Frederick Engels wrote The Housing Question as journalism, in the heat of a quarrel. It began as three series of articles for the Leipzig Volksstaat, the paper of the German Social-Democratic Workers' Party, published across 1872 and 1873, and Engels revised them for the separate book edition of 1887 whose text this volume reproduces. The occasion was a set of articles by a Proudhonist doctor, A. Mülberger, who proposed to cure the "housing shortage" of the new German industrial towns by turning the tenant into an owner — converting rent into the instalments of a purchase, so that every worker might in time possess his own cottage. Engels answered him in Part One; in Part Two he turned on the respectable bourgeois version of the same cure, the reform schemes of Dr. Emil Sax and the academic Kathedersozialisten — the professors' "socialism of the chair" — who hoped to quiet the social question with better sanitation and building societies; and in Part Three, provoked by a reply, he came back to Mülberger once more. The present edition — Marx and Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Progress Publishers, Moscow — prints the whole polemic with the notes of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, and it belongs to the moment just after the Paris Commune when Marx and Engels were fighting to clear Proudhon's inheritance out of the young workers' movement.
The book's strength is that it refuses to treat housing misery as a housing problem. To the reformers the shortage was a scandal to be abated by philanthropy and by-laws; Engels shows it to be a product — the necessary by-product of the headlong rush of capital and population into the industrial town. The famous pages on what he christened "Haussmann" have lost none of their edge. After the prefect who drove Napoleon III's boulevards through working-class Paris, Engels meant by the word "the practice, which has now become general, of making breaches in the working-class quarters of our big cities"; and he saw exactly what such improvement accomplishes. The slums, he wrote, "are not abolished; they are merely shifted elsewhere" — the same necessity that bred them in one place breeds them in the next. It is a description of every "urban renewal" and every wave of gentrification since. Just as sharp is his demolition of the home-owning cure. Give the worker his cottage, Engels answers Mülberger, and you have not freed him but re-chained him: his wage will simply fall by what he no longer pays in rent, so that "the worker would pay rent for his own house, but not, as formerly, in money to the houseowner, but in unpaid labour to the factory owner for whom he works." The little house becomes a fetter binding him to his employer and his town. Behind all of it stands the thesis Engels states without hedging: "only by the solution of the social question, that is, by the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, is the solution of the housing question made possible."
That same single-mindedness is the book's limitation. Engels is so determined to deny that housing is a "special" question standing on its own that he can sound as though he holds every partial reform in contempt — as though a drain laid or an eviction stayed were a distraction from the real fight rather than a thing that keeps people alive while the fight goes on. The polemic against Sax is often a polemic against palliatives as such, and the later socialists who built and defended council housing, rent controls and tenants' unions were doing necessary work that this text does not quite know how to value. And when Engels turns from diagnosis to cure he is airily brief. He assures Mülberger that there are "already" enough dwellings in the big cities "to remedy immediately all real 'housing shortage'" if only they were used judiciously — as if the problem were essentially one of distribution. The century that followed, capitalist and socialist alike, would show that industrial modernity generates an absolute shortfall of decent housing on a scale no redistribution of existing rooms could close: the shortage he thought a matter of rational allocation turned out to demand building on a heroic scale. His confidence that the antithesis of town and country was ripe for abolition carries the same forward-lean as the parliamentary optimism of his last years — the sense that the solution stood nearer than it did.
Which is just where this small book turns its uncomfortable face toward the state that canonised it. For Engels did name a first, transitional measure, and named it precisely: the shortage could be relieved at once "through the expropriation of the present owners by quartering in their houses homeless workers or workers overcrowded in their present homes. As soon as the proletariat has won political power," he added, such a measure would be on the order of the day. In the winter of 1917–18 the Bolsheviks did exactly this. They requisitioned the apartments of the propertied and moved worker families into them — the policy of uplotnenie, "consolidation," that produced the kommunalka, the communal flat in which several families shared one kitchen and one corridor. As an emergency act of a revolution besieged, blockaded and starving, it was defensible, and it was Engels's own prescription carried out to the letter. The betrayal lay in what came after. The kommunalka was meant as a measure of transition; it became a way of life for generations, the shared kitchen and the decades-long waiting list the ordinary Soviet experience of home. The state that reprinted Engels on the housing question with such care presided over one of the longest housing shortages of the modern age — while its own note to this very work singles out "the abolition of the antithesis between town and country" as the text's prophetic core. That antithesis the Soviet state did not abolish but entrenched: the internal passport and the propiska, the residence permit, bound a citizen to a place, and for four decades the collective-farm peasant was denied a passport altogether and could not lawfully leave for the town. The promise was printed; the queue was lived; and no note in the volume lets the one look at the other.
None of this is an argument against Engels; it is the measure of the distance between his text and its canonisers. The revolutionary current that Trotsky founded read the Soviet housing failure where Engels's own method points — not as proof that the analysis was wrong but as the mark of a revolution first isolated and then usurped. A backward country forced to industrialise at breakneck speed drew tens of millions into the cities faster than any regime could house them — Engels's period of "housing shortage" written across a continent — and a bureaucracy that chose heavy industry and its own privileged apartments over ordinary dwellings turned scarcity into a system. The Revolution Betrayed, and Ernest Mandel after it, located the failure there, in backwardness and bureaucratic usurpation, and not in any original fault of the October revolution. Read so, the living book is easy to recover. Its refusal to mistake home-ownership for freedom speaks straight to a capitalism that now disciplines whole populations through the mortgage; its account of "Haussmann" names the class content of every glittering redevelopment; and its central insight — that the housing question is reproduced by the mode of production and cannot be solved inside it — is confirmed, not refuted, by a century in which neither the market nor the bureaucracy that betrayed the revolution could house the people decently. Engels wrote against those who promised to solve the housing question without touching the order that produces it. That is still the promise on offer, and this is still the answer to it.