Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
work is padded out with digressive and repetitive disquisitions on
Mao and Stalin, on Lenin and Trotsky, on China and Yugoslavia,
which have little or no resonance nowadays. On the other hand,
equally typical are insights that are ahead of the game and live on:
the new “materialization” of the state, at once a decentralization
and reconcentration of governmental power and remit, signaled,
Lefebvre reckoned, an epochal transition, a situation in which “the
state now raises itself above society and penetrates it to its depths,
all the way into everyday life and behavior.” 3 Herein the SMP
has several dimensions, and a few telling moments: a managerial
moment of consent, a protective moment that seduces its population,
and a repressive moment that kills, that monopolizes violence
through military expenditure and strategies of war. Meanwhile,
within the state apparatus resides a restructured “division of political
labor,” coordinated by technocrats, the military, and professional
politicians, those agents of the state who preside over an
abstract space that “at one and the same time quantified, homogenized
and controlled—crumbled and broken—hierarchicized
[hiérarchisé] in ‘strata’ that cover and mask social classes.” 4
Ironically, the Marxist clarion call of the “withering away of
the state” in the passage toward socialism had been hijacked by
an innovative and brazen right wing, while the Communist Left—
Lefebvre’s own constituency—bizarrely clung on to a statist crutch.
The French Communist Party still insists on the importance of the
state, Lefebvre said in an interview in 1976. “This is Hegelian
thought; namely, the state is an unconditional political experience,
an absolute. We cannot envisage neither its supranational extension
nor its withering away, neither its regressive decomposition
nor its regional fragmentation. To maintain the state as absolute
is Stalinist, is to introduce into Marxism a fetishism of the state,
the idea of the state as politically unconditional, total, absolute.” 5
And yet the conservative flip side threatens society and economics,
a “danger that menaces the modern world and against which it
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