Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
the Hotel and Restaurant Employees’ union reconstruct its rank
and file there. Furthermore, a “post-Seattle” era was suddenly in
our midst, with a many-striped multitude of foes now confronting
corporate globalization and neoliberalism. Young people were
out on the street again, and direct action was alive and apparently
well, growing in strength. So Lefebvre’s The Explosion sounded
fresh again, and his insights sharp. Rereading chapters titled
“Contestation, Spontaneity, Violence” struck as amazingly salient
and suggestive for figuring out our own current situation. Here its
lessons are two pronged and double edged, just as they were in
1968: The Explosion issues words of wisdom about critical analysis
and radical tactics and duly throws down the gauntlet to both
the New Left and what we might now call the “new New Left.”
These days the New Left consists of those who came of age
during the 1960s civil rights and antiwar movements, the youth of
Lefebvre’s time. They were once yippies and hippies and SDSers
(Students for a Democratic Society) but are now the gray-haired
and gray-bearded “used” Left, an assorted coterie of still-radical
tenured professors, public school teachers, writers and intellectuals,
and dedicated subscribers of Monthly Review, Dissent, and
The Nation. The new New Left, on the other hand, coheres around
members of the United Students against Sweatshops, young college
kids launching consumer boycotts of campus garb made by
toiling third world below-minimum-wage employees; others are
straight out of college, ripe for high-paying jobs in the business
world yet have rejected the whole corporate bit. Instead, they’re
unofficial lieutenants in autonomous organizations like Global
Exchange and the Ruckus Society, footloose campaigners against
the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and global
trade inequities. Others are environmentalists with Friends of the
Earth, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and the Rainforest Action
Network. Still more are graduates of the Anti-Apartheid and Latin
American democracy movements, or black-masked anarchists and
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