Dialectical Materialism

<div>With the aim of widening the scope of Marxist theory Henri Lefebvre finished <i>Dialectical Materialism</i> 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. <i>Dialectical Materialism</i> is an implicit response to Joseph Stalin's <i>Dialectical and Historical Materialism</i> and an attempt to show that the Stalinist understanding of the concept was dogmatic and oversimplified.<br> <br> 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.</div>