4

HI~NI{I LI~FI~BVI{I~
THE URBAN REVOLUTION

IrJ:J'umalraces
WiUl gba.:ft~y spaces
Tbat IlO beart can .see
FillQ otber
place.s:
Here you can r t be,
YoU 1rl11\.IIIIall faces
--Fran~oi$ Habe~ai::;, oerseatue Bd Pa;t-agI'ue~

Growil..g Pa .ns and Hege~

It's amazing to think that Henri Lefebvre belonged
pretty much to the same generation as Walter Benjamn.
He was not quite nine years younger, yet lived for over
forty years longer. Benjamn was hesitant, melancholy,
and German; Lefebvre was confident, exuberant, and
French. Benjamin's Marxism was introverted, tragic,
messianic, and Iewish; Lefebvre's was extroverted, play
fui. festive, and Catholic. And yet, despite these differ
ences, their Marxist urbanism had a lot in cornmon:
each affirmed the world of minutiae, was fascinated by
cornmodities, by surrealism, and had a desire to ground
Marxism, to malee it more graphic, more dialecticaUy
concrete-an everyday urban affar, Each dearly loved
Paris, too--ambiguities and a1I. Benjamin knew of
Lefebvre, having read bis 1936 book La Conscience
Mystifie, which was coauthored with Norbert
Guterman. Lefebvre would've probably heard of
Benjamn, something of a rising star in European criti
cal and literary cirdes.
Yet there's no record of the two actuaUy meeting,
mutual acquaintances notwithstanding. even though
fuey were once in the same spot at the same time
Marseilles, in 1940. Both were then on the run, fleeing

the Nazi oeeupation of Pars. Benjamin, as we saw, intended to go west, to New York,
but never rnade it across the French/Spansh border. Lefebvre had found refuge for
awhile teaching at a lyee in Saint-Etienne. That was until the pro-Nazi Vichy ~ove_m
ment ordered the arrest of allleftist sympathizers. So Lefebvremoved first to his child

hood horne of Navarrenx, near Pau, in southwest France, before later joining the
resistance movement around Marseilles and Ax-en-Provence. He wrote stinging cri
tiques of Vichy for several cornmunist pamph1ets, helped derail ene~y train~, s~iffed
out collaborators, loitered in Marseilles' CafMirabeau with other reststants, dissdents
and intellectuals, and kept the red flagflying.Thus began alife of action and thought,
alife that would somehow alwaysbe lived on the run, alwayssornewhere in between,
often between Paris and the countryside.
Lefebvrewas once asked, in the late 1970s,whether in fact he was really an anarchist. "No;' he was reported to have said."I'm a Marxist, of course ... so that one day
we can a11become anarchists!'" It's a nice reply,elusive and playfu1,typical of someone
who proc1aimedhimself the last French Marxist. But there were al~ays.une~ec~ed
twists and turns to Lefebvre'sMarxism and Marxist urbanisrn, fitting given bis life
long desire-his life spanned almost the entire twentieth century (1901-199~)-to
make Marxism less dogmatic and more spatial, and cities more rornannc and
vibrant. Not only was his life long, it was also rieh and adventurous. He Lived
through two World Wars, drunk wine and coffee with leading Da~ists an~ surre
alists (likeTristan 'Izara and Andr Breton), participated in the Phtlosophes journal,
became an ever reluctant Communist Party and ex-Communist Party man
(expelled for "ideological deviations" in 1958,yet rejoining the flock during the
1970s).He did a stint drivinga cab in Paris, and taughtsociology and philosophy at
72 numerous French universities. ineludirlg those at Strasbourg anc Paris-Nanterre.
Meanwhile, he translated and helped introduce G. W. F. Hegel's thought into
Prance, and developed a whole body of existentialist, dialectical Marxism that trans
formed "unhappy consciousness" into alienation; he sought erotic as well as rational
knowledge, love more than FiveYearPlans. He also wrote prolifically-over thre~ hun
dred articles and sixty books-on art, literature. and philosophy; on everydayMe; on
Marxism and dialectical method; and on urbanism and space. He was a staunch critic
o Stalinism from the very beginning, though this rejection of Soviet-style socialism
saw no reason to reject real socialism, nor Marxism, since both bore no necessary con
nection to that system anyway.In fact, Lefebvre rejected any systematic rendering of
Marxism; he never took it as a holy writ, and alwaysemphasized open-ended practice
as central to democratie socialismoFuliy developed irldividuality came about through
differentiated practice, not through drudge or routine, and differentiated practice was
only possible through a differential spaee, through one's "right to the city;' through an
"urban revolution."
Henri Lefebvre'sadolescence and naseent adulthood was scarred by the experienee of
war-the religious wars that long plagued Landes, his birth dpartement in the
Pyrenees-Atlantique, home of King Henri IV and scene of the "protestant" Catholicisrn

of Jansenism and Saint-Cyran; and the two World Wars. His part-Basque mother,
Jean~e, the wif~ ~f Ren Lefebvre,a Minstry of Finance bureaucrat, was devoudy
fanatically-i-relgous; Henri often spoke about her narrow, "almost Jansenist" faith.'
Lefebvre mocked bis homegrown religious upbringing years later in "Notes Written
One Sunday in the French Countryside," a breezy little amble through native pastures:
"O .HolyChurc~, for centuries you have tapped and accumulated every illusion, every
fiction, everyvam hope, every frustration,? Lefebvrenoted that in hs youth he "stud
ied the history of the Church in the hope of ferreting out a vintage heresy I could res
urrect, an indestructible, indigestible heresy with which to torpedo the Church.
Jansen's?Too dry, too ternbly eighteenth-century petty-bourgeois, and as far as bore
dom goes, bis Augustinus beats even [Thomas Acquinas's1 Summa Theologiae"
Lefebvresuffered from bis Jesuit education and from the wisdom that irnmediate
happiness and gratification had to be postponed, made subordinate to the promise of
abetter world to come. Moving to Pars in 1920,to study philosophy at the Sorboone,
was the first great liberaton-of the body as much as the mind. For years, religion
had crippled his physique, repressed him, made him sicklyand weak,and ashamed
ofbis tlesh. In Paris he grew strong, jettisoned a fewuniversal idols, and discovered
surreaJism,Dada. and Hegel, and that helped. But the two World Wars cast storm
clouds overthe philosopher's joumeyman studies and over the first half of the cen
tury."1 remember very well the upheaval,"he cornmented late in life,"the fear, the
break-up of families as people left, the hardships. The general suffering was borne
lightheartedly and concealed in all sorts of ways,such as dancing, rnusic, and going
to plays.Beneath that there was a deeper suffering on account of the dead and the
wounded. It's strange remembering that war and the one which followed, how
injuries and deaths were masked by a superficial ideology and a eertain gaiety 7D
beneath which suffering persisted. Those were terrible memories. For me, the
Second World War wasn't greatly different except that 1 was older and had a clearer
understanding of things."
Lefebvre stressed 1925 as a watershed year. It was "the crucial date," he remem
~red. "I would want to emphasize that, because it is passed over rather lighdy in the
history books. My memories of it are very precise. A room was hired in the Rue
Jacques-Cellot, near the Ecole des Beaux Arts, for a meeting between the
~urrealists... the 'Philosophes' group, and various other avant-garde groups like
Clart.' The modem revolution was created al that point. We imagined a differeot
economic system,a different socialbase, and a different State superstructure. What we
had was a revolutionary plan in place of the vague aspirations of the '14-'18 War and
o the immediate post-war pericd." That same fateful year, one night in winter,
Lefebvrealso went to visit Andr Breton at his studio near the Place Pigalle,on whose
tablesat Hegel's huge tome Logic: "Breton said to me: 'Read that first and then come
and see me!' He gaveme a brilliant expos of the Hegelian doctrine of Surrealism and
ofthe relationsbip between the real and the surreal, which was a diaJecticalone."
Lefebvre began to devour Hegel, who led him to Marx. Indeed, if Breton had
round in Hegel the bridge spanning the uneonscious world of Freud-the world of

dreams and the id-with

the awake real world of consciousness, Lefebvre instead
found Marx; the world of consciousness then transformed itself into conscious activity,
into wide-awake social practice.' At first, Lefebvre read Marx as a critique of religion.
Back then, he knew only the early Marx, the Marx of 1844, the left-wing Hegelian, not
the politicoeconomic Marx of Capitai. which he'd encounter lateroBack then, Lefeb:re
dragged Hegel ever doser toward Marx, and Marx toward He~el, staking out a nc~
Hegelian Marxism, one that saw Hegel as crucial for understanding Marx as the latter s
direct dialectical precursor.
Hegel spoke to Lefebvre's psychic impulses and no~rishe~ his ~aturing Ma~st
yearnings; Hegel helped Lefebvre synthesize each respective d~lve, re~lpro~ally ~nnch
ing them. Now Lefebvre. the fonner Catholic boy, could re~n ce~n existential and
spiritual motifs-not by reaching upward to the extraterrestrial terrain o: theolo~, but
by pulling these motifs down to earth, into the grubby human sphere,. mto sociology
and politics, deepening Marxist thought (especiall~ in.stituti~nal Mar~t ~~ught) "'
route. Lefebvre's ntellectual interest in Hegel coincided with the nation s nterest m
Hegel. The great idealist thinker was quite the rage in in:erwar Fran~e, enjoyin~ a
glittering renaissance, inspiring an array of intellectual circles, spanmng the entire
political spectrum from left to right, from Marxists and existentialists to.phe~om
enologists and Catholics.ln 1929, the philosopher lean Wahl put a Galhc spm on
Hegel's "unhappy consciousness" from the Phenomenology of Spirit; and Alexandre
Koyr and lean Hippolite Likewise became enthusiastic and s~~inal purveyo.rs. of
neo- Hegelianism, translating several important works of Hegel s m 1931 and gtvmg
brilliant seminars at the Sorbonne. Another seminar on Hegel's Phenomenology,
most enlightening to Lefebvre, was given by Alexandre Kojeve at the cole des
74 Hautes tudes between 1933 and 1939. Kojeve was a Marxisant Russian migr
who had studied in Germany. He focused not on unhappy consciousness but on
the section preceding it in Phenomenology: the "master-slave" (or "lordship and
bondage") dialectic. Kojeve's dasses were never widely attended, but a sparkling cohort
of thinkers diligendy sat in and took notes: psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, poet andos~r
realist Andr Breton, phenomenologist philosopher Maurice Merleau- Ponty, political
theorist Raymond Aren, writers George Bataille and Raymond Queneau, and, of
COUIse Henri Lefebvre.' Lefebvre met Kojeve on several occasions. They had a few
conversations together. "He knew Hegel and German philosophy better than 1 did,"
Lefebvre admitted. "But he drew no practical or political consequences from them. 11
was enough for him to know what Hegel thought. So that created a gulf b~tween ~.
Because, for me, Hegel's propositions about contradictions seemed interestmg only lf
they were applied to the present, to current events, to real society of the day and not to
that of the nineteenth-century."
Hegel insisted that all philosophy, thought, and history hinged on "dialectical
movement," where categories of the mind and reality exist in "immanent unity:'
Hegelian history is an immense epic of the mind striving for unity, attempting to free
itself from itself. Prom a starting point purified of every "formal" or "emprical" pre
supposition, Hegel' s Phenomenology generates the objective world as a wholly interna!

rnovernent of the mind, the mind overcoming itself in a series of theses, antitheses,
and syntheses, "Consciousness itself," noted Hegel, "is the absolute diakcticaJ unrest.
this medley of sensuous and ntellectual representations whose differences coincide:
and whose identity is equally again dissolved.?" Unity here is the unity of contradic
tion, of looking the negative in the face and living with it. Without contradictions,
everything is void, nothingness. Contradictions are a bit like internal combustion,
inces~tly devo~ring themselves, uprooting being from itself, animating becoming,
promotmg both life and the annihilation of life.
Koieve dug his clawls into contradiction. The "awareness of amtradiaion'' he said,
"is what moves human, historical evolution. To beco me aware of a contradiction is
necessarily to want to remove it. Now, one can in fact overcome the contradiction of a
given existence only by modifyng the given exstence, by transforming it through
Action." Contradiction, specifically the contradiction between master and slave, lay at
the heart of Kojeve's reading of Hegel: "Man was born and History began," he main
tained, "with the first Fight that ended in the appearance of a Master and a Slave"
(43). Universal history-the history of human interaction with other humans and
with nature--is "the history of the interaction between warlike Masters and working Slaves," (One doesn't need a lot of imagination to see what Marx got from this!)
Human history, for Hegel, ceases once this difference-this opposition, this con
tradiction-between
master and slave ceases. Still, liberation necessitated a fight, a ~
"bloody Pight," with risk to life and limb, taking hold as a "struggle for ~
Recognition," a "dialectic of the Particular and the Universal in human existence." ~
On the one hand, the slave can't be content with attributing a value to himself
(D
alone. He wants his particular value, his own worth, to be recognzed by every
o~e-that is, unversally, and aboye all by the master, who won't deign to recognize 75
him. On the other hand, the master likewise yeams for universality, but similarly
can't have it so long as he oppresses his other, the slave, who won't acknowledge the
master's authority.
Hence an inextricable antinorny ensues, "two opposed shapes of consciousness,"
according to Hegel in Phenomenology: "one is the independent consciousness whose
essential nature is to be for itself the other is the dependent consciousness whose
essential nature is simply to live or to be for another" (115). The master and slave sit on
~ther side of the fence. But tbey can recognize themselves only by mutually recogniz
mg one another. So long as the master is opposed to the slave, so long as mastery and
slavery exist, Kojve notes, "the synthesis of the Particular and the Universal cannot be
~,and
human existen ce will never be 'satisfied'" (58). Hegel thought this coo
ftictual and contradictory history would actuaUy come to an end with the advent of the
liberal bourgeois state. Then, personal and individual value would be recognized in its
particularity while becoming incarnated universally, in the state, thus resolving the
particular-universal
contradiction,
transcending the rnastery-slavery dialectic.
Needless to say, Marx and Lefebvre (and Kojeve) had a hard time swaUowing Hegel's
liberal state medicine. Nevertheless, ther followed Hegel in believing tbat real human
individuality-real human freedom-was predicated on overcoming fragmented con-

sciousness and fragmented life, and on synthesizing particularity and universality. It

was crucial for individual and social well being, Free development of each, they knew,
is the condition for the free development of all,just as the free development of all is the

condition for the deve10pment of each, Kojeve summarized the dialectical dilemma,
using' crypto-Marxist terminology:
[W]bat ill recogl:ized uriverllally,
lIastery

by tne otners; by tile state,

al! sucn, il! nct; Work, ncr tbe worker':; 'persona1.ity,'

by
but,

at bellt tile imper:;onal.product of' work. AlIl.ong as tbe 5l.ave worka

wbil.e rellainll:g
risk bia lire,

a 5lave,

tbe ::Iocial. lif'e,

orar

particuJ.ar;
1.e.

la to lIay, as l.Ollgas be doel! not;

aa 1.011gas tJe doea ncu Ugbt to ilDpol!ebh penonal.

val.ue en tbe state,

he ia tbe

tbat

al! lOllg as tle does not activel.y

tJ1::IparticuJ.ar

ene to recognize i t.

118:1ter, Arld tnat

irl

Hence bia val.ue ls urJique~;y

tbe ::IynttJelli8 of' tiJe partieuJ.ar

Indlvidua1.ity--l::1

interverle

val.ue rellaula purel.y ::IubJective:

110llore realized

and tbe Univerl!al.--

ln tbe Slave tban il: tbe

1lI wby--oJlce Dlore--tbe aylltbeal::1 oC partieuJ.ar1t.y

arld Univera8l.i ty ir, Individuality,

whieb alone can truJ.y 'i:lati::lCy'

lIan, caro be real.ized

on1.y in arld by 8 :lYlltbetic 'overeollling'

lIutery

(60; eDlptJaai:liv tile orig1nal)

arld Slavery.

oC

lndividuality, for Kojeve--as for Lefebvre and Marx-meant a unity of the indi
vidual and society,of workers with their means of work, of a state with its citizens,
76 Democracy wasn't about despotie rule nor one-sided humanism, but "fully developed individuality,"circumstances in which everybody became, as Lefebvrehoped,
"total men"-a humanly, as opposed to stately, incarnation of Hege1'sabsolute idea.
Hegel, via Kojeve.had provided a method, the dialectic; he'd li.kewiseprovided a form,
the struggle for recognition, the contradiction between particularity and universality.
In the years ahead, Lefebvre would give concrete historical content to these abstract
Hegelian categories, grounding them in everyday lifeand in the city itself.He'd .findhis
Marxist humanist voice soon enough. One bold step in that direction emerged m 1939,
just as war broke out, with the publicaton of a little book, Dllectical Materialism,
Lefebvre'spesky rejoinder to Joseph Stalin's Dialectical and Historcal Materllism. The
text became a mini-best-seller in France; it helped make the }roung Marx credible,
readable, no longer offlimits. But it also brought Lefebvre heat from party bigwigs and
from sectarian dogmatists.

From Hege1ian Marx;m to Everyday Life

The inability to unify consciousness in both its particularity and universality is the
source of inward disruption in people. It unleashes "unhappy consciousness;' "con
sciousness of self as a dual-natured merely contradictory being."lZHegel said unhappy
consciousness is like gazing at one's own self-consciousness in somebody else's con-

sciousness. Consciousness was present, but somehow out there, elsewhere=-detached,

not presentoThis severing meant great mental torment. Hegel sought to fix it via the
mind, via pure reason, in purely abstract formo In fact, with Hegel it was al] in the
mind, all form; there wasn't anYreal content, any real materiality, any objectivity. Or,
more precisely,subjectively was the objectivity. True, masters and slaves existed, but
they weren't actual living people rooted in planet earth; they appeared more as forms of
amsciousness,as minds without men, as Marx said in The Economic and Philosophical
Manuscrpts (1844). Hegel, wrote Marx, "turns man into the man of consciousness,
instead of turning consciousness into the consciousness of real men." In Dialeaical
Materialism, Lefebvre sided with the young Marx: he concurred that Hegel didn't
really"get" alienation.
Actually, the Marx of 1844 simultaneously rejected and profoundly modified
~egel. .He knew Hegel had done critically steady work. But he knew, too. that Hegel's
dalectic needed content, unhappy consciousness a materialist anchoring. Content was
the real being that conditioned dialectical thought, Marx reckoned. Speculative
philosophy needed transcending in the name of action and practice. Practice is
this content; irs both the beginning and end, the origin of thought and the solution
to problems of thought. Hegel grasped ths, but did so in a "one-sided" manner,
recognizng only abstract mental practice, abstract mental labor. For young Marx
and youngish Lefebvre alike, practice meant a humanist naturalisrn, a social prac
tice, an analysis of pressing social problems, invariably economic problems, which
called for practical solutions-invariably, political solutions. Thus, Lefebvre's
"dialectical materialism" constructed a specifically historical and sociological
object; it was an analysis and a worldview, an awareness of the problems of the
world and a will to transform that world. It was mindful of the economic realm, 77
but didn't regress into economism; it acknowledged determination. but wasn't
itself deterministic; it established coherence without destroying complexity. It intro
duced, Lefebvre said, "living men-actions, self-interest, aims, unselfishness, events
..and chances--into the texture and intelligible structure of the Becoming"; and it ana
lyzed"a totality that is coherentyet many-sided and dramatic."1J
Through practice, humans refashion external nature at the same time as they
refashion internal nature, their own natuee. Hence practice also involved"the produc
tion of man."" Lefebvre was addressing the production of real, corporeal, sensuous
men and women, as was Marx; these were people who breathe "aH the powers o
nature"and who're equipped with "essentiaIpowers;'''vital powers,""drives"and ''pas
sions."Passion, Marx notes, "is man's essential power vigorously striving to attain its
~bject."15
Passionate human beings are protean creatures, desiring differentiated prac
~ce,needing meaningful and fulfillingactivity,something integral in inteHectual,emo
tional and biological nourishment. lf one cuts this off, denies it somehow, converts it
into a dread zone of necessity and hollows out the content, then essential powers are
~~ceforth estranged, alienated. Life was lived in Plato's cave,staring at shadows. But
;.alienationis more than "feeling bad." It may coincide with exploitation; often it does.
. People,however, might be alienated from what they do, or who they really are, even

when they're raking in wealth-maybe

especiaUywhen they're raking it in! The bour

geoisie is alienated, too, Marx felt, just as the master's consciousness is "unhappy" for
Hegel. Private property is public enemy number 1 here, of course, since it forges class
cleavages;the same is true for divisin of labor, money exchange, occupational struc
turing, profit dictates, and bureaucratic administration; and also for technological
advancement under capitalism, which inverts huge liberating potentiality, compelling a
10t of people to work more, with greater repetition, increasing their burden rather than
lightening the load.
Ininterwar France, Lefebvre's hope against hope was that socialism would overthrow alienated capitalist life while stavng off the specter of fascismoThe antithesis of
alienated man was the "total man," a character Marx alludes to in The Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts (see "Prvate Property and Communism"). "The positive
supersession of private property" Marx writes, means "the senSUQUS appropriation of
the human essence and human life,"Human essence doesn't just revolve around possession, around simply havng or owning; people, according to Marx, appropriate
their integral essence in an integral way,as "total people," Thus, "human relations to
the world-seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, contemplating,
sensing, wanting, acting, loving-in short, all the organs of his indivduality ... are
in their objective approach or in their approach to the object. the appropriation of
that object" (351).
Lefebvre takes this notion from Marx, yet pushes it much further. He claims
that this kind of sensual satisfaction-appropriating the external world and organ
ically connecting objectivity and subjectivity-has ro be a socialist ideaL It may
never become an actual fact; it is a striving, a hope; a goal, a limit, a possibility,
78 always frustratable and contingento It comes without guarantees, giving instead
"direction to our view of the future, to our activities and our consciousness."" It
signifies a future open to active human practice. to thought and striving, of putting
striving into action, nto praxis, to overeome "objective" contradictions. Nothng is
assured or definitive, predestined or closed; the totality of the total man is an "open
totality" The total man, Lefebvre notes, expresses "a !imit to infinity,"perpetual tran
scendence, incessant beeoming. It's not a "new man," somebody who "suddenly bursts
forth into history, complete, and in the possession of all htherto incompatible qualities
of vitalty and lucidity, of humble determnation inlabor and limitless enthusiasm in
creation.?"
This remark, like the general thesis aired in Dialectical Materialism, represents a
thinking radical's assault on the "offical" party Marxism of the day,the custodians of
which were Sta!in and Andrei Zhdanov (Stalin's hack theorist). This orthodoxy tried to
merge philosophy with the natural sciences and base dialectical method on the "dialee
ties of nature." Lefebvre'sMarxist humanism explicitlyseeksto scupper such dogma, to
loosen the grip of "systematized" Marxism, a Marxism redueed to a single science, a
catechism of the future in the form of poltical economy, with its law-Iike dialectic
supposedly operating objectively, unconsciously, behind the baeks of real, thinking
people. Soviet-style Marxism, Lefebvre warns, is dangerous because it has seductive

advantages: '~itis ~imple and easily taught," for one thing; "it steers clear of complex
problems, this being precise1ythe aim and meaning of dogmatism." It also "gives its
adherents a feeling of both vigorous affirmation and security." Meanwhile, it has a
deep mistrust of the complexity and richness of Marx's early writings.
From the mid-1940s onward, Lefebvre did begin to reeast Marx's thought. As a
rese~ch~r ~~the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Pars (1949-61),
working initially on rural sociology, he'd reverse the scale of Marxism, amid cries of
heresy,pitching his critique ofbourgeois society (and of institutionalized Marxism) to
the "everyday,"to quotidian experience, to ground zero--to the scale that most of us
find meaningful. "Modera" postwar capitalism continued to exploit and alienate at the
workplace, but now alienation also began to cut deep into everyday life itself, into
non-w:orkplace everyday life, into reproduction and leisure, flourishing through con
surnensrn, seducing va media and advertising, intervening tbough state bureaucracies
and planning agencies, seemingly lurching around ever comer and booming out on
every billboard. Now, cJaimed Lefebvre,"you are being looked after, cared for, told
how to live better, how to dress fashionably, how to decorate your house, in short
how to exist; you are totally and thoroughly programmed." But if this reeked of ~
pessimism and closure-Qf the sort of"one-dimensional" thesis Herbert Marcuse ~
would commandeer in the 1960s--none was intended. Lefebvre was much too ....
sprited, romantic, and dialectical for that.
~

.....

Everyday Jife, instead, possessed a dialectical and ambiguous nature. On the ~

c"
one hand, it's the realm increasingly colonized by the commodity, and hence <:
~
shrouded in all kinds of mystification, fetishism, and alienation. "The most ~
extraordinary things are also the most everyday,"Lefebvre quipped in Critique oJ
Everyday Life, reiterating Marx's comments on the "fetshism of comrnodities," that 79
"the stran~es~~gs "" often the most trivial." On the other hand, parado~cally,
everydaylife IS likewise a primal site for meaningful social resistance, "the inevitable
~tartingpoint for the realization of the possible," Or, more flamboyantly, "everyday life
lS the supreme court where wisdom, knowledge and power are brought to judgment.?"
Thus, radical politics has to begin and end in everyday life, it can't do otherwise.
Nobody can get beyond everyday life, which literally intemalizes global capitalism;
and global capitalisrn, in turn, is nothing without many everyday lives, lives of real
people in real time and space, coexisting with other people in real time and space.
Everydaylife is Iike quantum gravty: by going very small you can perhaps begin to
understand the whole structure of life. By changing everyday lfe you can change the
world; why change the world if it doesn't release everydayJife?People don't fight or die
for ~ns of steel, Lefebvre quips; they aspire to be happy in everyday life, to be free,
.W8DtIngnot to work or produce. But a lot of Marxista still held a blinkered notion of
.. class struggle, a largely abstract and idealized version that neglects, Lefebvre reckons,
not only the "recent modifications of capitalism," but also the "socialization of pro
duction" and "the hew contents of speeifically eapitalist relations."' In other words,
SOrneMarxists had let the world pass them by, had turned their backs away from the
mundane realities of modero everyday Jife,not confronted them.

Indeed, as the 1940s gave way to the 1950s, the capitalist system, for all its inherent
contradictions and crisis tendencies, actually grew, actually expanded its productive
forces, began colonizing hitherto uncolonized parts of life, broadening its web and
embedding the culture of commodities deeper into the structural and superstructural
fabric of society, The radical hopes that lit Lefebvre's fire in 1925 suddenly see~ed
naive against the soaring business cyele. Writing later, in 1971, Lefebvre recogmzed
that, "around 1960 the situation became clearer, everyday life was no longer the no
man's land, the poor relation of specialized activities. In France and elsewhere neo-cap
italist leaders had become aware of the fact colonies were more trouble than they were

worth and there was a change of strategy; new vistas opened out such asinvestments in
national territories and the organization of heme trade," The net result, he thought,
was that "all areas outside the centers of political decision and economic concentration
of capital were considered as semi-colonies and exploited as su~; these included ~he
suburbs of cities, the countryside, rones of agricultural production and all outlymg
districts inhabited, needless to say,by employees. technicians and manuallaborers;
thus the state of the proletarian became generalized, leading to a blurring of class
distinctions and ideological'values."?"
Work life, private life, and leisure all became fair game, "rationally" exploited,
cut up, laid out, and put back together again, timetabled and organized by various
corporations and assorted Katkaseque bureaucracies and teclmocracie~. No'_"a
massive scientific and technologica1revolution had occurred, a perverse inversion
of-and substitute for-the social and political revolution that never came. That
was like waiting for Godot. And when Russian tanks roUedinto Budapest in 1956,
crushing Hungary's democracy movement, it confirmed what many socialists and
80 communists already privately knew: the Sovietrevolution had failed. China's situation, too, was uncertain and suspect. So "there was this gap:' Lefebvre said, "and
then the rise of a new social class, that of the technocrats. And then the advent of the
world market, that is, a world rnarket after the period of industrial capitalismoThis
world market became an immense force with consequences even for the 'socialist'
countries.?" What's more, the massivetechnological revolution was matcned by equally
massive processes of urbanization and modernization, which began transforrning
industries and environments everywhere, seemingly without lirnit, opening out new
vistas, but also creating immense new voids, new desert spaces, deserts for the mind
and body.

urbar ..Lzat.Lon in tbe ModerIl Wor~d

"Whenever 1set foot in Mourenx" Lefebvrewrites in Introduction to Modernity, "1 am
filledwith dread," Mourenx is a prototypica1 species,a French "New 'Iown," which, lke
other New Towns sprouting up on the European (and American) landscape, "has a lot
going for it," The overall plan,"Lefebvrewrites, "has a certain attractiveness:the lines of
the tower blocks alternate horizontals and verticals.... The blocks of flats look well
planned and properly built; we know that they are veryinexpensive,and offer their res
idents bathrooms or showers, drying rooms, well-lit accommodation where they can

sit with their radios and television sets and contemplate the world from the comfort of
their own hornes.... Over here, state capitalism does things rather well. Our techni
cistsand technocrats have their hearts in the right place.'?' And yet, everytime he sees
these Corbusierian "machines for living in," he's terrified. He's adamant that such an
urbanization paradigm is Cartesian through and through, compartmentalizing differ
ent spheres of human activity,zoning things here and there, creating functional spaces,
but despoiling everyday life at the same time, turniog people inward, not outward,
turning them awayfrom each other.
Ren Descartes and the Cartesian tradition within Western philosophy and the
humanities began this severing in a noble pursuit of"rational"knowledge, carving out
a debilitating disjuncture between mind and body. New Towns Iike Mourenx were
really the spatial ernbodiment of this Legos, this big technocratic brain at work, and
Lefebvre knew it firsthand: Mourenx, after all, overlooked the cherished medieval
Navarennx, his childhood home and timeworn summer residence. He saw the New
Iown rise up out of nothing. And he was able to witness what Navarennx had that
Mourenx didn't, His grumble was a strange, lonely voice in the Marxist world,
since he demanded existential freedom alongside the material freedom that had
supposedly been granted "the masses," His voice combined Dostoevsky's Ivan
Karamazov with Karl Marx: he cautioned that planners had now become new
"grand inquisitors," promising bread as long as they controlled everybody's free ~
......
domoThe accusation. of course, merely reaffirmed Lefebvre'sMarxist humanism; (D
o
oruynow it became a ~atial" Marxist humanism as well.Now, a more wholesome <
(1)
personhood was predicated upon a more wholesome spatial organization; each
needed the other. Lefebvre's brand of Marxist-humanist urbanism demanded
bread and freedom, ethics and aesthetics, praxis and poiesis.
6l.
Alas, in!.'l0u~~.!lXennui had set in. Spontaneous vitality and creativity had
apparently been wrung out. Strangely, there aren't maoy traffic lights in Mourenx,
eventhough the place is described as being "nothing but traffic lights," lts whole phys
iognomy, meanwbile, is left naked, robbed of meaning, "totally legible."In Mourenx,
Lefebvrewrites, "modernity opened its pages to me," But here "what are we on the
threshold ot?" he inquires, is it~'socialismor su~e.~pitalism? ... Arewe entering the
city of joy or the world of unredeemable boredom? ... As yet I cannot give a firm
answer"(119). One conelusion, atany rate, is evident: Mourenx's world expresses an
ordered, enclosed, anclfinished world, a world in which there's nothing left lo do.
There is no adventure, thrill, or romance now; everything is dictated by predictable
mathematical exactitude. (It is a world marvelously satirized a fewyears later by lean
LucGodard, in his movieAlphaville.) Enter, in comparison, picturesque Navarrenx. In
. the fourteenth century, it too was a New Town, built to a fairly regular ground plan
. . near the River d'Oloron, and rebuilt two centuries later in an even more geometric
design, ringed with ltalianate ramparts. Lefebvreemphasized tbe subtle and instruc
tivedevelopment of Navarrenx through the example of a seashell. A seashell is the
.:...
of a living creature that has slowly"secreted a structure." Separate the creature
'.. from tbe fonn it's given itself-according to the laws of its species-and you're left

..,

with something soft, slimy and shapeless. The relationship between the animal and the
shell is, therefore, crucial for understanding both the shell and the animal. Navarrenx's
shell, Lefebvre claims, embodies the forms and actions of a thousand-year-old com
munity that has "shaped its shell, building and rebuilding it, modifying it again and

again according to its needs."

Lefebvre is mesmerized by Navarrenx's organic intimacy, much the way Walter
Benjamin was mesmerzed by Naples. Everythingabout Navarrenx's streets and build
ings, squares and passageways,style and function, have vitality and a kind of uni~. Its
streets aren't wastelands, nor are they simply how people go from point A to pomt B.
They're places "to stroll, to chnwag, to be alive in. Nothing can happen in the street
without it being noticed from inside the houses, and to sit watching at the window is a
legitimate pleasure .... The street is something integrated" (117). Over the years,
though, Navarrenx, like many small towns, has been dying, and the "expiring seashell
liesshattered and open to the skies,"It's gotten more boriag as time has passed. Market
day s tiny compared to that of yesteryear; surviving storekeepers are little more
than managers now; narrow streets are gridlocked each day with cars and trucks.
Nevertheless. its boredom was, and stiU is, .radically different from Mourenx's.
Navarrenx's boredom is more complacent, Lefehvrereckons; it is softer and cozier,
more comforting and carefree, like summer Sundays and winter evenings.
Mourenx's boredom, conversely,"is pregnant with desires,frustrated frenzies, unre
a1izedpossibilities. A magnificent lifeis waiting just around the comer, and far, fax
away" (124). Boredom impacts heavily,especially on the youth, and on women,
who alwaysbear the brunt of everydaylife.
Lefebvre.can't hide his fondness for the old pastoral town. At times, his fond82 ness smacks of gemeinschaft nostalgia, a romantic longing for paradise lost, for a
metaphysics of being that, we know, is a problematic stance for any Marxist.
Lefebvrerealizeshe's treading through land mines. But it's obvious as well that he has
something else in mind. The metaphor of the seashell is the key.With it, he's trying to
bighlight the relationship between an animal (i.e., us) and our habitat (i.e., our cities)
and specificallyhow this hbitat is flexible enough to permit the free growth of the
animal, how it is responsive to "the laws of its species,"The growth of the animal fol
lows a certain functioning order, yet it's equally random, spontaneous, and organic,
too. Thus, the living creature slowly,and with uncertainty, secretes its owo structure.
Human beings, Lefebvrefeels,are unique in that wehave two different waysof creating
and producing--of secreting our structure-that thus far haven't intersected: the
spontaneous-organic way or the abstract way. Thus arises a dilemma for which
Navarrenx-and history--offers but a few hints toward solving: '}ow lo rep!,~uce
what was once_~rea~~. sp~.?~I1_eo~~[eate
it from ~'
(,125).
Further~~~e, can spontaneity ever be revitalized in Mourenx, can a commumty be
created, create itself'?Is Moureux either laissez-faireorganicism or active human inter
vention via a prefigurative plan? ls the city a"technical object" or an "aesthetic objec(?
According to Lefebvre, socialism, as well as Marxist urbanism, has to fiad its own
answers here, has to find its own style in everydayIife.

Lefebvre'shomesickness, in short, isn't backward looking. His is no Heideggerian

atavistic model of authenticity and the "good life."His longing is firmly for the future
aod he uses the past only as a vehiclefor pushing forward and onward, toward a higher
plane of critical thinking and practice. He wants to brng spontaneity back into every
day life. Spontaneity can potentially disalienate everyday life. Some of the finest
moments of spontaneity within the everyday,especially within everyday Navarrenx,
were the bawdy rural festivals,perodic "celebrations [that] tightened sociallinks and
at the same time gave rein to all the desires which had been pent up by collective dis
cipline and the necessities of everyday work," These festivalsdrew al! that was ener
getic, al! that was pleasurable and possible from nature, food, sociallfe, and from the
mind and body. True, festivals always"contrasted violently with everyday life";"but
they were not separate from it," Quite the contrary: festivals represented "Dionysiac
life,"and "differed from everyday life only in the explosion o forceswhich had been
slowlyaccumulated in and via everydaylife itself?"
Festival days were days of excess, enormous orgies of eating and drinking,
almost without rules. Ioyous and passionate reveling,mockery and debauchery set
the tone, in a script straight out of Rabelais. In fact, the sixteenth-century French
iconoclast was something of a cult hero for Lefebvre;in 1955, he devoted a book
length study to the epic author of Gargantua and Pantagruel;whose own utopia,
the Abbey of Thleme, sounded a lot like Lefebvre'sutopian ideal. Thleme was t-o
~
Rabelais'great "Abbey of Desire" without clocks and walls around it. Hypocrites ~
and bigots, cynics and hungry lawyers were urged to "stay away."The people of :;
Thlerneweren't governed by lawsand statutes and rules,but behaved according to <D
their "own free will": "DO WHAT YOUWILL:' proclaimed Rabelais.Meanwhile,
everybodydrank and played, spoke fiveor six languages, and wrote "easy poetry" 8D
and "clear prose" in all of them. Festivals made a permanent impression on the
inteUectual imagination of Lefebvre, the former country boy from the Pyrenees.Atlantiquewho'd very soon in!egr~e.!.!:!1"~_fe.stive
traditioQs int~UlID.9_~m.indl:!!it.ral
and urban context and th~!l~!firlILthem,as.a.prospectiveJvflrps.t.pj)liticalpractice...
As far as classical Marxism went, with its Promethean impulse, this all sounded
weird.But Lefebvre saw no necessary contradiction between ideas about festival and
spontaneity with those of workers' self-management and socialismoBesides,"revolu
.. tions of the past:' he claimed, like 1789 and the 1871 Pars Commune, "were festi
.: vals--cruel, yes, but then is there not always something cruel, wild and violent in
festivals?"z<
Projected onto an urban canvas, the street, for Lefehvre,now became a
,ltind of stage. The drama here might be epic, or absurd, or hoth, scrpted by Bertolt
Antonin Artaud, Charlie Chaplin, or even Rabelais-who could tell?It's meant
.to be spontaneous, after all. In any event, the street would enact radical theater,
unleashingthe in-rour-face militaocy Lefebvredemanded from his Marxism, from his
urban Marxism. The amalgam was heterodox and thrilling: alongside Marx, we
had Hegel; but alongside Hegel, there was also room for Freud; alongside Freud,
Friedrich Nietzsche, too; and overlooking them all, somewhere, is Rabelais.In
I.efebvre found the unconscious; in Hegel, consciousness; in Marx, practical
'.;~""""J ...

and rniddle-class people, had done precisely the opposite, had fled the center for low
density, decentralized suburbs-both instances, Lefebvre notes, exhibited the same
violen.tly antiurban planning approach, The net product, either way, spells a "de
urbanized, yet dependent periphery established around the city."Effectively,the new
suburban dwellers remained urban, even though they're "unaware of it and believe
themselves to be close to nature." He is angry and concerned about this; coneerned
that the "~nsciousness of the city and of urban reality is dulled ... so as to disappear.
The practical and theoretical (ideological) destruction of the city cannot but leave an
enormous emptiness," He is concerned about the experience of urbanism that the
~~burbs engender, and ~ow they active!ywork against, and undermine, the best qual
mes of a dense, centralized and unified urbanization. "TIte suburbs ar~urban:'...he
confesses, "within a dissociateg~om.b.o.illgy"; they constitute "th~eml2.ireof sep'!!ra

.
ti 'ty m'Nietzsche language and power; in Rabelais,festival,laughter and
consctous ac IVl ;
,
mockery. In the city,he made space for all five. But there, unconscious desires lay dormant beneath the surface o the real,witbin the surreal.They wait for judgmen~ day, for
the day when they can be unlocked in awake experence,.freed from econoffil~ forces
that inevitably suppress passion or else create phony passtons, ones env~l~ped 10 mys
tification and fetishism. lnstead of mystification, Lefebvre wanted cines to release
.
t keep it under wraps as in Mourenx. He wanted cities to provide the
repression, no
'
means fOI"free conseious acti~!Y!'~toexpress.iQIillill~tense sensual (and se~ual)
-d- . -:-t'--e"n-t-"H'
-e-'w-'
anted everyday life to be "redaimed for itself,"reclaimed
p Ieasure an exci em '
by something tantalizingly called a "lived moment.:' This in~ar~ablynvolved sorne feat
of collective and individual resistance: the occupatlon ofbuildmgs, streets demons~ra
tions, free expressionist art and theater, picketing, rent strikes. ~~n ~ general strike.
These were recognitions of radical possibility, intensely euphonc incidents ~d hap

penings that might be serious-sometimes deadly se~~ou~as well as pla~: mdee~,

fOI Lefebvre, lived moments should be luminous festivals of the people, MarxI~t
politics with a rambunctious, carnivalesque spirit, demanding, aboye all, people s
"right to the city"

Tbe Rigbt to tbe City

In the early 1960s, Lefebvre proselytized the same a~the U~iversi~"of ~trasbo~,r~,
before moving, in 1965,to Paris-Nanterre, where he d remam until retirement m
1973, Increasingly, his work now began to bemoan the sacking of the central city
coreoHis beef could be summarized thus: withQ~!a_~~~r there simply can't b:_any
"urbanity" Such was the leitmotiv of a series of books he'd pen, in typically rapid84 firesuccession, on urbanism and urban politics over the next decade," In them.all,
he'd liken suburban and New}'~~ growth to a "deurbanized" kind of urbaniza
tion. In Fra~~~,-itbe;;~-~pcit
class warfare, just as it was in Barn Georges
Haussmann's day.lnevitably, it meant a denial of the working-class urbane, who fo~d
themselves steadily decanted and banished to the outlying baniieue, to places l~e
Mourenx, or elseto the new giant high-rise housing estates, ~~and ensembles,th~t lit
tered peripheral Paris and other French cities. The urban center was cor.respondmgly
conquered by the well-heeled, by the bourgeois, whose playgroun~ it henceforth
became. Tight-knit neighborhoods underwent disintegration, expenenced r~ne~al,
got refashioned, reformulated, upscaled; once gritty "use val~es" ~came ghstenmg
"exchange values," dancing to the tune oC rentier and financlal capital, as well as ~o
vested tourist interests. Lefebvre's own Paris residence at Rue Rarnbuteau because of lts
proximity to Remo Piano's and Richard Roger's speetacular Pompidou Center in Les
Halles and the Forum shopping complex, was likewise under fue, threatened

"
: l'
"h
d "thauhe...center 15
encroaching embourgeOlsement. 1 have the lee IDg, e muse ,
-:b.ecoming 'museumfied' and manageria!_.Not politically, but financially managenal.

h!

The metamorph~~~~ ~fthe c~

urban continue."
While this process seemed a lot more appropriate to continental Europe than
North America-where many upper- and middle-dass people, especI'ally wh'lte upper -

~io~and scission between eleIl!e!_1_t_Q_f

w~t_hl!:.,!_~~n~r:~~f!q
a.~uni~_and sirnuitane~
llY ; the old center, meanwhile, "rernains in a state of dispersed and ~t;d
actuality."u
Mind you, this anger and concern isn't meant to signify cynicism; nor, as we've
already seen from Navarrenx, is it a la recherched'espace petdu. Lefebvre, like Marx
and Engels, doesn't envisage the reconstitution of the old historie city: industrial
ization and modernity have gone too faro"The prescription," plainly, is that "there
5arlnot be a gomg blld::..(!~~~.!he traditioE~ city), nor a headlong flght, toward
a colossal and shapeless agglomeration."Jp~,
the revolutionary effort must
reach out, forward, toward "~I1~_luunm.i~m."
"a new praxis," toward "another
man, that of urban society,"with an "experimental utopa" (148); radical urbanists
"must invent" (213). The "right to the city" isn't a "pseudo-right" or simply a "visiting ~ight"; neither is it a return to a historically preserved, serially reproduced, 85
gentnfied urban coreoTIte right to the city is instead "like a cry and a demand," It
... hasto be f~rmulated as "a transformed and renewed right to urban life" (158). The city
. has to SUTVlve
as a place of encounter, as a space prioritizing use value, as an "inscrp
ton in space of a time promoted to the rank of a supreme resource among all
resources."And only the working dass can become the agent, the social carrier or sup
port of this realization.
.. According to Lefebvre, one of the crucial things about the Pars Commune was
.......
"the strength of the return toward the urban center of workers pushed out into the
.......
outskirts and peripheries, their re-conquest of !he city ... [of) this oeuvre which had
.'...been torn from them" (76). For barely ~~~e!_l!Y-threedays, freely elected workers
. artists, and small business owners were at the he~.-Th~ Co~mune embodied every~
Lefehvre loved about cities, festivals and revolutionary politics, and he chroni
it as such in La Proclamation de la Commune. Lefebvre called the Cornmune "!he
realization of revOluiionary uibanlsmto date:' Its issues, he said, were territorial
urban; its practice was festive and spontaneous. The Comrnunards, untit the
National Guard massacred thousands of them, launched a revolt in culture and
evI'l'W1"life,
demanded freedom and self-determination, destroyed reviled symbols of
power and authority, occupied the streets, shouted, saog for their "right to

city" Lefebvre thought the Commune was

"the city's grand and supreme attempt to

ality"
,
d norm ofhuman re 1 .
,
construet itseif as the measure an
d "M D ys" of 1968 this manifesto
during the hea y
aya,
1
Ninety-seven years ater,
fighting mayhem and gen.
As b fore there was street
,
flooded onto Parisian streets.
e
, d G lle's reign loosened. The Freneh
.
ifl F
hile Charles e au
darmes with n es, or awnue.
"
the Confederation of General
th
ith its handmalden umon,
Communist Party, toge er W1
d
1 d bellion At first, autoworkers at
1 d
ced the stu ent- e re
,
Workers, immediate y enoun
fth
th Lefebvre the Nanterre sociolik in support o e you '
,
Renault were reluetant to str e
h
teristieally followed suit, He sup. hi ;vtv eighth year, une arac
.,
ogy professor t h en m 15 S~'l ,"
l Th timing he and party cribes
,
.
b t only m pnnelp e.
e
,
ported the students actions, u
,.
th mpetus couldn't be sustained.
t imply wasn t npe, e
. '
claimed. was awry; th e momen s
..
d had at least in the begmnmg,
t
program
anyway,
an
,
Demonstrators ha d no conere e
b
both camps with allegianees
b
f
d himself torn etween
,
little popular base, Lefe vre oun
ist.aft all as still a socialist true believer, a
.
'h
th excommumst a er , w
,
in both and In neit er; e
circl O th other hand student radicals
ithi
arty circ es. n e
,
1
cautious fellow trave er W1 In P
.
lik D . l Cohn-Bendit and the
.
d
ti ns and occupatlOns, e ame
and cadre In the ernonstra o
d' ctl
d indirectly, once been men,
.'
G y Debord, had, ire y an
elder situatiorust guru, u
11
tudent of Lefebvre's, contrary to
(D b d was never actua y a s
tored by Lefebvre, e or
d b friended Debord through the
,
Lefebvre met an e
what sorne commentanes sayo
. th late 1950s.) All they did was
, ,
h 'd ta ght at Strasbourg m e
,
situationist students e
u
'Y
w they reproached their old
iti
s
into
practice.
et
no
put his lectures an d wn mg
, " ca1led him a hypoerite for
hi
"agent of recuperanou.
teacher, denounce d un as an
1 bbi g Molotov coektails on the
th b . des for not o m
not participating on e arnea,.'
h h
ce preached, The older genera, h 1f
t pracncmg w at e on
Boulevard St. Me e, or no
d d
sumer goods inereased wages,
'I
t d in had deman e con
,
86 tion had previous y wan e,
ali ted 1968generation now wanted
bit . the younger, ena
,
refrigerators an d automo es,
.
owth 1 What eost material
out, demanded something more, asked, What pnce gr
,

the

wealth?
h I d ccentuate the rift between "humanist"
The May strikes and upheaval also e pen: Louis Althusser. As we'll see in chapter
and "seientific" Maoosts, between Lefebvre.a uall
tuates the rift within Marxist
al C t 11s'swork lt eq yaccen
6, when we look at Manu
as e
'960
d 1970ssaw the reputation of party
,
nse the late 1 s an
. .
urban studles, In a perverse se,
'be
e de rigueur even Wlthm the
e
'd bl . his Marxtsm cam
,
disciple Althusser grow lorml a y.
fa'
t d with Althusser the reclusive and
radical student fratemity, Students were s~maheil
her They l~ened his famous
.
tructural1st p OSop ,
ascetie feole Normale Sup neure s
h st ets In desperation, Lefebvre

eak"
h' own out on t e re '
,
_"~P!~~
,to t en,
scribblin a mea eulpa, TheExplosion_.lnlt,he
-attempted to exonerate himself. qmckly
g.
,.
the students' exuberance
h
N
he sought not to cntlClze
expressed a change of eart. ow
1:
't to use it productively, construc. b t t how how to loster 1 ,
'cal
and street spontanelty, u o s
'sk'
H sought to steer a dialectl
,
al
.d arty and unton epUcs, e
ea!
tively, tactlcally, ongsl e p
.
' l'ty of action, He tried to d
. l'
f th ry and the rrabona I
eo
Alth'
Ma~sm never could,
Path between the ratwna tty o
,
that
ussenan
uu
with the slippage between t~e tw~, ~ a way r 'tl political analysis, an analysis that
, thiTIkin'g and acbng wlthm an exp le1 y
reeoup 1mg

opens up the horizon of possible altematves. His was a Marxism with; not without, a
class subject,"
May 1968, he noted, entailed a complex intermngling of cultural, poltical and
economc forces, sorne new, others old. The basic class contradction, of course,
between private ownership of the means of production and the social character of
productive labor considered primary by Marx remained unresoIved in 1968as it does
today. But ownership of the productive forces was-and is-no longer the same as in
Marx's day. What's happened instead is a newer contradiction: the growth of "the
entire compIex of organizations and institutions engaged in management and deci
sion-making. They are superimposed on the economie organizations proper, and con
stitute the foundaton and instrument of what is ealJed Power. They appear to
eonstitute a system. The term 'captalist system' has not lost its meaning in the century
that has eIapsed since the appearance in 1867 ofVolume 1of Capital. Far from it Its
meaning has become more precise. It has becorne dearly and distinctly politicar (15;
emphasis in the original). In this regard, contestation was absoluteIy crucial; it
helped "link economie factors (including economic dernands) with politcs" (65).
Contestation names names, points fingers, merges insttutions and men, makes
abstractions real, and is one way "subjects" express themselves, eeasing to be
"objects," Contestaton means a "refusal to be integrated" (67); it is "born from
negation and has a negative character; it is essentialJy radical," It "brings to light its
hidden origins; and it surges frorn the depths to the poltcal surnmits, whieh its
also illuminates in rejecting them," Contestation rejects passivity and fosters par
ticipation. It arises out of a latent institutional crisis, transforming it into "an open
crisiswhich challenges hierarchies, centers of power" (68; emphasis in the original),
.Contestation, rnoreover, frequently fiares up spontaneously, and this, as Rosa 87
Luxemburg knew, can be a prodigiously creative force. Lefebvre's humanist
Marxism bonds with Luxemburg's, the obverse of Althusser's courtship with
Leninism, "Killing a spontaneous ideology, instead of trying to understand it and
guide it toward a practiee which may overeome it at the right moment-neither too
..' earIynor too Iate-that:' he maintairu, "is a mark of dogmatism" (70), Without spon
.....taneity nothing happens, nothing progresses, "Power therefore regareIsspontaneity as
.......the enemy." Spontaneity always expresses_i~!(!l1
_~_
_ ~t~~t, .t!te authentie arena of
. l.efebvre's MarXis~,~iti~s~
;h~~itcan spawn within and event~~~form ~verYday
. > life.The street is that arena of society not occupied by insttutioru. The latter fear the
.... street, try to cordon the street off, to repress street spontaneity, to separate different
' . factions of protesters in the street, quelling the apparent disorder, seeking to reaffirm
.'. order,in the name of the law.From street level-from below-<ontestation can spread
institutional areas, aboye; sp~ntaneous contestaton can un~eil power, bring it out
tbe open, out
mirrored-gIass offices, black car motoreades, private country
and air-conditioned conference roomS,2lIStreets now become explieidy politi
filling the void left by institutional politics, Therein les tbe strength of sponta
street contestation; therein lies the weakness: the weakness of localism, of
il}'lnOI()w:m,
of"'partiaJ practice:' of nihilismoSo spontaneity required at the same time

a serious delineation

of spontaneity.

"which pure spontaneity

But this had to be done in the name of a theory

tends to ignore" (74): Marxist theory.

Space: Tbe Fina~ Frontier

In the wake of May 1968, not long after the dust had settled and the mist cleared,
Lefebvre, tbe sprightly sexagenarian, brougbt a new term to the Marxist lexicon: urban
revolution. Now, our Hegelian humanist Marxist had not only beeome a humanist
Marxist urbanist; he had a1sobeeome a radical geographer. Lefebvre pointed out how
"Marx thought that the produetive forees constantly flung themselves against the
restrictive Iimits of eX5tingrelations of production (and of the capitalist mode of pro
duction), and that the revolution was going to leap over these constraints. Partial erises
would change into a general crisis; the working dass was waiting impatiently for the
imminent hour, and would enter the transitional period following the poltical revolu
tion?" _Thep_r:()~g()~~~~~
1968, !!!_ce
the Communards of 1871,ha_dengineered a.g~l!:_
~r~~_~ci~!~_
~~_.o~ecouI!_tcy.:._The
French state tottered, yet the capitalist system
remained solidly intactoSomehow the protesters were reabsorbed, the countercul
tuce reincorporated, reappropriated into a suptrmarket counterculture. Protesters
were famous for about fifteen minutes. Th~~ere, as Godar~~dlil~J1.~f_
~x
and Coca-Cola." Here, as elsewhere, the capitalist "system" had apparently
............._ ..
withstood everything thrown at it; as ever, it attenuated its contradietions, even
eontradictions internal to it Against all odds, in the hundred-plus years since Marx
wrote Capital, this system bad succeeded in achieving growth. "We cannot calculate
at what price," admitted Lefebvre. "But we do know the means: by occupying space;

_---

by produol1g a space?" The :'pro~~~on of SE~~~.~ now the centxal plan.!< iQ '1!J:~
88 .s.uM"Jd.Q(.gpitalism;'

Indeed, a startling aspect of the eapitalist mode of production s and alwayshas

been its geographical dynamic. lt had been spelled out by Marx in the Communist
Manifesto, by Lenin in Imperialism: The Highest 5tage of Capitalism (1916), and by
Leon Trotsky in his theory of"uneven development." Yeta newer spatiallogic was now
before us, and Lefebvre believed it needed fleshing out with greater darity, warranted
better definition as well as a stronger urban mooring. Increasingly, he thought, the
Industrial Revolution that preoccupied Marx and Engels in the nineteenth century was
merelya precursor for the "urban revolution" of the twentieth century..the.c.apital/1-Q.Q!
eontradiction was nowJoremost a C9l}!T..9iq~Qn_qfyrban
so~,n~t
1l_4ustrial socie!!:.
Infact, ur:banism itselfhad become a "force of production," just like science.~1The real
ity of urbanism modified the relati~~s~fp;~ducti~~thout
being sufficient to trans
form them. Awhileago, as Engelsvividly highligbted, industrialization ereated a certain
type of urbanization; now, insisted Lefebvre, it was the other way around. Of course.
such a subordIDation of industrial societyto urban society handily bought time for cap
italism, permitted accumulation on an expanded scale, while, in turn, incubating the
seeds of further, deeper contradictions--not just social contradictions in space, but
social contradictions ofspace. The battle for and over urban space became the stage and
stake in the modern class struggle; revolt necessarilybegan on an urban horizon.

Surplus value was now generated throu h real estate i

.
struction of built infrastructure th
h g
estate mvestrnent, through the con, roug so-called fixed capital th ...
new trajectory of capital. the "
da
. .
1
at initiated a novel
, ~ secon ry C1fCWt of ca ital," Lef b
.
exponentiaUy relative to the " rima cir .
. p .. e vre felt rt had grown
this growth would continu~~-t
rydi ~ult. o~ industrial capital, and he believed
.
n ra ctions, ghtches and cri
. th
are the impetus to shift the di ti
f
.
nses m e latter circuit
ree Ion o capital flows fr
facturi
toward spatial production especiall t
d b
,om manu actunng production
different faetions of capi~ as 1I y di~waffi r ur an spatial production, and it involved
we as
erent factional st ggl
. hi
capital and labor Often too th
ru es wit m and between
.
"e
process was facilitated d
di
varying levels.As such, the physicallandsca e
.. ano coor mated.bythe state, at
way of life-had become exploitabl
d p tiof cities=-ndeed, urbanism as a whole
just realizing it.
e an pro table, actually valorizing value and not
Now, dead labor metamorpbosed m
i t o lrve space Space was .
. l
and commodified bought and Id
.
mcreasmg y colonized
'
so ,created and torn down
d d b
h
.use an a used, specuIated. on and fought over. Such was thee ni
pite of Lefebvre'smost th
h
pellmg spatial exploration The Pr. d .
oroug and corn
"detonate" and Ud de"
o uctton of Space (1974), in which he sought to
eco e space, and empower socialists ev
h
..
::r:
of, and struggle against, an urb ..
d
.
eryw ere JO their analyses (1)
amzmg mo ern capitali
Th b
::<
course, is produaion , and it chiImed W1ith th e radical
.
sm. e.. uzzword here, of 'i
.....
deployed it. Marx insisted that bein radical me
~ ma~ner I~ which Marx had ~
His obsession with production
des
d ant graspmg things by the root.?" (1)
_ .
was eSlgne to do precisely th t: t
......
of captalist society, to delve into the "hidden abod "
a. o grasp the root ~
observable appearance to trace t th ".
e, to go beyond the fetishism of ~
gory horror.
'
ou
e mner movement" holisticaUy, in all its (1)
Lefebvre, correspondingly, attem ted to de
.
..
trace out its inner dyna ..
p.
mystify capitalist social space, to 89
mies, ItSgeneratsve moments in all th .
.
obfuscations. Here, generative means "active" and "
. el~,vanous guises and
, .Lefebvre,an actual productive process Moreover . , "ereauve, and creation is, for
object to the activity that prod
d di
' rt s. never easy to get back from the
uce an or created it," for ft "th
completed, the scaffolding is take d
. lkew
'
a er
e eonstruction is
.
n own, ewise the fate of
th'
JS to be torn up and tossed away"J4If thi
d'
an au or s rough draft
'
.
ISsoun s a lot like a
tiali d
".,
spa ize version of
Marxs "fetishsm of commoditi
1 es, tt s meant to The shift fr
th
..
space" to the "production of spac ".
th
om eonzmg "things in
qthj
.
e, ID o er words mimi k d M '
.
ngs m exchange" to "social l.
f
.'
c e
arx s shlft from
. u
re aUons o productlOn" Now L fi b
. to concentrate attention on the prod ct.
f
.
,e e vre urged Marxists
.inherent to it-relationships wh.ch . Ud Ion o .space and the social relationships
.
1
mtro uce speClficcont d ti
.
soechoing the contradicti
be.
ra lC ons mto proouction,
.. d
on tween pnvate ownership of th
f
. an the social character of the p d . f.
e means o production
Urbanizati ..
ro uctJve orces" (90).
on 15 a pIVOta!extension of the "s atializa i "
driven, and empowered Lef, b
p
t on process.It's overwhelm;.enVisioni~ti
and
. d b'
e vre notes, by a representation of space, by a space
conceve y assorted professionals and tech
developers architects urb .
nocrats: planners, engi,
,anlsts,
geographers and oth
f
.
space retlects the arcane
di.
.'
ers o a sCJentificbent.
mo e s, slgns, and }argon used and transmitted by these

"specialists,"

.
Usually ideoogy,

power, an

d knowledge

lurk somewhere within it, or

. ty . timately"tied to the rela-

radiate from it. This is the dominant ~padce~f anh~shoc;o;em relations impose" (33).
ducti
d to the or er w le
tions of pro uction an
. ". monuments
towers, factories,
.
f
6 d " bjective expression m
,

Representatlons o space no.

d
lit" 1 uthoritarianism immanent to a
office blocks, and the "bureaucratic an ~o ica a t i class warfare, pitted against
"( ) Th ' used as an mstrumen m
repressive space 49.
ey re
ak Lec b e's heart soar: the directly
. t the spaee that m es le vr
representatioTlal space, agalOs
.
.
.
d via vernacular language,
.
f
d experience. This space lS expenenee
.
lived space o every ay
" du
" that "overlay physical space, making
.
f " h bitants an users
symbols and images o m al.
al
. ht be linked to "undersymbolic use of its ~bj:~s"(3:~'::i~~:en=::~,
f::~~o:~t
obey any rules of"conground and dandestme sides
. .
h "head": it's more felt than
.
"N ither does it mvolve too mue
.
sistency or coheslveness. el
th . "it
aks" according to Lefebvre."It
,
d r has more there ere. I spe ,
thought. lts ~otan a IVe,

ed bedroom, dwelling, house; or: square,

has an affective kernel or center. Ego, ~ f'
.
f action and oflived situations,
church, graveyard.lt embraces the 10Clo passlOntl,
o lt may be qualified in various
. lv i Ii t' e Consequen y 1
and t~us immbeddlrr.ateectYI'o:~
~:u~:o~al or relational, because it is essentially qualiwavs: It may e
,
tative, fluid and dynarnic" (42).
al
';secreted" by spatial
Representations of space and representation space ar~ . dial ctical unity
.
th
. d and lived space coexst m
e
.
practices, which ensure at conceive di ti n Spatial practices invariably relate to
They se.cretestability,as weU.as~o;;: o~ ~e' world, on tneir world-particularly
perception, to people s pe~celve . make sense (and nonsense) of everydayrealtheir everydayworld. Spatial practtces
th t link together
ks
tt s and movements a
ity, and include routes and ~etwor ,P:i e~ embrace production and reproduc90 spaces of work, play, and leisure. They
~.
. tal continuity and "spatial
.
d
t'
They mamtam SOCle
tion, conceptlOn an execu lon t between the conceived and the lived, keeping
competence" (33), and somehow me a e. al
together yet apart-keeping one
representations of space and represen~tlon ~pace
,
.
I
cal'
classic
Cartesian
fashion.
global, the o th er o , In
.
,
t ble And they adorn historical
. . his " tial triad" aren t ever s a .
Relations within t IS spa l
.'
d
b dying with actual flesh and
. I thei d termmatton nee s em o
clothing. According y, etr e
. al'
. ty makes no bones about it. Left
blood, with real-life specificity. But capit lalstSOCled erywhere tlourishes through
d f,
06t system ways an ev
unchecked, a market an a or-pr
,
hasi
" bstract" has obvious Mandan
. d a1m Lefebvre s emp ass on a
the abstract conceive re
.
.
f b tt. ct labor YetLefebvre takes it
rtners Marx's notion o a s
.
overtones: abstraa space pa
d 1 1 as a temporal phenomenon.
"b
t
ct"
operate
so
e
y
a step beyond Marx, for wh om a sra.
..
d the bouruali t' 1 different (concrete) labor acUvltles un er
Marx suggested that q
ta lve y
.'
re' money This standard
d
. le quantltatlve measu .
.
geois system got reduce to a smg
."
dity relations colonize
d
. t r for a11"thmgs as commo
becomes the common enomma o.
th fr'
d activity of such labor abstract
b d . Marx comed e mts an
d
everywhere an every o y,
,..
ied to the law of value, to socially neceslabor, labor in general, labor that s mtlmat~\t
ct" imply a mental abstraction: it has
sary labor time. In no way,of course, does a stra
.
. as exch ange value and value have.
a very real eXlstence,}ust

ili

In a like vein, abstract space has a very real social existence. It becomes concrete
and qualitative in different buildings, places, activities, and modes of social intercourse
over and through space. But its raison d' tre is conditioned by a logic that has no real
interest in qualitative difference. Its ultimate arbiter is none other than vaJue.Value
and money (the universal measure of value), by hook or by crook, set the tone of the
structural conception of abstract space. Thus, value dictates infuse it, Here exgences
of banks, business centers, productive agglomerations, information networks, and law
and order all reign supreme--or try to. Iust as abstract labor denies true concrete
labor-true fully developed individuality-abstract space likewise denies true con
crete qualtative space. It denies the generalization of differential space; a space that
doesn't look merely different, but really is different, different to its very coreoIt's dif
ferent because it celebrates particularity-both bodily and experientiaJ-and it affirms
the right to the city, the right to difference in the city. True differential spaee is a
burden. It cannot, must not, be allowed to fl.ourish by the powers that be. It places
unacceptable demands on capital accumulation and growth. On the other hand,
abstract space cardes within itself the seeds of differential space, much like Marx
reckoned capitalism carries the seeds of socialisrn within itself. Abstract space will
be the launchpad for differential space. The former once broke up unity; yet it can
restore unity, can spawn differential space, the spaee of socialism and socialist
urbanismo
Lefebvrec1earlyhad come a long way over a long period; bis Marxism had ducked
and dived all the while. He'd simultaneously embraced Hegel and ditcbed Hegel;
he'd operated on the center stage and meandered in the shadows. He'd roamed the
countryside and cruised the city streets. He'd affirmed workers' self-management 9~
and reveled in joyous festival. He'd both scorned and celebrated student spontaneity.He'd dissected everyday minutiae and swept across global capitalismoHe'd delved
into alienation and wrote about space. It was quite a brew, quite an actoBut was t too
much? Does his work stack up as a coherent whole? Trenchant critiques often came
from old pals, from ex-colleagues and associates wbo knew him and his vast work
well.
Manuel Castells, for one, once Lefebvre's assistant at Nanterre, undercut his
senor's humanist leanings and the intellectual credibility of Lefebvre'sobject of analy
siso In The Urban Ouestion, originally published in Freneh in 1972,the Spanish urban
sociologist boldly asked whether the urban and space were legitimate objects of
enquiry at all. In fuct, Castells thought Lefebvre a Iittle too lax in his "reification" of
space.Castells even caught a glimpse of "spatia! fetishism" going on. Indeed, rather
than address the fetishism of the space, Lefebvrehad masterminded his own fetishism,
by e1evatingspace and the city to an "it," to a thing that revolts of its own accord.
Castellswasn't impressed. From legitirnately trying to develop a "Marxist analysis of
the urban phenomenon," Lefebvre, Castells argues, "comes c10serand doser, through
...a rather curious intellectual evolution, to an urbanistic theorization of the Marxist prob1ematic.~"For his part, Lefebvre maintained that Castells elidn't understand space. "He

sets aside space," he wrote. "His is still a simplistic Marxist schema.?" But the bad press
stuck. It helped assure the relative neglect of Lefebvre's urban and spatial studies

during the 1970s.

And if that wasn't enough. there was another, more radical, political attack made on

GUY DI~BOI{D

Lefebvre by fellowtraveling Marxist urbanists. They were a younger crew: students, ex

students and wannabe students; struggling artists and poets; activists and hangers-on:
with much less to lose than the established Lefebvre. Lefebvre knew them all, and they
knew Lefebvre. It was a love story that didn't end well. They took Lefebvre up on his
urban radicalism, and pushed it further, even suggesting that the old professor had
ripped off their ideas all along. They pilloried him for not following them onto the
street, for not joining in, for not going for broke. The drama spanned the late 1950s,
culminated in 1968, then fizzled out in 1972.The partcipants operated under the loose
title "situationists," and a vagabond thinker and bandit called Guy Debord became
their leading theoreticallight. His efforts, and that of the situationists, mark another
vital current in the flow of Marxist urbanism, and that is what 1will chronide in the

THg CITY OF MAHX AND COCA-COLA

O, Nigbts o YO\.ll,
--Comte de Lautr';'-aJIIOllt,
You ba~e
caused me a ~ot of beadacbes!
Posi.e

1 bave been a wanderer tbe

--George Borro\v, aver;gro greater

part

of my ~ife.

next chapter.

GuyDebord
was aao::;t exact~y
tiJ i r ty years Henri Lefebvre'S
B
.

"". ID ,~931,in Pars, he was, he clairned, "a doctor of

~:~mg. In th~ s~-~o

years he lived,he never held a

y acadernic Job; ID fact, he never held any stead

:;s~e~ n~ghermade it through college, either, and barel;

1
school. He got by on rus wits, using bis
ncornparable
charm ' though often th e lifle o f a revoluti

92

onar: was also a life of penury. In Panegyric; his slim

autobiography, Debord said be was "born . t all
. ed," HO
vir U y
rum.
IS family's fortune was wiped out in the
1930s,as economic crisis swept eastward fro Am
Th ~
.
m
m~
ere er, ID the course of adolescence he"
'
never
grante. d th e sliightest importance to those rath
er ah stract
quesnons
about the future ." He "could not even think
. of
stu
.
o

:ymg fo~ one of the most learned professions that

7eteto b~'ding down a job, for all of them seemed com.im Jy alien to my ~tes or contrary to my opinions.'"
1

th hroes were twisted scribes like Arth ur eravan and

e Comte de
. Lautramont ' who both died at tender
ages, mystenously.
." I have seen only troubled
"All my, !ife" h e sad,

times,
divisions in society, and IDunense
.
dest extreme
. "
ructton. Debord's milieu was the milieu of dem li
ton
d
o lexperts an dangerous classes, of malcontents and

Junior.