Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

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idealized version that neglects, he reckons, not only “recent modifications
of capitalism” but also the “socialization of production.”
24 Put differently, Marxists had let the world pass them by;
rather than confront the mundane realities of modern everyday
life, they’d turned their backs away from them.
In the “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” Marx said
a worker “does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself,
feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental
and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind.
Hence the worker feels himself only when he is not working; when
he is working he does not feel himself. He is at home when he is
not working, and not at home when he is working.” 25 Lefebvre
suggests workers no longer feel at home even when they’re not
working; they’re no longer themselves at home, given that work
and home, production and reproduction—the totality of daily
life—have been subsumed, colonized, and invaded by exchange
value. For leisure, workers give back their hard-earned cash as
consumers, as mere bearers of money; private life, meanwhile,
becomes the domain where they’re lured to spend, the domain of
the ad, of fashion, of movie and pop stars and glamorous soap
operas, of dreaming for what you already know is available, at
a cost. In an ever-expanding postwar capitalism, all boundaries
between economic, political, and private life are duly dissolving.
All consumable time and space is raw material for new products,
for new commodities. Marx’s “estranged labor” now generalized
into an “estranged life.”
Everyday life mimics in the social realm what Marx spotted
in the economic realm: the notion of social man being conditioned
by a system that produced through private labor; that society was
founded on a privatized basis; and that never could capitalism
square the circle, humanize the social by means of the private.
Once, everyday life was textured around the private and the social
realms, a private consciousness and a social consciousness. At
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