The following work is a reprint of three articles
which I wrote in 1872 for the Leipzig Volksstaat. Just at that time,
the blessing of the French milliards was pouring over Germany: public debts
were paid off, fortresses and barracks built, stocks of weapons and war
material renewed; the available capital no less than the volume of money
in circulation was suddenly enormously increased, and all this just at
a time when Germany was entering the world arena not only a “united empire,”
but also as a great industrial country. These milliards gave the new large-scale
industry a powerful impetus, and above all they were responsible for the
short period of prosperity, so rich in illusions, which followed on the
war, and for the great crash which came immediately afterwards in 1873-74,
through which Germany proved itself to be an industrial country capable
of competing on the world market.

The period in which an old civilized country makes such a transition
from manufacture and small-scale production to large-scale industry, a
transition which is, moreover, accelerated by such favorable circumstance,
is also predominantly the period of “housing shortage.” On the one hand,
masses of rural workers are suddenly drawn into the big towns, which develop
into industrial centres; on the other hand, the building plan of these
old towns does not any longer conform with the conditions of the new large-scale
industry and the corresponding traffic; streets are widened and new ones
cut through, and railways run through the centre of the town. At the very
time when masses of workers are streaming into the towns, workers’ dwellings
are pulled down on a large scale. Hence the sudden housing shortage for
the workers and for the small traders and small businesses which depend
for their custom on the workers. In the towns which grew up from the very
beginning as industrial centres, this housing shortage is as good as unknown
– for instance, Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, Barmen-Elberfeld. On the
other hand, in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, the shortage took on acute
forms at the time, for the most part, continued to exist in a chronic form.

It was, therefore, just this acute housing shortage, this symptom
of the industrial revolution taking place in Germany, which filled the
press of the day with contributions on the “housing question,” and gave
rise to all sorts of social quackery. A series of such articles even found
their way into the Volksstaat. The anonymous author, who revealed
himself later on as Dr. A. Mülberger of Wurttemburg, considered the opportunity
a favorable one for enlightening the German workers, by means of this question,
on the miraculous effects of Proudhon’s social panacea. When I expressed
my astonishment to the editors at the acceptance of these peculiar articles,
I was called upon to answer them, and this I did. (See Part
One: How Proudhon Solves the Housing Question.) This series of articles
was soon followed by a second series examining the philanthropic bourgeois
view of the question, on the basis of a work by Dr. Emil Sax. (See Part
Two: How the Bourgeoisie Solves the Housing Question.) After a long
pause, Dr. Mülberger did me the honor of replying to my articles, and this
compelled me to make a rejoinder. (Part
Three: Supplement on Proudhon and the Housing Question.) With this,
however, both the polemic and also my special occupation with this question
came to an end. This is the history of the origin of these three series
of articles, which have also appeared as a reprint in pamphlet form. The
fact that a new reprint has now become necessary I owe undoubtedly to the
benevolent solicitude of the German imperial government which, by prohibiting
the work, as usual tremendously increased the sale, and I hereby take this
opportunity of expressing my respectful thanks to it.

I have revised the text for this new edition, inserted a few additions
and notes, and I have corrected a small economic error in the first edition,
as my opponent Dr. Mülberger unfortunately failed to discover it.

During this revision, it was borne in one me what gigantic progress
the international working class movement has made during the past 14 years.
At that time, it was still a fact that “for 20 years the workers of the
Latin countries had no other mental nourishment than the works of Proudhon,”
and, at best, the still more one-sided version of Proudhonism presented
by the father of “anarchism,” Bakunin, who regarded Proudhon as “notre
maitre a nous tous,” the master of us all. Although the Proudhonists in
France were only a small sect among the workers, they were still the only
ones who had a definitely formulated programme and who were able in the
Commune to take over the leadership on the economic field. In Belgium,
Proudhonism reigned unchallenged among the Walloon workers, and in Spain
and Italy, with isolated exceptions, everything in the working class movement
which was not anarchist was definitely Proudhonist. And today? In France,
Proudhon has been completely disposed of among the workers and retains
supporters only among the radical bourgeois and petty bourgeois, who, as
Proudhonists, also call themselves “socialists,” but against whom the most
energetic fight is carried on by the socialist workers. In Belgium, the
Flemish have ousted the Walloons from the leadership, deposed Proudhonism,
and greatly raised the level of the movement. In Spain, as in Italy, the
anarchist high tide of the ’70s has receded and swept away with it the
remnants of Proudhonism. While in Italy, the new party is still in process
of clarification and formation, in Spain the small nucleus, which as the
Neuva Federacion Madrilena remained loyal to the General Council
of the International, has developed into a strong party which – as can
be seen from the republican press itself – is destroying the influence
of the bourgeois republicans on the workers far more effectively than its
noisy anarchist predecessors were ever able to do. Among most Latin workers,
the forgotten works of Proudhon have been replaced by Capital, The Communist
Manifesto, and a series of other works of the Marxist school, and
the main demand of Marx – the seizure of all means of production in the
name of society by the proletariat, which has attained the monopoly of
political power – is now the demand of the whole revolutionary working
class in the Latin countries also.

If therefore Proudhonism has been finally supplanted among the
workers of the Latin countries also, if it – in accordance with its real
significance – only serves French, Spanish, Italian and Belgian bourgeois
radicals as an expression of their bourgeois and petty-bourgeois desires,
why bother about it today? Why combat anew a dead opponent by reprinting
these articles?

First of all, because these articles do not confine themselves
to a mere polemic against Proudhon and his German representatives. As a
consequence of the division of labour that existed between Marx and myself,
it fell to me to present our opinions in the periodical press, that is
to say, particularly in the fight against opposing views, in order that
Marx should have time for the elaboration of his great basic work. Thus
it became my task to present our views, for the most part in a polemical
form, in opposition to other kinds of views. So also here. Parts One and
Two contain not only a criticism of the Proudhonist conception of the question,
but also a presentation of our own conception.

Secondly, however, Proudhon played much too significant a role
in the history of the European working class movement for him to fall into
oblivion without more ado. Refuted theoretically and discarded practically,
he still retains his historical interest. Whoever occupies himself in any
detail with modern socialism must also acquaint himself with the “vanquished
standpoints” of the movement. Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy appeared
several years before Proudhon put forward his practical proposals for social
reform. In this work Marx was able to do no more than discover and criticise
the germ of Proudhon’s exchange bank. From this angle, therefore, this
work of mine supplements, unfortunately imperfectly enough, Marx’s work.
Marx would have accomplished all this much better and more convincingly.

And finally, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois socialism is strongly
represented in Germany down to this very hour; on the one hand by professorial
socialists and philanthropists of all sorts with whom the wish to turn
the workers into owners of their dwellings still plays a great role and
against whom, therefore, my work is still appropriate; and on the other
hand, in the Social-Democratic Party itself, and even in the ranks of the
Reichstag fraction, a certain petty-bourgeois socialism finds a voice.
This takes the form that while the fundamental views of modern socialism
and the demand for the transformation of all the means of production into
social property are recognised as justified, however, the realisation of
this is declared possible only in the distant future, a future which for
all practical purposes is quite out of sight. Thus, for the present time,
one has to have recourse to mere social patchwork, and sympathy can be
shown, according to circumstances, even with the most reactionary efforts
for so-called “uplifting the working classes.” The existence of such a
tendency is quite inevitable in Germany, the land of philistinism par
excellence, particularly at a time when industrial development is violently
and on a mass scale doing away with this old and deeply-rooted philistinism.
The tendency is also quite harmless to the movement, in view of the wonderful
common sense of our workers which has been demonstrated so magnificently
during the last eight years of the struggle against the anti-socialist
law, the police and the courts. But it is necessary that it should be clearly
realised that such a tendency exists. And when later on this tendency takes
on a firmer shape and more clearly defined contours, as it is necessary
and even desirable that it should do, it will have to go back to its predecessors
in order to formulate its programme and in doing so it will hardly be able
to avoid Proudhon.

The essence of both the big bourgeois and petty-bourgeois solutions
of the “housing question” is that the worker should own his own dwelling.
However, this is a point which has been shown in a very peculiar light
by the industrial development of Germany during the past twenty years.
In no other country do there exist so many wage workers who own not only
their own dwellings but also a garden or field as well. Besides these workers
there are numerous others who hold house and garden or field as tenants,
with, in fact, fairly secure possession. Rural domestic industry carried
on in conjunction with horticulture or small-scale agriculture forms the
broad basis of Germany’s new large-scale industry. In the west the workers
are for the most part the owners of their dwellings, and in the east they
are chiefly tenants. We find this combination of domestic industry with
horticulture and small-scale agriculture and therefore with secure possession
of a dwelling not only wherever handweaving still fights against the mechanical
loom: in the Lower Rhineland and in Westphalia, in the Saxon Erzgebirge
and in Silesia, but also wherever domestic industry of any sort has established
itself as a rural occupation: in the Thuringia Forest and in the Rhön.
At the time of the debates on the tobacco monopoly, it was revealed to
what extent cigar making was already being carried on as a rural domestic
industry. Wherever any condition of distress occurs among the small peasants,
as for instance a few years ago in the Eifel, the bourgeois press immediately
raises an outcry for the introduction of a suitable domestic industry as
the only remedy. And in fact both the growing state of want of the German
small peasants and the general situation of German industry leads to a
continual extension of rural domestic industry. This is a phenomenon peculiar
to Germany. Only very exceptionally do we find a similar phenomenon in
France, for instance in the regions of silk cultivation. In England, where
there are no small peasants, rural domestic industry depends on the labour
power of the wives and children of the agricultural labourers. Only in
Ireland can we observe the rural domestic industry of garment making being
carried on, as in Germany, by real peasant families. Naturally we do not
speak here of Russia and other countries not represented on the industrial
world market.

Thus as regards industry there exists today a state of affairs
over widespread areas in Germany which appears at first glance to resemble
that which prevailed generally before the introduction of machinery. However,
this is so only at first glance. The rural domestic industry of earlier
times, combined with horticulture and agriculture, was, at least in the
countries in which industry was developing, the basis of a tolerable and
in some cases even comfortable material situation for the working class,
but at the same time the basis of its intellectual and political nullity.
The hand-made product and its cost determined the market price, and owing
to the insignificantly small productivity of labour, compared with the
present day, the market grew faster than the supply as a rule. This held
good at about the middle of the last century for England, and partly for
France, and particularly in the textile industry. In Germany, however,
which was at that time only just recovering from the devastation of the
Thirty Years War and working its way up under most unfavourable circumstances,
the situation was quite different. The only domestic industry in Germany
producing for the world market, linen weaving, was so burdened by taxes
and feudal exactions that it did not raise the peasant weavers above the
very low level of the rest of the peasantry. But, nevertheless, at that
time the rural industrial worker enjoyed a certain security of existence.

With the introduction of machinery all this was altered. Prices
were now determined by the machine-made product, and the wage of the domestic
industrial worker fell with this price. However, the worker had to accept
it or look for other work, and he could not do that without becoming a
proletarian, that is without giving up his little house garden and field,
whether his own property or held by him as tenant. Only in the rarest cases
was he ready to do this. And thus the horticulture and agriculture of the
old rural hand weavers became the cause by virtue of which the struggle
of the hand loom against the mechanical loom was so protracted and has
not yet been fought to a conclusion in Germany. In this struggle it was
shown for the first time, especially in England, that the same circumstance
which formerly served as a basis for a comparatively comfortable material
situation of the workers – the ownership by the worker of his means of
production – had now become a hindrance and a misfortune for them. In
industry the mechanical loom defeated the hand loom, and in agriculture
large-scale methods (agriculture carried on in accordance with scientific
principles and with technically perfected tools) drove small-scale cultivation
from the field. However, while collective labour and the application of
machinery and science became the social rule on both fields of production,
the worker was chained to the antiquated method of individual production
and hand labour by his little house, garden, field and hand loom. The possession
of house and garden was now of much less advantage than the possession
of complete freedom of movement. No factory worker would have changed places
with the slowly but surely starving rural hand weaver.

Germany appeared late on the world market. Our large-scale industry
dates from the ’forties; it received its first impetus from the Revolution
of 1848, and was able to develop fully only after the Revolutions of
1866 and 1870 had cleared at least the worst political obstacles out
of its way. But to a large extent it found the world market already occupied.
The articles of mass production were supplied by England and the elegant
luxury articles by France. Germany could not beat the former in price or
the latter in quality. For the moment, therefore, nothing else remained
but, in accordance with the tendency of German production up to that time,
to squeeze into the world market with articles which were too petty for
the English and too shoddy for the French. Of course the popular German
custom of cheating, by first sending good samples and afterwards inferior
articles, soon met with sufficiently severe punishment on the world market
and was pretty well abandoned. On the other hand, the competition of overproduction
is gradually forcing even the respectable English along the downward path
of quality deterioration and so has given an advantage to the Germans,
who are unbeatable on this field. And thus we finally came to possess a
large-scale industry and to play a role on the world market. But our large-scale
industry works almost exclusively for the home market (with the exception
of the iron industry which produces far beyond the limits of home demand),
and our mass export consists of a tremendous number of small articles,
for which large-scale industry provides at most the half-finished manufactures,
which small articles, however, are supplied chiefly by rural domestic industry.

And here is seen in all its glory the “blessing” of house- and
land-ownership for the modern worker. Nowhere, hardly excepting even the
Irish domestic industries, are such infamously low wages paid as in the
German domestic industries. Competition permits the capitalist to deduct
from the price of labour power that which the family earns from its own
little garden or field; the workers are compelled to accept any piece wages
offered to them, because otherwise they would get nothing at all, and they
could not live from the products of their small-scale agriculture alone,
and because, on the other hand, it is just this agriculture and landownership
which chains them to the spot and prevents them from looking around for
other employment. This is the basis which upholds Germany’s capacity to
compete on the world market in a whole series of small articles. The
whole capital profit is derived from a deduction from normal wages and
the whole surplus value can be presented to the purchaser. That is
the secret of the extraordinary cheapness of most of the German export
articles.

It is this circumstance more than any other which keeps the wages
and the living conditions of the German workers on other industrial fields
also below the level of the Western European countries. The dead weight
of such prices for labour, kept traditionally far below the value of labour
power, depresses the wages of the urban workers also, even of the workers
in the big towns, below the value of labour power; and this is all the
more the case because poorly-paid domestic industry has taken the place
of the old handicrafts in the towns also, and here, too, depresses the
general level of wages.

Here we see clearly: that which at an earlier historical stage
was the basis of relative well-being for the workers, namely, the combination
of agriculture and industry, the ownership of house, garden and field,
and security of tenure in the dwelling-place, is becoming today, under
the rule of large-scale industry, not only the worst hindrance to the worker,
but the greatest misfortune for the whole working class, the basis for
an unexampled depression of wages below their normal level, and that not
only for individual districts and branches of enterprise, but for the whole
country. No wonder that the big bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie who live
and grow rich from these abnormal deductions from wages are enthusiastic
over rural industry and the workers owning their own houses, and that they
regard the introduction of new domestic industries as the sole remedy for
all rural distress.

That is one side of the matter, but it also has its reverse side.
Domestic industry has become the broad basis of the German export trade
and therefore of the whole of large-scale industry. It is thus spread over
wide areas of Germany and is extending still further daily. The ruin of
the small peasant, inevitable from the time when his industrial domestic
production for his own use was destroyed by the cheap, hand-made and machine
product, and his cattle breeding, and thus his manure production also,
was destroyed by the dissolution of the old Mark system, the abolition
of the common Mark and of compulsory land tillage – this ruin forcibly
drives the small peasant, fallen victim to the usurer, into the arms of
modern domestic industry. Like the ground rent of the landlord in Ireland,
the interest of the mortgage usurer in Germany cannot be paid from the
yield of the soil, but only from the wages of the industrial peasant. However,
with the expansion of domestic industry, one peasant area after the other
is being drawn into the present-day industrial movement. It is this revolutionisation
of the rural areas by domestic industry which spreads the industrial revolution
in Germany over a far wider territory than is the case in England and France;
it is the comparatively low level of our industry which makes its extension
in area all the more necessary. This explains why in Germany, in contrast
to England and France, the revolutionary working class movement has spread
so tremendously over the greater part of the country instead of being confined
exclusively to the urban centres. And this further explains the steady,
certain and irresistible progress of the movement. It is perfectly clear
that in Germany a victorious rising in the capital and in the other big
towns will be possible only when the majority of the smaller towns and
a great part of the rural areas have become ripe for the change. Given
anything like normal development, we shall never be in a position to win
working class victories like those of the Parisians in 1848 and 1871, but
for the same reason we shall not suffer defeats of the revolutionary capital
by the reactionary provinces as Paris suffered them in both cases. In France,
the movement always originated in the capital; in Germany, it originated
in the areas of big industry, of manufacture and of domestic industry;
the capital was conquered only later. Therefore, perhaps, in the future
also the initiative will continue to rest with the French but the decision
can be fought out only in Germany.

However, this rural domestic industry and manufacture, which in
its expansion has become the decisive branch of German production and thus
revolutionises more and more the German peasantry, is itself only the preliminary
stage of a far-reaching revolution. As Marx has already proved (Capital,
Vol. I, page 514, et seq.), at a certain stage of development the
hour of its downfall owing to machinery and factory production will sound
for it also. And this hour would appear to be at hand. But in Germany the
destruction of rural domestic industry and manufacture by machinery and
factory production means the destruction of the livelihood of millions
of rural producers, the expropriation of almost half the German small peasantry;
the transformation not only of domestic industry into factory production,
but also of peasant agriculture into large-scale capitalist agriculture,
of small landed property into big estates – an industrial and agricultural
revolution in favour of capital and big landownership at the cost of the
peasants. Should it be Germany’s fate also to undergo this transformation
while still under the old social conditions then it will unquestionably
be the turning point. If the working, class of no other country has taken
the initiative by that time, then Germany will certainly strike first,
and the peasant sons of the “glorious army” will bravely assist.

And with this the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois utopia which would
give each worker the ownership of his own dwelling, and thus chain him in
semi-feudal fashion to his own particular capitalist, takes on a very different
complexion. Its realisation is seen to be the transformation of all the
small rural house owners into industrial domestic workers; the destruction
of the old isolation and with it the destruction of the political insignificance
of the small peasants who would be dragged into the “social whirlpool”;
the extension of the industrial revolution over the rural areas and thus
the transformation of the most stable and conservative class of the population
into a revolutionary hotbed; and, as the culmination of the whole process,
the expropriation by machinery of the peasants engaged in home industry,
driving them forcibly into insurrection.

We can readily allow the bourgeois-socialist philanthropists the
private enjoyment of their ideal so long as they continue in their public
function as capitalists to realise it in this inverted fashion to the benefit
of the social revolution.

FREDERICK ENGELS

London, January 10 1887.