Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

G L o b a L i z a t i o n a n d t H e s t a t e
with its abstract space of “freedom of choice” to purchase a dazzling
array of consumer durables, the other with its absolute space
of dictatorial personality and totalitarian rule—is no more. The
rational combination of each rule has given liberal-bourgeois
capitalism license to permeate all reality, to colonize all culture
and dominate all geography. And, as we speak, that power of its
market homogenization is quite literally poised to smash down all
Chinese walls.
“No one,” says Lefebvre, “would deny that relations between
the economy and the state have changed during the course of the
twentieth-century, notably during the past few decades.” Enter the
SMP, Lefebvre’s attempt to shed light on this new general tendency,
this new “qualitative transformation,” “a moment in which
the state takes charge of growth, whether directly or indirectly.” 2
“The State Mode of Production” is the title of the third and most
original volume of Lefebvre’s four-tome exploration of the capitalist
state, De l’État, penned furiously between 1976 and 1978
as fiscal crisis of the state raged at every level of government in
advanced countries. In 1975, New York City declared itself fiscally
bankrupt—President Gerald Ford told it famously to “Drop
Dead!” In 1978–79, Britain underwent its “winter of discontent”;
refuse and utility workers lobbied James Callaghan’s Labour government
for cost-of-living raises. Power cuts, garbage mountains,
and rank-and-file acrimony greeted the prime minister’s austerity
appeals. And in Italy and West Germany, extraparliamentary
volatility epitomized by the militant “Red Brigade” and “Baader-
Meinhof” became the new disorder, filling the party political void,
flourishing in the ruins of welfare-state Keynesian—capitalism
with a human face—which was about to perish forever.
Lefebvre’s theoretically dense quartet, drawing heavily on
Hegel, Marx, and Lenin, wedges itself within this interregnum,
when the Phoenix of “New Right” orthodoxy was set to rise out
of Keynesian ashes. As is so typical with Lefebvre, much of this
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