Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

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a heretic. … I pronounce myself irreducibly against the existing
order … against a ‘being’ that searches for justifications beyond
judgment. I think the role of thought is to harry what exists by
critique, by irony, by satire. … I refuse to condemn spontaneity,
that of the masses and that of the individual, even when it tends
to be thoughtless, humorous, and bitterly ironic. I merit the value
of spontaneity; life shouldn’t fall from above and rest heavily;
and everyday life and humanity aren’t the realization of politics,
morality, the state and Party.” 11
Lefebvre was a Marxist who sought not to denounce student
exuberance in 1968 but to foster it, to use it productively, constructively,
tactically, alongside skeptical working-class rank and
filers. In The Explosion (1968), scribbled as the Molotov cocktails
ignited on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, Lefebvre assumed
the role of a radical honest broker, trying to galvanize the “old”
Left—his generation, who tended to rally around class, party, and
trade unions—with an emergent “New Left,” a younger crew of
militants, less steeped in theory, who organized around anti-imperialism
and identity themes and who spoke the language of culture
and everyday life. The parallels with post-Seattle agitation are
striking. The Lefebvrian desire to conjoin young and old progressives
around a concerted anticapitalist struggle remains as pressing
and as instructive as ever; his theories about space equally
resonate within analyses of globalization, just as his notion of
the “urban revolution” and “right to the city” endure as visionary
democratic ideals. Lefebvre warned us long ago that the ruling
class will always try to suppress and co-opt contestation, will
always try to convert romantic possibility into realistic actuality.
He knew that in desiring the impossible, in reaching for the stars,
we might at least one day stand upright.
His was a praxis that borrowed more from Rosa Luxemburg
than Vladimir Lenin, whiffed of Norman O. Brown rather than
stank of Leonid Brezhnev. In the 1970s, somebody asked Lefebvre
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