As corpo-políticas da produção do espaço: ensaios lefebvreanos sobre espaço, reprodução e política

Abstract

The research aimed to argue that there is a latent political theory in the work of Henri Lefebvre that I call here the body-politics of the production of space. The concept seeks to capture the way in which Lefebvre conceived, avant la lettre, the space, the territory, the body and everyday life as central elements for revolutionary politics and of class struggle itself. This implies that, unlike in the Fordist period that extended until the early 1970s, where politics was fundamentally focused on elements related to industrial and directly productive spaces (such as wage adjustments, unions and workers' parties, factory strikes, among other elements of the industrial universe), politics in the contemporary world is marked by a more direct relationship with urban space and the reproductive sphere. The thesis uses the concept, developed throughout the introduction and the first chapter, as the backbone of an argument developed in the form of essays that deal with elements specific to political theory – the forms of political organization, revolutionary subjectivity, new forms of exploitation and domination of Capital and the spatial aspect of politics. Lefebvre's political theory is also compared with other political theories from the 1970s that also deal with the city, the metropolis and the urban, such as those developed by the Italian operaistas (Negri, Federici, Dalla Costa and others) and by Brazilian urban sociology (in particular, Lúcio Kowarick and Chico de Oliveira). As a research question, we seek to address the relationship between the production of space, social reproduction, and radical politics in the Urban Era. In chapters two and three, we explore the recent history of politics in the Global North and South (the Italian, French and Brazilian cases), highlighting how urbanization transforms the relationship between space and politics - what we call a new political topology. In the fourth chapter, based on a vast review of feminist literature, social reproduction theory, popular economies, and recent studies on expanded extractivism, we argue that capitalist exploitation uses urban space as a vector of expansion toward the popular classes and the un-waged proletariat. Finally, we revisit some contemporary political experiments, showing how the anti-capitalist struggle in the 21st century transforms space and the body into new arenas of political dispute. If Capital extends beyond the factory walls and reaches space as a whole, it is life and its reproduction that must now be politicized – in other words, the struggle for everyday life and territories are part of class struggle.