On Engles' approach to the Housing Question

“As the wage worker in relation to the capitalist, so is the tenant in relation to the house owner.” [Mülberger in Der Volkstaat February 10 1872]

This is totally untrue.

In the housing question we have two parties confronting each other: the tenant and the landlord or house owner. The former wishes to purchase from the latter the temporary use of a dwelling; he has money or credit, even if he has to buy this credit from the house owner himself at a usurious price as an addition to the rent. It is simple commodity sale; it is not an operation between proletarian and bourgeois, between worker and capitalist. The tenant – even if he is a worker – appears as a man with money; he must already have sold his own particular commodity, his labour power, in order to appear with the proceeds as the buyer of the use of a dwelling, or he must be in a position to give a guarantee of the impending sale of this labour power. The peculiar results which attend the sale of labour power to the capitalist are completely absent here. The capitalist causes the purchased labour power firstly to produce its own value and secondly to produce a surplus value which remains in his hands for the time being, subject to its distribution among the capitalist class. In this case therefore an extra value is produced, the total sum of the existing value is increased. In the rent transaction the situation is quite different. No matter how much the landlord may overreach the tenant it is still only a transfer of already existing, previously produced value, and the total sum of values possessed by the landlord and the tenant together remains the same after as it was before. The worker is always cheated of a part of the product of his labour, whether that labour is paid for by the capitalist below, above, or at its value.

The tenant, on the other hand, is cheated only when he is compelled to pay for the dwelling above its value. It is, therefore, a complete misrepresentation of the relation between landlord and tenant to attempt to make it equivalent to the relation between worker and capitalist. On the contrary, we are dealing here with a quite ordinary commodity transaction between two citizens, and this transaction proceeds according to the economic laws which govern the sale of commodities in general and in particular the sale of the commodity, land property. The building and maintenance costs of the house, or of the part of the house in question, enters first of all into the calculation; the land value, determined by the more or less favourable situation of the house, comes next; the state of the relation between supply and demand existing at the moment is finally decisive.

well, first, Engles is correct in insisting that Volkstaat's assertion is totally untrue. A distinction must be made between the owner-worker relationship and the supplier-consumer relationship. A landlord-tenant relationship is the latter kind of relationship (despite the materially real aspect of the landlord being an "owner"). For example, a capitalist factory owner has employees/workers whom he exploits. However, he may also be a tenant of the factory that he owns. Often the petit bourgeois will not own the buildings they conduct business in and thus resort to this tenant-capitalist status (boutique owners is another good example - again, purely PETIT bourgeois). Additionally, owners and workers alike can be consumers, but only owners can be suppliers. Thus, there is a relationship between the owner-worker dynamic and the supplier-consumer dynamic, but they are not at all parallel.

The tenant is still exploited, as all consumers ultimately are, because the price they pay for the privilege of having housing is inflated in order for the landlord to accumulate surplus value.  However, the resources that the tenant receives to pay the rent can be from their productive work as a proletarian worker, or from their exploitation of workers as an owner, or even from casino-capitalist market-speculation, which is its own form of meta-exploitation, exploiting both owners and workers.

The key here is that these relations of production are nuanced.  It's been said that the one power the proletariat is granted under the capitalist system is the choice to spend their wages wherever they want.  This is, of course, at best naive conceptualization for the capacity for change that conscious consumptions holds.  However, it is relevant to this conversation as it does inform the discourse on the supplier-consumer relationship.

- Frederick Engles the Housing Question

Engles is correct in insisting that Volkstaat's assertion is totally untrue. A distinction must be made between the owner-worker relationship and the supplier-consumer relationship. A landlord-tenant relationship is the latter kind of relationship (despite the materially real aspect of the landlord being an "owner"). For example, a capitalist factory owner has employees/workers whom he exploits. However, he may also be a tenant of the factory that he owns. Often the petit bourgeois will not own the buildings they conduct business in and thus resort to this tenant-capitalist status (boutique owners is another good example - again, purely PETIT bourgeois). Additionally, owners and workers alike can be consumers, but only owners can be suppliers. Thus, there is a relationship between the owner-worker dynamic and the supplier-consumer dynamic, but they are not at all parallel.