What Would Marx Say About "the Everyday"?
What Would Marx Say About "the Everyday"?
A preliminary clarification is necessary, because the question contains a subtle anachronism. Marx himself never used "the Everyday" (le quotidien) as a formal theoretical category. The concept is a twentieth-century invention, above all the achievement of Henri Lefebvre, whose three-volume Critique of Everyday Life (1947–1981) is the canonical Marxist treatment of the subject. Lefebvre's own definition of "authentic Marxism" was precisely "the critical knowledge of everyday life" 1. So the honest answer to the question is twofold: Marx did not theorise the everyday, but his categories — alienation, commodity fetishism, reification, praxis, the "total man" — are the very ground on which any Marxist account of the everyday must stand. What follows reconstructs the position Marx's thought implies, and which his Marxist heirs made explicit.
1. The everyday as the lived site of alienation
For Marx, the everyday is not a neutral backdrop but the concrete terrain where alienation is experienced. Lefebvre renders this in starkly Marxian terms: "The real, everyday life of the worker is that of a commodity endowed, unhappily for him, with life, activity, muscles – and with a consciousness" 1. The worker's daily existence — waking, commuting, labouring, resting, consuming — is the lived form of the fact that his labour-power has been bought and sold. Alienation is not an abstract philosophical condition; it is what happens between the factory gate and the kitchen table.
This is why Lefebvre insists that the theory of alienation and of the "total man" remain "the driving force behind the critique of everyday life" 1. Marx would locate the everyday as the point where the economic categories of Capital — value, surplus-value, the commodity — become flesh. The everyday is where "alienations, fetishisms and reifications (deriving from money and commodities) all have their various effects" 1.
2. The everyday as "residue" — and as totality
Marx would also recognise the everyday's peculiar epistemological status. Lefebvre famously defines it as "residual," as "what is left over" once all distinct, superior, specialised, structured activities (work, politics, science, art, religion) have been singled out by analysis 2. The everyday is the "technical vacuum" between specialised activities, the connective tissue that binds them 1.
But — and this is the crucial Marxist move — the everyday must not be reduced to this arithmetical remainder. It is "both a product (the result of their conjunction) and a residue," and it "can be understood only if one considers the various activities in the totality encompassing them, that is to say, the mode of production" 1. In other words, Marx would say: the everyday is the product of the capitalist mode of production, and to understand it you must grasp the totality of social relations that generate it. The everyday is not a leftover; it is the concrete form in which the mode of production is realised and reproduced.
3. The everyday as the site of both alienation and the human
Here Marx's dialectical sensibility is decisive. The everyday is not simply a zone of domination. Lefebvre writes that "the substance of everyday life – 'human raw material' in its simplicity and richness – pierces through all alienation" 1. The everyday is where friendship, love, play, the need to communicate — the relations that make a human being a whole — take shape, "albeit in a manner which is always partial and incomplete" 1.
This is the dialectic Marx would insist upon: the everyday is the site of maximum alienation and relative disalienation simultaneously 1. It is where capitalism fragments and reifies human life, but also where the residues of genuine human relation persist and resist. The everyday is, in Lefebvre's phrase, "the non-everyday in the everyday" — the place where the marvellous, the possible, the not-yet-alienated survives 1.
4. The everyday as the terrain of praxis and revolution
Most importantly, Marx would refuse to treat the everyday as merely an object of contemplation. "Everyday man is the man of praxis, and praxis alone will enable him to free himself from alienation and attain the concrete totality of the 'total man'" 1. The everyday is not something to be described but something to be transformed. Lefebvre is explicit that "the only means of acceding to totality is via revolution" 1.
Lefebvre even reconstructs what he calls Marx's "two projects for the transformation of everyday life," both of which "imply a total revolutionary praxis" 1. The first is ethical: the recognition of the reciprocity of human needs and desires, the end of the "social mystery" that makes relations between people opaque and conceals them from consciousness 1. The second is the project of the total man — the overcoming of "divided man," the setting aright of "the world turned topsy-turvy" 1. For Marx, the everyday is precisely what revolution must redeem: not the abolition of daily life but its enrichment, its "organic" linkage to totality 1.
5. Where Marx would fall short — and where Lefebvre extends him
A faithful reconstruction must also note Marx's own limitation, which Lefebvre diagnoses with care. Marx tended to reduce alienation to economic alienation, expecting it to "disappear completely and in one blow, through a historical but unique act: the revolutionary action of the proletariat" 1. In this, Lefebvre argues, "there remained something of the philosophical absolute from which it derived" 1. The everyday, in other words, is more stubborn than Marx's revolutionary eschatology allowed: alienation persists in leisure, in consumption, in "private life," in the very texture of daily existence, even where the economic form has been transformed.
This is the point at which the concept of "the everyday" (le quotidien) parts company from "everyday life" (la vie quotidienne) — a distinction Lefebvre develops only later and never fully 1. The everyday, in its full sense, names the repetitive, programmed, administered quality of modern life — the "quotidianness" that survives even the critique of political economy. Marx, Lefebvre suggests, grasped the economic core of this but not its full extension into the fabric of daily existence.
Conclusion
What would Marx say about the Everyday? He would say, first, that it is not a trivial or merely "personal" matter but the concrete form in which the capitalist mode of production is lived and reproduced; second, that it is saturated with alienation, fetishism and reification, yet still harbours the "human raw material" that resists them; and third, that it is the proper object of praxis — not to be contemplated but to be transformed, through a revolution that would not abolish daily life but restore it to the "total man." In short, Marx would recognise the everyday as the missing middle term between his critique of political economy and his vision of human emancipation — the terrain that Lefebvre, his most faithful and most original heir, set out to reclaim.
References
- Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life, Volume I: Introduction (1947; trans. John Moore, London: Verso, 1991). 1
- Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life, Volume II: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday (1961; trans. John Moore, London: Verso, 2002). 12
- Lefebvre, Henri. "The Everyday and Everydayness," Yale French Studies, no. 73 (1987). 31
- Trebitsch, Michel. Preface to Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life (London: Verso, 1991/2014). 1
- Felski, Rita. Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2000). 3
- Upton, Dell. "Architecture in Everyday Life," New Literary History 33 (2002): 707–723. 4
- Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle (1967), with commentary on Lukács, History and Class Consciousness. 56
Note: The knowledge base consulted (QuietKB) contains Lefebvre's complete Critique of Everyday Life (Verso edition) and related secondary literature; all quotations above are drawn from that source.
