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
The key questions Marx posed in Critique of the Gotha
Program, and that Lefebvre developed and extended in his work on
the state—How can workers of the world conjoin across national
contexts? Does civil society in itself have sufficient resources and
organizational capacities to replace and reabsorb the state? How
can autogestion, or workers’ self-management, function against
and within the state?—seem too mundane for Hardt and Negri’s
“Big Bang” thesis of global revolution. Lefebvre, needless to say
takes a different tack; for him, “Marx’s comments on the Gotha
Program have lost nothing of their saltiness.” 14
“The ever-mounting number and size of government institutions
in modern society,” says Lefebvre, taking an inventory of
the problem, “call attention as never before to the contradiction
between the political and social aspects. … Will the modern state
manage to stifle social life entirely under the crushing weight
of politics? This is the question the Lassallians ignored, but that
Marx never tired of raising.” “What changes will the form of the
state undergo in the new society?” “What social functions similar
to the functions now performed by the state will remain in
existence?” “In the transitional period, the objective is not simply
to destroy the state (that is the anarchist position), but to let society
as a whole—the transformed society—take over the functions
previously performed by the state.” 15 “Marx’s objective,” Lefebvre
points out, “wasn’t necessarily opposed to that of the anarchists:
the end of the state, the end of hierarchies and political instances,
with an attendant abolition of private ownership of the means of
production.” 16 Nonetheless, anarchists like Bakunin “abridge and
even jump over the period of transition.”
Hardt and Negri’s political vision similarly abridges and leapfrogs
the period of transition. For them space has gobbled up place
and the global champed away at the local; ergo, the scale of politics
has to be pitched at a still-unimaginable world space, with
an “international brotherhood of peoples” (“the multitude”) pitted
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