The Housing Question

A work by Engels criticizing reformism and elucidating the theory of scientific socialism. Written between May 1872 and January 1873. The full text consists of three articles. It was originally published in Der Volksstaat, Nos. 51, 52, 53, 103 and 104, June 26, 29, July 3, December 25, 28, 1872, and in Der Volksstaat, Nos. 2, 3, 12, 13, 15 and 16, January 4, 8, 1873, and February 8, 12, 19, 22. From December 1872 to March 1873, a separate edition was published in Leipzig and in March 1887, a single edition of the overall book was published in Hottingen-Zurich under the general title Zur Wohnungsfrage.

After the 1870s, in the face of the serious housing shortage of the urban proletariat, the Proudhonists represented by Mulberger and Sax attempted to solve the problem by means of petty-bourgeois reformist methods and preached reformism. In order to criticize the erroneous claims of the Proudhonists, Engels successively wrote three polemical articles: How Proudhon Solves The Housing Question, How The Bourgeoisie Solves The Housing Question, and Supplement On Proudhon And The Housing Question, namely The Housing Question.

In The Housing Question, Engels applied the materialist conception of history to clarify the standpoint and viewpoint on solving problems such as the housing shortage and revealed the root of the housing shortage under the capitalist system. He believed that “as long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist, it is folly to hope for an isolated solution of the housing question or of any other social question affecting the fate of the workers. The solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the means of life and labor by the working class itself.” On the question of housing rent, Engels criticized the Proudhonists’ erroneous view of confusing the relation of the tenant of a dwelling to the house owner with that of the wage-worker to the capitalist. He concluded from his analysis of the composition of rents that rents are merely compensation for the cost of holding a house and its profit to the house owner, and that the housing rent is merely a question of commodities, which the real proletariat should analyze in terms of economic facts. In addition to this, in the work, Engels also addressed the fallacy put forward by Mulberger that the antithesis between town and country was “natural” and could never be abolished, elaborating the question of the relationship between the development of production and the emancipation of the proletariat. He pointed out that “from day to day [the abolition of the antithesis between town and country] is becoming more and more a practical demand of both industrial and agricultural production.” “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.”

The Housing Question is an important document of Marxism. Engels revealed the reactionary nature of Proudhonism by criticizing the viewpoints of the Proudhonists represented by Mulberger and Sax on the housing question, which was of great significance in purging the negative impact of Proudhonism among the proletariat and in pointing out a path for the workers.