Packing up my library today I came across two minor works by Henri Lefebvre:
Everyday Life in the Modern World (1971, original french edition 1968) and The Explosion: Marxism and the French Upheaval (1969, original french edition 1968 [as L'irruption de Nanterre au sommet]) More on Everyday Life later, but for now some quick notes on The Explosion, focused on the notion of "self-management."
This post will focus on Lefebvre's account of "self-management" as the "slogan" or ideology of the "Eruption" of 1968: later posts will trace it back through Ratgeb/Vaneigem (presumably one of the main sloganeers being profiled by Lefebvre), and then the way self-management emerged from the earlier notion of "worker's management" articulated by Castoriadis in Socialisme ou Barbarie in the 1950s.
In his first chapter "On Marxist Thought," Lefebvre charts the emergence of a new vision of Marxist humanism, rooted in a recognition of the way capitalism has changed, how new kinds of technocratic management have been added to the powers of capital, and why "the question of generalized self-management" has become so important as slogan and goal. Drawing on traditional Marxist theory, Lefebvre suggests that a Marxist humanism must entail (as a series of stages):
(1) Control of history (knowledge and the political consciousness of the working class must guide the process)
(2) Control of the market (the control of the law of value)
(3) Appropriation of the world, "the mastery by man of his own nature and life."
He ends the chapter by stating that Marx's work is "necessary but not sufficient" as a guide to this process. He then devotes chapters to Marcuse and Lenin, before turning his attention to "French Society in 1968" in a chapter focused on the oppressive role of the French State, then a chapter on three dead-end responses, all mapping out France's political space, centered by the state and its apparatus, but surrounded by a void filled with contestation that opposes the state-centered totality with a new totality. Contestation, as represented by the students at Nanterre with whom the 1968 "eruption" originated, initially had a negative character, consisting of a "refusal to be integrated" into the existing state-centered society, "a deliberate refusal to be co-opted" (67).
Then (after a few discussions I will skip for now), in Chapter 10, Lefebvre discusses "self-management." He argues that self-management as a revolutionary demand of students in France "arose spontaneously in the "empty" areas of social life...as the expression of a basic social need from which it cannot be isolated." He provides a critical exegesis of the concept, emphasizing that self-management:
(1) "Makes a break in the established network of decision making centers" managing and organizing production and consumption.
(2) "Implies a social pedagogy" that "shatter[s] bureaucracy and centralized state management" and "presupposes a new social practice at all stages and levels" (86).
(3) Demands "self-criticism and continuous active scrutiny of the relations between the functional and structural limits of a self-managing entity and society as a whole" (87).
He links self-management to the "importance of everyday life": self-management is a response to the humiliation and boredom that are "the reverse side of authority," part of the alienation/separation that are essential to the functioning of social institutions. Thus the eruption was a process of "dis-alienation" via unfettered speech, street activities, and spontaneous disorder (89).
Self management indicates the road toward the transformation of everyday existence. "To change life"---this defines the meaning of the revolutionary process. But life is not changed magically by a poetic act, as the surrealists believed [emphasis added--Take that Vaneigem!]...The transformation of everyday existence also involves institutions. The social practice capable of transcending dissociations and creating new institutions beyond those tha affirm dissociations--this social practice has a name, but cannot be reduced to language.(90).
For Lefebvre, the proper space to be occupied/produced by contestation is the urban: a unique space where production and consumption, production, decision-making, and exchange can co-occur. It must merely lose the trappings/husks of previous epochs, such as industrialization, to become a space in which it is possible for all "users" to become participants in self-management. The model here, I take it, is a commune, or worker cooperative.
More to come...especially on the relationship between this analysis and Lefebvre's work on the production of space...
