Abstract
ABSTRACTThis essay offers a comparative analysis of the work of Henri Lefebvre and C.L.R. James, both key contributors to the emergence of a humanist form of Marxism in the twentieth century. Independently of each other, both writers, I show, developed a mode of critique which emphasised capitalism’s dehumanizing social effects, and which rejected a merely instrumental or utilitarian political response. Consequently, both writers placed critical emphasis on those longings and demands made evident in the insurgent politics of everyday life and popular culture; in what both conceptualised as a search for ‘happiness‘. But at the same time, the comparison is important because it makes evident the extent of the divisive intellectual legacies of empire within European Marxism. Lefebvre’s work bears in itself the marks of a racialised understanding of human relations; the ’human’ of which he speaks is limited in ways that James challenged consistently.
Highlights
In an essay first published in 2001 and reprinted in the volume Racecraft (2012), Karen E
This essay offers a comparative analysis of the work of Henri Lefebvre and C.L.R
Both key contributors to the emergence of a humanist form of Marxism in the twentieth century. Of each other, both writers, I show, developed a mode of critique which emphasised capitalism’s dehumanizing social effects, and which rejected a merely instrumental or utilitarian political response. Both writers placed critical emphasis on those longings and demands made evident in the insurgent politics of everyday life and popular culture; in what both conceptualised as a search for ‘happiness‘
Summary
In an essay first published in 2001 and reprinted in the volume Racecraft (2012), Karen E. Underlying this position was their shared insistence on a qualitative rather quantitative understanding of human development: ‘progress in the way life is organised’, writes Lefebvre in 1947, at the end of the first volume of his Critique, ‘cannot be limited to a technical progress in external equipment, cannot be confined to an increase in the quantity of tools’ (268).
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