4

HENRI LEFEBVRE

56
THE URBAN REVOLUTION
Inhuman faces
With ghastly spaces
That no heart can see
Find other places:
Here you can't be,
You inhuman faces
-Francois Rabelais, Garganiua and Pantagruel

57
Growing Pains and Hegel
lt's amazing to think that Henri Lefebvre belonged pretty much to the same generation as Walter Benjamín. He was
not quite nine years younger, yet lived for over forty years longer. Benjamín was hesitant, melancholy, and
Gennan; Lefebvre was confident, exuberant, and French. Benjamin's Marxism was introverted, tragic, messianic,
and Jewish; Lefebvre's was extroverted, playful, festive, and Catholic. And yet, despite these differences, their
Marxist urbanism hada lot in common: each affirmed the wortd of minutiae, was fascinated by commodities, by
surrealism, and hada desire to ground Marxism, to make it more graphic, more dialectically concrete-an everyday
urban affair. Each dearly loved Paris, too-ambiguities and all. Benjamín knew of Lefebvre, having read his 1936
book La Conscience Mystifiée, which was coauthored with Norbert Guterman. Lefebvre would've probably heard
of Benjamín, something of a rising star in European critica! and literary circles.
Yet there's no record of the two actually meeting. mutual acquaintances notwithstanding. even though they
were once in the same spot at the same time-Marseilles, in 1940. 8oth were then on the run, fleeing the Nazi
occupation of París. Benjamín, as we saw, intended to go west. to New York, but never made it across the
French/Spanish border. Lefebvre had found refuge for awhile teaching at a lycée in Saint-Etienne. That was until
the pro-Nazi Vichy government ordered the arrest of all leftist sympathizers. So Lefebvre moved first to his
childhood home of Navarrenx, near Pau, in southwest France, before later joiningthe resistance movement around
Marseilles and Aix-en-Provence. He wrote stinging critiques of Vichy for several communist pamphlets, helped
derail enemy trains, sniffed out collaborators, loitered in Marseilles' Café Mirabeau with other res;stants, dissidents
and intellectuals, and kept the red flag flying. Thus began a life of action and thought. a life that would somehow
always be lived on the run, always somewhere in between, often between Paris and the countryside.
Lefebvre was once asked, in the late 1970s, whether in fact he was really an anarchist. "No," he was reported to have
said. "l'm a Marxist, of course ... so that one day we can all become anarchists1" 1 lt's a nice reply, elusive and playful,
typical of someone who proclaimed himself the last French Marxist. But there were always unexpected twists and turns to
Lefebvre's Marxism and Marxist urbanism, fitting given his life-Q long desire-his life spanned almost the entire twentieth
century (1901-1991)-to make Marxism less dogmatic and more spatial, and cities more romantic and vibrant. Not only
was his life long, it was also rích and adventurous. He lived through two World Wars, drunk wine and coffee with leading
Dadaists and surrealists (like Tristan Tzara and André Breton), participated in the Ph;Josophes journal, became an ever
reluctant Communist Party and ex-Communist Party man (expelled for "ideological deviations" in 1958, yet rejoining the
flock duríng the 1970s). He did a stint dríving a cab in Paris, and taught sociology and philosophy at numerous French
universities, including those at Strasbourg and Paris-Nanterre.
Meanwhile, he translated and helped introduce G. W F. Hegel's thought into France, and developed a whole body of
existentialist, dialectical Marxism that transformed "unhappy consciousness" into alienation; he sought erotic as well as
rational knowledge, love more than Five Year Plans. He also wrote prolifically-over three hundred articles and sixty books
-on art, literature, and philosophy; on everyday life; on Marxism and dialectical method; and on urbanism and space. He
was a staunch critic of 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 connection to that system anyway. In fact, Lefebvre
rejected any systematic rendering of Marxism; he never too kit as a holy writ, and always emphasized open-ended practice
as central to democratic socialism. Fully developed individuality ca me about through differentiated practice, not through
drudge or routine, and differentiated practice was only possible through a differential space, through one's "right to the
city/'' through an "urban revolution."
Henri Lefebvre's adolescente and nascent adulthood was scarred by the experience of war-the religious wars that long
plagued Landes, his birth département in the Pyrenees-Atlantique, heme of King Henri IV and scene of the "protestant"
Catholicism of Jansenism and Saint-Cyran; and the two World Wars. His part-Basque mother, Jeanne, the wife of René
Lefebvre, a Ministry of Finance bureaucrat, was devoutly- fanatically-religious; Henri often spoke about her narrow,
"almost Jansenist" faith.1 Lefebvre mocked his homegrown religious upbringing years later in "Notes Written One Sunday
in the French Countryside," a breezy little amble through native pastures: "O Holy Church, for centuries you have tapped
and accumulated every illusion, every fiction, every vain hope, every frustration." 3 Lefebvre noted that in his youth he
"studied the history of the Church in the hope of ferreting out a vintage heresy 1 could resurrect, an indestructible,
indigestible heresy with which to torpedo the Church. Jansen's? Too dry, too terribly eighteenth-century petty-bourgeois,
andas far as boredom goes, hisAugustinus beats even [Thomas Acquinas's] Summa 1heolor;¡iae."
Lefebvre suffered from his Jesuit education and from the wisdom that immediate happiness and gratification had to be
postponed, made subordinate to the promise of a better world to come. Moving to Paris in 1920, to study philosophy at
the Sorbonne, was the first great liberation-of the body as muchas the mind. For years, religion had crippled his physique,
repressed him, made him sickly and weak. and ashamed of his flesh. In Paris he grew strong, jettisoned a few universal
idols, and discovered surrealism, Dada, and Hegel, and that helped. But the two Wor1d Wars cast storm clouds over the
philosopher's journeyman studies and over the first half of the century. "1 remember very well the upheaval," he
commented 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 wavs. such as dancing, music, and going to plays. Beneath that there was a
deeper suffering on account of the dead and the wounded. lt's strange rememberingthat war and the one which followed,

58
how injuries and deaths were masked by a superficial ideology and a certain gaiety beneath which suffering persisted.
Those were terrible memories. Forme, the Second World War wasn't greatly different except that 1was older and had a
clearer understanding of things." 4
Lefebvre stressed 1925 as a watershed year. lt was "the crucial date," he remembered. "1 would want to emphasize
that. beca use it is passed over rather lightly in the history books. My memories of it are very precise. A room was hired in
the Rue Jacques-Callot, near the École des Beaux Arts, for a meeting between the Surrealists...the 'Philosophes' group, and
various other avant-garde groups like 'Ciarté.' The modern revolution was created at that point. We imagined a different
economic system, a different social base, and a different State superstructure. What we had was a revolutionary plan in
place of the vague aspirations of the '14-'18 War and of the immediate post-war period." 5 That same fateful year, one
night in winter, Lefebvre also went to visit André Breton at his studio near the Place Pigalle, on whose table sat Hegel's
huge tome Lagic. "Breton said to me: 'Read that first and then come and see me!' He gave me a brilliant exposé of the
Hegelian doctrine of Surrealism and of the relationship between the real and the surreal, which was a dialectical one." 6
Lefebvre began to devour Hegel, who led him to Marx. lndeed, if Breton had found in Hegel the bridge spanning the
unconscious world of Freud-the world of dreams and the id-with the awake real world of consciousness, Lefebvre
instead found Marx; the wortd of consciousness then transformed itself into conscious activity, into wide-awake social
practice. 7 At first, Lefebvre read Marx as a critique of religion. Back then, he knew only the earty Marx, the Marx of 1844,
the left-wing Hegelian, not the politicoeconomic Marx of Capital which he'd encounter later. Back then, Lefebvre dragged
Hegel ever closer toward Marx, and Marx toward Hegel, staking out a rich 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 nourished his maturing Marxist yearnings; Hegel helped Lefebvre
synthesize each respective drive, reciprocally enriching them. Now Lefebvre, the former Catholic boy, could reta in certain
existential and spiritual motifs-not by reaching upward to the extraterrestrial terrain of theology, but by pulling these
motifs down to earth, into the grubby human sphere, into sociology and politics, deepening Marxist thought (especially
institutional Marxist thought) en route. Lefebvre's intellectual interest in Hegel coincided with the nation's interest in
Hegel. The great idealist thinker was quite the rage in interwar France, enjoying a gtittering renaissance, inspiring an array
of intellectual circles, spanning the entire political spectrum from left to right, from Marxists and existentialists to
phenomenologists and Catholics. In 1929, the philosopher Jean Wahl puta Gallic spin on Hegel's "unhappy consciousness"
from the Phenomenology of Spirit, and Alexandre Koyré and Jean Hippolite likewise became enthusiastic and seminal
purveyors of a neo-Hegelianism, translating several important works of Hegel's in 1931 and giving brilliant seminars at the
Sorbonne. Another seminar on Hegel's Phenomenology, most enlightening to Lefebvre, was given by Alexandre Kojeve at
the ~cale des Hautes ~tudes between 1933 and 1939. Kojeve was a Marxisant Russian émigré 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 classes were never widely attended, but a sparkling cohort of
thinkers diligently sat in and took notes: psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, poet and surrealist André Breton, phenomenologist
philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, political theorist Raymond Aran, writers George Bataille and Raymond Queneau, and,
of course, Henri Lefebvre. 8 Lefebvre met Kojeve on several occasions. They hada few conversations together. HHe knew
Hegel and German philosophy better than 1did," Lefebvre admitted. "But he drew no practica! or political consequences
from them. lt was enough for him to know what Hegel thought. So that created a gulf between us. Because, forme,
Hegel's propositions about contradictions seemed interesting only if they were applied to the present, to current events,
to real society of the day and not to that of the nineteenth-century."9
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. From a starting point purified of every "formal" or "empirical" presupposition, Hegel's Phenomenology
generates the objective world as a wholly intemal movement of the mind, the mind overcoming itself in a series of theses,
antitheses, and syntheses. "Consciousness itself," noted Hegel, "is the absolute dialectical unrest, this medley of sensuous
and intellectual representations whose differences coincide, and whose identity is equally again dissolved." 10 Unity here is
the unity of contradiction, of looking the negative in the fa ce and living with it. Without contradictions, everything is void,
nothingness. Contradictions are a bit like interna! combustion, incessantly devouring themselves, uprooting being from
itself, animating becoming, promoting both life and the annlhilation of life.
Kojeve dug his clawls into contradiction. The "awareness of contradiction," 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 modifying the given existence, by transforming it through Action." 11
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 malntained, "with the first Fight that ended in the appearance of a Master anda 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 contradiction-between master
and slave ceases. Still,liberation necessitated a fight, a "bloody Fight," 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 alone. He wants his particular value, his own worth, to be recognized by every-

59
one-that is, universal/y, and above all by the master, who won't deign to recognize him. On the other hand, the master
likewise yearns for universality, but similarty can't have it so long as he oppresses his other, the slave, who won't
acknowledge the master's authority.
Hence an inextricable antinomy ensues, "two opposed shapes of consciousness,» according to Hegel in Phenomeno/ogy:
"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 orto be for another" (115). The master and slave sit on either side of the fence.
But they can recognize themselves only by mutual/y recognizing one another. So long as the master is opposed to the
slave, so long as mastery and slavery exist, KojE!ve notes, "the synthesis of the Particular and the Universal cannot be
realized, and human existence will never be 'satisfied"" (58). Hegel thought this con-flictual and contradictory history
would actually cometo an end with the advent of the liberal bourgeois state. Then, personal and individual value would be
recognized in its particularity while becoming incarnated universal/y, in the state, thus resolving the particular-universal
contradiction, transcending the mastery-slavery dialectic. Needless to say, Marx and Lefebvre (and Kojeve) hada hard
time swallowing Hegel's liberal state medicine. Nevertheless, theyfollowed Hegel in believingthat real human individuali'ty
-real human freedom-was predicated on overcoming fragmented consciousness and fragmented life, and on
synthesizing particularity and universality. lt 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
development of each. Kojeve summarized the dialectical dilemma, using crypto-Marxist terminology:
IW]hat is recognized universolly, bythe others, bythe State, by Mastery as such, is not Work, nor the worker's 'personality,' bLII: at best the impersonal
product ofwork. As long as the Slave works whlle remalnlng a Slave, that ls to say, as long as he does not rlsk hls llfe, as long as he does not flght to lmpose
his personal value on the State, as long as he does not actlvely lntervene in the soclalllfe, his partlcularvalue remains purely subjectlve: he ls the onlyone to
recognize it. Hence his value is unique/yparticular; the synthesisofthe Particular and the Universal- i.e. lndividuality-is no more realized inthe Slave
than in the Master, Andthat is why-once more-the synthesis of Particularity and Universality in lndividuality, which a lene can truly 'satisfy' Man, can be
realized only in and by a synthetic 'overcoming' of Mastery and Slavery. (60; emphasls in the original)

lndividuality, for Kojéve-as for Lefebvre and Marx-meant a unity of the individual and society, of workers with their
means of work, of a state with its citizens. Democracy wasn't about despotic rule nor one-sided humanism, but "fully
developed individuality," circumstances in which everybody beca me, as Lefebvre hoped, "total men» -a humanly, as
opposed to stately, incarnation of Hegel's absolute idea. Hegel, via KojE!ve, had provided a method, the dialectic; he'd
likewise provided 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
life and in the city itself. He'd find his Marxist humanist voice soon enough. One bold step in that direction emerged in
1939, justas war broke out, with the publication of a little book, Dia/ectical Materialism, Lefebvre•s pesky rejoinder to
Joseph Stalin's Dia/ectical and Historica/ Materialism. The text became a mini-best-seller in France; it helped make the
young Marx credible, readable, no longer off limits. But it also brought Lefebvre heat from party bigwigs and from
sectarian dogmatists.

60
From Hegelian Marxism to Everyday Life
The inability to unify consciousness in both its particularity and universality is the so urce of inward disruption in people. lt
unleashes "unhappy consciousness," "consciousness of self as a dual-natured merely contradictory being.,.¡2 Hegel said
unhappy consciousness is like gazing at one's own self-consciousness in somebody else's consciousness. Consciousness
was present, but somehow out there, elsewhere-detached, not present. This severing meant great mental torment. Hegel
sought to fix it via the mind, vía pure reason, in purely abstract form. In fact, with Hegel it was all in the mind, all form;
there wasn't any real 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 af consdausness, as minds without men, as Marx said in The Eronomic: and Philosaphic:al Manusaipts (1844). Hegel,
wrote Marx, •tums man into the man of consciousness, instead of turning consciousness into the consciousness of real
men." In Dialectic:al 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 Hegel. He knew Hegel had done critically
steady work. But he knew, too, that Hegel's dialectic 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; it's both the beginning and end, the origin of
thought and the solution to problems of thought. Hegel grasped this, but did so in a "one-sided" manner, recognizing only
abstract mental practice, abstract mental labor. For young Marx and youngish Lefebvre alike, practice meant a humanist
naturalism, a social practice, an analysis of pressing social problems, invariably economic problems, which called for
practica! solutions-invariably, politirol solutions. Thus, Lefebvre's "dialectical materialism" constructed a specifically
historical and sociological object; it was an analysis anda worldview, an awareness of the problems of the world anda
will to transform that world. lt was mindful of the economic realm, but didn't regress into economism; it acknowledged
determination, but wasn't itself deterministic; it established coherence without destroying complexity. lt introduced,
Lefebvre said, "living men-actions, self-interest, aims, unselfishness, events and chances-into the texture and intelligible
structure of the Becoming"; and it analyzed "a totalitythat is coherent yet many-sided and dramatic.'' 13
Through practice, humans refashion extemal nature at the same time as they refashion intemal nature, their own
nature. Hence practice also involved "the production of man.1114 Lefebvre was addressing the production of real,
corporeal, sensuous men and women, as was Marx; these were people who breathe "all the powers of nature" and
who're equipped with "essential powers," "vital powers," "drives" and "passions." Passion, Marx notes, "is man's essential
power vigorously striving to atta in its object." 15 Passionate human beings are protean creatures, desiring differentiated
practice, needing meaningful and fulfilling activity, something integral in intellectual, emotional 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 henceforth estranged, alienated. Life was lived in Plato's cave, staring at shadows. But
alienation is more than "feeling bad." lt 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 espedally when they're
raking it inl The bourgeoisie is alienated, too, Marx felt, justas 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 division of labor,
money exchange, occupational structuring. profit dictates, and bureaucratic administration; and also for technological
advancement under capitalism, which inverts huge liberating potentiality, compelling a lot of people to work more, with
greater repetition, increasing their burden rather than lightening the load.
In interwar France, Lefebvre's hope against hope was that socialism would overthrow alienated capitalist lite while
staving off the specter of fascism. The antithesis of alienated man was the "total man," a character Marx a Iludes to in The
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (see "Private Property and Communism"). "The positive supersession of private
property," Marx writes, means "the sensuous appropriation of the human essence and human life." Human essence
doesn't just revolve around possession, around simply having or awning; 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 individuality... are in
their abjective 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 extemal world and organically connecting objectivity and subjectivity-has to be a socialist ideal. lt may
never become an actual fact; it is a striving, a hope, a goal, a limit, a possibility, always frustratable and contingent. lt
comes without guarantees, giving instead "direction to our view of the future, to our activities and our consciousness." 16
lt signifies a future open to active human practice, to thought and striving, of putting striving into action, into praxis, to
overcome "objective" contradictions. Nothing is assured or definitive, predestined or closed; the totality of the total man
is an "open totality.'' The total man, Lefebvre notes, expresses "a limit to infinity," perpetua! transcendente, incessant
becoming. lt's nota "new man," somebody who "suddenly bursts forth into history, complete, and in the possession of all
hitherto incompatible qualities of vitality and lucidity, of humble determination in labor and limitless enthusiasm in
creation." 17
This remark, like the general thesis aired in Dia/ectical Materiofism, represents a thinking radical's assault on the

61
"official" party Marxism of the day, the custodians of which were Stalin and Andrei Zhdanov (Stalin's hack theorist). This
orthodoxy tried to merge philosophy with the natural sciences and base dialectical method on the "dialectics of nature."
Lefebvre's Marxist humanism explicitly seeks to scupper such dogma, to loosen the grip of "systematized" Marxism, a
Marxism reduced to a single stiente, a tatechism of the future in the form of politit:al er;onomy, with its law-like dialectic
supposedly operating objectively, unconsciously, behind the backs of real, thinking people. Soviet-style Marxism, Lefebvre
wams, is dangerous beca use it has seductive advantages: "it is simple and easily taught," tor one thing; "it steers clear of
complex problems, this being precisely the aim and meaning of dogmatism ... lt 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 recast Marx's thought. As a researcher at the Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique in París (1949-61), working initially on rural sociology, he'd reverse the sea le of Marxism, amid críes
of heresy, pitching his critique of bourgeois society (and of institutionalized Marxism) to the "everyday," to quotidian
experience, to ground zero-to the scale that most of us find meaningful. "Modern» postwar capitalism continued to
exploit and alienate at the workplace, but now alienation also began to r;ut deep into everyday life itself, into non-
workplace everyday life, into reproduction and leisure, flourishing through consumerism, seducing via media and
advertising, intervening though state bureaucracies and planning agencies, seemingty lurching around ever comer and
booming out on every billboard. Now, claimed Lefebvre, "yo u are being looked after, ca red 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-of the sort of "ene-dimensional, thesis Herbert Marcuse
would commandeer in the 1960s-none was intended. Lefebvre was much too spirited, romantit:, and dia/ectical for that.
Everyday life, instead, possessed a dialectical and ambiguous nature. On the one hand, it's the realm increasingly
colonized by the commodity, and hence shrouded in all kinds of rnystification, fetishism, and alienation. "The most
extraordinary things are also the most everyday," Lefebvre quipped in Critique of fveryday Life, reiterating Marx's
tomments on the "fetishism ot commodities," that "the strangest things are often the most trivial., On the other hand,
paradoxically, everyday life is likewise a primal site for meaningful social resistance, "the inevitable starting point for the
realization of the possible." Or, more tlamboyantly, "everyday lite is the supreme court where wisdom, knowledge and
power are brought to judgment." 18 Thus, radical politics has to begin and end in everyday lite; it can't do otherwise.
Nobody can get beyond everyday life, which literally internalizes global capitalism; and global capitalism, 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. Everyday lite is like quantum gravity: by going very small you can perhaps begin te understand the whole structure
of life. By changing everyday life you can change the world; why change the world if it doesn't release everyday life?
People don't fight or die for tons ot steel, Lefebvre quips; they aspire to be happy in everyday life, to be free, wanting not
to work or produce. But a lot of Marxists 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
production" and "the new contents of specifically capitalist relations.'' 19 In other words, sorne Marxists had let the world
pass them by, had turned their backs away from the mundane realities of modern everyday lite, not confronted them.
lndeed, as the 1940s gave way to the 19505, the capitalist system, for all its inherent contradictions and crisis
tendencies, actually grew, actually expanded its productive torces, 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 tire in 1925 suddenly seemed naive against the soaring business cycle. Writing
later, in 1971, Lefebvre recognized that, "around 1960 the situation became clearer, everyday life was no longer the no-
man's land, the peor 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 as investments in national territories and the organization of home 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 such; these included the suburbs of cities, the countryside, zones of agricultura! production and all
outlying districts inhabited, needless to say, by employees, technicians and manual laborers; thus the state of the
proletarian beca me generalized, leading to a blurring of class g distinctions and ideological 'values.m 20
Work life, prívate 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 Kafkaseque bureaucracies and technocracies. Now
a .p massive scientific and technological revolution had occurred, a perverse inversion of-and substitute for-the social
and political revolution that never ca me. That was like waiting for Godot. And when Russian tanks rolled into Budapest in
1956, crushing Hungary's democracy movement, it confirmed what many socialists and communists already privately
knew: the Soviet revolution had failed. China's situation, too, was uncertain and suspect. 5o "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 marl<et after the period of industrial capitalism. This world market beca mean immense force with consequences
even for the 'socialist' countries." 21 What's more, the massive technological revolution was matched by equally massive
processes of urbanization and modernization, which began transforming industries and environments everywhere,
seemingly without limit, opening out new vistas, but also creating immense new voids, new desert spaces, deserts for the
mindand body.

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Urbanization in the Modern World
"Whenever 1set foot in Mourenx," Lefebvre writes in lntroduction to Modemity, "1 am filled with dread." Mourenx is a
prototypical species, a French "New Town/' which. like other New Towns sprouting up on the European (and American)
landscape, "has a lot going for it." The overall plan," Lefebvre writes, "has a certain attractiveness: the lines of the tower
blocks alternate horizontals and verticals.... The blocks of flats loo k well planned and properly built; we know that they are
very inexpensive, and offer their residents 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 homes.... Over here,
state capitalism does things rather well. Our technicists and technocrats have their hearts in the right place."22 And yet,
every time 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 different spheres of human activity, zoning things here and
there, creating functional spaces, but despoiling everyday life at the same time, turning people inward, not outward,
turningthem awayfrom each other.
René Descartes and the Cartesian tradition within Westem philosophy and the humanities began this severing in a noble
pursuit of "rational" knowledge, carving out a debilitating disjuncture between mind and body. New Townslike Mourenx
were really the spatial embodiment of this Lagos, this big technocratic brain at work, and Lefebvre knew it firsthand:
Mourenx, after all, overlooked the cherished medieval Navarennx, his childhood heme and timeworn summer residence.
He saw the New Town 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 lvan Karamazov with Karl
Marx: he cautioned that planners had now become new "grand inquisitors," promising bread as long as they controlled
everybody's freedom. The accusation, of course, merely reaffirmed Lefebvre's Marxist humanism; only now it beca me a
"spatial" Marxist humanism as well. Now, a more wholesome 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.
Alas, in Mourenx ennui had set in. Spontaneous vitality and creativity had apparently been wrung out. Strangely, there
aren't many traffic lights in Mourenx, even though the place is described as being "nothing but traffic lights." lts whole
physiognorny, meanwhile, is left naked, robbed of meaning.. "totally legible." In Mourenx, Lefebvre writes, "modernity
opened its pages to me." But here "what are we on the threshold of?" he inquires, is it "socialism or supercapitalism?...
Are we entering the city of joy or the world of unredeemable boredom? ... As yet 1cannot give a finn answer" (119). One
conclusion, at any rate, is evident: Mourenx's world expresses an ordered, enclosed, andfinished wor1d, a world in which
there's nothing left to do. There is no adventure, thrill, or romance now; everything is dictated by predictable
mathematical exactitude. (lt is a world marvelously satirized a few years later by Jean-Luc Godard, in his movie Alphaville.)
Enter, in comparison, picturesque Navanrenx. In the fourteenth century, it too was a New Town, built to a fair1y regular
ground plan near the River d'Oioron, and rebuilt two centuries later in an even more geometric design, ringed with
ltalianate ramparts. Lefebvre emphasized the subtle and instructive development of Navarrenx through the example of a
seashell. A seashell is the result of a living creature that has slowly "secreted a structure." Separate the creature from the
form it's given itself-according to the laws of its species-and yo u' 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.
Navanrenx's shell, Lefebvre claims, embodies the forms and actions of a thousand-year-old community that has "shaped
its shell, building and re building it, modifying it again and again according to its needs."
Lefebvre is mesmerized by Navarrenx's organic intimacy, much the way Walter Benjamín was mesmerized by Na pies.
Everything about Navarrenx's streets and buildings, squares and passageways, style and function, have vitality anda kind
of unity. lts streets aren't wastelands, nor are they simply how people go from point Ato point B. They're places "to stroll,
to chinwag, 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,
Navanrenx, like many small towns, has been dying, and the "expiring seashell lies shattered and open to the skies."' lt's
gotten more boring as time has passed. Market day is 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 still is, radically different from Mourenx's. Navarrenx's boredom is more complacent, Lefebvre reckons; 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, unrealized possibilities. A magnificent life is waiting just around the cerner, and
far, far way" (124). Boredom impacts heavily, especially on the youth, and on women, who always bear the brunt of
everyday life.
Lefebvre can't hide his fondness for the old pastoral town. At times, his fondness 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.
Lefebvre realizes he'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 highlight the relationship between an animal (i.e., us) and our
habitat (i.e., our cities) and specifically how this habitat 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 follows a certain functioning arder, yet it's equally
randa m, spontaneous, and organic, too. Thus, the living creature slowly, and with uncertainty, secretes its own structure.

63
Human beings, Lefebvre feels, are unique in that we have two different ways of 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: "how to reproduce what was once created
spontaneously, how to create it from the abstract?" (125). Furthermore, can spontaneity ever be revitaliz.ed in Mourenx,
can a community be created, create itself? ls Moureux either laissez-faire organicism or active human intervention via a
prefigurative plan? ls the city a "technical object" oran "aesthetic object"? According to Lefebvre, socialism, as well as
Marxist urbanism, has to find its own answers here, has to find its own style in everyday lite.
Lefebvre's homesickness, 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 and he uses the past only as a vehicle for pushing forward and onward,
toward a higher plane of critica! thinking and practice. He wants to bring spontaneity back into everyday life. Spontaneity
can potentially disalienate everyday life. Sorne of the finest moments of spontaneity within the everyday, especially within
everyday Navarrenx, were the bawdy rural festivals, periodic "celebrations [that] tightened social links and at the same
time gave rein to all the desires which had been pent up by collective discipline and the necessities of everyday wor1c."
These festivals drew all that was energetic, all that was pleasurable and possible from nature, food, sociallife, 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 of torces
which had been slowly accumulated in and via everyday life itself."23
Festival days were days of excess, enormous orgies of eating and drinking, almost without rules. Joyous 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 Théleme, sounded a lot like Lefebvre's utopian ideal. Théleme
was 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 Théleme weren't governed by laws and statutes and rules, but behaved
according to their "own free will": "DO WHAT YOU WILL," proclaimed Rabelais. Meanwhile, everybody drank and played,
spoke five or six languages, and wrote "easy poetry'' and "clear prose" in all of them. Festivals made a permanent
impression on the intellectual imagination of Lefebvre, the former country boy from the Pyrenees-Atlantique who'd very
soon integrate rural festive traditions into a modern industrial and urban context and then affirm them as a prospective
Marxist political practice.
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 socialism.
Besides, "revolutions of the past," he claimed, like 1789 and the 1871 Paris Commune, "were festivals-cruel, yes, but then
is there not always something cruel, wild and violent in festivals?" 24 Projected anta an urban canvas, the street, for
Lefebvre, now became a kind of stage. The drama here might be epic, or absurd, or both, scripted by Bertolt Brecht,
Antonin Artaud, Charlie Chaplin, or even Rabelais-who could tell? lt's meant to be spontaneous, after all. In any event,
the street would enact radical theater, unleashing the in-your-face militancy Lefebvre demanded from his Marxism, from
his festive urban Marxism. The amalgam was heterodox and thrilling: alongside Marx, we had Hegel; but alongside Hegel,
there was also room for Freud; alongside Freud, there's Friedrich Nietzsche, too; and overlooking them all, somewhere, is
Rabelais. In Freud, Lefebvre found the unconscious; in Hegel, consciousness; in Marx, practica! conscious activity; in
Nietzsche, language and power; in Rabelais, festival, laughter and mockery. In the city, he made space for all five. But
there, unconscious desires lay dormant beneath the surface of the real, within the surreal. They wait for judgment day, for
the day when they can be unlocked in awake experience, freed from economic torces that inevitably suppress passion or
else create phony passions, ones enveloped in mystification and fetishism. lnstead of mystification, Lefebvre wanted cities
to relea se repression, not keep it under wraps, as in Mourenx. He wanted cities to provide the means for "free conscious
activity," to express jouissance, intense sensual (and sexual) pleasure and excitement. He wanted everyday lite to be
"reclaimed for itself," reclaimed by something tantalizingly called a "lived moment.u This invariably involved sorne feat of
collective and individual resistance: the occupation of buildings, streets demonstrations, free expressionist art and theater,
picketing, rent strikes, even a general strike. These were recognitions of radical possibility, intensely euphoric incidents and
happenings that might be serious-sometimes deadly serious-as well as playful; indeed, for Lefebvre, lived moments
should be luminous "festivals of the people," Marxist politics with a rambunctious, carnivalesque spirit, demanding, above
all, people's "right to the city.N

64
The Right to the City
In the early 1960s, Lefebvre proselytized the same at the University of Strasbourg. .p before moving. in 1965, to Paris-
Nanterre, where he'd remain until "retirement" in 1973. lncreasingly, his work now began to bemoan the sacking of the
central city core. His beef could be summarized thus: without a center there simply can't be any "urbanity." Such was the
leitmotiv of a series of books he'd pen, in typically rapid-fire succession, on urbanism and urban politics over the next
decade. 25 In them all, he'd liken suburban and New Town growth toa "deurbanized" kind of urbanization. In France, it
became explicit class warfare, just as it was in Baron Georges Haussmann's day. lnevitably, it meant a denial of the
worl<ing-class urbane, who found themselves steadily decanted and banished to the outlying banlieue, to places like
Mourenx, or else to the new giant high-rise housing estates, les grand ensembles, that littered peripheral París and other
French cities. The urban center was correspondingly conquered by the well-heeled, by the bourgeois, whose playground it
henceforth became. Tight-knit neighborhoods underwent disintegration, experienced renewal, got refashioned,
reformulated, upscaled; once gritty "use values" beca me glistening "exchange values," dancing to the tune of rentier and
financia! capital, as well asto vested tourist interests. Lefebvre's own París residence at Rue Rambuteau because of its
proximity to Renzo Piano's and Richard Roger's spectacular Pompidou Center in Les Halles and the Forum shopping
complex, wa s likewise under fire, threatened by encroaching embourgeoisement. "1 have the feel ing." he mused, "that the
center is becoming 'museumfied" and managerial. Not politically, but financially managerial. The metamorphoses of the
city and the urban continue."
While this process seemed a lot more appropriate to continental Europe than North America-where many upper- and
middle-class people, especially white upper-and middle-class people, had done precisely the opposite, had fled the center
for low-density, decentralized suburbs-both instances, Lefebvre notes, exhibited the same violently 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
dose to nature." He is angry and c:oncerned about this; concemed that the "consciousness of the city and of urban reality
is dulled ... so as to disappear. The practica! and theoretical (ideological) destruction of the city cannot but leave an
enormous emptiness." He is concerned about the experience of urbanism that the suburlbs engender, and how they
actively work against, and undermine, the best qualities of a dense, centralized and unified urbanization. "The suburbs are
urban," he confesses, "within a dissociated morphology"; they constitute "the empire of separation and scission between
elements of what had been created as unity and simultaneity"; the old center, meanwhile, "remains in a state of dispersed
and alienated actuality." 26
Mind you, this anger and concem isn't meant to signify cynicism; nor, as we've already seen from Navarrenx, is ita la
recherche d'espace perdu. Lefebvre, like Marx and Engels, doesn't envisage the reconstitution of the old historie city:
industrialization and modernity have gane too far. "The prescription," plainly, is that "there cannot be a going back
(toward the traditional city), nor a headlong flight, toward a colossal and shapeless agglomeration." lnstead, the
revolutionary effort must reach out, forward, toward "a new humanism," "a new praxis," toward "another man, that of
urban society," with an "experimental Utopía" (148); radical urbanists "must invent" (213). The "right to the city" isn't a
"pseudo-right" or simply a "visiting right"; neither is ita return toa historically preserved, serially reproduced, gentrified
urban core. The right to the city is instead "like a cry and a demand." lt has to be formulated as "a transformed and
renewed right to urban life" (158). The city has to survive as a place of encounter, as a space prioritizing use value, asan
"inscription in space of a time prometed to the rank of a supreme resource among all resources." And only the working
class can beco me the agent, the social carrier or support of this realization.
According to Lefebvre, one of the crucial things about the Paris Commune was "the strength of the return toward the
urban center of workers pushed out into the outskirts and peripheries, their re-conquest of the city ... [of] this oeuvre
which had been torn from them" (76). For barely seventy-three days, freely elected workers, artists, and small business
owners were at the helm. The Commune embodied everything Lefebvre loved about cities, festivals and revolutionary
politics, and he chronicled it as such in La Proclamation de la Commune. Lefebvre called the Commune "the only
realization of revolutionary urbanism to date." lts issues, he said, were territorial and urban; its practice was festive and
spontaneous. The Communards, until the French National Guard massacred thousands of them, launched a revolt in
culture and everyday life, demanded freedom and self-determination, destroyed reviled symbols of bourgeois power and
authority, occupied the streets, shouted, sang for their "right to the city." Lefebvre thought the Commune was "the city's
grand and supreme attempt to construct itself as the measure and norm of human reality."
Ninety-seven years later, during the heady "May Days" of 1968, this manifesto flooded onto Parisian streets. As befo re,
there was street fighting, mayhem and gendarmes with rifles. For awhile, Charles de Gaulle's reign loosened. The French
Communist Party, together with its handmaiden union, the Confederation of General Workers, immediately denounced
the student-led rebellion. At first, autoworkers at Renault were reluctant to strike in support of the youth. Lefebvre, the
Nanterre sociology professor then in his sixty-eighth year, uncharacteristically followed suit. He supported the students'
actions, but only in principie. The timing. he and party critics claimed, was awry; the moment simply wasn't ripe, the
ímpetus couldn't be sustained. Demonstrators had no concrete program anyway, and had, at least in the beginning, little
popular base. Lefebvre found himself torn between both camps, with allegiances in both and in neither; the excommunist,
after all, was still a socialist true believer, a cautious fellow traveler within party circles. On the other hand, student
radicals and cadre in the demonstrations and occupations, like Daniel Cohn-Bendit and the elder situationist guru, Guy

65
Debord, had, directly and indirectly, once been mentored by Lefebvre. (Debord was never actually a student of Lefebvre's,
contrary to what sorne commentaries say. Lefebvre met and befriended Debord through the situationist students he'd
taught at Strasbourg in the late 1950s.} All they did was .p put his lectures and writings into practice. Yet now they
reproathed their old a teacher, denounced him asan "agent of recuperation," called him a hypocrite for not participating
on the barricades, for not lobbing Molotov cocktails on the Boulevard St. Michel, for not practicing what he once
preached. The older generation had previously wanted in, had demanded consumer goods, increased wages, refrigerators
and automobiles; the younger, alienated 1968 generation now wanted out, demanded something more, asked, What price
growth? What cost material wealth?
The May strikes and upheaval also helped accentuate the rift between "humanist"' and "scientificH Marxists, between
Lefebvre and Louis Althusser. As we'll see in chapter 6, when we look at Manual Castells's work, it equally accentuates the
rift within Marxist urban studies. In a perverse sense, the late 1960s and 1970s saw the reputation of party disciple
Althusser grow formidably: his Marxism became de rigueur, even within the radical student fraternity. Students were
fascinated with Althusser, the reclusive and ascetic ficole Normale Superieure structuralist philosopher. They likened his
famous "epistemological break" to their own out on the streets. In desperation, Lefebvre attempted to exonerate himself,
quickly scribbling a mea culpa, The Explosion. In it, he expressed a change of heart. Now he sought not to criticize the
students' exuberance and street spontaneity, but to show how to foster it, to use it productively, constructively, tactically,
alongside party and union skeptics. He sought to steer a dialectical path between the rationality of theory and the
irrationality of action. He tried to deal with the slippage between the two, in a way that Althusserian Marxism never could,
recoupling thinking and acting within an explititly politica/ analysis, an analysis that opens up the horizon of possible
alternatives. His was a Marxism wíth, not without, a class subject. 27
May 1968, he noted, entailed a complex intermingling of cultural, political and economic torces, sorne new, others old.
The basic class contradiction, of course, between prívate ownership of the means of production and the social character
of productive labor considered primary by Marx remained unresolved in 1968 as it does today. But ownership of the
productive torces 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 complex of organizations and institutions engaged in management and decision-making. They
are superimposed on the economic organizations proper, and constitute the foundation and instrument of what is called
Power. They appear to constitute a system. The term 'capitalist system' has not lost its meaning in the century that has
elapsed since the appearance in 1867 of Volume 1 of Capital. Far from it. lts meaning has beco me more precise. lt has
become clearly and distinctly politicar' (15; emphasis in the original). In this regard, contestation was absolutely crucial; it
helped "link economic factors (including etonomic demands} with politics" (65}. Contestation names names, points
fingers, merges institutions and men, makes abstractions real, and is ene way "subjects" express themselves, ceasing to be
"objects." Contestation means a "refusal to be integrated" (67); it is "born from negation and has a negative character; it
is essentially radictll." lt "brings to light its hidden origins; and it surges from the depths to the political summits, which its
also illuminates in rejecting them." Contestation rejects passivity and fosters participation. lt arises out of a latent
institutional crisis, transforming it into "an open crisis which challenges hierarchies, centers of power" (68; emphasis in the
original).
Contestation, moreover, 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 practice which may overcome it at
the right moment-neither too early nor too late-that," he maintains, "is a mark of dogmatism" (70). Without
spontaneity nothing happens, nothing progresses. "Power therefore regards spontaneity as the enemy." Spontaneity
always expresses itself in the street, the authentic arena of Lefebvre's Marxist politics, where it can spawn within and even
transform everyday life. The street is that arena of society not occupied by institutions. 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 reaffinn order, in the na me of the law. From street level-from below-contestation can
spread to institutional areas, above; spontaneous contestation can unveil power, bring it out in the open, out of its
mirrored-gtass offices, black car motorcades, prívate country clubs, and air-conditioned conference rooms. 28 Streets now
become explicitly politicized, filling the void left by institutional politics. Therein lies the strength of spontaneous street
contestation; therein líes the weakness: the weakness of localism, of symbolism, of "partial practice," of nihilism. So
spontaneity required at the same time a serious delineation of spontaneity. But this had to be done in the name of a
theory "which pure spontaneity tends to ignore" (74): Marxist theory.

66
Space: The Final Frontier
In the wake of May 1968, not long after the dust had settled and the mist cleared, Lefebvre, the sprightly sexagenarian,
brought a new term to the Marxist lexicon: urbon revolution. Now, our Hegelian humanist Marxist had not only beco me a
humanist Marxist urbanist; he had also become a radical geographer. Lefebvre pointed out how "Marx thought that the
productive torces constantly flung themselves against the restrictive limits of existing relations of production (and of the
capitalist mode of production}. and that the revolution was going to leap over these constraints. Partial crises would
thange into a general trisis; the working class was waiting impatiently for the imminent hour, and would enter the
transitional period following the political revolution." 29 The protagonists of 1968, like the Communards of 1871, had
engineered a general crisis in one country. The Frenth state tottered, yet the capitalist system remained solidly intact.
Somehow the protesters were reabsorbed, the counterculture reincorporated, reappropriated into a supermarket
counterculture. Protesters were famous for about fifteen minutes. They were, as Godard said, "the children of Marx and
Coca-Cola." Here, as elsewhere, the capitalist ...system" had apparently withstood everything thrown at it; as ever, it
attenuated its contradictions, even contradktions interna! to it. Against all odds, in the hundred-plus years since Marx
wrote Capital this system had succeeded in achieving growth. "We cannot calculate at what price," admitted Lefebvre.
"But we do know the means: by oc:cupying space, by produdng a space,30 The "production of space" was now the central
plank in "the survival of capitalism."

lndeed, a startling aspect of the capitalist mode of production is and always has been its geographical dynamic. lt had
been spelled out by Marx in the Communist Manifesto, by Lenin in lmperialism: The Highest Stage of Copitalism (1916), and
by Lean Trotsky in his theory of "uneven development "Yet a newer spatial logic was now befare us, and Lefebvre
believed it needed fleshing out with greater clarity, warranted better definition as well as a stronger urban mooring.
lncreasingly, he thought, the Industrial Revolution that preoccupied Marx and Engels in the nineteenth century was merely
a precursor for the "urban revolution" of the twentieth century. The capital/labor contradiction was now foremost a
contradiction of urban society, not industrial society. In fact, urbanism itself had become a "force of production," just like
science.31 The reality of urbanism modified the relations of production without being suffkient to transform them. Awhile
ago, as Engels vividly highlighted, industrialization created a certain type of urbanization; now, insisted Lefebvre, it was the
other way around. Of course, such a subordination of industrial society to urban society handily bought time for
capitalism, 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 of space. The battle for and over urban
space beca me the stage and stake in the modem class struggle; revolt necessarily began on an urban horizon.
Surplus value was now generated through real estate investment, through the construction of built infrastructure,
through so-called fixed capital that initiated a novel new trajectory of capital; the "secondary circuit of capital." Lefebvre
felt it had grown exponentially relative to the "primary circuit" of industrial capital, and he believed this growth would
continue.32 Contradictions, glitches and crises in the latter circuit are the ímpetus to shift the direction of capital flows,
from manufacturing production toward spatial production, especially toward urban spatial production, and it involved
different factions of capital as well as different factional struggles within and between capital and labor. Often, too, the
process was facilitated and coordinated by the state, at varying levels. As such, the physicallandscape of cities-indeed,
urbanism as a whole way of life-had beco me exploitable and profitable, actually valorizing value and not just realizing it.

Now, dead labor metamorphosed into live space. Space was increasingly colonized and commodified, bought and sold,
created and tom down, used and abused, speculated on and fought over. Such was the pitch of Lefebvre's most thorough
and compelling spatial exploration, The Production of Space (1974), in which he sought to "detonate" and "decode" space,
and empower socialists everywhere in their analyses of, and struggle against, an urbanizing modern capitalism. The
buzzword here, of course, is production, and it chimed with the radical manner in which Marx had deployed it. Marx
insisted that being radical meant "grasping things by the root." 33 His obsession with production was designed to do
precisely that: to grasp the root of capitalist society, to delve into the "hidden abode," to go beyond the fetishism of
observable appearance, to trace out the "inner movement" holistically, in all its gory horror.
Lefebvre, correspondingly, attempted to demystify capitalist social space, to trace out its inner dynamics, its generative
moments, in all theirvarious guises and obfuscations. Here, generative means "active" and "creative," and creation is, for
Lefebvre, an actual productive process. Moreover, it's "never easy to get back from the object to the activity that
produced and/or created it," for after "the construction is completed, the scaffolding is taken down; likewise, the fate of
an author's rough draft is to be torn up and tossed away." 34 lf this sounds a lot like a spatialized version of Marx's
"fetishism of commodities," it's meant to. The shift from theorizing "things in space" to the "production of space," in
other words, mimicked Marx's shift from "things in exchangeH to "social relations of production." Now, Lefebvre urged
Marxists "to concentrate attention on the production of space and the social relationships inherent to it-relationships
which introduce specific contradictions into production, so echoing the contradiction between prívate ownership of the
means of production and the social character of the productive forces" (90).
Urbanization is a pivotal extension of the "spatialization" process. lt's overwhelmingly driven, and empowered,
Lefebvre notes, by a representation of space, by a space envisioned and conceived by assorted professionals and
technocrats: planners, engineers, developers, architects, urbanists, geographers, and others of a scientific bent. This space
reflects the arcane models, signs, and jargon used and transmitted by these "specialists." Usually ideology, power, and

67
knowledge lurk somewhere within it, or radiate from it. This is the dominant space of any society, intimately "tied to the
relations of production and to the 'order' which those relations impose" (33). Representations of space find "objective
expression" in monuments, towers, factories, office blocks, and the "bureaucratic and political authoritarianism immanent
toa repressive space" (49). They're used asan instrument in class warfare, pitted against representational space, against
the space that makes Lefebvre's heart soar: the directly lived space of everyday experience. This space is experienced via
vernacular language, symbols and images of "inhabitants" and "users" that "overlay physical space, making symbolic use
of its objects"(39). Representational space might be linked to ... underground and clandestine" sides of social lite as well,
for it doesn't obey any rules of "consistency or cohesiveness." Neither does it involve too much "head": it's more felt than
thought. lt's hot and alive, has more there there: "it speaks," according to Lefebvre. "lt has an affective kernel or center:
Ego, bed, bedroom, dwelling. house; or: square, church, graveyard. lt embraces the loci of passion, of action and of lived
situations, and thus immediately implies time. Consequently it may be qualified in various ways: it may be directional,
situational or relational, beca use it is essentially qualitative, fluid and dynamic" (42).
Representations of space and representational space are "secreted" by spatial practices, which ensure that conceived
and lived space coexist in dialectical unity. They secrete stability as well as contradiction. Spatial practices invariably relate
to perception, to people's perceived take on the world, on theirworld-particularly their everyday world. Spatial practices
make sense (and nonsense) of everyday reality, and include routes and networks, patterns and movements that link
together spaces of work, play, and leisure. They might embrace production and reproduction, conception and execution.
They maintain societal continuity and "spatial competence" (33), and somehow mediate between the conceived and the
lived, keeping representations of space and representational space together, yet apart-keeping one global, the other
local, in classic Cartesian fashion.
Relations within this "spatial triad" aren't ever stable. And they adom historical clothing. Accordingly, their
determination needs embodying with actual flesh and blood, with real-lite specificity. But capitalist society makes no
bones about it. Left unchecked, a market anda for-profit system always and everywhere flourishes through the abstrad
conceived realm. lefebvre's emphasis on "abstract" has obvious Marxian overtones: abstract space partners Marx's
notion of abstract labor. Yet Lefebvre takes ita step beyond Marx, for whom "abstract" operated solely as a temporal
phenomenon. Marx suggested that qualitatively different (concrete) labor activities under the bourgeois system got
reduced to a single quantitative measure: money. This standard becomes the common denominator for all "'things" as
commodity relations colonize everywhere and everybody; Marx coined the fruits and activity of such labor abstrad labor,
labor in general, laborthat's intimately tied to the law of value, to socially necessary labor time. In no way, of course, does
"abstract" imply a mental abstraction: it has a very real existence, justas exchange value and value have.
In a like vein, abstract space has a very real social existence. lt beco mes concrete and qualitative in different buildings,
places, activities, and modes of social intercourse over and through space. But its raison d'etre is conditioned by a logic
that has no real interest in qualitative difference. lts ultimate arbiter is none other than value. 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 exigencies of banks, business centers, productive agglomerations, information networks, and law
and order all reign supreme-ortry to. Justas abstract labor denies true concrete labor-true fully developed individuality
-abstract space likewise denies true concrete qualitative space. lt denies the generalization of differenUal space, a space
that doesn't look merely different, but really is different, different to its very core. lt's different because it celebrates
particularity-both bodily and experiential-and it affirms the right to the city, the right to difference in the city. True
differential space is a burden. lt cannot, must not, be allowed to flourish by the powers that be. lt places unacceptable
demands on capital accumulation and growth. On the other hand, abstract space carries within itself the seeds of
differential space, much like Marx reckoned capitalism carries the seeds of socialism 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 space of socialism and socialist urbanism.
Lefebvre clearly had come a long way over a long period; his Marxism had ducked and dived all the while. He'd
simultaneously embraced Hegel and ditched 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 and reveled in joyous
festival. He'd both scomed and celebrated student spontaneity. He'd dissected everyday minutiae and swept across global
capitalism. He'd delved into alienation and wrote about space. lt was quite a brew, quite an act. But was it too much?
Does his work stack up as a coherent whole? Trenchant critiques often carne from old pals, from ex-colleagues and
associates who knew him and his vast work well.
Manuel Castells, for one, once Lefebvre's assistant at Nanterre, undercut his senior's humanist leanings and the
intellectual credibility of Lefebvre's object of analysis. In The Urban Question, originally published in French in 1972, the
Spanish urban sociologist boldly asked whether the urban and space were legitimate objects of enquiry at all. In fact,
Castells thought lefebvre a little too lax in his "reification" of space. Castells even caught a glimpse of "spatial fetishism"
going on. lndeed, rather than address the fetishism of the space, Lefebvre had masterminded his own fetishism, by
elevating space and the city to an "it," to a thing that revolts of its own accord. Castells wasn't impressed. From
legitimately trying to develop a "Marxist analysis of the urban phenomenon," Lefebvre, Castells argues, "comes closer and
closer, through a rather curious intellectual evolution, to an urbanistic theorization of the Marxist prob-lematicl5 For his
part, Lefebvre maintained that Castells didn't understand space. "He sets aside space," he wrote. "His is still a simplistic

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Marxist schema." 36 But the bad press stuck. lt helped assure the relative negtect of Lefebvre's urban and spatial studies
during the 19705.
And if that wasn't enough, there was another, more radical, political attack made on Lefebvre by fellow traveling
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. lt was a love story that didn't end well. They too k Lefebvre up on his urban radicalism, and pushed it further,
even suggesting that the old professor had ripped off their ideas all along. They pllloried him for not following them onto
the street. for not joining in, for not going for broke. The drama spanned the late 19505, culminated in 1968. then fizzled
out in 1972. The participants operated under the loose title Hsituationists," anda vaga bond thinker and bandit called Guy
Debord became their leading theoreticallight. His efforts, and that of the situationists, mark another vital cunrent in the
flow of Marxist urbanism, and that is what 1 will chronicle in the next chapter.

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