The Analysis Of Lefebvre's Critical Theory

Lefebvre as a representative of Existential Marxism,he thought that the problem of market intervention,widespread of mass culture,technology restricting thinking,prevalence of consumerism in the western capitalist society in the twentieth Century,not only caused the split between man and nature,self split and the cover of personal creativity,the loss of specific meaning of life,but also led to the total alienation of people.From the general existence of human beings and the concrete existence of everyday life,Lefebvre criticized the new form of alienation in the contemporary capitalist society.Lefebvre believed that in the contemporary western capitalist society,the contradiction between man and nature was becoming more and more intense,the existence created by people controlled people in reverse.People were out of the society and knew themselves in isolation during the process of blindly chasing the private interests.What's more,it caused alienation of their own ideas,alienation of needs and alienation between human and collectivity and so on.These were expression of the loss of human existence.Lefebvre thought it should be criticized and the reality and independent of human beings should be restored.Lefebvre pointed out that the development of science in contemporary western capitalist society had led to the crisis of the new way of existence and the separation between human rational critical spirit and perceptual practice,so that the alienation was taken place in basic everyday life which reflected human existence.So his critical theory began to turn to the field of life.He made an analysis of the concept of everyday life.He thought that everyday life lost its original and true nature nowadays and it became monotonous.His early critique was around individual,mystifying,money,needs,work and freedom.He thought that man lost the consciousness to rethink what he really needed.After entering the consumer society later,he criticized the phenomenon that symbolized consumer culture further controlled the ideology ofhuman beings.He pointed out that it was necessary to dig into the possibilities of revolution in the field of everyday life,expected to awaken the revolutionary passion of the people in the festival and to return to the “total man”.In a word,Lefebvre's criticism is all around the present situation of human existence.His critical theory broadened the scope of Marx's alienation theory,carried forward the humanitarian spirit implied in Marx doctrine.The uniqueness of Lefebvre's critical theory is that he looks at the entire human society with a tiny personal everyday life,aimed at giving full play to the personality and value of human beings.His criticism focuses on the loss of subjectivity in the present situation of human existence.However,his cultural revolution was gradually divorced from the economic base;it also revealed the limitations of his theory,which made people fall into the path of pure humanism study on eternal alienation and abandoning alienation.The study of Lefebvre's critical theory helps to excavate the inner relevance between his theory and other representative Western Marx criticism theories,so as to understand Marxist philosophy and its history of development better.