BY FREDERICK ENGELS

Printed below are excerpts from the pamphlet The Housing Question by Frederick Engels. It originally appeared in 1872 as three articles in the Volksstaat, a revolutionary newspaper of the German working class movement. This excerpt addressed the views of Emil Sax, a liberal bourgeois economist of the day. The main points Engels makes about the crisis in capitalist society read as if they were written today.

The Housing Question provides an explanation to the facts presented in a six-part series that appeared in the New York Times in early October describing the horrendous housing conditions in New York City. Landlords charging outrageous rent for decaying, roach-infested apartments is endemic in New York and other cities throughout the world. The final article in the Times series cited the views of an urban planning professor, Peter Salins, on how to resolve the housing problem. "If New York were to eliminate rent control and rent stabilization, which limit rent increases on more than 1.1 million apartments, Mr. Salins said, private developers would have more incentive to build new housing for the middle and upper classes and in the process would free up older housing for the poor."

As long as capitalism exists, however, it will keep on reproducing its evils on a larger and larger scale - whether these evils be unemployment, periodic depressions, pollution, war, or the housing shortage. As Engels explained in the pamphlet, only by abolishing capitalism can the evils that arise from it be eliminated.

Modern natural science has proved that the so-called "poor districts," in which the workers are crowded together, are the breeding places of all those epidemics which from time to time afflict our towns. Cholera, typhus, typhoid fever, smallpox and other ravaging diseases spread their germs in the pestilential air and the poisoned water of these working-class quarters. Here the germs hardly ever die out completely, and as soon as circumstances permit they develop into epidemics and then spread beyond their breeding places into the more airy and healthy parts of the town inhabited by the capitalists. Capitalist rule cannot allow itself the pleasure of generating epidemic diseases among the working class with impunity; the consequences fall back on it and the angel of death rages in its ranks as ruthlessly as in the ranks of the workers.

As soon as this fact had been scientifically established the philanthropic bourgeois became inflamed with a noble spirit of competition in their solicitude for the health of their workers. Societies were founded, books were written, proposals drawn up, laws debated and passed, in order to stop up the sources of the ever-recurring epidemics. The housing conditions of the workers were investigated and attempts made to remedy the most crying evils. In England particularly, where the largest number of big towns existed and where the bourgeoisie itself was, therefore, running the greatest risk, extensive activity began.

Government commissions were appointed to inquire into the hygienic conditions of the working class. Their reports, honourably distinguished from all continental sources by their accuracy, completeness and impartiality, provided the basis for new, more or less thoroughgoing laws. Imperfect as these laws are, they are still infinitely superior to everything that has been done in this direction up to the present on the Continent. Nevertheless, the capitalist order of society reproduces again and again the evils to be remedied, and does so with such inevitable necessity that even in England the remedying of them has hardly advanced a single step....

Whence the housing shortage then? How did it arise? As a good bourgeois, Herr Sax is not supposed to know that it is a necessary product of the bourgeois social order; that it cannot fail to be present in a society in which the great labouring masses are exclusively dependent upon wages, that is to say, upon the quantity of means of subsistence necessary for their existence and for the propagation of their kind; in which improvements of the machinery, etc., continually throw masses of workers out of employment; in which violent and regularly recurring industrial fluctuations determine on the one hand the existence of a large reserve army of unemployed workers, and on the other hand drive the mass of the workers from time to time on to the streets unemployed; in which the workers are crowded together in masses in the big towns at a quicker rate than dwellings come into existence for them under the prevailing conditions; in which, therefore, there must always be tenants even for the most infamous pigsties; and in which finally the house-owner in his capacity as capitalist has not only the right but, by reason of competition, to a certain extent also the duty of ruthlessly making as much out of his property in house rent as he possibly can.

In such a society the housing shortage is no accident; it is a necessary institution and can be abolished together with all its effects on health, etc., only if the whole social order from which it springs is fundamentally refashioned. That, however, bourgeois socialism dare not know. It dare not explain the housing shortage as arising from the existing conditions. And therefore it has no other way but to explain the housing shortage by moralizing that it is the result of the wickedness of man, the result of original sin, so to speak....

This is a striking example of how the bourgeoisie settles the housing question in practice. The breeding places of disease, the infamous holes and cellars in which the capitalist mode of production confines our workers night after night, are not abolished they are merely shifted elsewhere! The same economic necessity which produced them in the first place produces them in the next place also. As long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist it is folly to hope for an isolated settlement of the housing question or of any other social question affecting the lot of the workers. The solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the means of subsistence and instruments of labour by the working class itself.  
 
 
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