The Grandchildren of Marx and Coca-Cola: Lefebvre, Utopia and the ‘Recuperation’ of Everyday Life

Abstract

In the wake of the failure of the 1968 May–June events to jump-start the widely expected revolutionary transformation of French society, Situationist Guy Debord unleashed a venomous assault on his former friend, mentor, and fellow imbiber Henri Lefebvre. Debord accused him of lifting the idea of the ‘festival’ from the Situationist International (S.I.) — somewhat ironically, in light of the fact that Situationist détournements can be read as elaborate plagiarizations of a wide range of theoretical and pop culture texts. And not to mention that Lefebvre, in a 1983 interview, claimed that Debord and company had cribbed, without attribution, his own research into the festive qualities of the 1871 Paris Commune. But, more ominously, Debord argued that Lefebvre had rendered this concept ‘useful’ for academic scholarship, thereby divesting it of any radical import vis-à-vis the immediate political situation. Lefebvre, in Debord’s eyes, was guilty of the primal sin of ultra-leftism: that of functioning effectively, if perhaps unwittingly, as an ‘agent of recuperation’. Lefebvre remained thereafter on the S.I.’s ‘blacklist’ until the organization’s demise in 1972.