Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

e v e r y d a y L i F e
This is the positive aspect of daily life: it was familiar, it was
the realm of home and leisure, the arena of safety and security, of
friends and families, of holidays and little treats—the side of life
that included work but was somehow separated from work, set
aside from work, liberated from it. Alienation that pervaded at the
workplace hadn’t yet penetrated the everyday, the nonspecialized
activities that lurked outside the factory gate and the office cubicle,
beyond the school staffroom or store checkout. Or had it? It’s now
that Lefebvre asserts his Marxist credentials; it’s here where the
negative side of daily life emerges. For more and more, he said in
1947, prophetically, everyday life was being colonized. Colonized
by what, exactly? Colonized by the commodity, by a “modern”
postwar capitalism that had continued to exploit and alienate at the
workplace but had now begun to seize the opportunity of entering
life in general, into nonworking life, into reproduction and leisure,
free time and vacation time. Indeed, it was a system ready
to flourish through consumerism, seduce by means of new media
and advertising, intervene through state bureaucracies and planning
agencies, ambush people around every corner with billboards
and bulletins. And it would boom out in the millions of households
that possessed TVs and radios.
* * *
In 1958, Lefebvre drafted a long foreword to his 1947 original
text, evaluating the state of the game ten years on. The pincers
of a cold war and a capitalist consumerist war squeezed tighter
and tighter. On the one side, state socialism bureaucratized daily
life, planned and impoverished it, converted it into a giant factory
intent on productive growth; on the other side, state capitalism
ripped off everyday life and sponsored monopoly enterprises
to mass produce commodities and lifestyles, dreams and desires.
One system transformed the realm of freedom into the drudge of
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