Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
of communication and publicity open everything up to “the eyes of
the global poor”—adapting Baudelaire’s poem—inspiring indignation
and organization as well as awe (“big saucers eyes”), prompting
the “world literature” Marx dreamed of in The Communist
Manifesto? Tens of thousands of poor landless Latinos have
already helped reinvent the urban labor movement in California;
militancy in South African townships brought down Apartheid;
millions took to the streets in Jakarta, Seoul, Bangkok, São Paulo,
and Buena Aires, when East Asian and Latin American economies
went into meltdown during 1997; revolts against the International
Monetary Fund shock therapy programs have regularly left many
developing world capitals smoldering as the most vulnerable connect
the global with the local on the street. Examples abound. The
fault line between the internationalization of the economy and
a marginalization of everyday life scars urban space. The urban
scale is the key mediator on the global scene, at once the stake and
terrain of social struggle, both launch pad and linchpin in history.
The urban revolution from below, as a historic bloc—or seismic
tremor—still remains the “virtual object” Lefebvre described in
1970, a future scenario yet to be established. But if it ever becomes
a “real” object, a directly lived reality, insurgency will look a lot
different from 1968 and 1871, and from 1917: the storming of the
Winter Palace will now come in the monsoon season.
* * *
The Urban Revolution intimates the shape of things to come, in
terms of both Lefebvre’s political desires and his scholarly œuvre.
As ever, one project prompted another, one thesis led him to an
antithesis and consequently to a higher thesis, something to be
confirmed, tested out, negated again. His life and work ceaselessly
moved through this dialectical process of affirmation and negation,
thesis and antithesis and synthesis. In one footnote, buried
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