 per cent a year on the capital invested (including profit), out of which repair costs and so on have still to be paid. In short, the rental contract is an entirely ordinary commodity transaction, which in theory has neither more nor less interest for the worker than any other commodity transaction, except the one concerned with the buying and selling of labour-power; while in practice it confronts him as one of the thousand forms of bourgeois cheating of which I speak on page 4 of the pamphlet edition, but which, as I showed there, are also subject to economic regulation.

Mülberger, on the other hand, sees nothing in the rental contract but pure “arbitrariness” (p. 19 of the pamphlet edition), and when I prove the contrary to him, he complains that I tell him “nothing but things which, unfortunately, he already knew himself.”

But with all the economic investigations into house rent we do not get to the point of turning the abolition of the rented dwelling into “one of the most fruitful and magnificent aspirations ever born from the womb of the revolutionary idea.” To manage that, we must translate the simple fact out of sober economics into the much more ideological sphere of jurisprudence. “The house serves as an eternal legal title” to house rent — “thus it comes about” that the value of the house can be paid two, three, five or ten times over in rent. To find out how “it comes about,” the “legal title” does not help us an inch further; and that is why I said that Mülberger could have found out how “it comes about” only by investigating how the house becomes a legal title. We find this out only when we investigate, as I did, the economic nature of house rent, instead of getting angry at the legal expression under which the ruling class sanctions it. Anyone who proposes economic steps for abolishing house rent is surely obliged to know a little more about house rent than that it “represents the tribute which the tenant pays to the eternal right of capital.” To which Mülberger replies: “A description is one thing, an explanation another.”

We have thus turned the house, although it is by no means eternal, into an eternal legal title to house rent. We find, no matter how “it comes about,” that by virtue of this legal title the house brings in its value several times over in the form of rent. By translating into legal terms we have happily got so far away from economics that we now see only the phenomenon that a house can gradually pay for itself several times over in gross rent. Since we think and speak in legal terms, we apply to this phenomenon the yardstick of right, of justice, and find that it is unjust, that it does not correspond to the “conception of right of the revolution,” whatever kind of thing that may be, and that the legal title is therefore no good. We find further that the same applies to interest-bearing capital and to leased agricultural land, and we now have a pretext for singling out these classes of property from the others and subjecting them to exceptional treatment. This consists in the demand: 1) to deprive the owner of the right to give notice, the right to reclaim his property; 2) to let the tenant, borrower or leaseholder have the use of the object transferred to him, but not belonging to him, free of charge; and 3) to pay off the owner in long-term instalments without interest. And with that we have exhausted Proudhon’s “principles” in this respect. This is Proudhon’s “social liquidation.”

Be it remarked in passing that this whole reform plan is obviously intended to benefit almost exclusively the petty bourgeois and small peasants, by consolidating them in their position as petty bourgeois and small peasants. The figure of “the petty bourgeois Proudhon,” legendary according to Mülberger, here suddenly acquires a very tangible historical existence.

Mülberger continues: “When I say, following Proudhon, that the economic life of society should be permeated by a conception of right, I am thereby describing present-day society as one in which, though not every conception of right is lacking, the conception of right of the revolution is lacking — a fact which even Engels will admit.” Unfortunately I am not in a position to do Mülberger this favour. Mülberger demands that society should be permeated by a conception of right, and calls that a description. If a court sends me a demand through the bailiff to pay a debt, then, according to Mülberger, it is doing no more than describing me as a man who does not pay his debts! A description is one thing, a demand another. And precisely here lies the essential difference between German scientific socialism and Proudhon. We describe — and every real description, in spite of Mülberger, is at the same time the explanation of the thing — economic relations as they are and as they develop, and we furnish the proof, strictly economically, that their development is at the same time the development of the elements of a social revolution: the development, on the one hand, of a class whose conditions of life necessarily drive it to social revolution, the proletariat; and on the other hand, of productive forces which, having outgrown the framework of capitalist society, must necessarily burst it, and which at the same time offer the means of abolishing class distinctions once and for all in the interest of social progress itself. Proudhon, on the contrary, demands of present-day society that it should transform itself not according to the laws of its own economic development but according to the precepts of justice (the “conception of right” is not his but Mülberger’s). Where we prove, Proudhon preaches and laments, and Mülberger with him.

What kind of thing “the conception of right of the revolution” is, I absolutely cannot guess. Proudhon, it is true, makes “the Revolution” into a kind of goddess, the bearer and executor of his “justice”; in doing so he falls into the strange error of mixing up the bourgeois revolution of 1789–94 with the future proletarian revolution. He does this in almost all his works, especially since 1848; as an example I cite only Idée générale de la Révolution, edition of 1868, pp. 39 and 40. But since Mülberger disclaims all and every responsibility for Proudhon, I am forbidden to explain “the conception of right of the revolution” from Proudhon, and I remain in Egyptian darkness.

Further, Mülberger says:

“But neither Proudhon nor I appeal to an ‘eternal justice’ in order thereby to explain the existing unjust conditions, or even, as Engels imputes to me, to expect the improvement of these conditions from an appeal to this justice.”

Mülberger must be relying on the fact that “Proudhon is, generally speaking, as good as unknown in Germany.” In all his writings Proudhon measures all social, legal, political and religious propositions by the yardstick of “justice,” rejecting or accepting them according to whether they agree or do not agree with what he calls “justice.” In the Contradictions économiques this justice is still called “eternal justice,” justice éternelle. Later the eternity is passed over in silence, but remains in substance. For example, in De la Justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Église, edition of 1858, the following passage is the text of the whole three-volume sermon (vol. I, p. 42):

“What is the fundamental principle, the organic, regulating, sovereign principle of societies — the principle which, subordinating all others to itself, governs, protects, represses, chastises, and in case of need even suppresses all rebellious elements? Is it religion, the ideal, interest?… This principle, in my opinion, is justice. — What is justice? The essence of humanity itself. What has it been since the beginning of the world? Nothing. — What should it be? Everything.”

A justice that is the essence of humanity itself — what is that but eternal justice? A justice that is the organic, regulating, sovereign fundamental principle of societies, which has nevertheless been nothing until now but is to be everything — what is it but the yardstick by which all human affairs are to be measured, and to which, in every case of conflict, appeal is to be made as the deciding judge? And have I asserted anything else than that Proudhon covers up his economic ignorance and helplessness by judging all economic relations not according to economic laws but according to whether they agree or not with his notion of this eternal justice? And in what way does Mülberger differ from Proudhon when Mülberger demands that “all the exchanges in the life of modern society… be permeated by a conception of right, that is, be everywhere carried out according to the strict demands of justice”? Can I not read, or can Mülberger not write?

Further, Mülberger says:

“Proudhon knows as well as Marx and Engels that the real driving force in human society is economic, not juridical relations; he too knows that the conceptions of right of a people at any given time are only the expression, the imprint, the product of economic — in particular, production — relations.… For Proudhon, in a word, law is an economic product that has come into being historically.”

If Proudhon knows all this “as well as Marx and Engels” (I will pass over Mülberger’s unclear way of expressing himself and take the will for the deed), how can we still be quarrelling? But the fact is that Proudhon’s knowledge is rather different. The economic relations of a given society present themselves first of all as interests. Now in the passage of his main work just quoted, Proudhon says in so many words that the “regulating, organic, sovereign fundamental principle of societies, which subordinates all others to itself,” is not interest but justice. And he repeats the same thing in all his writings at all the decisive points. This does not prevent Mülberger from continuing: “… that the idea of economic right, as developed most profoundly by Proudhon in La Guerre et la Paix, coincides completely with those fundamental ideas of Lassalle so beautifully set out in his preface to the System of Acquired Rights.”

La Guerre et la Paix is perhaps the most schoolboyish of Proudhon’s many schoolboyish works, but that it would be cited as evidence of his alleged understanding of the German materialist conception of history — which explains all historical events and ideas, all politics, philosophy and religion, from the material, economic conditions of life of the historical period in question — that I could not have expected. The book is so little materialist that it cannot even complete its construction of war without calling on the Creator for help: “Meanwhile the Creator, who chose this way of life for us, had his purposes” (vol. II, p. 100 of the 1869 edition). On what knowledge of history it rests can be seen from the fact that it believes in the historical existence of the golden age: “In the beginning, when humanity was still thinly scattered over the globe, nature provided for its needs without effort. It was the golden age, the age of abundance and peace” (ibid., p. 102). Its economic standpoint is that of the crassest Malthusianism: “When production is doubled, the population will soon be doubled too” (p. 105). And in what does the materialism of the book consist? In asserting that the cause of war has always been, and still is, “pauperism” (for example, p. 143). Uncle Bräsig was just as accomplished a materialist when, in his speech of 1848, he calmly uttered the great words: “The cause of the great poverty is the great pauvreté.”

Lassalle’s System of Acquired Rights is caught up not only in the whole illusion of the jurist but also in that of the Old Hegelian. Lassalle declares expressly on page VII that “in economics too the concept of acquired right is the driving source of all further development”; he wants to demonstrate “law as a rational organism developing out of itself” (and therefore not out of economic preconditions) (p. IX); for him it is a matter of deriving law not from economic relations but from “the concept of will itself, of which the philosophy of law is only the development and exposition” (p. X). What, then, is this book doing here? The only difference between Proudhon and Lassalle is that Lassalle was a real jurist and Hegelian, while Proudhon, in jurisprudence and philosophy as in everything else, was a mere dilettante.

I know very well that Proudhon, who notoriously contradicts himself continually, now and then makes a remark that looks as if he were explaining ideas from facts. But such remarks are of no importance whatever compared with the man’s general trend of thought, and where they occur they are, besides, extremely confused and inconsistent in themselves.

At a certain, very primitive stage of the development of society, the need arises to bring the daily recurring acts of production, distribution and exchange of products under a common rule, to see to it that the individual submits to the common conditions of production and exchange. This rule, at first custom, soon becomes law. With law there necessarily arise organs entrusted with maintaining it — public authority, the state. With further social development, law develops into a more or less comprehensive legislation. The more complicated this legislation becomes, the further its mode of expression departs from that in which the ordinary economic conditions of life of society are expressed. It appears as an independent element which derives the justification of its existence and the grounds of its further development not from economic relations but from its own inner foundations — from the “concept of will,” if you like. People forget that their law derives from their economic conditions of life, just as they have forgotten their own descent from the animal kingdom. As legislation develops into a complicated and comprehensive whole, the necessity of a new social division of labour emerges: an order of professional jurists is formed, and with them legal science arises. In its further development legal science compares the legal systems of different peoples and different times with one another, not as imprints of the economic relations of the time, but as systems that find their justification in themselves. Comparison presupposes something in common: this is found when the jurists put together what is more or less common to all these legal systems as natural law. The yardstick, however, by which it is measured what is natural law and what is not, is precisely the most abstract expression of law itself: justice. From then on, therefore, the development of law for the jurists, and for those who take their word for it, is nothing but the striving to bring human conditions, in so far as they are expressed in legal terms, ever closer to the ideal of justice, of eternal justice. And this justice is never anything but the ideologised, glorified expression of existing economic relations, now from their conservative side, now from their revolutionary side. The justice of the Greeks and Romans held slavery to be just; the justice of the bourgeois of 1789 demanded the abolition of feudalism because it was unjust. For the Prussian Junkers even the paltry District Ordinance is a violation of eternal justice. The idea of eternal justice thus varies not only with time and place but even with persons, and belongs among those things of which, as Mülberger correctly remarks, “everyone understands something different.” While in everyday life, given the simplicity of the relations that come up for judgement there, expressions like right, wrong, justice and sense of justice are accepted without misunderstanding even with reference to social matters, in scientific investigations of economic relations they create, as we have seen, the same hopeless confusion as would arise, for instance, in modern chemistry if the terminology of the phlogiston theory were retained. The confusion becomes still worse if one believes, like Proudhon, in this social phlogiston, “justice,” or if one asserts, like Mülberger, that phlogiston is every bit as correct as oxygen.