Brian Michael Napoletano

Both the urban and the metabolic rift have been recognized as planetary phenomena with worldwide implications. Underlying their historical conjuncture is the way the two are rooted in basic contradictions of the capital system – including town–country, domination-appropriation, and exchange value–use value – rendering them mutually reinforcing and co-constitutive. Thus, the looming threat of what French Marxist Henri Lefebvre referred to as the “planetarization of the urban” also represents a planetarization of the metabolic rift. Rather than a negation of the urban, the project of autogestion suggests that metabolic restoration lies in the reappropriation of space through urban society. This raises challenges of substantive equality, substantive democracy, and openness to the future, which also serve as orienting principles rooted in the socialist project. Although transforming these into a radical project of transition represents a monumental challenge, its urgent necessity becomes increasingly apparent with the growing stakes of our contemporary social-ecological crisis.

In our article, ‘Henri Lefebvre's Conception of Nature-Society in the Revolutionary Project of Autogestion’, we sought to open an important dialog on the relation of autogestion to the ecological struggle for metabolic restoration. The four insightful commentaries in this dialog have taken up this argument and moved it forward substantially. Here, we briefly reflect on a central problem raised by these four interventions and Lefebvre's theory of autogestion more generally: The agent of radical social transformation.

En el marco del Antropoceno y las propuestas en torno a la sustentabilidad, la reconsideración de enfoques teóricos que tomen en cuenta tanto los aspectos históricos (temporales) como los procesos geográficos (espaciales) de los fenómenos ambientales, se vuelve una necesidad imperante. La posibilidad de una resolución exitosa de la crisis del Antropoceno en términos de supervivencia humana depende de una clara comprensión de la novedad histórica del sistema del capital y su modo alienado y totalizador de control metabólico social. Partiendo del trabajo sobre cómo Henri Lefebvre incorporó la teoría de la fisura metabólica a su teorización de la producción del espacio, examinamos su proyecto ritmanalítico como complemento de su trabajo sobre el espacio, y analizamos cómo la producción conjunta de tiempo y espacio estructura la vida cotidiana en torno a la dominación capitalista del tiempo lineal sobre los ritmos del cuerpo y la sociedad. Al ser el lugar (el espacio) donde esta contradicción se hace más aguda, los ritmos corporales de la vida cotidiana también sientan las bases de un modo alternativo de control metabólico social, que persigue la igualdad sustantiva como fin y condición previa para la sustentabilidad.

While Henri Lefebvre has certainly become an important figure in Marxist thought, referring to him as one of the most influential French Marxists might be a bit hyperbolic—although I guess this would depend on whom you ask. I am not sure Lefebvre’s...

El intrincado enfoque materialista dialéctico de Henri Lefebvre sobre la problemática naturaleza-sociedad, junto con su defensa de una praxis orientada a la transformación total desde la base a través de la autogestión, ofrece un enfoque unificado, crítico y dialéctico de la ecología política. Desgraciadamente, su trabajo en estas áreas se ha interpretado con demasiada frecuencia como dividido y fragmentario, lo que ha escindido su análisis radical de la producción del espacio-tiempo de su praxis crítica relacionada con la autogestión. Para ofrecer un correctivo a esto, elaboramos brevemente su uso del enfoque materialista dialéctico de Marx esbozando cómo Lefebvre lleva este método a la problemática naturaleza-sociedad, y cómo su teorización de la autogestión apunta a una praxis radical dirigida a superar las contradicciones socio-ecológicas del capital. Su compromiso con la teoría de la fractura metabólica de Marx, así como su defensa de un proyecto radical de autogestión como parte de la crítica de la vida cotidiana, sirven para situar la cuestión subyacente de la enajenación en términos espaciales y ofrecen a la geografía una perspectiva transformadora que evita plantear sistemas cerrados e intentar agotar los diversos significados asignados a la naturaleza. Con ello, Lefebvre demuestra cómo la problemática naturaleza-sociedad desborda las cuestiones tanto de encuadre ontológico como de lenguaje y reclama una unidad de teoría y práctica radicales para superar las separaciones.

Henri Lefebvre's intricate material-dialectical approach to the nature-society problematic, taken together with his advocacy of a praxis oriented to total transformation from the ground up through autogestion, offers a unified, critical, and dialectical approach to political ecology. Unfortunately, his work in these areas has too often been interpreted as divided and fragmentary, splitting his radical analysis of the production of space-time from his critical praxis related to autogestion. We offer a corrective to this by elaborating briefly on his use of Marx's material-dialectical approach, outlining how Lefebvre brings this method to bear on the nature-society problematic, and how his theorization of autogestion points to a radical praxis aimed at overcoming the social-ecological contradictions of capital. His engagement with Marx's theory of metabolic rift, and his advocacy of a radical project of autogestion as part of the critique of everyday life, serve to place the underlying issue of alienation in spatial terms, offering geography a transformative perspective that avoids positing closed systems and attempting to exhaust the various meanings assigned to nature. In this, Lefebvre demonstrates how the nature-society problematic overflows issues of ontological framing and language, calling for a unity of radical theory and practice to overcome the separations.

The work of Henri Lefebvre has played a pivotal role in human geography in recent decades. At the same time, it has frequently been subject to partial and fragmented appropriations that isolate his insights on the production of space from his broader corpus, leading to confusion and misunderstanding regarding his handling of the dialectical relationships between space, time, society, and nature. In particular, Neil Smith's claim that Lefebvre's conceptualization of nature was both deficient and inconsistent with his dynamic conceptualization of space has tended to dominate geographical engagements with Lefebvre in this area. Following Smith, researchers generally reconstruct the production of space as an epiphenomenon of the production of nature. We critically assess and respond to Smith's criticisms of Lefebvre. Specifically, we contrast Lefebvre's material–dialectical approach to Smith's production-of-nature thesis. While Smith's thesis is helpful in understanding how capital attempts to subsume all of nature under commodity production, Lefebvre's dialectical conceptualization of nature–society as an oppositional unity points both to the impossibility of capital subsuming all of nature and the dangers that its attempts to do so pose to human civilization (even survival). Lefebvre's observations, regarding the growing rupture between natural processes and spatial dynamics, which he incorporates into his own elaboration of Karl Marx's theory of metabolic rift, make his work indispensable to the development of an ecospatial critique within geography and the social sciences more generally.