Friedrich Engels’s pamphlet, The Housing Question, published in 1872, is astonishingly prescient. In it, he analyses the root causes of housing inequality and its endemic relationship to the capitalist system. He describes the squalid slums of the Victorian working class, breeding grounds for disease and early death.

One hundred fifty years on, COVID has been referred to by a Labour councilor in Newham as “a housing disease” because of how it disproportionately affected his borough, the one with the most overcrowded homes in the UK. In the aftermath of the fifth anniversary of the Grenfell atrocity and the ending of the public inquiry, Engels’s concept of “social murder” continues to echo down the years. In 1872, as now, there was what Engels calls a “so-called housing shortage,” by which he doesn’t mean that housing scarcity was an illusion but that, in the more recent words of Herbert Marcuse, “the housing crisis doesn’t exist because the system isn’t working. It exists because that’s the way the system works.”

Engels wrote the pamphlet in a period of sociopolitical volatility comparable with today. The 1870s brought huge industrial and technological development but also deepening class tensions, reflected in the rapid growth of increasingly militant trade unionism. These forces were accentuated by a war in Europe, between Prussia and France, which led to the Paris Commune, an inspirational landmark in working-class history.