Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

M o M e n t s
comes. / And if he comes? / We’ll be saved / … Well? Shall we go?
/ Yes, let’s go. / They do not move.) And when Russian tanks rolled
into Budapest in 1956, crushing Hungary’s democracy movement,
it publicly confirmed what Lefebvre privately already knew: the
Soviet revolution had failed, had betrayed everyday life. And
China’s situation was uncertain and suspect. So “there was this
gap,” Lefebvre says, “and then the rise of a new social class, that
of the technocrats. And then the advent of the world market—that
is the world market after the period of industrial capitalism. This
world market became an immense force with consequences even
for the ‘socialist’ countries.” 4 Moreover, the massive technological
revolution was matched by equally massive processes of urbanization
and modernization, which began transforming industries and
environments everywhere, seemingly without limit, opening out
new vistas while creating new voids, not Rabelaisian Abbeys of
Thélème but new desert spaces, Alphavilles of the body and soul.
* * *
The Critique of Everyday Life—Volume 2 (1961) not only revisited
Lefebvre’s old thesis a decade and a half on but also cut a
swath—or “Cleared the Ground,” as he put it—for a new platform
of struggle, plotting a new revolutionary Northwest Passage
within and beyond everyday life. In his one-hundred-page opener,
Lefebvre seems to invent the 1960s in his own head, threading
his way through “the labyrinthine complexities of the modern
world.” 5 Early on, he gives us a neat summation of his work to
date. First, he’d reinstated a new Marxist agenda, a project both
utopian and practical, based on the idea of a social praxis resolving
contradictions and eliminating alienating divisions. Second,
he’d grounded this agenda in everyday life, shedding light on what
precisely revolution would change and could change, if anything.
Third, he’d continue to monitor the “lags” between the real and
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