Translator’s Introduction
The following interview with Henri Lefebvre was conducted for the French Communist Party (PCF) journal La Nouvelle Critique in 1979. It belongs to the brief period of cautious political reopening and theoretical reorientation which characterised French Marxism in the latter years of the seventies. Its significance lies not only in Lefebvre’s reflections on strategy and theory at this pivotal juncture for Western communism, but also in the symbolic weight of the venue itself. Lefebvre’s return to La Nouvelle Critique marked the end of a silence lasting more than two decades: he had been expelled from the journal’s editorial board in 1957 for publishing the article ‘Le Marxisme et la pensée française’ in France Observateur and Les Temps Modernes in which he had openly condemned the theoretical poverty of Stalinist dogmatism. His reappearance in its pages thus signalled both a personal and an institutional shift, reflecting changes underway inside the PCF in the wake of the political and theoretical crises of the seventies.
The interview appears against the backdrop of Lefebvre’s partial rapprochement with the PCF after a long period of distance. Expelled from the Party in 1958 and marginalised for much of the following two decades, Lefebvre nevertheless remained one of the most prolific and inventive Marxist thinkers in France. By the late 1970s, he regarded the conjuncture as having entered a new phase. The exhaustion of Gaullism, the structural crisis of postwar capitalism, and the impasse of both social democracy and far-left sectarianism reopened the question of communist strategy in Western Europe. After twenty years of separation, Lefebvre wrote in L’Humanité in March 1978 an appeal to voters to support the PCF in the legislative election. As the interview shows, this renewed engagement with the PCF was neither nostalgic nor opportunistic but grounded in his conviction that Marxism required continual theoretical renegotiation if it was to remain capable of grasping contemporary reality.
This moment of rapprochement has been overlooked in Anglophone contextualisations of Lefebvre’s life and work. In the 1990s, his reception in the English-speaking world was largely framed around his critiques of everyday life, urbanism, rural sociology and his spatial theory. Championed for his heterodoxy, his ongoing engagement with historical experiences of Marxist politics and communist strategy was conspicuously downplayed. As a result, Lefebvre was frequently presented as a precursor to cultural theory or radical geography, detached from the organisational and strategic questions that continued to preoccupy him in the final decades of his life. The present interview complicates that picture. It shows Lefebvre not as a thinker who had abandoned Marxism or party politics, but as one who sought, however cautiously, to re-engage them under historically altered conditions.
The interview also bears witness to a reconfiguration of Marxist theory underway in the late 1970s. Throughout the 1960s, Lefebvre had been positioned (often polemically) against the Althusserian current which had gained prominence within the intellectual life of the left in France. But, by this point, with the waning of Althusserianism, he repeatedly affirmed that the sharp division between what he called the critical tendency in Marx (concerned with the exposure of fixed categories to historical processes) and the epistemological tendency (concerned with scientific concepts, structures, and modes of production) had lost its justification. These were not opposing camps, but complementary moments of Marx’s thought, especially in light of the emerging theoretical and political counterrevolution. In a letter written to Althusser in June 1978, Lefebvre affirmed his hopes for precisely this reconciliation of tendencies within French Marxism. This insistence on theoretical unity functioned as an opening toward dialogue with the Althusserian current, even as Lefebvre maintained his resistance to theoreticism and abstraction detached from social practice. The interview reflects this shift in tone: less a polemic than an attempt to situate theoretical differences within a shared Marxist horizon against mounting reactionary forces.
Politically, the interview should be read in the wake of the failure of the Union of the Left and its Common Programme for Government. Lefebvre had offered the alliance his guarded support, viewing it as a possible, though fragile, opening for socialist transition led by grassroots autogestion struggles. At the same time, he remained deeply sceptical of an electoral strategy that risked reducing socialism to state management and reformist administration. The collapse of the Union of the Left leading up to the 1978 legislative election confirmed many of his concerns, reinforcing his belief that an electoral project could not substitute for the transformation of social relations from below. Yet this failure did not lead Lefebvre to retreat from political engagement. On the contrary, it sharpened his insistence on strategy as a central Marxist problem: how to think reform and rupture together, how to relate parties to social movements, and how to prevent the state from becoming the horizon of socialist politics.
Lefebvre’s reflections here also reaffirm his long-standing commitment to autogestion as a strategic and theoretical horizon. For Lefebvre, self-management was neither a technocratic reform nor a rhetorical supplement to state power, but a deeply dialectical process that cut across various mediations: production, everyday life, and space itself. At the same time, he remained openly critical of the Yugoslav experiment, which he viewed, at this moment, as having institutionalised self-management in a manner that ultimately reproduced state hierarchies and bureaucratic control. This critical stance underscores Lefebvre’s refusal to treat autogestion as a model to be exported, rather than as a problem to be continually rethought in relation to concrete historical conditions.
In this respect, the interview occupies an important place within contemporary archival efforts (such as those undertaken by Viewpoint magazine) to map the theoretical coordinates of the late-1970s ‘crisis of Marxism’. The distinctiveness of Lefebvre’s status in this debate was as a living testament to the fact that this crisis did not emerge suddenly in the aftermath of 1968 or the electoral defeats of the decade. For Marxists of his generation, its provenance extended back at least to 1956, inaugurating a long lag between political dilemma and theoretical reworking. Having lived through, and theorised, multiple crises of Marxism across the twentieth century, while remaining committed to its integrity, Lefebvre cut through the era’s prevailing pessimism.
The interview is also inseparable from the theoretical trajectory started by The Production of Space and developed throughout Lefebvre’s later work. From the early 1970s onward, Lefebvre increasingly framed politics in spatial and strategic terms, analysing the simultaneous interconnected mediations in the reproduction of capitalist social relations, and the virtual field of possible interventions this brought forth. The strategic considerations articulated here – concerning civil society, autogestion, the possible, and revolutionary patience – belong to this broader project. They reveal Lefebvre developing a conception of strategy that is at once theoretical and practical, attentive to the uneven terrains of struggle across space and time, precisely at a moment when Western Marxism was being condemned for having abandoned the question of strategy.
Lefebvre’s return to La Nouvelle Critique thus represents more than a symbolic reconciliation. It marks a moment in which Marxism was subjected to renewed critical development by a thinker who, having lived through its many crises, remained convinced of its necessity – and of the need to continually remake it in relation to history.
This translation is dedicated to Asad Haider
Translated by Roberto Mozzachiodi
Interview conducted by Bruno Bernard in La Nouvelle Critique, June 1979, No. 125
Bruno Bernard: The following text scarcely requires an introduction to Henri Lefebvre. Yet it is precisely because, more than twenty years later, he agreed to respond to questions from La Nouvelle Critique, on whose editorial board he once served, that we wish to express our particular pleasure at welcoming him back to the pages of our journal. It should also be recalled that while Henri Lefebvre is widely known as a leading Communist intellectual in the years following the Liberation, and as a major theorist of everyday life and the state in the 1960s and 1970s, it is less well known that, much earlier, alongside Georges Friedman, Norbert Guterman, Pierre Morhange, and Georges Politzer, he was among the pioneers who introduced Marxism into the field of philosophy in France, around 1925-30.
I would like to begin by emphasising the significance of your contribution to La Nouvelle Critique today, in 1979. It seems to me to signal something that has changed in recent years, particularly within the French Communist Party. A silence is thus being broken – a silence of more than twenty years in this journal, to whose editorial board you once belonged, and a silence that has often surrounded your rich, complex, and productive work during this period.
We are therefore reopening a debate that began in L’Humanité in 1977. It will not be possible to address all the themes and questions at stake today, but in seeking to define the present theoretical situation, we will attempt to take up some of the essential issues.
Henri Lefebvre: For me too, your visit here, to my home, as a representative of La Nouvelle Critique, is an important moment, and I hope that we will be able to carry this discussion through to the end, and with all the seriousness it deserves.
For me, it offers a way of restoring unity to a life that may have otherwise appeared fragmented. This is not only because there have been profound disagreements between the Communist Party and my own research, but also because, for a long period, between 1958 and 1972, I was extremely distant from the Party. To some of my friends, the rapprochement that took place last year may therefore have appeared duplicitous. I do not think so. On the contrary, I believe that what I have been stubbornly pursuing all along is something quite simple: the perpetual aggiornamento of Marxism and Marxist thought. Through all the difficulties, in an increasingly complex world, a world that in many ways appears to contradict – yes, to contradict – Marxist thought, I strive to make it capable of grasping, in all its contours and twists and turns, this modern world that is so complex and elusive. And I believe that this is the unity that can be seen through a body of work that may itself appear fragmented.
BB: I think that today we will indeed have the opportunity to better understand the continuity, but also the subjective and objective discontinuity of this period, and of your work during it, in the questions we will address. I think it is important to emphasise what you have just pointed out: today, when many, abandoning and burning what they once adored, make Marxism the source of the evils of our time and condemn it as incapable of accounting for our reality, you insist, on the contrary, on showing how Marxism, provided it is given full creative development, is the only weapon that allows us to understand modernity in all its complexity.
HL: This concern dates back to the very beginning of my research. Long ago, before the Second World War, I wrote (together with my friend and collaborator Norbert Guterman) a book entitled La Conscience mystifiée. This book represents a certain milestone, and here is why: no consciousness, be it working-class or proletarian consciousness, contains within it, by vocation or essence, the criterion of truth or veracity. This was the fundamental thesis of La Conscience mystifiée. It therefore opposed the official theses of the Communist International at the time, which saw fascism, for example, as nothing more than an epiphenomenon, an almost insignificant phenomenon that the working class would, one fine morning, get rid of with a shrug of the shoulders. This thesis seemed to me to be terribly wrong (I had made several trips to Germany), missing the mark in an extremely dangerous way. But the book also opposed Lukacs’ thesis that there is a historical consciousness that is forming, culminating in the working class or its theoretical representatives, and which holds the truth and the totality. Our thesis was that consciousness is caught up in contradictions and struggles, that it weakens, wins, loses, becomes alienated, and is reconquered. And that, at times, it can yield under the pressure of both ideologies and violence and accept the worst forms of mystification.
From that moment on, there was a struggle against fascism, an effort to understand the source of its strength, the core, the driving force behind its actions. During my trips to Germany, I was struck by the power of Hitlerism and by the emotional and political shock it produced. This disturbed me deeply. The book therefore already bears the mark of an attempt to understand the enemy, not through ready-made formulas, but by grasping the core of its strength and, as far as possible, identifying its vulnerable points – that is, points of attack.
BB: I believe the value of the reminder you have just offered lies in the way it immediately establishes a necessity: the necessity of theory. This necessity dispels both the illusion of objectivism, which denies any efficacy to consciousness, and the illusion of a spontaneously true consciousness, which claims to dispense with theoretical detours and labour. But this immediately raises a question about the nature of such theoretical work: what place does philosophy occupy within it? What is the philosopher’s role? Since La Somme et le Reste in 1958, at least at the explicit level, you have continually questioned your own status as a philosopher and, more broadly, the status of philosophy itself. At one point, you were even tempted to adopt the thesis of the ‘death of philosophy’, believing that Marx had brought the history of philosophy to an end. Later, in an effort to think through this overcoming dialectically, you put forward the idea of a “metaphilosophy”.
How, then, should we understand the relationship between theory and philosophy, and your own relationship to philosophy?
HL: Philosophy is not innocent; it is not difficult to show this. Its relationship with knowledge and power is not always clear. However, we cannot simply throw it overboard and consign it to the dustbin of history. The idea of overcoming philosophy, which would begin with the negation of philosophy (i.e. which would be neither what Marx nor Hegel meant by overcoming), this termination of philosophy has serious consequences, not only in the exercise of thought but also in its very content.
For example, it is impossible to formulate the concept of truth without resorting to philosophy. I am well aware that philosophers have not worked in isolation on the question of truth, that they have drawn on scientific knowledge. Nevertheless, it is among the great philosophers (Spinoza, Leibniz and Kant) that we find both the most profound elaboration of the concept of truth and the most difficult questions about it. If we throw philosophy overboard entirely, what remains of the concept of truth? It seems that we are leaving the field open, paving the way for mystification and lies, if we disregard the immense research of classical philosophy, its scruples and its constantly renewed reflections. The concept of truth is dangerous, on the one hand, because it allows for dogmatism: we must not forget that Stalinism presented itself as a true doctrine, absolutely true, politically true. Politics, here, takes over from philosophy, which has been consigned to limbo. But, at the same time, if we undermine the truth, there are no safeguards, no barriers against lies and manipulation. I believe that this is one of the key problems of our time. There are moments when we ask ourselves: is there still a criterion for truth? Is the field not open to mystification? All the more so today, when the notion of information is beginning to dissolve truth, and knowledge is aligning itself with information. The consequences of this are so serious that we can scarcely imagine them.
On the one hand, empiricism throws the whole of philosophy overboard, and positivism too, which is exactly what I say we must avoid. On the other hand, it is not a question of continuing philosophy in the sense of seeking to develop yet another philosophical system with its own problematics, themes and categories. It is something else entirely, which I call metaphilosophy. Let me explain briefly. It is a matter of extending philosophy by using its concepts for analyses and for purposes for which they were not intended by the philosophers themselves. It is a matter of considering philosophy as a whole, classical philosophy in its total movement, and showing that it constitutes a language, that it has the properties, qualities and dimensions of a language. And this language must be used to achieve objectives that are no longer those of philosophers.
I could give an example from practical, social and political reality, for the study of which philosophy, with its language and concepts, is necessary but not sufficient: the problems of space. But that would take a little too long.
BB: Perhaps we might now turn to that great period of upheaval, both in terms of historical reality and in terms of the history of Marxism and contemporary thought as a whole, that followed Stalin’s death. I am referring to the long and painful process of de-Stalinisation. In a book written in 1957, Les Problèmes actuels du marxisme, which caused considerable controversy, you offered a diagnosis: Marxism was in crisis. This claim was accompanied by a second, more general thesis, that philosophy itself was also in crisis. What was the reaction at the time? It must be said here, calmly and without polemic: the reaction was one of outright denial. This was evident, among other examples, in an article by Roger Garaudy in Les Cahiers du communisme, which sought to demonstrate, by a logic of A+B, that to speak of a crisis in Marxism was nothing more than a confession of having abandoned Marxist principles.
Today, more than twenty years later, it has become commonplace, even among Communist theorists, to speak of a crisis in Marxism. The real question now is how to characterise that crisis, and what conclusions should be drawn from it? Does this mean, then, that you were simply right twenty years too early? Or, more seriously, to what extent do you think it is the same crisis, given all that has occurred since 1958 and the history that has unfolded in the meantime?
HL: Self-satisfaction, the satisfaction of having been right, is completely meaningless and offers me nothing. I believe that today, the situation that began to emerge 20 years ago, and which goes back even further, is now widely recognised. But there are also new elements. I believe that this goes back a long way; I believe that the crisis is also a crisis in the relationship between theory and practice. The problem that is often raised, that of intellectuals and their status, masks a deeper problem: that of their relationship and contribution to theory, and the problem of the relationship between theory and practice.
I wonder whether the divergence between theory and practice does not reach back much further. Was the rift not already apparent in Lenin’s The State and Revolution? Lenin comes to power just after writing that the state must immediately begin to wither away. Those words have remained etched in my mind, for it was while reading them that I joined the Party. Yet almost immediately, Lenin took measures whose full consequences he could not foresee – measures that would, ultimately, contribute to the consolidation of the state, culminating in the Stalinist era.
BB: The question that arises is precisely this: this divorce between theory and practice clearly has objective causes (i.e. it is the result of internal contradictions in practice), but does it not also have theoretical causes? Are there not internal contradictions within the theory at play here?
HL: The idea of a crisis in Marxism is not surprising. Why should Marxism alone escape crises when everything around it is in crisis to a greater or lesser extent? Why should Marxism escape the common fate of the modern world?
But the word ‘crisis’ can be taken in very different senses when it comes to Marxism. It can be taken in a malicious way: Marxism has failed, Marxism has led to disasters. But it can also be taken in a favourable sense: for example, one can say that Marxism develops itself through contradictions, through its own contradictions, that this is its way of evolving. It develops according to the laws of development that Marx himself formulated, and which no one, except a few dogmatists, has ever said were always pleasant or mechanically favourable.
BB: We could then take the term crisis in its full meaning: a situation in which the new must emerge (a necessity arising from practice itself) yet cannot emerge; and it is precisely this contradiction that constitutes a state of crisis. Based on this, I would like to ask the following question: what is the driving contradiction that today necessitates this advance in Marxist theory? Towards what is this contradiction tending in its development?
HL: Are we certain that there is indeed a contradiction, a central contradiction, a driving contradiction? With a few friends, we are trying to make a kind of list of the problems that remain unresolved. I must admit that there are an extremely large number of them and they are difficult to parse.
BB: There are difficulties and contradictions, some of which clearly have deep roots and which we have been carrying with us for a long time. The question now is: what is new, what has arisen that we can no longer ignore, that creates a kind of consensus that we must move forward and produce theory as Marxists by confronting these issues in depth? But, here, could we not view the crisis of Marxism in a positive light? Could we not say that it is the prospect of possible democratic changes in Europe – particularly in Italy, but also in France – that has made it clear that we need theory not merely to write texts or justify others, but to understand reality and equip ourselves to transform it?
From this point on, it is no longer a matter of endlessly debating the ‘Marxist theory of the state’, but of addressing the practical questions concerning the state: what does transforming social reality mean in concrete terms? What does the seizure of state power entail? What does the withering away of the state signify for us?
I believe that it was from the new perspective of a democratic road to socialism, as formulated by the 22nd Congress, that a set of theoretical questions arose, albeit often in a vague, sometimes confused or hasty manner. And these questions were posed as practical ones: as questions of the movement, of the struggle, and of our future.
HL: I agree with this conclusion. But I would like to take a few steps to get there. First point: I believe that we must not go back on the idea of a diversified Marxism. We must accept the diversity of currents within Marxism. Any other position would be a return to unacceptable dogmatism. It seems extremely difficult to me now to go back on the idea that there is a Chinese Marxism, which is developing in a certain way, and a Soviet Marxism, which is constituted in another way. I believe we must accept this diversification. What I want to combat more specifically is the idea, for example, that Gramsci is the only Marxist of our time. I find that extraordinarily absurd. I am quite familiar with Gramsci’s work, I have had the opportunity to discuss it with Togliatti, for example, and I am convinced that there is an Italian nuance to Marxism, and that some of Gramsci’s ideas must be taken into account. But to say that Gramsci is the Marxist of our time! This way of thinking and posing questions seems absurd to me, and takes Marxism back to a monolithic conception that must be eradicated.
There are different forms of Marxism. Even in France, there are several Marxist tendencies. There was a time when I was involved in quite violent polemics with the Althusserian tendency. This tendency conceived of Marxism around an epistemological core, and was, in a certain way, incompatible with my critical tendency, and with my more or less successful effort to use Marxism and Marx’s thought in understanding and grasping what was happening in the second half of the 20th century. The critical tendency that I represented had a certain impact between 1960 and 1968, then drifted towards a hypercriticism in which perpetual self-destruction dominated; there was no longer any position that did not destroy itself. There is no point in returning to the discussions of that period. In any case, this hypercriticism, which took various names, including Situationism, has now disappeared; it is a historical phenomenon. So, I believe in the possibility of a union, a reunion of tendencies: the tendency that wants to make Marxism a science, and the tendency that wants to make Marxism a critique of present and current reality. I believe that there are no longer any oppositions between them and that the time for polemics is over. I believe that some of Althusser’s friends and Althusser himself agree on this point.
While we should not abandon the diversification of Marxism, we should also not assume that certain contradictions are beyond resolution. Contradictions exist to be resolved, to be renewed, and sometimes to reappear in different forms. This constitutes a second step toward an answer.
Thirdly, what strikes me about the current situation is that, both in theory and in practice, we are often unable even to name the difficulties we face. I have written some texts, which I may publish soon, in which I pose the problems in the following terms: an impasse? A stumbling block? Something else? An invisible wall? People, thought, and action find themselves at an impasse, arising from the fact that relations of domination are now more subtle than in the past, less obvious, less visible, yet they still resist any attempt to move forward. It is an obstacle that is difficult to overcome. This, in turn, creates an urgent need for a new instrument: there is something, like an impasse or a barrier, that must be overcome both in theory and in political practice.
BB: So, you would see the crisis of Marxism on the one hand, and, on the other, the resurgence of all possible varieties of obscurantism, fatalism and renunciation, as two aspects of the same reality? A crisis that is no longer just theoretical but also practical. How, then, can we characterise this critical state of society? And how, consequently, can we characterise its reflection, or its theoretical corollary?
HL: There is an invention to be made (I’m not quite sure how) that is blocked, thwarted. I tend to attribute this visible or invisible barrier to the state. Perhaps I am fascinated with the state, and this fixation has become an obsession. I would like someone to prove me wrong. I find that the globalisation of the state and its terrible power are exercised in this way: by blocking not only the imagination, but also theoretical and practical invention. But how can we break through this barrier, which is both imaginary and real, fictitious and practical? I have proposed and continue to propose – to give concrete meaning to what you said about democracy, which I agree with – the development of a strategy of autogestion.
BB: This term, and beyond the term the idea of autogestion as an essential dimension of the democratic path to socialism formulated by the 22nd Congress, is taking on an increasingly important place in the analyses and, little by little, in the practice of the PCF.
HL: I will attempt to give a theoretical definition of autogestion: when a group, in the broad sense of the term, that is to say, workers in an workplace, but also the people of a neighbourhood or a city, when these people no longer passively accept their conditions of existence, when they no longer remain passive in the face of the conditions imposed on them; when they try to dominate them, to control them, an attempt at autogestion is taking place. And there is a march in and towards autogestion. In this sense, and I emphasise this strongly, autogestion is not a legal system: the mistake made by the Yugoslavs is that autogestion cannot be an established system, because autogestion is a path, a perpetual and perpetually reborn struggle. An attempt at autogestion is something essential and fundamental, since it is the control of living conditions.
BB: To link this question to that of the state, could we say that our reality, the crisis of our reality, both practical and theoretical, is characterised by a hypostasis of politics outside and above society? This results in a loss of sight of what constitutes the object and objective of politics. Ultimately, we lose sight of the very content of power, and consequently the very object of workers’ and democratic struggles, namely everyday life, social relations as a whole and not just their concentrated expression in political relations.
I believe that, since 1968, this fundamental idea has become increasingly clear: there is no theory of politics other than the theory of social relations as a whole.
Autogestion is precisely the theoretical and practical answer to this question. Autogestion is a practice of politics that is not separate from social relations, but within social relations. This is perhaps why some who seek class struggle cannot find it: they are not looking for it where it is, that is, not only in workplaces, but in neighbourhoods, in all struggles for the right to difference.
It is undoubtedly from this perspective that we can understand the revival or emergence of concepts, often insufficiently defined or developed, such as the social fabric, civil society, and the specifically Marxist concept of economic and social formation.
HL: What I take from what you have said is the observation, not without irony, that politics has provided a new absolute. The theological absolute was in rather bad shape, moribund if not dead; the philosophical absolute was hardly any better; and then suddenly the political absolute came along to replace these two somewhat decrepit forms of the absolute. Politics has become the modern absolute. The connecting point in this regard is Hegel. This conception of the political absolute passed through Hegel and culminates in the entire modern world.
This brings us to a second point, which is also important: the founders of Marxism, the founding fathers as we now call them, seem to have been very naïve. They believed that the state would commit suicide, and Engels said that the final act would be to dispossess the bourgeoisie and establish collective ownership. But the state is like the army: when it holds something, it does not let go so easily. This is the formidable danger of the state: the state does not commit suicide. It must be fought from within and undermined at the grassroots level. This is probably the meaning of autogestion. For there cannot but be a new contradiction between the tendency towards autogestion and the tendency towards statism, between the tendency to make the state an absolute and autogestion as a practical means of struggle. The interest of Yugoslavia is not that it attempted to establish a system of autogestion, but that autogestion there appears to reveal the contradictions of a country and a state that claims to be socialist. And these contradictions are innumerable. These words may cause me to fall out with them, but I can’t help it: here too, we must speak the social truth against the political truth. The idea of a self-managed state is more than questionable; it is deeply contradictory.
BB: But can we not say, at the same time, that this contradiction is unavoidable, and that it is this contradiction that defines the transitional state? We must therefore consider the conditions for overcoming it in such a way that it does not reproduce itself, which would perpetuate the state, but that it develops by overcoming itself. In other words, we have here the contradiction between the idea of autogestion and the withering away of the state on the one hand, and, on the other, the necessary tendency of all forms of social relations to reproduce themselves. This contradiction means that the transitional state tends to maintain itself, to reproduce itself. But how can this be avoided?
HL: This is a new contradiction that is emerging on all sides. And this is what needs to be brought to light. I believe that one of the tasks of Marxist thought during its renewal is to highlight this contradiction without being overwhelmed by the difficulty of the task, without being positively or negatively fascinated by the state. There have been times when I have allowed myself to be negatively fascinated by the state, and when I have found it so powerful that I’ve told myself that the contradiction could never come to light. But I think that it is coming to light in one way or another and that the new contradictions are continuing on their path. The theory that is being developed is one that will shed light on these new contradictions.
I think it is entirely accurate to say that autogestion is at the level of civil society: it is social relations that are the place, the birthplace of autogestion. It is neither economics nor politics taken separately.
BB: If you agree, we might pursue this question a little further, as I believe it to be absolutely essential. To that end, I would first like to add fuel to your fire, and then stir the pot by raising a few questions. You spoke of the “colouring” you wished to bring to Marxism, and I find that a particularly interesting expression to reflect upon. But how can it be characterised? At the risk of anticipating your response, it seems to me that it could be defined by a focus on the social: by the idea that social relations are, in theory, irreducible to economics and politics, and, in practice, must be defended and developed against exploitation and the alienation it produces, as well as against the state and its forms of oppression. This thesis runs like a leitmotif through much of your works: practically, in the first volume of Critique of Everyday Life as early as 1945; theoretically, in your 1956 book on Lenin, where the concept of an economic and social formation (set against the impoverished and reductive opposition between base and superstructure) is brought to the fore; and, politically and critically, in 1957, when, in Les Problèmes actuels du marxisme you characterised Stalinised Marxism as the absorption of the social into the economic and the political. More recently, in 1978, in your interviews with Catherine Régulier, you returned to this theme concerning the new forms of struggle that were emerging: qualitative demands centred around the concept of civil society.
HL: I believe we need to emphasise this point strongly. The concept of civil society can indeed be found in Gramsci’s work, as he himself notes, but, within Marxism, it remains largely implicit and insufficiently developed. For Hegel, civil society is bourgeois society; yet, when he speaks of bourgeois society, he does so in a way quite different from Marx, and in a manner that remains extremely rich and worthy of renewed attention. Bourgeois society constitutes the foundation of civil society insofar as it is a society governed by its own principles, which do not derive from religion, from God, or from the political power of the monarchy. This idea is rooted in eighteenth-century French thought. In fact, Hegel develops, at a theoretical and philosophical level, what unfolded historically in France during the eighteenth century, through the French Revolution and into the early nineteenth century. There is civil society because there is civilisation, and because there is civility: these elements are inseparable. This is very difficult to distinguish among eighteenth-century thinkers. They speak of a certain form of sociability, which they call civility, and of a civil society that demands, and will obtain, its rights. These are no longer criminal rights, and still less canonical or religious rights; they are civil rights. All these ideas emerge simultaneously, and I believe they deserve to be defended and methodically re-examined, especially in the face of the extremely harsh attacks currently being directed at the French eighteenth century.
I am struck, in this respect, by the success of Michel Foucault, who tends to depict the French eighteenth century as little more than an era of confinement and repression, the century in which repression became methodical and new forms of punishment were invented. Yet, it was precisely at this moment that confessions ceased to be regarded as evidence, that confessions extracted under torture were no longer accepted as proof, and that the idea gradually took hold that it was the responsibility of the prosecution to provide evidence, and that every individual was presumed innocent until proven guilty. One of the tragedies of French society is that it was this society that established these principles (perhaps under English influence), but has since allowed them to erode, to the point that today everyone is effectively presumed guilty.
BB: All this was done under the auspices of the state…
HL: Yes, but against the centralised monarchical state, which maintained the idea that it alone held the principles of the political existence of society. For it defended itself on this ground.
The idea of a civil society was a revolutionary idea. It took institutional form in the Civil Code, which, although formulated and promulgated under Napoleon, was fundamentally a product of the Revolution. This idea of civil society is, in my view, inseparable from the idea of social relations – that is, relations governed by contracts – and from the idea of human rights. These rights, which have been developing for nearly two centuries and cannot be abandoned without serious consequences, are themselves a constitutive element of civil society.
I am well aware of all that can be said about the limits of human rights, yet I do not believe we can dispense with them.
BB: Not only should we not abandon them, but we should also seek their source neither in the legal forms of the state nor in some timeless conception of human nature, but, rather, in the historical evolution of social relations as they are lived and experienced as tending toward liberation. In this sense, they are bound up with the very object of the struggle for emancipation as it unfolds in everyday life. It is on this basis, I believe, that we can think about human rights in concrete terms, and then attempt an analysis that is materialist without being reductive…
HL: An analysis of civil society, of its development, and then of the way it is smothered between politics and economics. My impression is that in the United States this suppression is carried out primarily by the economic sphere, whereas in socialist countries politics likewise tends to overwhelm civil society. Autogestion, by contrast, is grounded in social relations and extends from there into the economic and political spheres.
BB: Incidentally, the relevance of the concept of autogestion to contemporary issues lies precisely in its capacity to overcome the political, social, and economic spheres simultaneously.
Let us now turn, however, to the more problematic aspect of the question. While this notion of autogestion is closely connected to our present reality and is fruitful for Marxist theory, inasmuch as it allows it to break with a kind of Talmudic involution, it is not without its difficulties. Do we not, in fact, risk sidestepping the fundamental concept of Marxist theory – class struggle – in favour of a drift that is at once functionalist and libertarian? Yet it is precisely this axis that enables us, on the one hand, to grasp the totality of social relations, and on the other, to understand the articulation of the economic and the political in relation to the social.
HL: Class struggle should not be viewed as something fixed and defined once and for all. It changes and transforms. It diversifies and enriches itself. There are many examples of this on an international scale, which are particularly illuminating… We are led to analyse strategies, for example, which are not always simple: what strategies are at work on a global scale, and how do they relate to the classes? The class struggle is diversifying, ranging from the everyday to the global. I believe that the struggle for autogestion takes on all the characteristics of class struggle and brings them to a new level of precision, scale and intensity. It does not abolish the quantitative reality of class struggle, but new demands have emerged. We cannot ignore them. I do not believe that the organisation of space, for example, is something external to the classes and their struggles. Even if the working class has not always been able to take them into account until now.
BB: One of the characteristics of recent years is precisely that these issues are tending to be taken into account.
HL: Yes, and I am happy about that. But, in all its diversity, the class struggle must be thought through and brought into theory. And I don’t think that emphasising autogestion means forgetting other aspects. Focusing solely on qualitative issues would be both a tactical and strategic error. The central question is that of strategy.
On a theoretical level, the concept of strategy must be given its rightful place. It already has a century and a half of history and is being developed in a very scientific way. I fear that here too there is a certain lag in Marxist thinking. It was believed that class struggle constituted a strategy, whereas what is needed is a strategy for class struggle.
BB: To answer the question: what is strategic in the class struggle? Things remain relatively simple as long as we remain within the framework of politics as a concentrated expression of both the economic and the social. However, it has become clear to us today that politics is totally invested or reinvested in the whole thickness of social relations.
So, the question becomes singularly complicated: there is no one place where everything is played out, but everything is played out everywhere and at all times. This necessarily leads us to consider the theory of the moment of decision and the theory of the qualitative leap in a more complex way.
HL: It is quite true that everything happens everywhere and at all times; this is intrinsic to the very concept of strategy. Just as all moments of action are interdependent, a move made at one point can have repercussions at another, infinitely distant point. This is well illustrated by the strategy board game Go, which is now beginning to gain wider recognition.
BB: Do the difficulties encountered in analysing the period after March 1978 not stem precisely from the fact that we are trying to think about a new situation in old terms? We have tried to think about the period in terms of deadlines, as if everything were going to be decided on a single day and at a decisive date. But what we realise today is precisely that nothing is decided at such a precise moment, but that everything was decided in an extremely complex process that unfolded over several years (at least from 1974 to 1978). So, we need to think of a strategy that tackles the whole issue, in space and time. To focus on autogestion is to forget the other aspects. Similarly, concentrating solely on qualitative issues would constitute both a tactical and strategic error, just as an exclusive focus on quantitative demands would also be mistaken.
HL: But we must always think about the whole and the big picture without ever disregarding specific analyses. In Marxism, there has been a tendency to consider the global separately, outside of the specific. But, outside of Marxism, by contrast, recent years have seen a tendency to produce narrowly specific analyses detached from any global perspective. It is this separation that must be overcome in current thinking, by restoring priority to the global, but to the global taken concretely. This is the very concept of strategy: there is only strategy of the global and the possible.
BB: Yes, but, in the same way that we must return to a dialectical conception of the global, as a totality of contradictions that is always concrete, we must also succeed in restoring the thinking of the possible to its rightful place. Everything seems to be happening very quickly, as if Marxist thinking, contrary to what Marx did, had relegated the category of the possible to a secondary category of the movement of thought.
HL: …and as a category subordinate to the real.
BB: What has become of the possible? The name given to uncertainty, that is to say, to something of the order of ignorance! It was understood that the real proceeded only in the mode of the necessary, that the truth of knowledge proceeded only in the mode of the recognition of the necessary, in the knowledge of determinism. Here, we find a Spinozist schema: knowledge is that of necessity; freedom is its contemplation; and the possible is theoretically only the name given to a lack of understanding, and practically the place of empiricism.
We must therefore revisit this reflection on the possible, attempting to understand how the evolution of Marxist thought could have led to a way of thinking that closes itself off from reality, insofar as it imagines itself to have grasped it once and for all.
HL: The notion of reality, the real, has taken on an almost obsessive character. On the one hand, there has emerged a confidence bordering on certainty in our grasp of reality, as if it could be seized and held fast within the clutches of knowledge. On the other hand, there is a constant anxiety about not straying from reality, an anxiety that ultimately proves sterilising. What is needed is a scientific and philosophical critique of this notion of reality. Such a critique has already been undertaken to some extent within epistemology, but it must now be revisited in relation to Marxist thought. I would go even further: what is required is a complete reversal, an inversion of Marxist thought as it has come to be constituted. By fetishising reality, Marxism has not only closed itself off but effectively shut itself down; it has degraded itself and, in doing so, has come to resemble a crude form of empiricism, without even possessing empiricism’s precision or fidelity to reality. The result has been a profound confusion. What is therefore required is a reversal analogous to the one Marx proposed in relation to Hegel: a task of putting Marxist thought back on its feet.
BB: Can the instrument and essence of this reversal be reduced to dialectics? We have begun to take reality for granted, as something complete, whereas Marxist dialectics shows us that reality is open, something that is in flux.
HL: If reality is what we say it is, then all we have to do is describe it, and that is all there is to it. Everything is complete. Whereas, if reality is in flux, possibility must appear at every moment. And possibility is part of reality. The virtual is a category of thought as important as the real.
BB: Could we not find a clue to this objectivist drift in Marxist thought in a misunderstanding of the idea of historical necessity?
HL: The idea of necessity, of determination, has undergone a number of vicissitudes, and it too has been fetishised. This fetishism in Marxist thought has also served as a pretext for attacking it, so that this form of dogmatism and its criticism have fed off each other in a kind of vicious circle. Determinism and necessity were identified with the real: the real was necessary. And knowledge was never anything other than knowledge of the real, of the necessary.
BB: This somewhat questionable formula of Hegel’s, that freedom is the knowledge of determinism, was even exploited. It is precisely this formula that causes Marxism to lose sight of the fact that it is not only theory, but also practice.
HL: It thus becomes one-dimensional and flattened. This is part of dogmatism. We must rediscover the meaning of the virtual, of the possible. And the idea that the possible can also be known, sought after, explored. There is no political thought without thought of the possible.
BB: The possible has indeed been used as a category of political thought. But it has been used as a category which, in politics, corresponded empirically to what ‘mechanism’ was in the theory of history. On the one hand, it was said: everything is necessary. And we fell into mechanism, forgetting the theory of contradictions. On the other hand, we fell into the most total subjectivism at the political level, and the possible degenerated into a tool of empiricism.
HL: It is because of this fetishisation of the real that we came to this very flat vision of the deadlines we were talking about. It was a failure to explore the possible. And there were men of action on the other side who knew how to have a sense of the possible, of their possibilities. In this way, strategy is reduced to tactics, and tactics to a very weak calculation of short-term chances. Strategic thinking tends to disappear.
BB: Is there not also an insufficient consideration of Marx’s thinking on time? We could take up Labriola’s reflection here when he opposed the idea of chronological prediction. As if time were chronological! As if predicting the possible meant dictating a timetable! For Labriola, Marx does not make chronological predictions, but morphological ones. He reads reality as an open system that tends towards its own overcoming. He reads the possible in the real. The future is not to be predicted as if it were inscribed in the present, but as lines of direction and development that we can use. The possible thus refers to the idea of power, to that of practice and intervention…
HL: … and to that of tendency. For there has never been any law other than tendency. Reintegrating the possible and the virtual also means reintroducing the idea of tendency and dialectically softening the idea of law. Here too, there has been a mechanisation and evacuation of dialectics based on the idea of law. And this has been achieved by aligning the laws of society with the laws of nature. This amounts to evacuating time: not historical time, past time, but the time of virtualities and possibilities.
By restoring the virtual and the possible, we restore the notion of tendency in all its importance, then that of time, then that of strategy. A strategy anticipates and evaluates various possibilities, a multiplicity of objectives from which to choose.
BB: From this point of view, it would be interesting to follow, at the level of metaphors, the movement by which the notion of line has tended to replace that of strategy. The term line corresponds to the negation of possibilities: one claims to have exhausted the virtualities of the present in an infallible position of what must be. The idea of strategy, on the contrary, presupposes that one operates in a widely open field of possibilities.
HL: The substitution of the metaphor of the line for the idea of strategy dates back to the Stalinist era. And it seems to me to be a symptom of that era. There is something falsely clear and falsely current about this metaphor: the line is there in front of us and stretches to the horizon. It is drawn in advance.
BB: A line is followed, a strategy is constructed and invented.
HL: That is very true, but, politically, it goes quite far! We need to rehabilitate the idea of strategy in relation to the notion of the line, and, above all, the notion of a correct or true line. This concept combines the drawbacks of a misleading metaphor with those of a dogmatic conception of truth, and it has caused considerable damage.
Talking with you, and remembering Marx’s political texts, I am struck by the fact that they are works of strategy: one never gets the impression, see for example The Eighteenth Brumaire, that the game is rigged. But we see actions that have consequences…
BB: Hence the importance attached by Marx and Lenin to the moment of decision and initiative.
HL: It is the moment of decision, the critical moment, that is most important. And it is always those who have a strategy, however poorly developed, who prevail.
Reflection on what is possible must therefore be taken up again at the base. There have been pseudo-scientific, technocratic attempts at futurology, but they have clearly failed. Prospectivism is not really a way of thinking about what is possible. It merely makes projections that are nothing more than an extension of current trends into the future.
But, on the Marxist side, there is an ambiguity that needs to be cleared up: in Lukacs’ line of thinking, a particular concept has emerged, that of possible consciousness. This is something quite different from what we might call consciousness of the possible. The consciousness of the possible unfolds, develops, discovers, and necessarily becomes strategic thinking. Whereas possible consciousness is only an awareness of the real.
BB: It is in fact nothing other than the old Aristotelian distinction between potentiality and act, for which there is nothing more possible in the act than in the potentiality. If the possible is present in reality, it is not in the mode of inclusion, of simple repetition, but it contributes something, whereby reality tends to overcome itself, which makes it the possible place for intervention.
HL: The opening of the real to something other than itself is the path of difference.
BB: There is more in potentiality than in act. There is more in manifestation than in essence. Or, more precisely, manifestation tends to develop a new essence.
HL: We are therefore revisiting the abandoned concept from the ground up, and this is a task of great scope which should be developed.
BB: I believe that here we must revisit the old question of what has been developed by materialism and what has been developed by idealism.
Materialism, being a philosophy of effectiveness, developed around the category of necessity (see Spinoza or Diderot). However, from this rooting in ancient materialism, we have unconsciously taken up ‘mechanism’. And, in doing so, we have discarded the idea of the possible. We have taken up Spinoza’s theory, according to which the possible is fiction, that is, the name given to ignorance.
On the other hand, idealism (and particularly in theology) sought to think about the possible, the virtual, precisely because idealism did not have this fetishism of the real. It has been said that the active side of thought was seen by idealism; one may also wonder whether it did not have the merit of seeing the active side of reality. It is no coincidence that the great thinkers of the idea of the possible are people like Leibniz.
HL: But it is at the level of reality that the thought of the possible encounters its greatest obstacle: the transition is frozen, captured, immobilised by the state. One of the state’s negative functions in the contemporary world is precisely this act of capture, this reification of transition, if you like. As a consequence, the possible itself is blocked.
The current state, and this is what makes the situation so grave, operating behind the mask of neoliberalism, tends not only to conflate knowledge with information, but also the possible with information itself. I attach the greatest importance to this hypothesis concerning information as generated and disseminated by the state: it functions as yet another instrument for blocking the possible, at the level of both its conception and its imagination.
The question of the possible is therefore dramatic, even tragic. Never have possibilities been so vast; yet at the same time we confront formidable forces of blockage that prevent not only their realisation, but even their very thought or imagination. The blockage reaches that far.
BB: This highlights the practical urgency today of developing a creative theoretical thought capable of being a thought of the possible.
But I would like to ask you one last question to conclude this interview. Starting with La Somme et le reste in 1958, you wanted to reflect on the crisis of Marxism that emerged from and was engendered by the Stalinist period, as well as the inability at that time of the communist movement and Marxist theorists to address it at its root. This is what we now refer to as ‘the lag of 56’. The brutal and unqualified reception of this book was one of the signs.
I think it is good for communist philosophers to reflect on this. You yourself described the period of your reflection that followed, from 1958 to 1972, as radical criticism or hypercriticism. There is something here that seems to indicate a unilateral nature to this approach. Is this statement therefore self-critical in nature? Or, more precisely, how would you characterise the current period of your theoretical work? How is this radical criticism being overcome?
HL: It seems to me that we need to periodise the modern era and distinguish a few dates. 1956-58 is indeed one such date. For me it is an important date because it is when I left the PCF. But it has a much broader meaning than this subjective one. For several years, and especially from 1953 to 1958, an anti-Stalinist opposition formed, with dramatic events on an international scale (notably in Poland and Budapest). In 1957-58, this opposition was defeated, both internationally and in France. At that point, another period began, one in which energies emerged on the fringes of the communist movement, outside of it: Fidel Castro, the Cultural Revolution (with its crazy but also stimulating aspects), and the student movements. It was a time of radical criticism and ‘protest’. I admit that I threw myself into this path with a certain rage and frenzy. I certainly made extremely harsh judgements about the Communist Parties. This period culminated in 1968. There is much to be said about the year 1968, many aspects of which remain unclear. Criticism of the state in general, in the name of Marx, proved effective in unusual ways. But, afterwards, we saw a proliferation of critical thinking. A little too much for my taste. Each one more intelligent than the last, I don’t need to name them. But, in the end, they all have the same character of destruction and self-destruction.
I saw the protest around me become fragmented, divided into small groups, fraying into doctrines and systems that never seemed destructive enough. But destructive in a vacuum, destructive of nothing, destructive of life. It was not only circular thinking, but suicidal, nihilistic thinking. And nihilism has always been an enemy to me. That is what motivated me, at a certain point, to distance myself. I sought another direction from 1975 onwards.
BB: And now?
HL: Now? As you know, a little over a year ago, after responding to the best of my ability to the offensive of the ‘New Philosophers’, I thought that it was on the side of the Communist Party that there was an opening, on the side of Eurocommunism, on the side of the Latin Communist Parties. I thought there was an opening there, new theoretical and political possibilities. For the past year, I have been trembling at the thought that these possibilities might disappear without having been realised. I believe that would be intolerable and unbearable.
BB: I think it is precisely up to all of us to work now, for example through this interview, to ensure that these possibilities develop and are realised.
