ABSTRACT
Lefebvre was like an electric wire: he conducted ideas from movement to movement and generation to generation. The purpose of this chapter is to survey his early theoretical work, which introduces and reappears in his later work and thus the later thematic chapters that follow. This involves taking seriously his engagement with ideas and proposals generated by the artistic avant-gardes of the 1920s and his work on Hegel and dialectical materialism-a theoretical encounter chaperoned by Surrealists such as André Breton. His involvement with different movements stretched from attempts in the early 1920s to resolve the malaise of post-First World War society to working alongside bohemian poets and radically disenchanted artists such as the Dadaists and Surrealists. Even as an avowed Marxist, he joined forces with Existentialist philosophers and Situationist artists and sociologists; later, he aligned himself with the student counterculture of the 1960s and the urban planning movements of the 1970s. His ideas took on an international life of their own, inspiring the German Green Party, British anarchist punks, such as Class War (Home 1988), and both American postmodernists (Jameson 1984; see Chapter 8) and their Marxist opponents (Jameson 1991; Harvey 1989; 1991). He maintained links in Quebec, in Ottawa, in Central and South America, and above all in Eastern Europe, where he became a confidant of the Romanian dictator Ceaucescu. To understand Lefebvre’s work fully, however, it is necessary to remember his Nietzschean and Surrealist roots. Can would-be Dadaists turn into Marxists? Yes-and no.
