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| Henri Lefebvre |
By Adam Whitford, Socialist Resistance, September 22, 2011
Henri Lefebvre
(1901-1991) is famous for writing about space: not outer space, but social
space. He looks at how space is created and used under capitalism, and how
different social forces could shape space differently. His influence is
apparent in the work of Marxist economic geographer David Harvey, and in the
debates about the impact of occupations of buildings and public spaces in the
Middle East, Greece, the Spanish State, Britain and Israel.
Here I want to
focus on the possible links between Lefebvre’s arguments in his book The
Production of Space (1974; translated from French in 1991) and contemporary
ecosocialist approaches.[1] Ecosocialism, as it has developed since the 1990s,
is based on the twin notions that ecological sustainability is indispensable if
we are to achieve prosperity and equality for all human beings, and that such a
society would be impossible under capitalism. What, then, can Lefebvre tell us
about the spatial relationship that capitalism has constructed with the earth
and with its human inhabitants? What alternative set of relationships does he
have in mind?
We can start by
noting that The Production of Space (PoS) represents something of a response to
the ecological movement of the 1970s. Thus Lefebvre presents an apparently
isolated object, a house, as connected to wider networks of energy:
‘One might almost
see [the house] as the epitome of immovability, with its concrete and its
stark, cold and rigid outlines. … Now, a critical analysis would doubtless
destroy the appearance of solidity of this house, …In the light of this
imaginary analysis, our house would emerge as permeated from every direction by
streams of energy which run in and out of every imaginable route: water, gas,
electricity, telephone lines, radio and television signals, and so on…. (PoS,
92-3).
Lefebvre goes on to
extend this model of energy flows to the street, and thence to a whole city,
ending the passage with a striking image:
…the city, which
consumes (in both senses of the word) truly colossal quantities of energy, both
physical and human, and which is in effect a constantly burning, blazing
bonfire. (PoS, 93)
In contrast to such
an approach, capitalism has traditionally tried to make us think about the
things people buy, or purchase the use of – a car, a flat, etc – as separated
from such networks. Under capitalism, each object has its own magical value. In
picking out these commodities as individual objects, advertising tends to
present them as special, separate, unique to you. This magic of the commodity ,
momentarily isolated from its surroundings, is what Marx calls its fetish
value. The private car, for Lefebvre, is our fetish object number one: “ In
this society where things are more important than human beings, there is a
king-object, a pilot-object : the automobile. Our society, so called
industrial, or technical, has this symbol, a thing invested with prestige and
power …”[2] In fetishising such objects, then, we commonly fail to recognise
the material foundations on which their existence depends; these foundations
comprise not only wage labour, but the energy which this labour both harnesses
and embodies.
How is it that
Lefebvre is able to view things in this interconnected way? It is not just that
he has been influenced by ecological radicalism. His dialectical approach means
that he never sees phenomena as separate and self-contained objects, but as
part of wider processes. For him, as for Heraclitus, Epicurus and his
followers, the Chinese Daoists, Hegel and Marx (who wrote a thesis on
Epicureanism), nothing remains the same, everything is in movement.
His approach thus
stands in opposition to the more rigid outlook associated with the early
capitalism and the 17th century European scientific revolution. The philosopher
Rene Descartes developed the idea of a powerful, rational, human subject (‘I
think, therefore I am’) separated from but dominating physical space. The
astronomer Isaac Newton saw space as essentially an empty void, filled
occasionally with objects such as stars and planets and molecules, which were
solid, like billiard balls. Einsteinian physics and quantum theory have dealt a
series of blows to such confident simplicities. They present space not as
empty, but as traversed by interconnections, by energy waves. Solid elementary
particles meanwhile turn out to be far from solid; they become concentrations
of energy. But the old view of an empty space inhabited by solid objects (such
as the house) is still ‘common sense’ in modern societies, and it is one that
has been promoted by capitalism itself.
Why is this?
Lefebvre explains that capitalists need to exercise their power over space in
order that they can make a profit. This is not only about marking out private
property; it involves having a command over one’s own national territory, as
well as dependent territories. This means that capitalists will tend to see a
space partly as ‘empty’ (think: Zionists in Palestine, the colonisation of
North America, the straight lines demarcating the frontiers of African and
Middle Eastern nations) and partly as containing certain objects, which can
either be turned into commodities (minerals, oil, labour resources), or which
are obstacles to the process of commodification and have to be destroyed or
neutralised (insurgents, resistant communities, natural obstacles). For these
purposes, accurate maps organised on a grid system have proved essential .
But, one may
object, surely all the talk about globalisation is proof that capitalists don’t
any longer think in Cartesian or Newtonian terms? The media gives us a picture
of a planet traversed by flows of energy, resources, capital, labour. We are
all familiar with those images of bright cities at night seen from space, of
internet connections, of airline routes, all of which can evoke the vitality
and dynamism of global capitalism.
There are, in fact,
two tendencies of capitalism which converge here. On the one hand, everything
and everywhere is seen as potentially subject to change, open to inflows from
elsewhere; on the other hand, everything is potentially classifiable, and thus
capable of being fixed in place and plotted on the abstract spatial grid of
power. The Communist Manifesto famously summed up the experience of capitalist
modernity in the phrase: ‘All that is solid melts into air’. But the
fragmentation and disorientation that we feel is only part of that experience:
simultaneously we come up against something very solid – structures of
exploitation and control, in the form of the capitalist market and state.
Capitalism thus constructs a “a visual space of transparency and readability…
nothing in it escapes the surveillance of power” [PoS 147].
Nonetheless,
Lefebvre also invokes, inspiringly, the spectre of resistance – a
‘counter-space’, which is developed wherever the rule of capital is being
fought.
We know what
counter-projects consist or what counter-space consists in – because practice
demonstrates it. When a community fights the construction of urban motorways or
housing developments, when it demands ‘amenities’ or empty spaces for play and
encounter, we can see how a counter-space can insert itself into spatial
reality: against the Eye and the Gaze, against quantity and homogeneity,
against power and the arrogance of power, against the endless expansion of the
‘private’ and of industrial profitability. [PoS 381-2]
This ‘Eye’ which
must be resisted, Lefebvre clarifies elsewhere, is ‘the eye of God, of the
Father, of the Master or Boss’, the eye that watches over capitalist social
space. Thus he understood the political significance of these local ‘environmental’
challenges to power before most of the Left, who would have tended to dismiss
them as the work of a few middle-class cranks. Perhaps Lefebvre gives the
over-optimistic impression that local campaigns will spontaneously cohere and
present an alternative to the system – but he does recognise that these
conflicts over space must achieve ‘resolution’ in the form of a different
method of organising society, otherwise we are doomed to keep fighting over –
literally – the same old ground. What he is sceptical about (and this is one
area where I would differ from him) is the necessity for a political party or
parties to give direction to this resistance.[PoS 381]
Nature is a key
referent in Lefebvre’s argument. He argues, however, that nature has been
‘defeated’: ‘natural space’ is on the point of disappearing [PoS 30-1]. This
all started, he says, when humans developed tools, thus alienating themselves
from nature. This process has latterly been hugely shaped – and accelerated –
by capitalism, but the source of original sin is in human consciousness itself,
which aims to subordinate nature to its purposes. [PoS 376].
The ecosocialist
Daniel Tanuro would disagree on both counts:
It is not nature
that is in crisis, but the historically determined relationship between
humanity and its environment. This crisis is not due to the intrinsic
characteristics of the human species but to the mode of production that became
dominant about two centuries ago — capitalism — and the modes of consumption
and mobility that it entails.[3]
Nonetheless,
Lefebvre goes on to propose that , faced with the catastrophic degradation of
nature, the aim of socialists should be to develop a ‘second nature’. [PoS 376]
What would this ‘second nature’ be like? Lefebvre gives us few clues, but it
would be based on ‘appropriation’ of Nature rather than ‘domination’[PoS 376].
It would by no means be the techno-utopia beloved of modernists, but it would
owe its existence to the possibilities opened up by huge technological advance,
above all to automation which would be controlled by human beings rather than
controlling them. Humans could then construct a nature which would be both a
product of science and technology, and a creative work of art [PoS 409].
Tanuro has argued
that such ‘mastery’ of nature, in the classical Marxist sense, is impossible,
given nature’s complexity and unpredictability. But it is perhaps easier to
accept Lefebvre’s related point, that under socialism the sharp distinction
between humanity and nature , upheld in their different ways by both
capitalists and ecological radicals, would have to be broken down. David Harvey
has similarly pointed out that building an ecologically sustainable human
society would require active engagement with nature. ‘For Marxists’, he has
stated, ‘there can be no going back, as many ecologists seem to propose, to an
unmediated relation to nature’[4]. A ‘pure’, ‘untouched’ natural environment is
a fantasy under any circumstances.
Lefebvre also
criticises those socialists who cleave “to an ideology of growth which, if it
is not actually aligned with bourgeois ideology, is close to it” [PoS 422].
“There are those who want a ‘socialism’ in the industrialised countries that
would simply continue along the path of growth and accumulation” [PoS 357]
Instead, he argues, revolutionaries must put “the process of purely
quantitative growth into question”[ibid]. Rather than focusing on the
production of more things in space, a socialist society would create a
qualitatively different space, a space of solidarity, creativity and love.
Reading The
Production of Space can be a frustrating experience. Its argument may seem
abstract, vague, circular – because it frequently is. But it is also remarkable
to watch a Marxist in his (and the) early seventies actively engaging with the
issues brought into the light once again by the rise of the modern green
movement. It is only in the last decade that some socialist organisations, not
just individual academics, have begun to take on board the challenge posed by ecological
theory and practice. In this context, Lefebvre still has a good deal to teach
us.
References:
1) A 2002 special
issue of the academic journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism also attempts to
engage in various ways with the implications of Lefebvre’s thought for Marxist
ecology.
2) Henri Lefebvre,
Contre les technocrates, 1967, re-edited in 1971 as Vers le cybernanthrope,
Paris, Denoel, p.14. Quoted and translated by Michael Lowy in “The
revolutionary romanticism of May 68”, February 2002, www.essf.lautre.net)
3) Daniel Tanuro,
“Foundations of an ecosocialist strategy” . First published in Nouveaux Cahiers
du Socialisme, No.6, autumn 2011. Translated by Richard Fidler at
http://lifeonleft.blogspot.com/2011/09/foundations-of-ecosocialist-strategy.html
4) David Harvey ,
“The Nature of Environment: Dialectics of Social and Environmental Change”,
Socialist Register, 1993, p.42.
Further Reading:
Rob Shields, Lefebvre, Love and Struggle: Spatial Dialectics,
Routledge, 1999
Andrew
Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre: a
critical introduction, Routledge, 2006.
Lefebvre’s work on space is the key inspiration for David
Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (Blackwell, 1989), which succeeds as no
other book does in explaining shifting cultural experiences in terms of changes
in the use of space under capitalism.
John
Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology:
Materialism and Nature (Monthly Review Press, 2000) discusses, among other
things, the young Marx’ s engagement with the materialists of classical
antiquity, particularly Epicurus and Lucretius.
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