Henri Lefebvre’s Research On The Theory Of Spatial Production

Henri Lefebvre is a famous French philosopher,sociologist and western Marxist.He is one of the main representatives of the critical theory of daily life and capitalist urban space in France.He criticized and reflected on the development state of modern western developed capitalist society from the spatial dimension,and made a unique theoretical exploration and important contribution to the innovative development of Marxist theory in the 20 th century.This paper aims to systematically study and elaborate Lefebvre’s spatial production theory,and make a general study of Lefebvre’s critical theory of daily life,social space production theory,abstract space production theory and differential space theory according to the research path of the transformation of the research field,the innovation of methods and the display of functions of his spatial production theory.In addition,the paper combines Lefebvre’s spatial production theory with the social practice of urbanization development,highlights the planning function and practical character of his theory,and analyzes the social contradictions caused by the urban spatial production and operation mechanism in the developed industrial society.This paper puts forward some useful thought resources contained in Lefebvre’s theory about how to deal with the problems of social production and daily life in the process of urbanization in China.The thesis mainly carries out the research from the following five parts.This paper examines the emergence of Lefebvre’s theory of space production.In France after World War II,capitalist society entered a new stage of urbanization,and the organization form of capitalist production mode changed.The bourgeoisie has exercised more complex and covert rule over people through the appropriation and reproduction of space;The unequal distribution of rights and capital leads to the intensification of conflicts in cities.The country has a crisis of urban management,and the society is faced with various problems in the transition to urban centralization.The students and workers put up a fierce resistance to the bourgeoisie through social movements.Facing the new social changes,western Marxist researchers doubted the legitimacy of Marx’s social critical theory and its social diagnostic power,which aroused Lefebvre’s attention to the urban space problem.Based on Marx’s social critical theory,Lefebvre analyzed the contradictions caused by social space production in the process of capitalist urbanization and formed his spatial production theory,trying to enhance the interpretive power and influence of Marx’s social critical theory from the spatial dimension.This paper studies Lefebvre’s field transformation from the critique of daily life in rural society to the critique of urban space.Lefebvre started with the investigation of land ownership in rural society,criticized the daily life of rural society,and gradually turned to the study of urban space theory,which provided a starting point for the study of his spatial production theory.He studied the emergence and development of daily life step by step from ontology to practice,and revealed that daily life is the common basis of all dissimilation phenomena.By analyzing the political struggle in the French Pyrenees mountains and the land ownership in rural society,Lefebvre launched a critique of the alienation in the daily life of rural society,providing practical experience and concrete methods for the study of urban social contradictions and class structure in capitalist society.With the acceleration of urbanization,Lefebvre saw that urban space had become the main field for the accumulation of capitalist surplus value.He analyzed the social contradictions caused by modernity in the process of urbanization,and criticized and reflected on the alienation of daily life in modern society and the society with controlled consumption.Lefebvre examined the prominent problems of spatial production in modern capitalist society by grasping the change of land ownership in the process of transformation from rural to urban,and opened the preface to the study of spatial production theory.This paper studies Lefebvre’s theory of social space and his thought of tripartite dialectics.With the development of urbanization in capitalist society,Lefebvre found that urban space is the concentrated embodiment of production relations and social order with practical significance.In his criticism of urban alienation,he found the spatial development of cities,placed the contradictions in the process of urbanization under the perspective of social space,re-examined the concepts of social space and production,and proposed that social space,as an important resource for social production and development,is the carrier of spatial production.It reveals that the core of the alienation phenomenon of capitalist society is the production of social space.Lefebvre put forward the thought of tripartite dialectics of social space,created a new perspective of dialectic criticism of space,criticized the capitalist society’s homogenous social space production mode,and reflected the vision of socialist space full of pluralism.This paper studies Lefebvre’s theory of abstract space production and differential space production.Lefebvre re-examined the historical contradictions of capitalist society from the spatial dimension after a careful investigation of the problem of capitalist social space,revealing that capitalist countries have gradually shifted from intervening in social space to using abstract space production to obtain economic benefits and maintain political rule.Based on Marx’s theory of social form,he analyzed the historical mode of production of space,proposed a new form of social space,and revealed the crux of the development of capitalist society: exploitation in the process of capital multiplication is hidden in the process of abstract space production,which will lead to urban space gradually becoming the victim of capital multiplication.Lefebvre analyzed that the contradictions of capitalist social space contain a dialectical negation,hidden a new principle of spatial order and justice,and tried to find a different socialist space from the spatial dimension and plan a new social form.Through the construction of a beautiful daily life with differences,the goal of the whole person is finally realized,which provides a spatial liberation path for people to resist the alienated manipulation of capital logic and realize the free development of people,and highlights the planning function of its spatial production theory.This paper discusses the evaluation and enlightenment of Lefebvre’s spatial production theory.Lefebvre’s spatial production theory reflects the further investigation of spatial ontology and epistemology.He focuses on urban problems,and opens the criticism of spatial dimension to the contradictions caused by urban spatial production,providing a spatial research path for Marxist political economy criticism.Lefebvre put forward the social space form superimposed on the space production from the perspective of space,which enriched Marx’s social form theory.We should dialectically understand the deficiency of Lefebvre’s theory of space production,clarify the contribution and limitation of Lefebvre’s theory of space production,and deepen the study of Lefebvre’s theory of space production.At the same time,Lefebvre’s theory of spatial production is applied to the context of urbanization,revealing the phenomenon of spatial aggregation caused by capital concentration in the process of urban spatial production,and promoting social production to follow the principle of fairness and justice.To find out the application field of spatial production theory in the process of socialist urban spatial production in practice,and open up a new space for the development of China’s regional economy and the world economy;It provides a new development path for the urban modernization construction with Chinese characteristics,and provides practical enlightenment for meeting the extensive and diverse social production needs in the process of urbanization in China and maintaining the orderly operation of social production.