Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
better,” Hardt and Negri conclude (p. 46), “both theoretically and
practically to enter the terrain of Empire and confront its homogenizing
and heterogenizing flows in all their complexity, grounding
analysis in the power of the global multitude.”
* * *
How, we might justifiably wonder, can resistance to global power
begin if it isn’t permitted to nurture somewhere, in a specific location?
And what would be the point of any global politics if it isn’t
responsive to some place or people, isn’t rooted in a particular
context? Just as Marx in Critique of the Gotha Program (1875)
accused Ferdinand Lassalle of “conceiving the workers’ movement
from the narrowest national standpoint,” Hardt and Negri take it
the other extreme, conceiving the workers’ movement from the
broadest international standpoint. In a document fundamental to
Lefebvre’s ideas on the state and politics, Marx critically assessed
the draft program of the United Workers’ Party of Germany,
fronted by Lasselle: “It is altogether self-evident,” Marx wrote,
“that, to be able to fight at all, the working class must organize
itself at home as a class and that its own country is the immediate
arena of its struggle.” 12 This class struggle, Marx added, must
be national “in form” but not “in substance.” The “substance” of
the workers’ movement, of course, is international. But Marx’s
internationalism retains dialectical content and real life friction.
“To what does the German Workers’ Party reduce its internationalism?”
he queried. “To the consciousness that the result of its
efforts will be ‘the international brotherhood of peoples.’ Not a
word, therefore, about the international functions of the German
working class! And it is thus that it is to challenge its own bourgeoisie—which
is already linked up in brotherhood against it with
the bourgeois of all other countries.” 13
12