Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

n o t e s
2. Henri Lefebvre and Norbert Guterman, La Conscience Mystifiée (Éditions
Syllepse, Paris, 1999), p. 66.
3. Ibid., p. 66.
4. La Somme et le Reste—Tome II, pp. 453–55. Cf. Conversation avec Henri
Lefebvre, pp. 43–44.
5. Ibid., pp. 453–54.
6. Ibid., p. 453.
7. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977),
p. 124. Emphasis in original.
8. Ibid., p. 126.
9. Jean Wahl, Le Malheur de la Conscience dans la Philosophie de Hegel
(Gérard Monfort, Paris, 1989), p. 9.
10. See Karl Marx, “Critique de la dialectique hégélienne,” trans. Lefebvre
and Guterman Avant-Poste, juin 1933, pp. 32–39. With Norbert Guterman,
Lefebvre translated Hegel, Marx, and Lenin (on Hegel) and presented each
in volumes called Morceaux choisis de Hegel, Morceaux choisis de Marx,
and Cahiers de Lénine sur la dialectique de Hegel, respectively.
11. Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Karl Marx—Early
Writings (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1974), p. 386.
12. Ibid., p. 382.
13. Twenty-odd years later Lefebvre came clean: La Somme et le Reste—Tome
II (p. 452) said that Lukács’s confounding of economic and political consciousness,
holy writ for the Third International, was “pernicious” for
workers’ struggle. The Third International (1919–43) became the sequel
to the initial Marx and Engel’s inspired “First International Workingmen’s
Association,” the international communist movement’s attempt to “unite
workers of the world.” After the collapse of the “Second International”
(1889–1914) as World War I broke out, the Third International, or
Comintern, was established by Lenin in Moscow in March 1919 following
the October 1917 revolution. The statutes that followed, until the renegade
Trotsky founded the Fourth International in 1938, proclaimed a “World
Union of Socialist Soviet Republics.” In The Survival of Capitalism (p. 50),
Lefebvre wrote, “The lifespan of the Third International, a revolutionary
organization transformed into a Stalinist institution, saw political thought
and theoretical research completely crushed.”
14. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Massachusetts Institute
of Technology Press, Cambridge, 1971), p. 86.
15. For a more detailed summary, see my Metromarxism (Routledge, New
York, 2002), pp. 26–29.
16. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 197.
17. There’s a curious sense in which Lefebvre’s critique of Lukács’s “concrete
universal” equally applies to the thesis of “the multitude” espoused by
Michael Hardt and Toni Negri in Empire. The act of faith through which
Lukács posited the proletariat as the “identical subject-object of history”
mirrors to a tee Hardt and Negri’s “faith” in the multitude: “The concrete
universal,” Hardt and Negri say, “is what allows the multitude to pass from
1 7