ABSTRACT
There are many ways from the perspective of Marxism to characterize everyday life: for example, a site of class struggles, a realm of commodity fetishism. In this chapter the author intend to focus exclusively on alienation. The author begins the concept as developed by Karl Marx and then explores how it is further developed, more explicitly in relation to everyday life, in the work of Henri Lefebvre. Over a period of thirty four years Lefebvre published his Critique of Everyday Life in three volumes. As Lefebvre himself explains the project, the Critique of Everyday Life was built entirely around the concept of alienation. This is important because, for people who have been unable to overcome alienation, the alienated world social appearances, the theories and abstractions which express these appearances seems the only reality. It is also important to understand that Lefebvre’s critique of everyday life is not just an attempt to simply understand it but an effort to transform it.
