Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

G L o b a L i z a t i o n a n d t H e s t a t e
early driving force behind such politicization; economic, administrative,
and military organization got inscribed in parts of the
world once unique, once outside centers of power and domination.
At that moment, abstract space took over from historical space,
setting in motion a new historical and geographical dynamic.
In its birth pangs, Marx called this impulse “primitive accumulation”;
in The Production of Space, Lefebvre gives it an
explicit spatial dynamic. “The forces of history smashed naturalness
forever,” he notes, “and upon its ruins established the space
of accumulation (the accumulation of all wealth and resources:
knowledge, technology, money, precious objects, works of art
and symbols)” (POS, p. 49). What Hardt and Negri identify as
“Empire” is, in reality, the most developed form yet of Lefebvrian
abstract space, and it incarnates the passage from “the capitalist
state” to the SMP, replete with its own biopower: “The state’s management,”
he says in De l’État,
develops its effects in society as a whole; it doesn’t limit itself to
steering society: it modifies society from top to bottom. Political
society engenders social relations; reacting in the breast of civil
society, political society modifies these social relations with a
“determined” orientation: formation, consolidation and reinforcement
of the middle-classes. This process can itself be considered
as a political product, because its relations tend to reproduce
themselves in assuming the general reproduction of social relations
of production and domination. … The state redirects the
reproduction of social relations by diverse means: by repression
and hierarchy, by the production of appropriated (political) space,
in brief, by the management of all aspects of society. 18
The domain of Empire thereby periodizes a sort of neoabstract
space, something even more abstract than heretofore, whose
generative roots hark back to the global crises of the mid-1970s,
to economic and political upheavals triggered by the demise of
Bretton Woods and catalyzed by the 1973 oil embargo. Yet there’s
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