Autogestion and ecological politics in the work of Henri Lefebvre

Abstract

In this commentary, I discuss how Napoletano, Urquijo, Clark and Foster engage with the work of Henri Lefebvre through three interlinked themes: the dialectical method, the nature–society problematic, and the concept of autogestion. I outline each of these themes and consider the importance of Lefebvre's interpretation of autogestion for an ecological politics which can reconcile human emancipation with resistance to the socio-ecological crises of capitalism and its destructive effects on the non-human environment.

Many readers of this journal will require no introduction to Henri Lefebvre's work as his writings on the production of space and the right to the city have been incredibly influential within human geography since the 1970s (Lefebvre, 1991, 1996). Lefebvre's work has also been a source of inspiration for a range of scholars who have contributed to the ‘spatial turn’ within my own fields of critical legal geography and law and humanities in recent years (Butler, 2009, 2012, 2019; Delaney, 2010; de Villiers, 2016; Finchett-Maddock, 2016; Keenan, 2015; Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2015). But one area where there has been insufficient investigation is the potential that lies in Lefebvre's contribution to theorising the relationship between society and nature. Napoletano et al. (2023) have expanded the debate over the ways in which Lefebvre's ‘dialectical approach to nature–society’ can be brought together with his radically democratic conceptualisation of a politics of autogestion in order to confront the social and ecological crises of twenty-first century capitalism. Their article forms part of a broader project in which the authors have argued that Lefebvre's thought can deepen our understanding of the nature–society dialectic and provide crucial methodological tools for critical geography and environmental sociology (Foster et al., 2020; Napoletano et al., 2020, 2022a, 2022b). I have great sympathy with the aims of this project, and a comprehensive integration of the diverse elements of Lefebvre's thinking to draw connections between his understanding of nature–society and his conception of emancipatory politics is long overdue.

The authors begin their analysis of Lefebvre's engagement with the nature–society problematic by emphasising his approach to the dialectical method, which is premised on resisting premature closure and the artificial resolution of contradictions. This was a consistent theme in Lefebvre's thinking that can be traced back at least as far as Dialectical Materialism, his first book-length treatment of the philosophical method, which was originally published in 1939 (Lefebvre, 1968). One of the targets of this book was the dominance of Stalinist interpretations of the dialectic which had reduced Marxist theory to a form of positivist economism, based on a distorted and mechanistic characterisation of natural science. In response, Lefebvre argued for a version of dialectical thinking which is never closed or fixed, but intrinsically open to dynamic change and ‘perpetually in the process of being transcended’ (Lefebvre, 1968: 111). As Napoletano et al. identify, this approach to the dialectic is carried through into Lefebvre's later writings on everyday life, the production of space, and rhythm analysis, and his longstanding concern with the dialectical relationship between non-human nature and social life is crucial for understanding how his thought can contribute to contemporary ecological politics. This attention to the continuity of themes throughout Lefebvre's writing echoes a dominant approach taken within much of the secondary literature on his work during the last three decades (Butler, 2012; Elden, 2004; Merrifield, 2006; Shields, 1999; Stanek, 2011). It is central to the authors’ argument that Lefebvre avoids both classical humanism's ‘dualistic’ conceptualisation of society and nature as well as the ‘flat’ ontologies that are associated with much recent posthumanist and more-than-human scholarship (Ash, 2020; Marston et al., 2005).

Drawing on both Lefebvre's analysis of the status of nature in Marxist thought and his reflections on the destruction of the non-human environment in the 1960s and 1970s, Napoletano et al. make a convincing case for revisiting his contributions to the theorisation of the contemporary nature–society problematic (Lefebvre, 1995, 2003, 2016). Writing in 1973, Lefebvre was clear that concerns about environmental degradation, resource depletion, and pollution cannot be treated as isolated issues but are manifestations of the more ‘global problem’ of capitalism's ‘survival’, through its reproduction of the social (and spatial) relations of production (Lefebvre, 1976: 17). In this context, one aspect of the authors’ argument which may well provoke debate is their explicit linking of Lefebvre's approach to nature with their advocacy of the concept of ‘metabolic rift’ as a central concept for critical environmental geography. The metabolic rift approach has been powerfully developed in the work of John Bellamy Foster, Paul Burkett, and Kohei Saito as a means of explaining the inherent tendencies of capitalism to generate ecological crises (Burkett, 2014; Foster, 2000; Saito, 2017). The association of this approach with Lefebvre's thinking is primarily grounded in his discussion of Marx and Engels’ writings about the disruptive effects of urbanisation on the ‘metabolic’ interaction between humanity and non-human nature in Marxist Thought and the City (Lefebvre, 2016). Given the recognition of Lefebvre's understanding of the politics of space and nature in a number of other approaches to environmental geography, it is not possible in this commentary to fully assess whether his work is such a specific precursor to contemporary metabolic rift scholarship (Moore, 2015; White et al., 2017).

Nevertheless, where the article under discussion provides a particularly novel contribution is by mobilising Lefebvre's concept of ‘autogestion’ in the pursuit of an explicitly ‘ecological’ political project (Lefebvre, 2001, 2009). Literally translated as ‘self-management’, most interpretations of Lefebvre's use of autogestion situate it within the context of attempts during the 1960s and 1970s to broaden social struggles from narrow forms of economism or abstract political claims, to a confrontation with both state power and capital through the production of transformed spaces (Brenner, 2001: 788; 2008; Brenner and Elden, 2009; Butler, 2012: 100–103; Rose, 1978). Lefebvre understands autogestion as a ‘fundamentally antistatist’ orientation towards the progressive democratisation of institutions and decision-making processes within workplaces, representative structures, cities, and regions (Lefebvre 2001: 780). His version of autogestion clearly exceeds both a liberal pluralist notion of public participation and the versions of self-management adopted by Euro-communists and the Yugoslavian state during the 1970s. In relation to the latter, Lefebvre argued that these interpretations of autogestion were concerned almost entirely with increasing workers’ input into decisions over economic production, but ignored the importance of the transformation of space in the liberation of everyday life (Lefebvre, 1976: 120).

Despite the breadth of Lefebvre's understanding of autogestion, much of the literature on this aspect of his thinking focuses on its relevance for forms of human emancipation such as radical democracy and urban citizenship, particularly through the generalised spatial demands of the ‘right to the city’ and the ‘right to difference’ (Butler, 2012; Purcell, 2013). Napoletano et al. are to be commended for turning their focus to the crucial connection between autogestion and strategies which resist the technological ‘domination of nature’ by the state and capital (Lefebvre, 1991: 343; also, see Lefebvre, 2014), and which provide a template for the ‘reappropriation of nature, space, and the body’ (Napoletano et al., 2023). One question which is obviously beyond the scope of the article, but is of immediate strategic interest, is the extent to which existing institutional structures, such as the legal system, can play a role in mediating the autonomous agency of inhabitants in the praxis of autogestion (Butler, 2009; Huchzermeyer, 2018). Yet the authors have done us a great service by opening up new lines of inquiry on the meaning of autogestion and emphasising the role of the ‘appropriation’ of nature in an ecological politics oriented towards sustainable and de-alienated forms of inhabitance.