III.4. Part III: Supplement on Proudhon and the Housing Question — IV

So much writing was necessary to get through Mülberger’s various evasions and twists to the thing itself, which Mülberger carefully avoids touching in his reply.

What positive things had Mülberger said in his treatise?

For each of these points I have cited the passage in Proudhon where the original of Mülberger’s copy is to be found, and I now ask whether I was entitled or not to call the author of an article containing thoroughly Proudhonist and nothing but Proudhonist views a Proudhonist? And yet Mülberger complains of nothing more bitterly than that I call him so, because I “came upon a few turns of phrase peculiar to Proudhon”! On the contrary. The “turns of phrase” all belong to Mülberger; the content belongs to Proudhon. And when I then supplement the Proudhonist treatise from Proudhon, Mülberger complains that I foist Proudhon’s “monstrous views” on him!

What, now, did I reply to this Proudhonist plan?

Points 2 and 4 Mülberger has now conceded. To the other points he replies not a word. And yet these are precisely the points at issue in the debate. But Mülberger’s answer is no refutation; it carefully avoids all the economic points, which are after all the decisive ones; it is a personal letter of complaint, nothing more. Thus he complains when I anticipate his announced solution of other questions — state debts, private debts, credit, for example — and say that the solution is everywhere that, as with the housing question, interest is abolished, interest payments are turned into instalments on the capital sum, and credit is made free of charge. Nevertheless I would still wager today that, if these articles of Mülberger’s ever see the light of day, their essential content will agree with Proudhon’s Idée générale — credit, p. 182; state debts, p. 186; private debts, p. 196 — just as closely as his articles on the housing question agree with the passages of the same book cited above.

On this occasion Mülberger instructs me that these questions — taxes, state debts, private debts, credit, to which is now added the autonomy of the commune — are of the greatest importance for the peasant and for propaganda in the countryside. Largely agreed; but 1) so far there had been no mention of the peasants at all, and 2) Proudhon’s “solutions” of all these questions are just as economically absurd and just as essentially bourgeois as his solution of the housing question. I need not defend myself against Mülberger’s insinuation that I fail to recognise the necessity of drawing the peasants into the movement. But I certainly consider it folly to recommend Proudhon’s quackery to the peasants for this purpose. In Germany there is still a great deal of large landed property. According to Proudhon’s theory all of it would have to be divided into small peasant holdings — which, given the present state of agricultural science and the experience gained in France and western Germany with parcelled landownership, would be downright reactionary. The large landed property still existing will rather offer us a welcome lever for having agriculture on a large scale — which alone can use all modern aids, machines and so on — carried on by associated workers, and thereby making the advantages of large-scale farming by means of association evident to the small peasants. The Danish socialists, in this respect ahead of all others, recognised this long ago.

Nor need I defend myself against the suggestion that the present infamous housing conditions of the workers appear to me as “an insignificant trifle.” I was, so far as I know, the first to describe these conditions in the German language in their classically developed form, as they exist in England: not, as Mülberger thinks, because they “offend my sense of justice” — anyone who wanted to turn all the facts that offend his sense of justice into books would have a great deal to do — but, as can be read in the preface to my book, in order to give German socialism, which was then arising and floundering about in empty phrases, a factual basis by describing the social conditions created by modern large-scale industry. But to want to solve the so-called housing question is certainly not my intention, any more than I concern myself with the details of the solution of the still more important food question. I am satisfied if I can show that the production of our modern society is sufficient to provide all members of society with enough to eat, and that there are enough houses to offer the working masses spacious and healthy accommodation for the time being. To speculate on how a future society will regulate the distribution of food and dwellings leads straight into utopia. At most we can establish, from an understanding of the basic conditions of all modes of production hitherto, that with the fall of capitalist production certain forms of appropriation of existing society will become impossible. Even the transitional measures will everywhere have to be adapted to the conditions existing at the moment; in countries of small landownership they will be essentially different from those in countries of large landownership, and so on. Where one ends up if one seeks separate solutions for these so-called practical questions, such as the housing question, is shown better than by anyone by Mülberger himself, who first explains over twenty-eight pages how “the whole content of the solution of the housing question is given in the word: redemption,” only, as soon as he is pressed, to stammer in embarrassment that it is in fact very doubtful whether, in the actual taking possession of the houses, “the working people will incline more to redemption” or to some other form of expropriation.

Mülberger demands that we become practical, that “in the face of real practical conditions” we should not “merely bring dead abstract formulas into the field,” that we should “leave abstract socialism and approach the definite concrete conditions of society.” Had Mülberger done this, he might perhaps have rendered great services to the movement. The first step in approaching the definite concrete conditions of society surely consists in getting to know them, in examining them in their existing economic connections. And what do we find in Mülberger? Two whole sentences, namely:

No one has “approached the definite concrete conditions of society” more closely than Marx in Capital. He spent twenty-five years examining them from every side, and the results of his criticism contain everywhere also the germs of the so-called solutions, so far as such are possible at all today. But that is not enough for friend Mülberger. That is all abstract socialism, dead abstract formulas. Instead of studying the “definite concrete conditions of society,” friend Mülberger contents himself with reading a few volumes of Proudhon, which offer him next to nothing about the definite concrete conditions of society but, on the other hand, very definite concrete miracle cures for all social evils; and he brings this ready-made plan for saving society, this Proudhonist system, before the German workers on the pretext that he wants “to say adieu to systems,” while I “choose the opposite path”! To understand this I must assume that I am blind and Mülberger deaf, so that any understanding between us is quite impossible.

Enough. If this polemic serves no other purpose, it has at any rate the merit of having furnished proof of what the practice of these self-styled “practical” socialists amounts to. These practical proposals for removing all social evils, these social universal panaceas, have always and everywhere been the manufacture of founders of sects who appeared at a time when the proletarian movement was still in its infancy. Proudhon too belongs among them. The development of the proletariat soon casts aside these swaddling-clothes and produces in the working class itself the understanding that nothing is less practical than these “practical solutions,” thought out in advance and applicable to every case, and that practical socialism consists rather in a correct knowledge of the capitalist mode of production in its various aspects. A working class that knows its way about here will never be at a loss, in any given case, against which social institutions and in what way it has to direct its main attacks.