Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

n o t e s
entrepreneurial, often supranational, one: Le mode de production étatique
(1977)—the statist mode of production.
5. Vladimir Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (The Crisis in Our
Party) (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1978).
6. Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, and Lenin or Marxism?
(University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1961).
7. One of the great countercultural texts of Lefebvre’s generation, urging
the same exuberance to Rabelaisian audiences across the ocean,
was Norman O. Brown’s Life against Death (Wesleyan University Press,
Middletown, Connecticut, 1959): “It was Blake who said that the road to
excess leads to the palace of wisdom; Hegel was able to see the dialectic
of reality as ‘the bacchanalian revel, in which no member is not drunk.’ …
The only alternative to the witches’ brew is psychoanalytical consciousness,
which is not the Apollonian scholasticism, but consciousness embracing
and affirming instinctual reality—Dionysian consciousness” (p. 176).
8. The Survival of Capitalism, p. 100. “There must be an objective,” Lefebvre
says, “a strategy: nothing can replace political thought, or a cultivated
spontaneity.” Curiously, when Lefebvre published La survie du capitalisme
in 1973, he included several essays that had already figured in The
Explosion [L’irruption de Nanterre au sommet], including “Contestation,
Spontaneity, Violence.” Alas, the English version removed these repetitions,
denying Anglophone scholars the chance to muse on why the doubling
up. The subtitle of Survival offers clues: “reproduction of relations
of production.” Five years on from ’68, the capitalist system had not only
withstood “subjective” bombardment but also “objectively” began to grow.
The essential condition of this growth is that relations of production can be
reproduced. How are they reproduced? In a wink to Althusser, Lefebvre’s
text is less exuberant in its revolutionary hopes and enters into the world of
institutional analyses; yet it’s obvious he can’t quite resist toying with the
idea of spontaneity and contestation throwing a spanner in the apparatus
of societal reproduction. See, for more details, Remi Hess’s enlightening
“Postface” to the third edition of La survie du capitalisme (Anthropos,
Paris, 2002), pp. 197–214.
9. See Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy
(Polity, London, 1998).
Chapter 4
1. In Pyrénées, Lefebvre calls Mourenx a “semi-colony,” built between 1957
and 1960 for gas workers at the plant in nearby Lacq. Of Lacq, Lefebvre
notes (p. 116), “The ‘complex,’ according to the pompous and imprecise
vocabulary of the technocrats, encrusts itself in the landscape like a foreign
body.” “Who had profited?” from this alien intrusion. “Before all
Paris, before all private enterprise, who receive from here energy and natural
resources, and who’ve participated in the trappings of mobilizing the
gigantic means of state capitalism” (p. 117).
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