Henri Lefebvre’s Marxian ecological critique: recovering a foundational contribution to environmental sociology

ABSTRACT

French Marxist sociologist, Henri Lefebvre, was one of the foremost social theorists of the twentieth century, celebrated for his critiques of everyday life, urban revolution, and the production of space. We argue here that his mature work also encompassed a theory of ecological crisis, drawing directly on Marx’s theory of metabolic rift. In this conception, the dialectics of nature and society were subject to alienated capitalist accumulation, giving rise to metabolic rifts, epochal crises, and new historical moments of revolutionary praxis aimed at the metamorphosis of everyday life. Lefebvre thus ranks as one of the foundational contributors to environmental sociology, whose rich theoretical analysis offers the possibility of a wider social and ecological synthesis.

KEYWORDS:

• Henri Lefebvre
• Karl Marx
• dialectics of nature
• metabolic rift
• ecological crisis
• critique of everyday life
• Western Marxism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Although Lefebvre’s analysis of nature-society relations has received some attention, primarily within geography (Loftus 2012; Smith 1998, 2003, [1984] 2008), his approach has frequently been dismissed – wrongly we believe – as dualistic, reflecting the posthumanist, hybridist turn (see Malm 2019; Napoletano et al. 2019 for critiques of such views). Yet, systematic, in-depth treatments of his conception of the dialectics of nature and its relation to classical Marxism are lacking.

2. The central role played by the dialectics of nature in the classical, First International Marxism of both Engels and Marx has now been firmly established in recent research in Marxian ecology. See especially Foster (2020).

3. It would be a mistake to attribute the criticism of the dialectic of nature by Western Marxism simply to its rejection of official Soviet Marxism. Rather it had its deeper bases in the development of neo-Kantianism in Germany, which established epistemology as the queen of philosophy, relegating logic to a much more minor role than it had played in German idealism, and enshrining the principle that the Kantian thing-in-itself removed the natural sciences from the realm of reflexive or dialectical knowledge. It was out of this tradition that the main figures of critical theory, from Georg Lukács to the Frankfurt School, were to emerge (Ilyenkov 2008, 289–319).

4. The interpretation of the Frankfurt School and Western Marxism on nature and society offered here is firmly established in the literature. See Foster and Clark (2016), Bhaskar (2011), Jacoby (1983), Sheehan (1985), Dickens (2004), Jameson (2009), Jay (1973), Leiss (1974), Timpanaro (1975), and Napoletano et al. (2019). Nevertheless, some notable recent interpretations have taken a much more positive view of the Frankfurt School on the environment. See in particular the work Gunderson (2015a, 2015b) and Cook (2014). In our argument Lefebvre is to be viewed as a genuine representative of ‘theory of praxis’ (Hoffman 1975), who also holds on to the notion of the dialectics of nature. He thus represents a crucial bridge between orthodox/official Marxism/historical materialism and Western Marxism (including the Frankfurt School) – a bridge needed all the more in our age of planetary ecological crisis.

5. Lefebvre refers here to the ‘control of nature,’ even though he acknowledges that nature is appropriated only in part and human beings are unable to break away from it. Still, his emphasis on control is one-sided compared to his later work. Lefebvre’s argument here thus reflects the fact that The Sociology of Marx was written in 1966, before he began to incorporate ecological assumptions centrally into his analysis in the early 1970s. Nevertheless, his emphasis on human-social emergence out of nature, and the continuing dependence on nature, reflect the dialectical nature of his thinking.

6. Lefebvre is referring here to Marx ([1864-65] 1981, 959).

7. Lefebvre’s treatment of ‘spaces of catastrophe,’ ecological rupture, the metabolic rift, etc., along with his critique of the ideologies of growth, put his work in line with what are now known as the metabolic rift and treadmill of production traditions in environmental sociology, theoretically opposed to capitalist ecomodernization theory.

8. Lefebvre’s analysis is entirely compatible with that of dialectical critical realism as exemplified by Bhaskar (1993, 2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Bellamy Foster

John Bellamy Foster is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403. E-mail: [email protected], and editor of Monthly Review (New York). He has writen extensively on Marx and ecology and the political economy of the environment. He is a recipient of the Fred Buttel Distinguished Contribution Award from the the Enviornmental Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association and a member of the Foundation International Advisory Board for Environmental Sociology.

Brian M. Napoletano

Brian M. Napoletano is an Assistant Professor in the Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Antigua Carretera a Pátzcuaro, Morelia, Michoacán, México 58087. Email: [email protected]. His research is focused on  geographic expressions of the metabolic rift, with a particular emphasis on the geograpnic rifts of captialist urbanization and conservation.

Brett Clark

Brett Clark is a Professor of Sociology and Sustainability Studies in the Department of Sociology at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112. E-mail: [email protected]. His research is focused on the political economy of global environmental change and the philosophy, history, and sociology of science.

Pedro S. Urquijo

Pedro S. Urquijo is an Assisant Professor in the Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Antigua Carretera a Pátzcuaro, Morelia, Michoacán, México 58087. Email: [email protected]. His research is focused on historical geography, environmental history, and the history of geography.