Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

M y s t i F i e d c o n s c i o U s n e s s
class consciousness isn’t an “objective” category, Lefebvre said,
isn’t something singular and pure, absolutely distinct from bourgeois
consciousness. Indeed, the German situation revealed the
mismatch between “economic consciousness” and “political consciousness,”
given German workers voted—as their American
counterparts had—against their own “objective” interests. Old
friends began disowning Lefebvre; George Politzer, defending
the mind of the proletarian masses, told his former comrade, in
no uncertain terms, “There is no mystified consciousness; there
are only those who mystify.” 1
And yet, Hitler marched on, and the people cheered and followed,
carried along by the tidal wave of mass adoration. With
eight million workers without jobs, Hitler promised work, promised
bread and circuses. We will make arms again, he proclaimed,
we will get our factories moving again. Workers cheered even
louder, even while they gave themselves over—as both cannon
fodder and economic fodder—to big financiers and monopoly
capitalists, with petit bourgeois merchants in tow. “The bourgeoisie,”
Lefebvre said in La Conscience Mystifiée, in a second-term
tongue, “is obliged to maneuver great masses of men awakened
to a certain social and political consciousness. The bourgeoisie
doesn’t need ideas too refined and metaphysical. Carefully instigated
banalities are usually more useful than metaphysics. It now
needs only to utilize old everyday sentiments, sentiments whose
fragrance is ‘all natural’ and ‘simply itself’: faith, hearth, race,
heroism, purity, duty—banalities inscribed in all our hearts.” 2
Demagogues wax lyrical in simple yet seductive language; they
instigate festivals and launch wars, create external enemies apparently
more fearful than internal enemies: “they tenderly embrace
infants, or eat soup with unemployed workers and soldiers; they
ennoble work, and arouse sacred emotions. Amplified by a servile
press, these shameful machinations glory in heroism.” 3 With mystified
consciousness, fiction just as easily transmogrifies into fact;
145