22
PARTISAN REVIEW
kind. He is evidently superior to socialism as a political movement.
This bias appears in his incapacity to understand the simplest
socialist
st~tements
of the same problems. In criticism of Engels on
the housing question, he writes that Engels "not merely opposed
all
'palliative' measures to provide better housing for the working classes,"
but held "the iI1nocent notion that the problem would be solved even–
tually for the proletariat by a revolutionary seizure of the commodious
quarters occupied by the bourgeoisie," quarters which Mr. Mumford
in his boundless sympathy with the masses rejects as "intolerable
superslums." He calls Engels' proposal "merely an impotent gesture
of revenge," while his own solution- "increasing the amount of hous–
ing, equipment and communal facilities"- he considers to be "far
more revolutionary in its demands than any trifling expropriation of
the quarters occupied by the rich would be," for it "demanded a revo–
lutionary reconstruction of the entire social environment-such a
reconstruction as we are on the brink of to-day."
Let us leave him on the brink and read what Engels actually
wrote in 1872 in answer to the Mumfords of his day.
"How a s()cial revolution would solve this problem (of housing)
depends not only on thl': conditions at the time, but also on much more
far-reaching questions among which the abolition of the .antagonism
of city and country is one of the most essential. But since we are not
designing a utopian system for setting up the future society, it would
be more than idle to go into such questions. But this much is certain,
that there exist in the great cities enough dwellings which if rationally
used would satisfy the actual need for shelter."
It is evident that Engels did not regard the division of existing space
as the "eventual solution," but only as an immediate step and part
of a more general expro.priation. Like other socialists of his time he
foresaw the ruralized city as the real locus of the solution. The criti–
cism of palliatives was not a rejection of all improvements in building
-as Mumford would have his readers believe- but an assertion of the
impossibility of solving the housing problem of the masses under cap–
italism, an assertion which Mumford now repeats in this book. But
whereas Engels also observed the role of philanthropic housing projects
in dulling the worker's insight into his social experience, and the mil–
itary and class functions of the city-planning of his time, and there–
fore warned the worker against them, Mumford continues like
his
forebears of the 70's to promote the illusions.
If
he states again and
again that to posit these ideals of housing is to demand a revolution,
he repeats no less often that the revolution has already begun, that
we are on the brink of basic socialism since Radburn, New Jersey, has
been completed. But even here he straddles, and reveals his underlying
