送交者: apate 于 2005-4-24, 21:01:22:
回答: 他山之石，可以攻玉--一个抑制房价上涨的方法 由 吴聊 于 2005-4-24, 14:08:28:
In reality the bourgeoisie has only one method of solving the housing question after its fashion-that is to say, of solving it in such a way that the solution continually reproduces the question anew. This method is called “Haussmann.”
By the term “Haussmann” I do not mean merely the specifically Bonapartist manner of the Parisian Haussmann – breaking long, straight and broad streets through the closely-built workers’ quarters and erecting big luxurious buildings on both sides of them, the intention thereby, apart from the strategic aim of making barricade fighting more difficult, being also to develop a specifically Bonapartist building trades’ proletariat dependent on the government and to turn the city into a pure luxury city. By “Haussmann” I mean the practice which has now become general of making breaches in the working class quarters of our big towns, and particularly in those which are centrally situated, quite apart from whether this is done from considerations of public health and for beautifying the town, or owing to the demand for big centrally situated business premises, or owing to traffic requirements, such as the laying down of railways, streets, etc. No matter how different the reasons may be, the result is everywhere the same: the scandalous alleys and lanes disappear to the accompaniment of lavish self-praise from the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but they appear again immediately somewhere else and often in the immediate neighborhood.
In The Condition of the Working Class in England I gave a description of Manchester as it looked in 1843 and 1844. Since then the construction of railways through the centre of the town, the laying out of new streets, and the erection of great public and private buildings have broken through, laid bare and improved some of the worst districts described in my book, others have been abolished altogether, but many of them are still, apart from the fact that official sanitary inspection has since become stricter, in the same state or in an even worse state of dilapidation than they were then. On the other hand, however, thanks to the enormous extension of the town, whose population has increased since then by more than half, districts which were at that time still airy and clean are now just as excessively built upon, just as dirty and overcrowded as the most ill-famed parts of the town formerly were.
Here is just one example: On page 80 and the following pages of my book I describe a group of houses situated in the valley bottom of the river Medlock, which under the name of Little Ireland was for years one of the worst blots on Manchester. Little Ireland has long ago disappeared and on its site there now stands a railway station built on a high foundation. The bourgeoisie printed with pride to the happy and final abolition of Little Ireland as to a great triumph. Now last summer a great inundation took place, as in general the rivers embanked in our big towns cause extensive floods year after year owing to easily understood causes. And it was then revealed that Little Ireland had not been abolished at all, but had simply been shifted from the south side of Oxford Road to the north side, and that it still continues to flourish. Let us hear what the Manchester Weekly Times, the organ of the radical bourgeoisie of Manchester, has to say in its number of July 20, 1872:
“The misfortune which befell the inhabitants of the lower valley of the Medlock last Saturday will, it is to be hoped, have one good result: namely that public attention will be directed to the obvious mockery of all the laws of hygiene which has been tolerated there so long under the noses of our municipal officials and our municipal health committee. A forcible article in our daily edition yesterday revealed, though hardly trenchantly enough, the scandalous condition of some of the cellar dwellings near Charles Street and Brook Street which were reached by the floods. A detailed examination of one of the courts mentioned in this article enables us to confirm all the statements made about them, and to declare that the cellar dwellings in this court should long ago have been closed down, or rather, they should never have been tolerated as human habitations. Squire’s Court is made up of seven or eight dwelling houses on the corner of Charles Street and Brook Street. Even at the lowest part of Brook Street, under the railway bridge, a pedestrian may pass daily and never dream that human beings are living under his feet in what are little more than caves. The court itself is hidden from public view and is accessible only to those who are compelled by their impoverishment to seek a shelter in its sepulchral seclusion. Even if the usually stagnant waters of the Medlock, which are shut in between locks, do not exceed their usual level, the floors of these dwellings can hardly be more than a few inches above the surface of the river. A good shower of rain is capable of driving up filthy and nauseous water through the drains and filling the rooms with pestilential gases such as every flood leaves behind it as a souvenir....
“Squire’s Court lies at a still lower level than the uninhabited cellars of the houses in Brook Street-twenty feet lower than the street level, and the foul water driven up on Saturday through the drains reached to the roofs. We knew this and therefore expected that we should find the place uninhabited or occupied only by the sanitary officials engaged in cleaning the stinking walls and disinfecting the houses. Instead of this we saw a man, in the cellar home of a barber, engaged in shoveling a heap of decomposing filth, which lay in a corner, onto a wheelbarrow. The barber, whose cellar was already more or less cleaned up, sent us still lower down to a number of dwellings about which he declared that, if he could write, he would have written to the press to demand that they be closed down. And so finally we came to Squire’s Court where we found a buxom and healthy-looking Irishwoman busy at the washtub. She and her husband, a night watchman, had lived for six years in the court and had a numerous family.... In the house which they had just left, the water had risen almost to the roof, the windows were broken and the furniture was reduced to ruins. The man declared that the occupant of the house had been able to keep the smells from becoming intolerable only by whitewashing it every two months.... In the inner court, into which our correspondent then went, he found three houses whose rear walls abutted on the rear walls of the houses just described. Two of these three houses were inhabited. The smell there was so frightful that the healthiest man would have felt sick in a very short space of time.... This disgusting hole was inhabited by a family of seven, all of whom had slept in the place on Thursday evening (the first day the water rose). Or rather, not slept, as the woman immediately corrected herself, for she and her husband had vomited continually the greater part of the night owing to the terrible smell. On Saturday they had been compelled to wade through the water, chest high, to carry out their children. She was of the opinion that the place was not fit for pigs to live in, but on account of the low rent – one and sixpence a week – she had taken it, because her husband had been out of work a lot recently owing to sickness. The impression made upon the observer by this court and the inhabitants huddled in it, as though in a premature grave, was one of utter helplessness. We must point out, by the way, that, according to our observations, Squire’s Court is no more than typical – though perhaps an extreme case – of many other places in the neighborhood whose continued existence our health committee should not countenance. Should the committee permit these places to be inhabited in the future then it is taking on itself a responsibility whose gravity we shall not discuss further here, and it is exposing the whole neighborhood to the danger of infectious epidemics.” [Retranslated from the German.-Ed.]
This is a striking example of how the bourgeoisie solves the housing question in practice. The breeding places of disease, the infamous holes and cellars in which the capitalist mode of production confines our workers night after night, are not abolished; they are merely shifted elsewhere! The same economic necessity which produced them in the first place, produces them in the next place also. As long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist, it is folly to hope for an isolated solution of the housing question or of any other social question affecting the fate of the workers. The solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the means of life and labor by the working class itself.