Abstract: In the face of the intensifying crises and alienation in late capitalism, Henri Lefebvre, based on the standpoint of historical materialism and within the context of the critique of political economy, shifted Marx's critique of production relations based on commodity production to the critique of the production of space.Through exploring the contemporary heterogeneous issues of space, he consciously constructed a three-dimensional picture of spatial dialectics with the practice of space production as the theoretical foundation and the “abstract-concrete” as the methodological principle.That is to say, the utopian “differential space” derived from the “contradictory space” signified the end of the capital production and reproduction relations represented by “abstract space”.It not only revealed the spatial fetishism caused by the domination of capital's “abstract space” but also depicted the possibility of sublating the abstract space and moving towards the differential space.Thus, his spatial dialectics initiated the critique of spatial political economy, expanded the dimension of Marx's critique of political economy, and had a broad and far-reaching impact on the research of contemporary spatial issues.However, because his spatial dialectics overly emphasized the spatial dimension and utopian conceptions, to some extent, it led to the closure of dialectics and made it difficult to highlight the revolutionary and thorough nature of dialectics.

Key words: Henri Lefebvre, space, capital, the production of space, spatial dialectics, the critique of political economy