Producing Profit

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n the chapter entitled ‘Social Space’, from Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, you can’t help but to question the definition to most of the words, you think you know the meaning of. We are first introduced to trying to understand the term ‘production’ and it’s the difference, and the relationship with the term ‘product’. Lefebvre points out that this exploration has previously been studied by Marx and Engels. According to them, ‘production’ can either mean, in a general sense, that if something develops, it is produced, or you can look at it in specific terms, looking at it in terms of ‘products’. According to Lefebvre, ‘production’ is labour; “it organizes a sequence of actions with a certain 'objective' in view”. A ‘product’ is “the result of repetitive acts and gestures”, and there is a reason for why it is produced. He continues by comparing it to ‘nature’ and what is created (not produced) by nature. According to him nature does not produce because there is no thought process behind the action of creating, nature just does, and doesn’t even know that it is doing. However Lefebvre states that it is because of humanity that nature is dying: “nature is being murdered by 'anti-nature' - by abstraction, by signs and images, discourse, as also by labour and its products.” As humans continue to produce, they are destroying nature, and ultimately themselves.

What Lefebvre is trying to get at, whilst trying to properly define these key words, is we have lost the real meaning of these words: ‘production’, ‘product’, ‘work’. The last time they were properly used was by Marx and Engels. They are now only being used as ways to describe the consumer aspect of them: ‘product’ is now only used in reference to the things we buy in stores, and ‘production’ is only used as a means of describing how these ‘things’ are made. We have been so caught up by the buying and selling of items, which we have forgot the essence of these words, the essence in ourselves.

These thoughts are basically very similar to the ones stated by both Badiou and Eagleton in the earlier texts. Production was earlier described as “a sequence of actions with a certain 'objective' in view”. However, the current capitalistic world has only interpreted that in one way, with only one ‘objective’ in mind: profit.