Housing Problem

Why do the houses where workers live collapse at the slightest tremor? Despite the fact that epidemics caused by the poor living in unhealthy conditions also affect capital owners, why can these conditions not be rectified? Why can flood disasters in large cities not be prevented? Is it a revolutionary demand for everyone to own the house they live in?

In this work, Friedrich Engels discusses how social problems stemming from the capitalist mode of production should be approached, by examining the reasons why attempts to solve the housing problem concerning workers by petty-bourgeois socialism, represented by Proudhon, and philanthropic bourgeois were doomed to fail.

Although Proudhon's influence on the European labor movement had significantly diminished by the time the work was written, Engels, foreseeing that the approach of seeking solutions to social problems within the system would gain strength again, complements Karl Marx's critique of Proudhon in his book The Poverty of Philosophy with The Housing Question.
"It is enough for me to be able to prove that the production of our modern society is capable of providing all members of society with sufficient food, and that there are enough houses to temporarily provide comfortable and healthy housing for the working masses. To speculate on how a future society will arrange the distribution of food and housing directly leads to utopia."