Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
the mold that gives the cheese its distinctive blue veins. On the
other hand, McDonald’s signifies malbouffe—junk food—“food
from nowhere,” Bové calls it, and pits big multinationals against
low-paid agricultural workers and small farmers in a complexly
mediated class war. McDonald’s symbolizes “anonymous globalization,”
having little relevance to real food or to local cultures;
abstract food (and drink) thereby helps produce and reproduce
abstract space. 26 In Millau, Bové’s protest was a localized action
that enabled people to see an abstract enemy more definitively,
helping them to grasp concretely new forms of alienation and economic
domination. It also ignited debates about globalization in
France and elsewhere in the world; questions that Lefebvre posed
theoretically decades earlier have been—and continue to be—
explored on the streets of hundreds of cities everywhere.
Henceforth a new kind of multinational trade unionism in
the agricultural sector has burst forth, politicizing urban streets,
opening out onto a global stage, “one that denounces inequalities
and struggles for work and for a redistribution of public funds,
and has an international outlook.” 27 Add this to the struggle for
immigrant rights, for sans papiers, for the excluded and the homeless,
together with local negotiations with the French state on a
thirty-five-hour week—which Bové sees as all part of the movement
against neoliberalism—then “a general upsurge is in the air.”
Meanwhile, Bové and the Confédération Paysanne participate in
a bigger international umbrella movement, Via Campesina, which
organizes and coordinates assorted farmers’ associations and
peasants’ groups throughout North, Central, and South America;
Asia; Africa; and Europe. Via Campesina mobilizes member
organizations in their respective places, where they retain a fierce
loyalty to local culture and local food systems, but their political
activism bonds with other people elsewhere, reaches out across
abstract space; in the contact zones a robust, mediated concrete
politics takes hold.
13