/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

It's time someone said it: Engels was dead wrong in "on the housing question", especially in a US context.

<During the 1870s, a major polemical debate unfolded in Germany’s worker/democratic press on the shortage of housing available to workers in major industrial centres. The influx and increase of the proletariat created a housing crisis. On June 26 1872, Engels contributed the first of a series of articles to the Volksstaat, entitled “The Housing Question.” The last appeared on February 22 1873. Engels’ central point was that the revolutionary class policy of the proletariat cannot be replaced by a policy of reforms, because "it is not that the solution of the housing question simultaneously solves the social question, but that 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." The series criticizes Proudhonism (and petty-bourgeois socialism in general, including Lassalleanism). It also discusses things like the nature of the State, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the eradication of the antithesis between town and country, the solution of the agrarian problem, forms of the socialist reconstruction of society and the tasks of the proletarian party.

Engels argued against other socialists like Proudhon and Emil Sax who argued that widespread working class home ownership was the solution to the housing crisis. Engels actually classified Sax's scheme as "bourgeois socialism" because it aimed state intervention at ameliorating class consciousness without altering overall class relations that much, by "bourgeois-fying" the proletariat through home ownership.

Engels denies that workers even want land and also thinks that if workers owned houses the bourgeoisie will just lower their wages by the amount of the rent they no longer have to pay.

In his haste to prove these non revolutionary class reconciliation schemes can't work and only socialist revolution can actually resolve the contradictions of housing under capitalism. Perhaps that it true in the long run, but that may be centuries. Engels concedes, essentially, that working class homeowners, while not capitalist, are also non proletarian:

>Capital is the command over the unpaid labor of others. The house of the worker can only become capital therefore if he rents it to a third person and appropriates a part of the labor product of this third person in the form of rent. By the fact that the worker lives in it himself the house is prevented from becoming capital, just as a coat ceases to be capital the moment I buy it from the tailor and put it on. The worker who owns a little house to the value of a thousand talers is certainly no longer a proletarian, but one must be Dr. Sax to call him a capitalist.

Engels, with all due respect, was wrong. Yes, it is true that workers who own their homes are not capitalists (unless they become landlords), but it is equally telling that Engels does not address the fact that workers can and frequently do sell their houses at an enormous markup from the price at which they bought them. It is this mechanism that allows them to realize the surplus value expropriated in exchange through ground rent. While the house itself may be a normal commodity, the land underneath it, is not.

Engel’s example of a coat does not apply to land or a house of land (“a coat ceases to be capital the moment I buy it from the tailor and put it on”). Yes, that is because a coat does not typically appreciate in value and get resold. A coat has no future income stream while a plot of land does (expected cash flow from ground-rent). While land produces no value it does enter a circuit of capital, specifically fictitious capital, the term Marx uses for things like stocks, bonds, and land titles. Fictitious capital creates no new value at all in the transaction itself; the gain is a redistribution of already-existing social surplus value toward whoever holds the title when the capitalized rent happens to rise, funneled through rising expected future rents. That's precisely why aggregate "housing wealth" is close to zero-sum across society even though it feels like wealth creation to any individual seller: your gain is the next buyer's higher future cost of access, not a net addition to social product.

Engels doesn't name this class but I think it is most accurate to call it petit-rentier, or possibly something akin to a new gentry class. Essentially homeownership allows this class, either upon realizing the home price gains by selling the house or even through something like a home equity line of credit, to appropriate part of the total surplus value of society through this mechanism described above.

This is why home ownership is known to have an economic conservatizing effect, turning homeowners into single issue voters based on preserving the price of their home and/or increasing it. This is the origin of the stereotypical suburban NIMBY.

If this is true, the majority of citizens of western, especially English speaking nations are not proletarian, but not for the reason third worldists think.

In the US for example depending on how one defines it, somewhere between 52% and 65% of the population consists of homeowners (the latter number counts people who are members of homeowning household, even if not the homeowner themselves), which means even in the conservative case half the population has a reason to be reactionary which is hardly the basis for a mass movement, and in the worst case, around 2/3rds of the population isn't even proletarian.

Let's talk about "bourgeois socialism":

<The Marxist view is such that the bourgeois socialist is the sustainer of the state of bourgeois class relations. In The Principles of Communism, Friedrich Engels describes them as "so-called socialists" who only seek to remove the evils inherent in capitalist society while maintaining the existing society often relying on methods, such as welfare systems and grandiose claims of social reform. Opinions vary as to whether if bourgeois socialist is actively protecting or intentionally excusing the current order, but the common thread is that they are in objective fact preserving it. Rather than abolishing social class divisions, they wish to simply raise everyone up to be a member of the bourgeoisie to allow everyone the ability to endlessly accumulate capital without a working class.

I've reached a conclusion that is as disturbing to orthodox Marxists as it is to right wingers; which is that the United States is ALREADY SOCIALIST. That is to say by Engelsian standards it has been successfully practicing a form of bourgeois socialism at least since the new deal if not even sooner, and in fact the United States and other countries went far, far further in terms of state intervention than men like Emil Sax ever envisioned.

>Sax's proposal, in its own terms: private savings-and-loan-style building societies letting individual workers purchase homes through installment/deferred payment, financed by workers' own accumulated savings and modest capital, not government funds. Its stated political purpose, per Sax's own words that Engels quoted specifically to expose it, was to bind workers to the soil and defuse the dangerous confusion of ideas and proletarian bitterness threatening the social order. Privately financed, operating on existing urban land within existing city limits.

The new deal era US took something very similar and backed it with state power by creating a federal housing administration that backed loans made by private banks, and also heavily subsidized highway (and other) infrastructure to make these far flung suburbs made of detached single family homes accessible by automobile.

The 19th century homesteader fufilling Jeffreson's ideal of the yeoman farmer was only possible after the land was cleared of the natives by the military and gifted by the federal government 40 acres at a time. But the myth of the individualist settler winning the west persisted because that intervention was largely invisible and it appeared that success or failure was up to the individual settler or family's ability to farm a small plot of land.

Similarly there is a genius of the federal subsidization of suburbia, without which large swathes of the population would never be able to live in large detached single family homes as the level of property tax to support transportation, etc. infrastructure to support this would be unimaginably high. To be self sustaining without federal support, property taxes would likely have to raise 30-40% even just to maintain current suburbs let alone build greenfield ones, and other estimates are far, far, far higher.

But to the individual mcmansion owner it appears that their quality of life is entirely their own doing or due to simple market forces causing their houses to appreciate in value. The state driven origins of their prosperity are laundered, unlike social welfare which is clearly perceived as direct transfer payments. What market oriented YIMBYs get wrong is not that this is a form of state intervention into capitalism that is "inefficient" by neoliberal standards, but that without this, towns and cities without 1920s levels of density would either have to densify or fail financially. That would be equivalent to reproletarianizing the petit rentier class, which would essentially be the end of american bourgeois socialism and stripping asset ownership from masses of the working class population would also destroy the lack of class conflict the US has "enjoyed" since the end of the 1940s.