Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

s p o n t a n e i t y
Molotov cocktails, and manned the barricades. On May 13, there
was a one-day general strike; “student–worker” solidarity suddenly
looked possible, against the French Communist Party’s and
general worker’s union’s odds. By May 20, strikes and occupations
became contagious. Nationwide, around ten million workers
downed tools and froze assembly lines. France seemed on the
precipice of revolution; a festival of people was glimpsed, briefly.
Lefebvre’s double allegiance with the students and the working
class meant his Marxist take on May 1968 was at once orthodox
and heterodox, rooted in the “objective conditions” of French postwar
society, conditions expressive of economic contradictions and
crisis tendencies in long waves of growth; on the other hand, he
was equally sympathetic to the “specific” and “subjective” grievances
of the youth: their alienation, their hatred of institutions,
their loathing of the admen and technocrats plotting to commodify
the world. (They were also voicing discontent over an all-toopersistent
theme: an illegal war in a far-off place perpetrated by
American military might.) In essence, the wily Lefebvre wanted
to highlight what was simultaneously general and specific about
this latest “French Revolution,” what was objective and subjective,
structural and superstructural, old and new in the situation.
He wanted to grasp everything dialectically and explain things in
their totality. He yearned, above all, for young and old progressives
to dialogue around theory and action.
When I first read The Explosion in the late 1980s, it hadn’t
turned me on much. Doubtless the prevailing political climate
hardly helped. After all, my friends and I, like much of the British
left, were then afflicted with New Right blues, or were languid
with the melancholy of postmodernism. A decade or more on, a
few things had changed, some for the better! To begin with, the din
around postmodernism had subsided: nowadays, the intellectual
left isn’t so much bothered about deconstructing Los Angeles’s
Bonaventure Hotel as a postmodern hyperspace as it is supporting
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