Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

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collaborator Norbert Guterman. Guterman, a Jew, left France in
1933 and settled permanently in New York. With Lefebvre and
writer–communists Paul Nizan (gunned down in Dunkirk in
1940, at age thirty-five) and Georges Politzer (who could swear in
German at his Nazi torturers), Guterman collaborated on a series
of short-lived philosophy journals. For more than forty years, until
Guterman’s death in 1984, he and Lefebvre corresponded. In 1935
they busied themselves on a book, trying to explain why, despite
being counter to its collective interests, the German working class
ran with Hitler. Lefebvre and Guterman appealed for a Popular
Front that could reconcile fractional differences and catalyze a
gauchiste revolution.
Alas, their book, published the following year, was denounced
in “official” communist circles and dismissed as Hegelian and
revisionist. Yet the thesis survived the party and the plague, and
its intriguing title is apt for explaining the zeitgeist of contemporary
America seventy years down the line: La Conscience
Mystifiée—mystified consciousness, a consciousness not only
usurped by the fetishism of the market but alienated from itself
by “absolute truths” of nationhood, patriotism, God, and the
president. Lefebvre’s letters from this period are shadowed by a
pessimism of impending doom that has a familiar ring about it:
“a funk prevents the people from thinking and living,” he wrote
on October 19, 1935; “The moment of catastrophe approaches,”
recalled another communiqué (January 1936). “I will not make a
will,” Lefebvre confessed, on the brink (August 28, 1939). “What I
would have been able to bequeath isn’t yet born. … I don’t think of
posterity in writing to you, but of our work, our fraternity, our true
friendship.” The “Guterman Collection” is a moving testimony of
an enduring friendship that survived a century of war and peace,
love and hate, displacement and disruption.
Yellowing letters, written on tissue-paper parchment, on
regional Communist Party notepaper (“La Voix du Midi”), on
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