Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
Henri Lefebvre never wrote anything explicit about what we today
call “globalization.” But his thesis on the production of space, and
its role in the “survival of capitalism,” tells us plenty about our
spatially integrated yet economically fractured world. It’s a world
in which information technology collapses distances between
continents and fosters cultural and market exchanges, yet simultaneously
reifies “uneven development” between (and within)
richer and poorer countries. It’s a world, too, in which a lot of our
economic, political, and ecological problems possess an intriguing
geographical dimension, whose spatial stakes have ratcheted
up a few notches since Lefebvre first unveiled his famous thesis:
“Capitalism has found itself able to attenuate (if not resolve) its
internal contradictions for a century, and consequently, in the hundred
years since the writing of Capital, it has succeeded in achieving
‘growth.’ We cannot calculate at what price, but we do know
the means: by occupying space, by producing a space.” 1
Indeed, the question of space has now opened out to its broadest
planetary frontiers. The economy expanding materially across
the globe—and ideologically within daily life—has equally contorted
the internal and external dynamics of the nation-state; “a
new state-form,” Lefebvre remarked, was asserting its will in
the mid-1970s, a grip that has congealed into assorted superstate
and suprastate authorities and agreements, replete with acronyms
galore (e.g., WTO, GATT, NAFTA, FTAA, MAI, etc.). The planetary
production of abstract space has detonated the traditional
scale and scope of political management and warranted new contradictory
modes of national and international (de)regulation—a
new “State Mode of Production” (SMP)—opening up markets
here, sealing them off there, lubricating free flows of capital on
one hand, doling out subsidies on the other. And with the Berlin
Wall gone, the former Communist Bloc can now be seduced, can
now jump on the bandwagon and grab its market cachet—or be
damned. The hoary demarcation between two rival systems—one
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