ABSTRACT
Lefebvre’s early association with avant-garde artists and poets such as Tristan Tzara, the inventor of Dadaism, and Surrealists such as Max Jacob and André Breton provides a basis for understanding his eccentric Marxism. Why call it ‘eccentric’? For two reasons: Lefebvre fashioned his own Marxism by applying Marx’s method of dialectical materialism more systematically than Marx himself. Also, Lefebvre was always an outsider. His path was an ‘eccentric orbit’ around the institutionalised Marxism of the Stalinist-dominated Communist Party. He compared himself with Heine, who ‘used poetry as a yardstick for revolution but, preferred justice to poetry,’ even to the point of preferring a future in which poetry might be put at risk (1995 [1962i]:34). Nonetheless, the dialectical model always remained at the core of Lefebvre’s work.
