Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

s p o n t a n e i t y
Marx never really elaborated a theory of “contestation,” so in The
Explosion Lefebvre lends a hand. What is crucial about contestation,
Lefebvre believes, is “its aim to link economic factors (including
economic demands) with politics” (p. 65). Contestation names
names, points fingers, has institutions and men merge, makes
abstractions real, and is one way “subjects” express themselves,
ceasing to be “objects” of institutional will and economic capital.
Contestation, Lefebvre says, “replaces the social and political
mediations by which the demands were raised to an all-inclusive
political level” (p. 65). In other words, contestation blooms because
activists and contesters know, for certain, that capitalist representative
“democracy” is a crock of shit. Contestation smacks as a refusal
to be co-opted, a “refusal to be integrated.” Integration symbolizes
cowardice, and its rejection shows “an awareness of what integration
entails with respect to humiliation and dissociation” (p. 67).
Contestation is “born from negation and has a negative character;
it is essentially radical” (p. 67). It “brings to light its hidden origins;
and it surges from the depths to the political summits, which it also
illuminates in rejecting them” (p. 67). It rejects passivity, fosters
participation, arises out of a latent institutional crisis, transforming
it into “an open crisis which challenges hierarchies, centers of
power” (p. 68). Contestation “obstructs and undermines a rationality
prematurely identified with the real and the possible” (p. 68)
and pillories the complacency of institutional wishful thinking,
especially ideologies of TINA—There Is No Alternative.
At the same time, contestation—the AFL–CIO (American
Federation of Labor) might want to take note—“surges beyond the
gap that lies between the realm of limited economic trade-union
demands and the realm of politics, by rejecting the specialized
political activity of political machines” (p. 68). In rejecting narrow
economic demands, “contestation reaches the level of politics
by a dialectical process that reflects its own style: critical and
theoretical contestation, contesting praxis, and the theoretical
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