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 in some of the literature 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.
