ABSTRACT
Marxism and everyday life.The two seem unlikely bedfellows in the amnesiac age of postmodernism, divulging little of their intimate and revolutionary relationship in the first decades of the last century.According to the politically correct sensibilities of late, the quotidian is too precious and sublime an object to be exposed to the concerns of a doctrine convicted so soundly of (class) essentialism, (economic) reductionism, and (historical) determinism. Better to entrust it to something as pluralist and post-Marxist as cultural studies.Yet it was less than a century ago that the objective of socialist revolution was visible as the radical reconstruction of everyday life. And even-or especially-after attempts to change the world miscarried, the link between this keenly contested level of social reality and the struggle for socialism was not lost on a few thinkers known as Western Marxists. Henri Lefebvre stood out among them when he said: “Marxism, as a whole, really is a critical knowledge of everyday life.” Guy Debord and the Situationists agreed, when a talking head in their “detourned” cartoon strip said: “Yes, Marx’s thought is really a critique of everyday life!”1
