Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
with coherence and form. When the fighting stopped, and when
people came up for air during the 1970s, Althusser’s ideas thus
cornered an ever-growing radical niche.
Luxemburg, however, like Lefebvre, has no truck with Lenin’s
“ultra-centralist tendency,” rejecting his contempt for nonaligned
working-class activism, for the “objectivity” of the party that
Althusser equally underscored. Different progressive and workingclass
federations, Luxemburg wrote in The Russian Revolution,
and Leninism or Marxism? needed a “liberty of action.” 6 That
way they could better “develop their revolutionary initiative and
… utilize all the resources of a situation.” Lenin’s line was “full of
the sterile spirit of overseer. It is not a positive and creative spirit.”
Luxemburg is more generous, more sensitive to the ups and downs
of struggle, in the course of which an organization emanates and
grows, unpredictably pell-mell. Social democracy, she said, isn’t
just “invented”; it is “the product of a series of great creative acts
of the often spontaneous class struggle seeking its way forward.”
Of course, a movement might not immediately recognize itself
within this class struggle, given people become aware of themselves
objectively, as members of the working class, during the
course of struggle. They define themselves through their opposite,
through encountering a “ruling class,” their other, people who are
different from them, who have power and wealth and authority and
whose interests are different from theirs, against theirs somehow.
Class becomes acknowledged en route—not a priori—through
a struggle for recognition, as Hegel would have said. Sometimes
this could be misrecognition, too. There aren’t any precisely prescribed
sets of revolutionary tactics, no tactical recipe books.
In fact, “the erection of an air-tight partition between the classconscious
nucleus of the proletariat already in the party and its
immediate popular environment” is, for Luxemburg, mindlessly
sectarian. The unconscious comes forth before the conscious;
the movement, she said, advances “spontaneously by leaps and
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