Seeds beneath the snow: Lefebvre,autogestion,and ecological questions

Abstract

This commentary engages with Napoletano et al.'s (2023) analysis of the relationship between society, nature, and ‘autogestion’ in the work of Henri Lefebvre. I present some reflections on what kind of relationship between humans and nature is envisioned with respect to political and social forms of governance after the advent of metabolic rift and, with Lefebvre, what kind of ‘autogestion’ regime can be imagined to begin to solve the ecological question.

First of all, I would like to thank the journal and the authors of the article for inviting me to participate in this debate, because the idea of discussing Henri Lefebvre's thought within political ecology is very fruitful. Napoletano et al.'s (2023) article is a further milestone that, in the first place, allows Lefebvre's thought to be measured within ecological studies and, secondly, allows Lefebvre's work to be placed among the best interpretations of Marxism and Marx's materialist dialectic, removing it from postmodern readings, which are often very anti-Marxist and decidedly misleading with respect to the internal coherence of the French sociologist's thought. As I have written elsewhere (Biagi, 2021), Lefebvre's thought is part of the critical theory directly inspired by Marx and Engels. Without Marxism, it is not possible to understand Lefebvre's thought, and too often this element is forgotten, with the French author being quoted out of context. Moreover, Napoletano et al. (2023) are careful readers of Lefebvre and avoid including him in the stereotypical framework of ‘French theory’ as has been done for too long in Anglophone scholarship. I would like to enter this debate, following the urge to discuss the concept of ‘autogestion’ in Lefebvre through that form of intellectual enquiry that follows the Socratic method of dialectics, as indicated in the article's conclusion. This commentary is not a systematic work, as I have been asked to express myself in a limited number of words, as is the practice in such cases, so I would only like to launch some issues of research that I will explore in the future.

Here I pose a series of central questions: what political institutions are suitable to manage a possible path out of the ecological problems caused by capitalism? What kind of relationship between humans and nature is envisioned in relation to political and social forms of governance after the advent of the metabolic rift? How can one think about the regime of government that will have to manage a society that is at least post-capitalist, if not yet anti-capitalist? What kind of ‘concrete utopia’ (Lefebvre, 2016: 102, 107) can be imagined to begin to solve the ecological question? Clearly, to answer these questions, we need to think about a reversal of power relations, in which it is the popular and oppressed classes that decide the lines of government, think about the degree to which we still use state institutions to overcome certain contradictions, and practice truly authentic forms of democracies that respond to the survival needs of nature and society as a whole.

The ‘autogestion’ proposed by Lefebvre questions the foundations of the modern state and proposes an internationalist grassroots democracy within a global project of new humanism and real democracy. Reflections on the concept of ‘autogestion’ have to be framed within its path of bibliographic production. Lefebvre proposed the political project of ‘autogestion’, redeeming the radical democratic tradition of the Paris Commune, to which he dedicated a very long book of historical and political analysis (Lefebvre, 2019). The ‘tradition of the oppressed’ of the Paris Commune – to use Walter Benjamin's (1940) political concept, reinterpreted today by Tomba (2019) – is also the object that gives political substance to the concept of the ‘right to the city’. Koselleck (2004) argues that political concepts have a layered history, i.e. they do not possess a single meaning, but are the result of a constellation of meanings that, from time to time, are reactivated or silenced. These layers of meaning are revived in later centuries not out of nostalgia for the past, but in order to re-actualize political experiences that were later forgotten and erased because they were inconvenient or too revolutionary for the upper classes. Lefebvre, for example, takes up the experience of the Paris Commune to explain what it means to be excluded from the city center and then takes it back and self-manages it, even if only for 3 months. The violence of repression extinguished that political experience, but not its historical and social validity. That ‘seed beneath the snow’, as Ross (2015) describes it, was then taken up in the experience of the German and Italian workers’ councils (Ness and Azzelini, 2011), in the forms of self-management of the res publica in Spain before and during the civil war (Ragona and Quirico, 2021), or in the Zapatista Indigenous communities in Mexico (Tomba, 2019), and in the ‘democratic confederalism’ in Kurdistan (Saed, 2015).

I do not want to fall into the stereotypical debate between anarchy as the a priori enemy of the state and communism as the solver of the problems of the bourgeois state, while not abandoning its essential guidelines. Nor do I want to fall into the gullibility of thinking that Zapatista or Kurdish self-government (‘autogestion’) can be replicated in other societies that are radically different in terms of social conditions and the development of power relations – just as a 21st-century Paris commune or the forms of workers’ control of Spain, Germany, and Italy in the 1920s, before the birth of Nazism and Fascism, cannot be replicated. And, lest one be a victim of one's own inexperience and gullibility, it is not possible to forget Malm's (2020) reflections about the need for a time of transition – even a harsh one – in which certain decisions are imposed on the upper class for the collective good by the force of rulers who embody the needs of the most oppressed. As Harvey (2014: xiii) argues, many are the small, localistic, and unconnected political experiences that appeal to different ideologies but which are unable to oppose an adequate political project to contend for power with ‘an increasingly consolidated plutocratic capitalist class [that] remains unchallenged in its ability to dominate the world without constraint’. These ‘seeds beneath the snow’ can either grow, strengthen, unite, and give birth to a strong tree or they can remain isolated and distant from each other, survive a little some years and then die. However, it is necessary to get out of the two dichotomies – that is, on the one hand, the absolute exaltation of these ‘seeds’ in the isolated exodus from neoliberal society and, on the other hand, the contempt for these experiences, blaming them for the loneliness they experience in the everyday life of politics.

With Lefebvre, we can think of a way out. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx (1875) talks of the state being converted ‘from an organ superimposed on society into one thoroughly subordinate to it’. I think it is misleading to reintroduce stereotypical dichotomies and – following Lefebvre's reasoning – we can realize a political practice without producing discussions abstracted from the context in which we live. There is a politicization of the surrealist concept of ‘changer la vie’ and an emphasis on always linking the two dimensions of micro and macro in everyday life. This can lead us to prefigure the possibility of creating a ‘popular power’ where in ‘autogestion’ we attempt to realize spaces of radical democracy that increasingly expand by governing the economy and opening a process of transformation of the state, where society is the protagonist of the fate of its own life. Harvey (2017) recalls how the young Antonio Gramsci (1919) urged his political organization to stimulate grassroots democracy, not only in workplaces but also in urban neighborhoods and city space. In my opinion, it is not a matter of ‘democratizing democracy’ (Sousa Santos, 2007), but of creating popular power. By means of the method of practicing self-management, new institutions can be created that can simultaneously overcome the problems of the state in the realization of the democratic-radical principle and respond immediately to the current consequences caused by the metabolic rift.

Finally, as Lefebvre notes, ‘autogestion’ is not something established but is itself the ‘site and stake of struggle’ (2009b: 134) and ‘indicates the road toward the transformation of everyday existence’ (1969: 90). This reaffirms the hypothesis that experience and social practice show that management associations – namely ‘autogestion’ – appear ‘in the weak points of existing society’ (Lefebvre, 2009a: 144). The ‘existing society’ is this kind of alliance between state and capital that has produced new variants of representative democracy in neoliberal times. These caring networks of mutual support (namely ‘autogestion’) are very reminiscent of the social work of the labor movement at the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries: social and revolutionary trade unionism, beyond the fences between anarchist and communist areas, combined the struggle for social rights and adequate welfare with collective support networks that solved those goals in a more equitable and solidarity-based way than an authentic political community which was not just ‘the executive committee of the bourgeoisie’ would have to solve instead. It is from here, surely, that we have to start again in order to build political paths of emancipation and liberation, for the ‘right to the city’, for ‘autogestion’, and against neoliberalism; and, especially, against that individualist vulgate that has created its own ruthless cultural hegemony in our society. The ‘autogestion’ within a caring network of mutualism is certainly the basic political program that can enable us to practice an ‘anticipation’ of that new society for which we are fighting. It is also the means through which we can begin to overturn individualist and profit-driven logics. Without ‘prophesying’ too much about future political scenarios, it is incumbent upon us to highlight those shoots of a new society, those ‘seeds beneath the snow’ that grow in difficult times. Neoliberalism tells us that ‘there is no alternative’, so politics is no longer transformation but a tool for the preservation and administration of given power arrangements. Politics has become administration and governance, and ‘capitalist realism’ seems an invincible enemy against which the struggle must continue.