Preface to the Second Edition (1887)

The following work is a reprint of three articles which I wrote in 1872 for the Leipzig Volksstaat. At that time the rain of French milliards was just pouring over Germany: state debts were paid off, fortresses and barracks built, stocks of weapons and military equipment renewed; available capital, no less than the quantity of money in circulation, was suddenly enormously increased — and all this just at a time when Germany was entering the world stage not only as a “united Empire” but also as a great industrial country. The milliards gave the young large-scale industry a powerful impetus; it was they above all that brought about the short period of prosperity after the war, so rich in illusions, and immediately afterwards, in 1873–74, the great crash by which Germany proved itself an industrial country capable of competing on the world market.

The period in which an old civilised country makes such a transition from manufacture and small-scale production to large-scale industry — a transition, moreover, accelerated by such favourable circumstances — is also, above all, the period of the “housing shortage.” On the one hand, masses of rural workers are suddenly drawn into the big towns, which are developing into industrial centres; on the other hand, the layout of these older towns no longer corresponds to the conditions of the new large-scale industry and of the traffic that goes with it; streets are widened and new ones driven through, railways are laid right across them. At the very moment when workers are streaming in in crowds, workers’ dwellings are being pulled down wholesale. Hence the sudden housing shortage of the workers and of the small traders and craftsmen who depend on working-class custom. In towns that grew up from the start as industrial centres this housing shortage is as good as unknown: so in Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, Barmen-Elberfeld. In London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna, on the other hand, it took on an acute form in its day and mostly continues in chronic form.

It was, then, precisely this acute housing shortage, this symptom of the industrial revolution taking place in Germany, that filled the press at that time with treatises on the “housing question” and gave occasion for all sorts of social quackery. A series of such articles also found its way into the Volksstaat. The anonymous author, who later revealed himself as Dr. med. A. Mülberger of Württemberg, thought the opportunity favourable for demonstrating to the German workers, by means of this question, the miraculous effects of Proudhon’s social panacea. When I expressed to the editors my astonishment that these strange articles had been accepted, I was invited to reply, and I did so. (See Part I: How Proudhon Solves the Housing Question.) Soon afterwards I followed this series of articles with a second, in which the philanthropic-bourgeois view of the question was examined on the basis of a work by Dr. Emil Sax. (Part II: How the Bourgeoisie Solves the Housing Question.) After a fairly long pause Dr. Mülberger honoured me with a reply to my articles, which obliged me to answer (Part III: Supplement on Proudhon and the Housing Question), and with that both the polemic and my own special concern with the question came to an end. Such is the history of these three series of articles, which also appeared as separate pamphlets. If a new printing is now needed, I doubtless owe it once again to the benevolent solicitude of the government of the German Empire, which, by banning the work, has as always greatly promoted its sale, and to which I hereby most humbly express my thanks.

For the new printing I have revised the text, inserted a few additions and notes, and corrected a small economic error in the first part, since my opponent Dr. Mülberger unfortunately failed to discover it.

In revising it I am made vividly aware of the gigantic progress the international workers’ movement has made in the last fourteen years. At that time it was still a fact that “for twenty years the workers speaking Romance languages had had no other mental nourishment than the works of Proudhon,” and at most the further one-sided version of Proudhonism by the father of “anarchism,” Bakunin, who saw in Proudhon “the master of us all,” notre maître à nous tous. Although the Proudhonists in France were only a small sect among the workers, they were the only ones who had a definitely formulated programme and who were able to take over the leadership in the economic field under the Commune. In Belgium Proudhonism reigned unchallenged among the Walloon workers, and in Spain and Italy, with very few exceptions, everything in the workers’ movement that was not anarchist was decidedly Proudhonist. And today? In France Proudhon has been completely finished off among the workers and retains supporters only among the radical bourgeois and petty bourgeois, who as Proudhonists also call themselves “socialists” but are fought most vigorously by the socialist workers. In Belgium the Flemish have ousted the Walloons from the leadership of the movement, deposed Proudhonism and given the movement a powerful lift. In Spain as in Italy the anarchist high tide of the seventies has ebbed and carried away the remnants of Proudhonism with it. While in Italy the new party is still in the process of clarification and formation, in Spain the small nucleus which, as the Nueva Federación Madrileña, remained loyal to the General Council of the International has developed into a vigorous party which — as can be seen from the republican press itself — is destroying the influence of the bourgeois republicans on the workers far more effectively than its noisy anarchist predecessors were ever able to do. Among the Romance-speaking workers the forgotten works of Proudhon have been replaced by Capital, the Communist Manifesto and a series of other writings of the Marxian school; and Marx’s chief demand — the seizure of all the means of production in the name of society by the proletariat, risen to sole political power — is today the demand of the whole revolutionary working class in the Romance countries too.

If, then, Proudhonism has been finally driven out among the workers of the Romance countries as well, if — in accordance with its real purpose — it now serves only French, Spanish, Italian and Belgian bourgeois radicals as an expression of their bourgeois and petty-bourgeois appetites, why come back to it today? Why fight a dead opponent afresh by reprinting these articles?

First, because these articles do not confine themselves to mere polemic against Proudhon and his German representative. As a result of the division of labour between Marx and me, it fell to me to present our views in the periodical press, and therefore particularly in the struggle with opposing views, so that Marx would have time for the elaboration of his great main work. I was thus put in the position of presenting our way of looking at things mostly in polemical form, in opposition to other views. So too here. Parts I and III contain not only a critique of Proudhon’s view of the question but also an exposition of our own.

Second, however, Proudhon played far too important a part in the history of the European workers’ movement for him simply to fall into oblivion. Theoretically refuted, practically pushed aside, he retains his historical interest. Anyone who concerns himself at all closely with modern socialism must also get to know the “superseded standpoints” of the movement. Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy appeared several years before Proudhon put forward his practical proposals for the reform of society; there Marx could only discover and criticise Proudhon’s exchange bank in embryo. In this respect his work is supplemented by the present one — imperfectly enough, unfortunately. Marx would have done it all much better and more convincingly.

Finally, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois socialism is strongly represented in Germany down to this very hour. On the one hand by professorial socialists and philanthropists of every kind, among whom the wish to turn the workers into owners of their dwellings still plays a large part, and against whom, therefore, my work is still in place. On the other hand, however, a certain petty-bourgeois socialism finds representation in the Social-Democratic Party itself, right up into its parliamentary group in the Reichstag. It takes the form of recognising as justified the basic views of modern socialism and the demand for the transformation of all the means of production into social property, while declaring that their realisation is possible only in a distant future that cannot in practice be foreseen. For the present, therefore, one is thrown back on mere social patchwork, and can, according to circumstances, even sympathise with the most reactionary efforts for the so-called “raising of the working class.” The existence of such a tendency is quite unavoidable in Germany, the land of philistinism par excellence, and at a time when industrial development is violently and on a mass scale uprooting this deep-rooted philistinism. It is also quite harmless to the movement, given the wonderfully sound sense of our workers, which has proved itself so brilliantly in the last eight years of the struggle against the Anti-Socialist Law, the police and the judges. But it is necessary to be clear that such a tendency exists. And if later on, as is necessary and even desirable, this tendency takes on a firmer form and more definite outlines, it will have to go back to its predecessors to formulate its programme, and in doing so it will hardly be able to pass over Proudhon.

The core of both the big-bourgeois and the petty-bourgeois solution of the “housing question” is the worker’s ownership of his dwelling. This, however, is a point on which the industrial development of Germany in the last twenty years has cast a quite peculiar light. In no other country are there so many wage-workers who own not only their dwellings but also a garden or a field; besides them there are numerous others who hold house and garden or field as tenants, with possession that is in fact fairly secure. Rural domestic industry, carried on together with gardening or small-scale farming, forms the broad basis of Germany’s young large-scale industry; in the west the workers are mostly owners, in the east mostly tenants, of their homesteads. This combination of domestic industry with garden and field cultivation, and therefore with secure housing, we find not only wherever hand-weaving is still fighting against the power-loom — on the Lower Rhine and in Westphalia, in the Saxon Erzgebirge and in Silesia; we find it wherever domestic industry of any kind has thrust itself in as a rural trade, for instance in the Thuringian Forest and in the Rhön. In the course of the negotiations on the tobacco monopoly it came out how far cigar-making, too, is already carried on as rural domestic work; and wherever distress occurs among the small peasants, as a few years ago in the Eifel, the bourgeois press at once raises the cry for the introduction of a suitable domestic industry as the only remedy. In fact both the growing distress of the German smallholders and the general situation of German industry are driving towards an ever wider extension of rural domestic industry. This is a phenomenon peculiar to Germany. We find something similar in France only quite exceptionally, for example in the silk-growing districts; in England, where there are no small peasants, rural domestic industry rests on the labour of the wives and children of agricultural day-labourers; only in Ireland do we see the domestic industry of ready-made clothing carried on, as in Germany, by real peasant families. Russia and other countries not represented on the industrial world market we naturally leave aside here.

Thus over wide areas of Germany there exists today an industrial state of affairs which at first sight resembles the one that generally prevailed before the introduction of machinery. But only at first sight. The rural domestic industry of former times, combined with garden and field cultivation, was, at least in the industrially advancing countries, the basis of a materially tolerable and in places comfortable situation for the working class, but also of its intellectual and political nullity. The hand-made product and its costs determined the market price, and with the productivity of labour vanishingly small compared with today, markets as a rule grew faster than supply. This holds, for the middle of the last century, for England and partly for France, and especially for the textile industry. In Germany, which was then only just working its way up again, under the most unfavourable circumstances, out of the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, things were of course quite different; the only domestic industry here that worked for the world market, linen-weaving, was so weighed down by taxes and feudal dues that it did not raise the weaving peasant above the very low level of the rest of the peasantry. But all the same the rural industrial worker of that time had a certain security of existence.

With the introduction of machinery all this changed. The price was now determined by the machine-made product, and the wage of the domestic worker fell with this price. But the worker had to accept it or look for other work, and that he could not do without becoming a proletarian, that is, without giving up his little house, garden and field, whether owned or rented. And that he was willing to do only in the rarest cases. So the garden and field cultivation of the old rural hand-weavers became the reason why the struggle of the hand-loom against the power-loom everywhere dragged on so long, and in Germany has not yet been fought out. In this struggle it was shown for the first time, especially in England, that the very circumstance which had formerly been the basis of the workers’ relative prosperity — the worker’s possession of his means of production — had now become a hindrance and a misfortune to them. In industry the power-loom beat his hand-loom; in agriculture large-scale farming drove his small holding from the field. But while on both fields of production the combined labour of many and the application of machinery and science became the social rule, his little house, garden and field and his loom chained him to the outdated method of individual production and handwork. The possession of house and garden was now worth far less than the freedom of movement of the outlaw. No factory worker would have changed places with the slowly but surely starving rural hand-weaver.

Germany appeared late on the world market. Our large-scale industry dates from the forties, received its first impetus from the revolution of 1848, and could develop fully only when the revolutions of 1866 and 1870 had cleared at least the worst political obstacles out of its way. But it found the world market largely occupied. England supplied the mass-produced articles, France the tasteful luxury articles. Germany could beat the one neither in price nor the other in quality. So nothing was left but, following the established rut of German production, to edge into the world market with articles that were too petty for the English and too shabby for the French. The favourite German practice of swindling — first sending good samples and afterwards bad goods — was, it is true, punished hard enough on the world market and fell into considerable decline; on the other hand, the competition of overproduction pushed even the solid English gradually on to the downward path of deteriorating quality and so helped the Germans, who in this field are unbeatable. And so we have at last come to possess a large-scale industry and to play a part on the world market. But our large-scale industry works almost exclusively for the home market (except the iron industry, which produces far beyond domestic needs), and our massive exports are made up of a vast number of small articles, for which large-scale industry supplies at most the necessary semi-finished goods, but which are themselves supplied largely by rural domestic industry.

And here the “blessing” of the modern worker’s owning his own house and land shows itself in all its glory. Nowhere, hardly excepting even Irish domestic industry, are such infamously low wages paid as in German domestic industry. What the family earns from its own little garden and field, competition allows the capitalist to deduct from the price of labour-power; the workers simply have to take any piece-rate, because otherwise they get nothing at all and cannot live from the produce of their farming alone; and because, on the other hand, this very farming and landownership ties them to the spot and prevents them from looking around for other employment. Here lies the reason that keeps Germany competitive on the world market in a whole series of small articles. The entire profit on capital is squeezed out of a deduction from the normal wage, and the whole of the surplus value can be made a present of to the buyer. That is the secret of the astonishing cheapness of most German export articles.

It is this circumstance, more than any other, that keeps wages and the workers’ standard of living in Germany below the level of the western European countries in other industrial fields too. The leaden weight of such prices of labour, traditionally kept far below the value of labour-power, also presses the wages of urban workers, and even of those in the big cities, below the value of labour-power; and all the more so as in the towns, too, badly paid domestic industry has taken the place of the old handicrafts and here too depresses the general level of wages.

Here we see it clearly: what at an earlier historical stage was the basis of the workers’ relative well-being — the combination of agriculture and industry, the ownership of house, garden and field, security of housing — becomes today, under the rule of large-scale industry, not only the worst fetter on the worker but the greatest misfortune for the whole working class, the basis of an unprecedented depression of wages below their normal level, and that not only in particular branches of business and particular districts but over the whole national territory. No wonder that the big and petty bourgeoisie, who live and grow rich on these abnormal deductions from wages, are enthusiastic about rural industry and house-owning workers, and see in the introduction of new domestic industries the only cure for all rural distress!

That is one side of the matter; but it also has its reverse side. Domestic industry has become the broad basis of the German export trade and therefore of the whole of large-scale industry. It is thus spread over wide stretches of Germany and is extending itself more every day. The ruin of the small peasant — inevitable from the time when his industrial domestic work for his own use was destroyed by the cheap ready-made and machine product, and his livestock, and therefore his production of manure, by the break-up of the Mark constitution, of the common Mark and of compulsory rotation — this ruin drives the small peasants, fallen into the hands of the usurer, forcibly into modern domestic industry. As in Ireland the landlord’s ground-rent, so in Germany the interest of the mortgage usurer can be paid not out of the yield of the soil but only out of the wages of the industrial peasant. With the extension of domestic industry, however, one peasant district after another is being dragged into the industrial movement of the present day. It is this revolutionising of the rural districts by domestic industry that spreads the industrial revolution in Germany over a far wider area than in England and France; it is the comparatively low stage of our industry that makes its extension in breadth all the more necessary. This explains why in Germany, in contrast to England and France, the revolutionary workers’ movement has spread so enormously over the greater part of the country instead of being confined exclusively to urban centres. And this in turn explains the calm, sure, irresistible progress of the movement. In Germany it is self-evident that a victorious rising in the capital and the other big cities will become possible only when the majority of the small towns and a large part of the rural districts have also become ripe for the change. Given anything like normal development, we can never be in a position to win workers’ victories like those of the Parisians in 1848 and 1871, but for that very reason we cannot suffer defeats of the revolutionary capital by the reactionary provinces such as Paris suffered in both cases. In France the movement always started from the capital; in Germany from the districts of large-scale industry, of manufacture and of domestic industry; the capital was conquered only later. Perhaps, therefore, the role of initiative will remain reserved for the French in the future too; but the decision can be fought out only in Germany.

Now this rural domestic industry and manufacture, which by its extent has become the decisive branch of production in Germany and is thereby revolutionising the German peasantry more and more, is itself only the preliminary stage of a further upheaval. As Marx has already shown (Capital, vol. I, 3rd ed., pp. 484–95), for it too, at a certain stage of development, the hour of its downfall through machinery and the factory system strikes. And this hour seems to be close at hand. But the destruction of rural domestic industry and manufacture by machinery and the factory system means, in Germany, the destruction of the livelihood of millions of rural producers, the expropriation of almost half the German small peasantry, the transformation not only of domestic industry into factory production but also of peasant farming into large capitalist agriculture and of small landed property into great estates — an industrial and agricultural revolution in favour of capital and big landownership at the expense of the peasants. Should it be Germany’s fate to go through this transformation too under the old social conditions, it will without question form the turning-point. If by then the working class of no other country has taken the initiative, Germany will without question strike first, and the peasants’ sons of the “glorious army” will bravely lend a hand.

And now the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois utopia that wants to give every worker a little house of his own, and so to chain him to his capitalist in semi-feudal fashion, takes on quite a different shape. Its realisation appears as the transformation of all the small rural house-owners into industrial domestic workers; the destruction of the old isolation, and with it the political nullity, of the small peasants, who are dragged into the “social whirlpool”; the spreading of the industrial revolution over the countryside, and with it the transformation of the most stable and most conservative class of the population into a nursery of revolution; and, as the conclusion of the whole, the expropriation of the domestic-industrial peasants by machinery, which drives them by force into revolt.

We can gladly allow the bourgeois-socialist philanthropists the private enjoyment of their ideal, so long as in their public function as capitalists they go on realising it in this inverted fashion, to the benefit and profit of the social revolution.

London, 10 January 1887. Friedrich Engels.