Henri Lefebvre: Key Writings by Henri Lefebvre

Author:Henri Lefebvre [Lefebvre, Henri]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, General
ISBN: 9780826492463
Google: h1nDSyI_ZPgC
Publisher: Continuum
Published: 2003-12-12T06:00:00+00:00

There is a double reversal: the subordination of urban reality to its antecedents and conditions, and the subjection of habitation to supposedly higher levels of social practice. Hence a fundamental (from the bottom and from the foundation) reorganization.

An especially bold, yet very simple, interpretation of Marxist thought sees in Marx’s work (in Capital, and also the so-called philosophical and political works) an account of a world turned upside down and a proposal for re-inverting it, that is, to put it back on its feet.10 It is not just Hegelian philosophy and dialectic that have their head down below and their feet in the air, very encumbered (alienated) by this situation, whose strangeness has been diluted or eliminated by custom. The upside-down world, according to Marx, is a society:

a) in which the intermediary supplants the producer (worker) and the creator (artist, inventor, producer of knowledge and ideas) and in which he is able to enrich himself at their expense by harnessing the results of their activity and leaving in poverty those who have taken the risk of creating something. Who are these intermediaries? Merchants, and the many others who manage to plug into the circuit connecting production with consumption and vice versa. In the front rank: the capitalist, whether a landlord or a producer;

b) in which the State (which ought to serve the whole society and diffuse through it its organizational capacity and rationality) comes to do precisely the opposite: it reinforces the exploitation of society as a whole, sets itself up above it and declares itself the vital essence of social life and its structure, while being no more than an accident (a superstructure);

c) in which the bureaucracy can acquire interests of its own and the means to serve them, and where skill and knowledge become the criteria for appointment to the bureaucracy;

d) in which as a result, effects pass for causes, and the end becomes the means and the means the end.

We have only added a few articles to the theory of the upside-down world, which support the project for re-inverting this world, and contribute to the Marxist project for a revolution in industrial organization through a project for urban revolution. It is not difficult to show that any other interpretation of Marxist thought is precisely that, an interpretation, a weaker version, designed to manage this or that institution or aspect of the upside-down world: the State, philosophy, division of labour, the existing morphology, etc. It is just as easy to show that without total subversion of that sort, including the kind that foregrounds problems relating to the actual places where social relations take place, what is said about these relations is nothing but ideological talk. We are happy to repeat, after Marx, that ‘man’ in his ‘essence’ does not reside in the isolated individual but consists of a set of relations or concrete (practical) social relationships. With the result that generic Man (man in general) is only an abstraction. What system of reference enables us to discover the features of the personal?

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