Passing through difference: C.L.R. James and Henry Lefebvre

Smith, Andrew ORCID: 0000-0003-1514-8553 (2020) Passing through difference: C.L.R. James and Henry Lefebvre. Identities, 27 (1). pp. 38-52.

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1070289x.2018.1558880

Abstract

This 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.

Item Type:	Article
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	07 May 2019 15:49
Last Modified:	19 Jan 2023 00:49
DOI:	10.1080/1070289x.2018.1558880
Related URLs:	Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3040113