M lberger complains of the form and the content of my criticism. As far as the form is concerned, it will be sufficient to reply that at the time I did not even know who had written the articles in question. There can therefore be no question of any personal prejudice against their author; against the solution of the housing question put forward in the articles I was certainly in so far prejudiced that I was long ago acquainted with it from Proudhon and my opinion on it was firmly fixed. I am not going to quarrel with friend M lberger about the tone of my criticism. When one has been so long in the movement as I have, one develops a fairly thick skin against attacks, and therefore one easily presumes also the existence of the same in others. In order to compensate M lberger I shall try this time to bring my tone into the right relation to the sensitiveness of his epidermis. M lberger complains with particular bitterness that I called him a Proudhonist, and he protests that he is not one. Naturally, I must believe him, but I shall adduce the proof that the articles in question and I had to do with them alone contain nothing but undiluted Proudhonism. But according to M lberger I have also criticized Proudhon frivolously and have done him a serious injustice. The doctrine of the petty-bourgeois Proudhon has become an accepted dogma in Germany, which is even proclaimed by many who have never read a line of him. When I express regret that for twenty years the workers of the Latin countries have had no other mental nourishment than the works of Proudhon, M lberger answers that as far as the workers of the Latin countries are concerned, the principles formulated by Proudhon are almost everywhere the driving spirit of the movement. This I am compelled to deny. First of all, the driving spirit of the working class 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 hand and of the proletariat on the other. Secondly, it is not correct that in the Latin countries Proudhon s so-called principles play the decisive role ascribed to them by M lberger; that the principles of anarchism, of the organization of the forces economiques, of the liquidation sociale, etc., have become the true bearers of the revolutionary movement. Not to speak of Spain and Italy, where the Proudhonist universal panacea has only gained some influence in the still more botched form presented by Bakunin, it is a notorious fact for anyone who knows the international working class movement that in France the Proudhonists are nothing more than an insignificant sect, while the masses of the French workers refuse to have anything to do with the social reform plan drawn up by Proudhon under the title Liquidation sociale and Organization des forces economiques. This was shown, among other things, in the Commune. Although the Proudhonists were strongly represented in the Commune, not the slightest attempt was made to liquidate the old society or to organize the economic forces according to Proudhon s proposals. On the contrary, it is to the great honor of the Commune that in all its economic measures the driving spirit was not any set of principles, but simple, practical needs. And therefore the measures taken by the Commune abolition of night work in the bakeries, prohibition of monetary fines in the factories, confiscation of idle factories and workshops and their handing over to workers associations were not at all in accordance with the spirit of Proudhonism, but certainly in accordance with the spirit of German scientific socialism. The only social measure which the Proudhonists put through was the decision not to seize the Bank of France, and this was partly responsible for the downfall of the Commune. In the same way, when the so-called Blanquists made an attempt to transform themselves from mere political revolutionaries into a socialist workers fraction with a definite programme as was done by the Blanquist fugitives in London in their manifesto, Internationale et Revolution they did not proclaim the principles of the Proudhonist plan of social salvation, but rather adopted, and almost literally at that, the views of German scientific socialism on the necessity of the political action of the proletariat and of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the transitional stage to the abolition of classes and with them of the state, views such as had already been expressed in The Communist Manifesto and since then on innumerable occasions. And if M lberger even concludes, from the disapproval of Proudhon by the Germans, a lack of understanding of the movement in the Latin countries down to the Paris Commune, then let him as a proof of this lack tell us what work from the Latin side has even approximately so correctly understood and described the Commune 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 working class movement is directly under the influence of Proudhonist principles is Belgium, and precisely as a result of this the Belgian movement comes, as Hegel would say, from nothing, through nothing, to nothing. When I consider it a misfortune that for twenty years the workers of the Latin countries were fed directly or indirectly on Proudhon, I do not mean that thoroughly mythical dominance of Proudhon s reform recipe termed by M lberger the principles but the fact that their economic criticism of existing society was infected by the absolutely false Proudhonist phrases and that their political actions were bungled by Proudhonist influence. Whether thus the Proudhonized workers of the Latin countries stand more in the revolution than the German workers, who, in any case, understand the meaning of German scientific socialism infinitely better than the workers of the Latin countries understand their Proudhon, we shall be able to answer when we have discovered what to stand in the revolution really means. We have heard talk of people who stand in the Grace of God, in the true faith, in Christianity, etc. But standing in the revolution, in the most violent of all movements? Is then the revolution a dogmatic religion in which one must have faith? M lberger further accuses me of having asserted, in defiance of the express wording of his articles, that he had declared the housing question to be an exclusively working class question. This time M lberger is really right. I overlooked the passage in question. It was irresponsible of me to overlook it, for it is one of the most characteristic of the whole tendency of his articles. M lberger writes actually in plain words: It is, therefore also perfectly logical when, on page 25 of the reprint, M lberger extols small enterprise as the actual buttress of society, because in accordance with its own nature, it unites the three factors: labor acquisition property, and because in the unification of these three factors it places no bounds to the capacity for development of the individual, and when he reproaches modern industry in particular with destroying this nursery for the production of normal human beings and making out of a vigorous class continually reproducing itself, a helpless mass of human beings who do not know whither to direct their anxious glances. The petty bourgeois is thus M lberger s model human being and small-scale enterprise is M lberger s model mode of production. Did I defame him therefore when I put him among the petty-bourgeois socialists? As M lberger rejects all responsibility for Proudhon, it would be superfluous to discuss here any further how Proudhon s reform plans aim at transforming all members of society into petty bourgeois and small peasants. It will be just as unnecessary to deal here with the alleged identity of the interests of the petty bourgeoisie and the workers. What is necessary is to be found already in The Communist Manifesto. (Leipzig Edition, 1872, pp. 12, 21.) The result of our examination is therefore that side by side with the myth of the petty bourgeois Proudhon appears the reality of the petty bourgeois M lberger. M lberger, on the other hand, regards the rent agreement as nothing but pure arbitrariness (page 19 of the reprint) and when I prove the contrary to him he complains that I am telling him all sorts of things which unfortunately he already knew. But with all the economic investigations into house rent we are not able to turn the abolition of the rented dwelling into one of the most fruitful and magnificent efforts which has ever sprung from the womb of the revolutionary idea. In order to accomplish this we must translate the simple fact from sober economics into the far more ideological sphere of legal talk. The house serves as a perpetual legal title to house rent, and thus it comes about that the value of a house can be paid back in rent two, three, five or ten times. In order to discover how it really comes about, the legal title does not help us in the least and therefore I said that M lberger would have been able to find out how it thus comes about by first of all inquiring how the house becomes a legal title. We discover this only after we have examined, as I did, the economic nature of house rent, instead of getting angry at the legal expression under which the ruling class sanctions it. Whoever proposes the taking of economic steps to abolish rent ought surely, first of all, to know more about house rent than that it is the tribute which the tenant must pay to the perpetual title of capital. But to this M lberger answers, a description is one thing, an explanation another. We have, therefore, converted the house, although it is by no means everlasting, into a perpetual legal title to house rent. We find no matter how it thus comes about, that by virtue of this legal title, the house brings in its original value several times over in the form of rent. By the translation into legal phraseology we are happily so far removed from economics that we can see no more than the phenomenon that a house can gradually get paid for in gross rent several times over. As we are thinking and talking in legal terms, we apply to this phenomenon the measure of equality and justice, and we discover that it is unjust, that it is not in accordance with the conception of justice of the revolution, whatever kind of a thing that may be, and that therefore the legal title is no good. We find further that the same holds good for interest-bearing capital and leased agricultural land, and we now have the excuse for separating these classes of property from the others and subjecting them to exceptional treatment. This consists in the demands: 1. to deprive the owner of the right to give notice, the right to demand the return of his property; 2. to give the lessee, borrower or tenant the use without payment of the object handed over to him, but not belonging to him; and 3. to pay off the owner in installments over a long period without interest. And with this we have exhausted the Proudhonist principles from this angle. This is Proudhon s social liquidation. Incidentally, it is obvious that this whole reform plan is to benefit almost exclusively the petty bourgeois and the small peasants in that it consolidates them in their position as petty bourgeois and small peasants. Here we can observe that the petty bourgeois, Proudhon, who is a mythical figure according to M lberger, suddenly takes on a very tangible historical existence. M lberger continues: What kind of a thing the conception of justice of the revolution is, I am quite unable to guess. Proudhon, it is true, makes a sort of goddess out of the Revolution, the bearer and executor of his Justice in doing which he then falls into the peculiar error of mixing up the bourgeois revolution of 1739-94 with the coming proletarian revolution. He does this in almost all his works and particularly since 1848; 1 shall quote only one as an example, namely, the Id e g n rale de la r volution, pages 39 and 40 of the 1868 edition. As, however, M lberger rejects all and every responsibility for Proudhon I am not allowed to explain the conception of justice of the revolution from Proudhon and remain therefore in Egyptian darkness. M lberger says further: M lberger says further: Lassalle s System of Acquired Rights is caught in the trammels not only of the whole illusion of the jurists, but also in that of the Old-Hegelians. On page VII, Lassalle declares expressly that also in economics the conception of acquired right is the driving force of all further development and he seeks to prove that justice is a reasonable organism developing out of itself (and not therefore out of economic prerequisites). (Page IX.) For Lassalle it is a question of evolving justice not out of economic relations, but from I know perfectly well that Proudhon, who notoriously continually contradicts himself, occasionally made an utterance here and there which looked as though he explained ideas on the basis of facts, but such utterances are without any significance as against the basic tendency of his thought, and where they do occur they are extremely confused and inherently illogical. At a certain, very primitive stage of the development of society, the need arises to co-ordinate under a common regulation the daily recurring acts of production, distribution and exchange of products, to see to it that the individual subordinates himself to the common conditions of production and exchange. This regulation, which is at first custom, soon becomes law. With law, organs necessarily arise which are entrusted with its maintenance public authority, the state. With further social development, law develops into a more or less comprehensive legal system. The more complicated this legal system becomes, the more its terminology becomes removed from that in which the usual economic conditions of the life of society are expressed. It appears as an independent element which derives the justification for its existence and the reason for its further development not out of the existing economic conditions, but out of its own inner logic, or, if you like, out of the concept of will. People forget the derivation of their legal system from their economic conditions of life, just as they have forgotten their own derivation from the animal world. With the development of the legal system into a complicated and comprehensive whole the necessity arises for a new social division of labor; an order of professional jurists develops and with these legal science comes into being. In its further development this science compares the legal systems of various peoples and various times, not as the expression of the given economic relationships, but as systems which find their justification in themselves. The comparison assumes something common to them all, and this the jurists find by summing up that which is more or less common to all these legal systems as natural law. However, the standard which is taken to determine what is natural law and what is not, is precisely the most abstract expression of law itself, namely, justice. From this point on, therefore, the development of law for the jurists, and for those who believe them uncritically, is nothing more than the striving to bring human conditions, so far as they are expressed in legal terms, into closer and closer conformity with the ideal of justice, eternal justice. And this justice is never anything but the ideologized, glorified expression of the existing economic relations, at times from the conservative side, at times from the 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 Junker even the miserable Kreisordnung [legislation establishing distinct local authorities.-Ed.] is a violation of eternal justice. The conception of eternal justice therefore varies not only according to time and place, but also according to persons, and it belongs among those things of which M lberger correctly says, everyone understands something different. While in everyday life, in view of the simplicity of the relations which come into question, expressions like right, wrong, justice, conception of justice, can be used without misunderstanding even in relation to social matters, they create, as we have seen, hopeless confusion in any scientific investigation of economic relations, in fact, much the same confusion as would be create in modern chemistry if the terminology of the phlogiston theory were to be retained. The confusion becomes still worse if one, like Proudhon, believes in this social phlogiston, justice, or if one, like M lberger, declares that the phlogiston theory no less than the oxygen theory is perfectly correct. [Before the discovery of oxygen the chemists explained the burning of substances in atmospheric air by assuming the existence of a special igneous substance, phlogiston, which escaped during the process of combustion. Since they found that simple substances on combustion weighed more after having been burned than they did before, they declared that phlogiston had a negative weight so that a substance without its phlogiston weighed more than one with it. In this way all the main properties of oxygen were gradually ascribed to phlogiston, but all in an inverted form. The discovery that combustion consists in a combination of the burning substance with another substance, oxygen, and the preparation of this oxygen disposed of the original assumption, but only after long resistance on the part of the older chemists. Note by F. Engels.] And further: No wonder M lberger complains when I regard the philanthropic efforts of Dollfus and other manufacturers to assist the workers to obtain houses of their own as the only possible practical realization of his Proudhonist projects. If he were to realize that Proudhon s plan for social salvation is a fantasy resting completely on the basis of bourgeois society, then he would naturally not believe in it. I have never at any time called his good will into question. But why then does he praise Dr. Reschauer for proposing to the Vienna Town Council that it should imitate the projects of Dollfus? M lberger further declares: The abolition of the antithesis between town and country is no more and no less utopian than the abolition of the antithesis between capitalists and wage workers. From day to day it is becoming more and more a practical demand of both industrial and agricultural production. No one has demanded this more energetically then Liebig in his writings on the chemistry of agriculture, in which his first demand has always been that man shall give back to the land what he takes from it, and in which he proves that only the existence of the towns, and in particular the big towns, prevents this. When one observes how here in London alone a greater quantity of manure than is produced by the whole kingdom of Saxony is poured away every day into the sea with an expenditure of enormous sums, and when one observes what colossal works are necessary in order to prevent this manure from poisoning the whole of London, then the utopian proposal to abolish the antithesis between town and country is given a peculiarly practical basis. And even comparatively insignificant Berlin has been wallowing in its own filth for at least thirty years. On the other hand, it is completely utopian to want, like Proudhon, to transform present-day bourgeois society while maintaining the peasant as such. Only as uniform a distribution as possible of the population over the whole country, only an integral connection between industrial and agricultural production together with the thereby necessary extension of the means of communication presupposing the abolition of the capitalist mode of production would be able to save the rural population from the isolation and stupor in which it has vegetated almost unchanged for thousands of years. It is not utopian to declare that the emancipation of humanity from the chains which its historic past has forged will only be complete when the antithesis between town and country has been abolished; the utopia begins when one undertakes from existing conditions to prescribe the form in which this or any other of the antitheses of present-day society is to be solved. And this is what M lberger does by adopting the Proudhonist formula for the solution of the housing question. M lberger then complains that I have made him to a certain extent co-responsible for the monstrous views of Proudhon on capital and interest and declares: It is certainly true that the working people will ask neither me nor M lberger whether in the actual seizure it will pay allegiance more to the idea of gradual redemption or immediate expropriation. In all probability it will prefer not to pay allegiance at all. However, there was never any question of the actual seizure of all the instruments of labor by the working people, but only of M lberger s assertion (page 17) that the whole content of the solution of the housing question is given in the expression: gradual redemption. And if he now declares this gradual redemption to be extremely doubtful, what was the reason for giving ourselves and our readers all the unnecessary trouble? For the rest, it must be pointed out that the actual seizure of all the instruments of labor, the seizure of industry as a whole by the working people, is the exact contrary of the Proudhonist theory of gradual redemption. Under the latter the individual worker becomes the owner of the dwelling, the peasant farm, the instruments of labor; under the former the working people remain the collective owners of the houses, factories and instruments of labor and would hardly permit their use, at least in a transitional period, by individuals or associations without compensation for the cost. Just as the abolition of property in land is not the abolition of ground rent, but its transfer, although in a modified form, to society. The actual seizure of all the instruments of labor by the working people therefore does not at all exclude the retention of the rent relations. In general, the question is not whether the proletariat when it comes to power will simply seize by force the tools of production, the raw materials and means of subsistence, whether it will pay immediate compensation for them, or whether it will redeem property therein by installments spread over a long period. To attempt to answer such a question in advance and for all cases would be utopia-making, and I leave that to others. What were M lberger s positive statements in his articles? Firstly: that the difference between the original cost price of a house, building site, etc., and its present value belongs by right to society. In the language of economics, this difference is called ground rent Proudhon also wants to appropriate this for society, as one may read in his Id e g n rale de la r volution, page 219 of the 1868 edition. Secondly: that the solution of the housing question consists in everyone being the owner instead of the tenant of his dwelling. Thirdly: that this solution takes place by the passing of a law turning rent payments into installment payments on the purchase price of the dwelling. These points 2 and 3 are both taken from Proudhon as anyone can see in the Id e g n rale de la r volution, page 199 et seq., where on page 203 a project of the law in question is to be found already drafted. Fourthly: that the productivity of capital is taken by the horns by a transitional law reducing the rate of interest temporarily to one per cent, subject to reducing it still further later on. This point has also been taken from Proudhon and can be read in detail on pages 182 to 186 of the Id e g n rale de la r volution. With regard to each of these points I have cited the passage of Proudhon where the original of the M lberger copy is to be found, and I ask now whether I was justified in calling the author of a series of articles containing completely Proudhonist and nothing but Proudhonist views, a Proudhonist or not? Nevertheless M lberger complains about nothing more bitterly than that I call him a Proudhonist because I came upon a few expressions such as are peculiar to Proudhon! Quite the contrary. The expressions all belong to M lberger, their content belongs to Proudhon. And when I then supplement the Proudhonist articles from Proudhon himself, M lberger complains that I am ascribing to him the monstrous ideas of Proudhon! What did I reply to this Proudhonist plan? Firstly: that the transfer of ground rent to the state is identical with the abolition of individual property in land. Secondly: that the gradual redemption of the rented dwelling and the transfer of property in the dwelling to the tenants does not at all affect the capitalist mode of production. Thirdly: that with the present development of large-scale industry and towns, this proposal is as absurd as it is reactionary, and that the reintroduction of ownership of his dwelling by each individual would be a step backward. Fourthly: that the compulsory reduction of the rate of interest on capital would by no means attack the capitalist Mode of production, and that, on the contrary, as the usury laws prove, the idea is as old as it is impossible. Fifthly: that the abolition of interest on capital by no means abolishes the payment of rent for houses. M lberger has now admitted points 2 and 4. To the other points he makes no reply whatever. Nevertheless, these are just the points around which the whole debate centered. M lberger s answer, however, is not a refutation; it carefully avoids dealing with all economic points, which are, of course, the decisive ones. It is a personal complaint, nothing more. For instance, he complains when I anticipate his promised solution of other questions, for instance, state debts, private debts and credit, and say that the solution would be the same in each case as his solution of the housing question, namely, the abolition of interest, the transformation of interest payments into installments for paying off the capital sum, and free credit. Nevertheless, I am still ready to bet that if these articles of M lberger ever see the light of day, their essential content will coincide with Proudhon s Id e g n rale de la r volution: credit, page 182; state debts, page 186; private debts, page 196; just as his articles on the housing question coincided with the passages I have quoted from the same book. M lberger takes this opportunity of informing me that questions such as taxation, state debts, private debts and credit, to which is now added the question of municipal autonomy, are of the greatest importance to the peasant and for propaganda in the countryside. To a great extent I agree, but, 1. up to the moment there has been no mention of the peasant, and 2. Proudhon s solutions of all these questions are just as absurd economically and just as essentially bourgeois as his solution of the housing question. I need hardly defend myself against M lberger s suggestion that I fail to appreciate the necessity of drawing the peasants into the movement. However, I certainly consider it folly to recommend to them for this purpose the Proudhonian quackery. There is still very much large-scale landed property in Germany. According to Proudhon s theory all this ought to be divided up into small peasant farms, which, in the present state of agriculture and after the experience of small landownership in France and in Western Germany, would be positively reactionary. The large-scale landed estates which still exist will rather afford us a welcome opportunity of conducting agriculture on a large scale the only way which can utilize modern equipment machinery, etc. by associated workers, and thus demonstrating to the small peasants the advantages of large-scale enterprise by means of associations. The Danish socialists, who in this respect are ahead of all others, have realized this long ago. It is equally unnecessary for me to defend myself against the suggestion that I regard the existing infamous housing conditions as an insignificant detail. As far as I know, I was the first to describe in German these conditions in their classical form as they exist in England. I did not do that, as M lberger suggests, because they violated my sense of justice whoever insisted on writing books about all the facts which violated his sense of justice would have a lot to do but as can be read in the introduction to my book, by describing the social conditions created by modern large-scale industry, to provide an actual basis for German socialism, which was then arising and was expending itself in empty phrases. However, it does not occur to me to try to solve the so-called housing question any more than I occupy myself with the details of the still more important food question. I am satisfied if I can prove that the production of our modern society is sufficient to provide all its members with enough to eat, and that there are houses enough in existence to provide the working masses for the time being with roomy and healthy living accommodation. To speculate as to how a future society would organize the distribution of food and dwellings leads directly to utopia. The utmost we can do is to note, from an understanding of the basic conditions of all modes of production up to now, that with the downfall of the capitalist mode of production certain forms of appropriation by society hitherto will become impossible. Even the transitional measures will everywhere have to be in accordance with the conditions in existence at the moment; in countries of small-scale landownership quite different from those in countries where large-scale landownership prevails, etc. M lberger himself shows us better than anyone else where one arrives at if one attempts to find isolated solutions for so-called practical questions, such as the housing question, when he takes 28 pages to explain to us that, the whole content of the solution of the housing question is given in the expression: gradual redemption, but who, when one presses him hard, begins to stammer in embarrassment that it is really very doubtful whether, when it comes to a question of the actual seizure of the houses, the working people will pay allegiance more to the idea of gradual redemption or to some other form of expropriation. M lberger demands that we should become practical, that we should not come forward merely with dead and abstract formulas when faced with real practical conditions, that we should, proceed beyond abstract socialism and come close to the definite concrete conditions of society. If M lberger had done this himself he might perhaps have rendered great service to the movement. The first step in coming close to the definite and concrete conditions of society is surely that one should learn what they are, that one should examine them according to their existing economic interrelations. But what do we find in M lberger s articles? Two whole sentences, namely: But enough. If this polemic serves for nothing else it has the value in any case of having provided proof of how impractical these so-called practical socialists really are. These practical proposals for the abolition of all social evils, these universal social panaceas, have always and everywhere been the work of sectarians who appeared at a time when the proletarian movement was still in its infancy. Proudhon also 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, concocted in advance and universally applicable, and that practical socialism consists rather in a correct knowledge of the capitalist mode of production from all its various sides. A working class which is secure in this knowledge will never be in doubt in any given case against which social institutions, and in what manner, its main attacks should be directed.
The Housing Question