Abolition of the antithesis between town and country

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(In last month's Monthly Review, which I have just taken a look at, there's
a review of Mike Davis's "Dead Cities". As most of you know, I strongly
identify with his belief that large cities like Los Angeles are
unsustainable. The review alludes to Engels's "On the Housing Question",
which is an extended polemic with Proudhon on the housing shortage. In Part
3, Engels has a formulation that pretty much epitomizes what I have been
saying about such questions on the Internet for some time. It is also what
John Bellamy Foster has been saying in print publications. Nothing about
this is a departure from classical Marxist thought.)

The abolition of the antithesis between town and country is no more and no
less utopian than the abolition of the antithesis between capitalists and
wage workers. From day to day it is becoming more and more a practical
demand of both industrial and agricultural production. No one has demanded
this more energetically then Liebig in his writings on the chemistry of
agriculture, in which his first demand has always been that man shall give
back to the land what he takes from it, and in which he proves that only
the existence of the towns, and in particular the big towns, prevents this.
When one observes how here in London alone a greater quantity of manure
than is produced by the whole kingdom of Saxony is poured away every day
into the sea with an expenditure of enormous sums, and when one observes
what colossal works are necessary in order to prevent this manure from
poisoning the whole of London, then the utopian proposal to abolish the
antithesis between town and country is given a peculiarly practical basis.
And even comparatively insignificant Berlin has been wallowing in its own
filth for at least thirty years.

On the other hand, it is completely utopian to want, like Proudhon, to
transform present-day bourgeois society while maintaining the peasant as
such. Only as uniform a distribution as possible of the population over the
whole country, only an integral connection between industrial and
agricultural production together with the thereby necessary extension of
the means of communication-presupposing the abolition of the capitalist
mode of production-would be able to save the rural population from the
isolation and stupor in which it has vegetated almost unchanged for
thousands of years. It is not utopian to declare that the emancipation of
humanity from the chains which its historic past has forged will only be
complete when the antithesis between town and country has been abolished;
the utopia begins when one undertakes "from existing conditions" to
prescribe the form in which this or any other of the antitheses of
present-day society is to be solved. And this is what Mulberger does by
adopting the Proudhonist formula for the solution of the housing question.

full: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/housing-question/ch03.htm


Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org