State and Revolution,
Part 7a
The Housing Question
In the
period following the 1867 publication of Capital, Volume 1, the rise and fall
of the Paris Commune in 1871, and the relative lapse of the formal
International Working Men’s Association (the “First International”) in 1872,
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels continued to be active and prominent leaders.
The
international working-class movement continued to correspond and to meet. There
was a Congress in Ghent,
Belgium in 1877, and what is regarded as the Founding
Congress of the Second International took place in Chur, Switzerland in
1881 (This was still within the lifetime of Karl Marx, who only died at age 65
in 1883). Between these two meetings the main body of anarchists dropped out of
formal liaison with the organised communists, never to return.
Anti-communist
bourgeois historians (e.g. the authors of the Wikipedia entry on the Second
International) are inclined to depict a collapse and a vacuum in this
period, followed by a sudden re-founding of the “socialist international” in
1889, in Paris. The fullest record of the founding of the Second International
is, as usual, on the Marxists Internet Archive. It shows continuity, and not a
vacuum.
Some of the
struggles of the time were repetitions of earlier ones. This much is well
illustrated by Engels’ book called “The Housing Question”
(downloadable extract linked below).
The first
published “classic” of Marxism, according to Lenin’s judgement, was “The Poverty of Philosophy”,
which came out in 1847. It was a polemic against the anarchist Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon (1809-1865).
It
sometimes helps to regard Marxism as a matter of marking out boundaries, or
borders. The first demarcation is the one that separates the Bourgeoisie from
the Proletariat, as was done, for example, in the “Communist Manifesto” of
1848. Although this division and the consequent prospect of class struggle is
contested by some liberals, yet most bourgeois intellectuals find themselves
obliged to accept it, most of the time.
This
boundary is not the only one that is required for an all-round definition of
Marxism. From the start, a different lot of liberals, usually called anarchists
or “ultra-leftists” but still essentially liberals, challenged Marx and Engels
at every point. Their names crop up even before the 1845 genesis of Marxism:
Stirner, Weitling, Proudhon. Later, Bakunin wastes time in the First
International by opposing the organised proletarian communists.
Now, in
1872, a quarter of a century after the publication of “the first mature work of
Marxism” (“The Poverty of Philosophy”), and with its author, Marx’s old
antagonist, long deceased, Engels finds it necessary to re-launch the polemic
against Proudhon, in this classic work “The Housing Question”. This was because
of a resurgence of “Proudhonism”.
Thanks to
his own 1845 book, “The
Condition of the Working Class in England”, Frederick Engels was
already a pioneer of urban studies; so one might approach his book “The Housing Question”
(part attached, and linked below) expecting answers to the housing question.
One might hope for instructions about what to build. One might expect sermons
about “delivery”, or even model house-plans.
Instead,
one finds severe polemic about very fundamental issues of class struggle.
Polemic
Let us
briefly consider what “polemic” is. The rules of polemic are roughly these: It
is done in writing. It is always against another named individual’s writing. It
is direct and frank and it pays little regard for bourgeois squeamishness; on
the other hand, it pays the utmost respect to the meaning of the opponent’s
words. Opponents in polemic never misrepresent each other. Everything is
permissible, except misrepresention.
For
example, Engels begins the linked text with references to his opponent
Mulberger, who had complained that Engels had been blunt to the point of
rudeness. Engels concedes little more than sarcasm:
“I am not going to quarrel with friend Mulberger 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 Mulberger I shall try
this time to bring my ‘tone’ into the right relation to the sensitiveness of
his epidermis.”
But later,
admitting that he had misrepresented Mulberger on a particular (quite small)
point, Engels lambastes himself as “irresponsible”.
“This time Mulberger is really right. I overlooked the passage in
question. It was irresponsible of me to overlook it…”
After his
remarks about “Mulberger”, Engels goes straight into a long paragraph (the
second half of page 1, going over to page 2) that contains a summary of theory
and practice, vanguard and mass, from the 1840s up until his point of writing,
just one year after the fall of the Paris Commune. The paragraph mentions “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.”
This is the
Communist Manifesto all over again. So, we can ask, why does Engels “go to
town” to this extent? Is this not merely “housing” we are talking about? Is not
housing something that everybody needs? Classless, surely? A win-win situation?
Motherhood and apple-pie?
Engels
says: NO! Engels says: the class struggle is here, and everywhere.
What we can
read in Mulberger, through Engels’ eyes, is the petty-bourgeois (and full
bourgeois) greed for this Housing Question as a means, or a tool, for
reproducing petty-bourgeois consciousness, and this is just exactly how the
post-1994 South African Government started dealing with the housing question.
Yes, there should be lots of houses, it said in effect, but they must be
petty-bourgeois-style houses, both in physical type, and in form of ownership.
The
argument about housing is an argument about the reproduction of capitalism. It
is an argument about the continuation of the ascendancy of bourgeois values
over those of the working-class. For the bourgeoisie, the creation of a
dwelling is an opportunity to invest the house with peasant-like values of
individuality, and with petty-bourgeois ideas of “entrepreneurship”, and to
regulate and control the working class according to these values.
Everything
that happened in “housing” in South Africa post-1994 is pre-figured in the
banal prescriptions of Mulberger that Engels lambastes. Any critique of housing
in South Africa will inevitably have to follow the example of Engels if it
is to be of any use. Please, comrades, read the first pages and the last
paragraphs of this document, if you cannot read all of it.
As the Communist Manifesto says, the history
of all hitherto-existing societies has been a history of class struggle. The
coming “development” period of South African history will also be a period of
class struggle. We may not necessarily win every specific struggle. But what
this text of Engels says is: let us never fool ourselves. Win or lose, we are
in a class struggle and there is no neutral ground, least of all on the
question of housing and land development. There is much more to be studied
here, but the key is political.
Pictures: Shack, Abahlali BaseMjondolo; RDP House, David Goldblatt:
“Miriam Mazibuko watering the garden of her new RDP house, Extension 8, Far
East Bank, Alexandra Township, Johannesburg, 12 September 2006. It has one
room. For lack of space, her four children live with her parents-in-law.”
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: The Housing Question, 1872, Part Three, Frederick Engels, 1872.
