ABSTRACT
Lefebvre’s critique of everyday life places emphasis upon the extent to which, by the 1970s, time had become dominated by space, the growth of the forces of production by the development of the social relations of production, and in the urban form. The relativization and simultaneity of everything particular in space had, after the Second World War, become the means by which capital reproduces itself. In short, capital does indeed strive to create a world in its own image, as Marx and Engels observed in The Communist Manifesto (2004 [1848]). But, Lefebvre suggests, this entails more than the simple ‘annihilation of space by time’ or the melting of ‘all that is solid into air’; rather, the reproduction of capitalism occurs by means of the totalizing drive to concretize an abstract space (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]: ch. 4; Stanek 2008: 76), which is ‘abstract inasmuch as it has no existence save by virtue of the exchangeability of all its component parts, and concrete inasmuch as it is socially real and as such localised’ (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]: 341-2). In other words, Lefebvre explains how the production of this space is at the same time a process of the reproduction of alienated social relations. The human subjects that go about their individual everyday lives locked into a seemingly self-regulating circuit of production-consumption-production socially constitute such a space.
