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
is necessary to struggle at all costs. There is no ‘good state’; today
there is no state that can avoid moving towards this logical outcome:
the State Mode of Production; that’s why the only criterion
of democracy is the prevention of such an outcome.” 6
Lurking behind this new state form, behind a “simulacrum
of decentralization,” is thus a right-wing Hegelian “ruse of reason.”
The neoliberal state’s divestment from the public sphere in
the name of personal liberty—epitomized by Margaret Thatcher’s
1980s maxim “There is no such thing as society, only individuals
and families”—“merely transferred the problems,” Lefebvre reckons,
“but not the privileges.” 7 No longer is government coughing
up for public service provision and collective consumption budgets;
instead it subsidized corporate enterprise, lubricated private
investment into “the secondary circuit of capital,” and left it to
grassroots groups and voluntary organizations to clear up the mess
of market failure, to handle affairs of redistributive justice.
The loosening or breaking down of the state’s centralized
administration, its apparent rolling back and strengthening of civil
society, is really “the crushing of the social between the economic
and the political.” 8 Privatization and deregulation actually extend
the domain of the state rather than restrict it. From being outside of
civil society, the state henceforth suffuses all civil society. “If the
state occupies three dominant sectors (energy, information technology,
and links with national and world markets),” Lefebvre cautions,
“it can loosen its reins somewhat towards subordinate units,
regions and cities, as well as business … it can control everything
without needing to monitor everything.” 9
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Abstract space and SMP orthodoxy have proliferated most forcefully
in the post-1991 era. So forcefully, in fact, that the dialectical
link between space and politics seems to have receded behind
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