Dialectical Materialism

With the aim of widening the scope of Marxist theory, Henri Lefebvre finished *Dialectical Materialism* just before the beginning of World War II and the Resistance movement against the Vichy regime. As the culmination of Lefebvre's interwar activities, the book highlights the tension-fraught relationship between Lefebvre and the French Communist Party (PCF). For Lefebvre, unlike for the PCF, Marxism was above all a dynamic movement of theory and practice. *Dialectical Materialism* is an implicit response to Joseph Stalin's *Dialectical and Historical Materialism* and an attempt to show that the Stalinist understanding of the concept was dogmatic and oversimplified. This edition contains a new introduction by Stefan Kipfer, explaining the book's contemporary ramifications in the ever-expanding reach of the urban in the twentieth-century Western world.