For Lefebvre, social practices are the decisive aspect of society and everyday life. Social practices extend into all realms of society. The “superstructures are linked to society as a whole, to social practice as a whole” (CEL1, 57). The logical implication is that the physical production is not simply a base to which culture and politics can be reduced. Culture and politics are material and economic because they are produced and reproduced. There are political, cultural, ideological, intellectual, and so forth workers. In Volume 3, Lefebvre argues that the importance of bureaucracy, information production and information technology explodes the Stalinist distinction between base and superstructure:
The traditional Marxist thesis makes the relations of production and productive forces the “base” of the ideological and political superstructures. Today – that is to say, now that the state ensures the administration of society, as opposed to letting social relations, the market and blind forces take their course – this thesis is reductionist and inadequate. (CEL3, 123)
Information is produced. It is consumed. Information technology confirms the outmoded character of the classical Marxist contrast between base and superstructure. Information is not – or not merely – a superstructure, since it is an – exchangeable – product of certain relations of production. What was regarded as superstructural, like space and time, forms part of production, because it is a product that is bought and sold. (CEL3, 144)
Lefebvre advances several important arguments why the orthodox separation of the economy and culture is untenable:
• Computing as convergence technology: Networked computer technologies are convergent means of production, distribution, and consumption of information. Computing transcends the traditional separation between production as economic and consumption as cultural.
• Knowledge work: Information technology is characteristic of the knowledge age, where knowledge work that produces information has become an important feature in the economy. Knowledge work transcends the boundary between the economy and culture. It produces cultural products within the economy.
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Theorists