Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
followed by a weakening, even a breaking-up or withering away;
on the other hand, local powers assert themselves vigorously, then
lose their nerve and fall back. … What form might resolution
take?” What kind of local activism can ground itself in a global
spatial practice? How can people find the means to recognize that
their particular grievances coexist with other particular grievances
elsewhere, and that these particulars need each other if they are to
grow universally strong? How can people bond with other people
across space and time, generalize as they particularize?
For Lefebvre, there is one path and practice that can bring
people together to oppose the “omnipotence” of the state and multinational
capital. This, he says, will be the “form taken today by
the spontaneous revolutionary; it is no more anarcho-syndicalism”
but something radically different, something even radically different
from what Marx ever imagined: autogestion—democratic
participation, workers’ self-management, and control of ordinary
peoples’ destinies. 28 This isn’t a revolutionary “recipe,” Lefebvre
cautions: autogestion must be perpetually negotiated and enacted,
relentlessly practiced and earned.
Autogestion is never a condition once established but a struggle
continually waged; it’s a progressive strategy, not a consolidated
model. Autogestion, he says, “carries within itself, along with the
withering away of the state, the decline of the Party as a centralized
institution monopolizing decision-making.” 29 Autogestion is
antistatist: it tries to strengthen the “associative ties” in civil society.
Workers’ militancy, in and beyond established trade unions,
embodies autogestion, where rank and filers assert control of the
means of production not simply comanage them with capital.
Direct action, like the dismantling of McDonald’s, living wage
campaigns, workday reductions, urban housing squabbles, environmental
justice, peasant land struggles, and the activities of Via
Campesina, Conférération Paysanne, Global Exchange, Direct
Action Network, Reclaim the Streets, the World Social Forum—
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