The Reconstruction of Moscow

& the heads of, the poor. If the population of .great cities is too dense in general, it is they in particular who are packed into the least space. As though the vitiated atmosphere of the streets were not enough,, they are penned in dozens into single rooms, so that the air which they breathe at night is enough in itself to stifle them. They are given damp dwellings, cellar dens that are not waterproof from below, or garrets that leak from above. Their houses are so built that the clammy air cannot escape."* In his preliminary notes for The Holy Family (1844) Marx wrote concerninig the housing conditions of the workers under capitalism: "Man returns to the cave dwelling, which is now,, however, poisoned Ipy the mephitic, pestilential air of civilization, in which, moreover, he only dwells precariously, a foreign power which can slip away from him any day, out of which he can be thrown any day if he does not pay. He must pay for this- death house. The sunny dwelling, which Aeschylus has Prometheus call one of the great -gifts by which he made a savage a man, ceases to exist for the worker." ** ■ , Marx's scathing and trenchant criticism of bourgeois society in his immortal Capital also treats of the fright- ful housing conditions of the workers under capitalism. In the Draft and Explanation of the Program of the Social-Democratic Party which Lenin compiled in prison in 1895-96, he wrote the following on the impoverishment

* Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. ** Marx-Engels, Collected Works, Vol. Ill, Book 1, p. 128, German ed.

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