Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
Coming hot on the heels of Bush’s second-term election victory,
the admonition understandably raised a few eyebrows. Despite
blue-chip tax dodging and squandering public monies, doctoring
election ballots the first time around and fabricating a need for
war, George W. seduced Christian conservatives and Bible Belt
bigotry to sweep to power. “The comparison between the propagandistic
manipulation and the uses of Christianity, then and now,
is,” cautioned Stern, “hidden in plain sight. No one will talk about
it. No one wants to look at it.”
Around the time of the appearance of this article, I was reading
Henri Lefebvre’s La Conscience Mystifiée, a book seemingly
forgotten and largely ignored in Lefebvre’s œuvre, a text still not
translated into English. Moreover, few Anglophone critics even
allude to what may be his most relevant political tract, seventy
years after its original publication. Stern’s concern about propagandistic
manipulation and uses of Christianity, and the seduction
of an electorate, was precisely Lefebvre’s concern. I was as guilty
as anybody for overlooking Lefebvre’s attempt to comprehend
such “mystified consciousness,” and so was finally getting down
to studying his initial claim to fame, a thesis published in 1936 as
the Popular Front stormed to victory in Spain and socialists won
out in France. Just as few American liberals, against a backdrop
of failed war and economic mismanagement, could have predicted
a romping neocon success, the Popular Front—uniting socialists,
communists, and fellow-traveling lefties—believed its mandate
would be a beachhead against Hitlerism. Little did people know
what lay ahead.
In France, Lefebvre’s book (written in collaboration with
Norbert Guterman) was frowned on in the inner circles of the
French Communist Party. Some of its contents seemed directed
more at old friends than at new enemies. Pride was piqued; loyalties
were tested. Workers were critiqued; classical Marxist tenets
impugned. Despite communist wishful thinking, proletarian
144