The charge most often levelled at my 1969–70 essay on the ISAs is ‘functionalism’. Readers thought they saw in my theoretical sketch an attempt to subscribe, on behalf of Marxism, to an interpretation that defined organs by their functions alone, their immediate functions, thus immobilizing society within ideological institutions charged with functions of subjection: ultimately, a non-dialectical interpretation the deep logic of which excluded all possibility of class struggle.
I do not think readers have paid enough attention to the notes at the end of my essay, which emphasize the ‘abstract’ nature of my analysis and explicitly locate the class struggle at the heart of my concerns.
For we can say that the specificity of the theory of ideology deducible from Marx consists in affirming the primacy of the class struggle over the functions and functioning of the state apparatus and Ideological State Apparatuses. This primacy is obviously incompatible with functionalism of any kind.
For it is clear that we cannot regard the system by which the dominant class provides society with ideological ‘leadership’, that is to say, the consensus effects of the dominant ideology (‘which is the ideology of the dominant class’ – Marx), as a pure and simple fact, a system of defined organs that automatically duplicate the same class’s violent domination or are put in place by the clear political consciousness of this class to ends defined by their functions. For the dominant ideology is never a fait accompli of class struggle that is itself exempt from class struggle.
For the dominant ideology, which exists in the complex system of Ideological State Apparatuses, is for its part the result of a very long, very harsh class struggle through which the bourgeoisie (to take that example) can achieve its goals only on the twofold condition that it struggle simultaneously against the old dominant ideology, which lives on in the old apparatuses, and the ideology of the new exploited class, which seeks its own forms of organization and struggle. This ideology, by means of which the bourgeoisie succeeds in establishing its hegemony over the old landed aristocracy and also the working class, is constituted not just by an external struggle against these two classes, but also and at the same time by an internal struggle to overcome the contradictions of bourgeois class fractions and realize the unity of the bourgeoisie as the dominant class.
We have to conceive of the reproduction of the dominant ideology in this sense. Viewed formally, the dominant class has to reproduce its material, political and ideological conditions of existence (to exist is to be reproduced). But the reproduction of the dominant ideology is not simple repetition, simple reproduction. It is not even an automatic, which is to say mechanical, reproduction on an extended scale of given institutions, defined once and for all by their function. Rather, it is the combat for the unification and renewal of prior ideological elements, which are disparate and contradictory, within a unity conquered in and through the class struggle in opposition to prior forms and new antagonistic tendencies. The combat for the reproduction of the dominant ideology is a combat that is never over; it has to be taken up again and again, and always under the law of the class struggle.
There are several reasons for the fact that the combat for the unification of the dominant ideology is ‘never over’ and must always ‘be taken up again’. It is not just because of the persistence of the old dominant class’s ideological forms and Ideological State Apparatuses, which put up a fierce resistance (what Lenin calls ‘habit’). It is not just because of the vital necessity of forging the unity of the dominant class, a product of the contradictory fusion1 of various class fractions (mercantile capital, industrial capital, finance capital, and so on) and the necessity of making that class realize its ‘general interests’ as a class, over and above the contradictions of the ‘particular interests’ of individual capitalists. It is not just because of the class struggle that has to be waged against the nascent forms of the ideology of the dominated class. It is not just because of the historical transformation of the mode of production, which dictates that the dominant ideology be ‘adapted’ to the class struggle (today, the legal ideology of the classic bourgeoisie is yielding to technocratic ideology). It is also because of the materiality and diversity of the practices whose ‘spontaneous’ ideology must be unified. This huge, contradictory task is never completely accomplished, and there is reason to doubt that the model of the ‘ethical state’, whose utopian ideal Gramsci borrowed from Croce, will ever exist. Just as the class struggle never ceases, so the dominant class’s combat to unify existing ideological elements and forms never ceases. This amounts to saying that the dominant ideology can never completely resolve its own contradictions, which are a reflection of the class struggle – although its function is to resolve them.
That is why we can derive from this thesis of the primacy of the class struggle over the dominant ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses another thesis, its direct consequence: the Ideological State Apparatuses are necessarily both the site and the stake of a class struggle that extends the general class struggle dominating a social formation into the apparatuses of the dominant ideology. If the function of the ISAs is to inculcate the dominant ideology, the reason is that there is resistance; if there is resistance, the reason is that there is struggle. In the final analysis, this struggle is a direct or indirect echo of the class struggle, sometimes a close echo, more often a distant one. The May 1968 events brought this fact into the broad light of day, revealing a struggle that had until then been mute and suppressed. However, in revealing, in the form of a revolt, an immediate class struggle in the Ideological State Apparatuses (especially the scholastic apparatus, followed by the medical apparatus, architectural apparatus, and so on), they have somewhat obscured the basic phenomenon commanding these immediate events: the nature of the class struggle inherent in the historical constitution and contradictory reproduction of the dominant ideology. May 1968 was ‘experienced’ in the absence of any historical or political perspective in the strong sense of those terms. That is why I considered it necessary to recall that, in order to understand the facts of the class struggle in the Ideological State Apparatuses and put the revolt in proper perspective, we had to adopt ‘the standpoint of reproduction’, which is the standpoint of the class struggle as an overall process [procès d’ensemble], not a sum of confrontations that are punctual or limited to this or that ‘sphere’ (the economy, politics, ideology); and as a historical process, not isolated episodes of repression or revolt.
When I recall these perspectives, I find it truly difficult to understand how anyone can impute to me a ‘functionalist’ or ‘systems-theory’ interpretation of the superstructure and ideology, one that ignores class struggle in favour of a mechanistic conception of instances.
Other objections to my essay have to do with the nature of political parties, that of the revolutionary political party above all. In a word, readers have tended to ascribe to me the view that each political party taken by itself is an Ideological State Apparatus. This could have the effect of radically locking every political party into the ‘system’ of the Ideological State Apparatuses, subjecting it to the law of that ‘system’, and excluding the possibility of a revolutionary party from the ‘system’. If all parties are ISAs and serve the dominant ideology, a revolutionary party, reduced to this ‘function’, becomes unthinkable.
But I have never written that a political party is an Ideological State Apparatus. I have even said (only briefly, I admit) something quite different: that political parties are merely the ‘component parts’ of a specific Ideological State Apparatus, the political Ideological State Apparatus, which ‘realizes’ the dominant class’s political ideology in, let us say, its ‘constitutional regime’ (the ‘fundamental laws’ under the monarchy of the Ancien Régime, the Parlement, and so on; the parliamentary-representative regime under the bourgeoisie in its ‘liberal’ phases).
I am afraid that readers have not clearly understood what I was proposing to think under the term political Ideological State Apparatus. To get a better grasp on it, one must carefully distinguish the political Ideological State Apparatus from the (repressive) state apparatus.
What constitutes the (repressive) state apparatus, whose unity, even when it is contradictory, is still infinitely greater than that of the ensemble of Ideological State Apparatuses? The state apparatus comprises the chief of state; the government and the administration, an instrument of the executive; the armed forces; the police; the judiciary; and the courts and their dispositives (prisons and so on).
Within this ensemble, we have to distinguish what I will call the political state apparatus, comprising the chief of state, the government that he or she directly leads (in the system current in France and many other countries), and the administration (which carries out government policy). The chief of state represents the unity and will of the dominant class – the authority capable of seeing to it that the dominant class’s general interests prevail over its members’ or fractions’ particular interests. [French President] Giscard d’Estaing very conscientiously ‘laid his cards on the table’ in announcing that if the Left were to carry the 1978 [legislative] elections, he would remain in office ‘to defend Frenchpeople’s freedoms’ (read: the bourgeois class’s freedoms). The government (which is currently under the direct orders of the chief of state) executes the politics of the dominant class, while the administration, under the government’s direct orders, applies it in detail. This distinction, which brings out the existence of the political state apparatus, indicates that the administration is part of that apparatus, notwithstanding the ideology (which it lives on, like the bourgeois state) that has it that it ‘serves the general interest’ and plays the role of a ‘public service’. It is not a question of individual intentions, or of exceptions: the administration’s function is, overall, inseparable from the application of the bourgeois government’s politics, which is a class politics. The upper levels of the state administration, charged with applying that politics in detail, play a directly political role, while the administration as a whole increasingly plays the role of ‘gridding’ [quadrillage]. It cannot apply the bourgeois government’s politics unless it is also charged with supervising the way individuals and groups execute them and denouncing those who fail to respect them to the repressive forces, or handing them over to them.
Understood this way, the political state apparatus (chief of state, government, administration) is part of the (repressive) state apparatus. It may legitimately be singled out within the state apparatus.
We now come to the tricky part: the political state apparatus (chief of state, government, administration) must be distinguished from the political Ideological State Apparatus. The former is part of the (repressive) state apparatus, whereas the latter is one of the Ideological State Apparatuses.
What is to be understood by the term political Ideological State Apparatus? The ‘political system’ or ‘constitution’ of a given social formation. Thus the French bourgeoisie, like all contemporary bourgeoisies in capitalist countries, has generally deemed the political system of parliamentary representation, which has realized bourgeois ideology in a political Ideological State Apparatus, to be the one best suited to it. However, it has, in class struggle situations dangerous for it, endowed itself with other regimes as well (Bonapartism I and II; the constitutional monarchy of the Restoration; Pétain’s fascism).
The parliamentary political ISA may be defined as an (electoral) mode of representation of the ‘will of the people’ by elected delegates (more or less universal suffrage) to whom the government, chosen by the chief of state or the parliament itself, is supposed to be ‘answerable’ or ‘responsible’ for its politics. It is, however, well known that the government in fact has at its disposal an impressive set of means for dodging and circumventing this ‘responsibility’ (therein lies the advantage of this apparatus for the bourgeoisie). To begin at the beginning, it can, every imaginable form of pressure aside, falsify the results of ‘universal suffrage’. It can, further, use the parliamentary rules in force to the same end (census suffage, disinfranchisement of women and young people, indirect election, the ‘separation’ of powers, a bicameral system with different constituencies for each chamber, bans on revolutionary parties, and so on). Such are the real facts. But what justifies calling the ‘political system’ an ‘Ideological State Apparatus’ is the fiction, corresponding to a ‘certain’ reality, that the component parts of this system, as well as the principle of its functioning, are based on the ideology of the ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ of the individual voters and the ‘free choice’ of the people’s representatives by the individuals who ‘make up’ the people. This choice supposedly depends on the idea each individual has of the politics the state should put into practice. It is on the basis of this fiction (for the state’s politics is ultimately determined by the dominant class’s interests in the class struggle) that ‘political parties’ are founded, supposedly in order to formulate and represent the major divergent (or convergent) options for a basic national politics. Each individual can then ‘freely’ express an opinion by voting for the political party of his or her choice (assuming it has not been condemned to operate illegally).
Be it noted that there can be a degree of reality to political parties. Basically, if the class struggle is sufficiently developed, they can roughly represent the interests of antagonistic classes or class fractions in the class struggle, or, again, those of social strata seeking to promote their special interests within class conflicts. By way of this reality, the fundamental class antagonism can ultimately emerge into the light, notwithstanding all the obstacles and impostures of the ‘system’. I say ‘can’, because we know that there are bourgeois countries (the USA, Great Britain, Federal Germany, and so on) in which the political development of class struggles does not succeed in attaining the threshold of electoral representation: in such cases, parliamentary antagonisms are only very remote, or even completely distorted, indices of real class antagonisms. The bourgeoisie in such countries is perfectly invulnerable, shielded by a parliamentary system that goes round in circles or simply idles. On the other hand, cases can occur in which the working class’s economic and political class struggle becomes so powerful that the bourgeoisie fears the ‘verdict of universal suffrage’ (France, Italy), although it also has considerable means to hand with which to overturn that verdict or reduce it to naught. It is enough to recall the Chamber in the Popular Front period in France: it took the bourgeoisie just two years to break its majority and then hand it over to Pétain with the Chamber’s own approval.
I believe that, if we confront the ‘principles’ of the parliamentary regime with facts and results, no one can doubt their ideological nature.
Bourgeois ideology in its entirety, from legal ideology through philosophical ideology to moral ideology, all of which have been disseminated for centuries, maintains the following ‘self-evident truth’ of ‘human rights’: every individual is free to choose his ideas and his camp (his party) in politics. Above all, it maintains the idea underlying this ‘self-evident truth’, which is ultimately simply an imposture: the idea that a society is made up of individuals (Marx: ‘society is not made up of individuals’, but of classes confronting each other in the class struggle); that the general will emerges from the ballot box in an election by majority vote; and that this general will, represented by the parties’ delegates in parliament, forges the politics of the nation. In reality, it only ever forges the politics of a class, the dominant class.
It is all too obvious that this political ideology is part of the dominant ideology and in full harmony with it: we find the same ideology everywhere in bourgeois ideology (which, let us note, has for the last ten years been undergoing a process of transformation). This will hardly surprise anyone who knows that the ‘matrix’ of this dominant ideology is legal ideology, which is indispensable to the functioning of bourgeois law. The fact that an ideology can be found everywhere indicates that we have to do with the dominant ideology. And it is from this permanent reciprocal reference from one ‘self-evident truth’ to the next, from the ‘self-evident truth’ of legal ideology to the ‘self-evident truth’ of moral ideology, from there to the ‘self-evident truth’ of philosophical ideology, and from there to the ‘self-evident truth’ of political ideology that every ideological ‘self-evident truth’ draws its immediate confirmation, imposing itself on every individual by way of the various practices of the ISAs. This ideology of the rights of man, freedom, equality, the freedom to choose one’s ideas and one’s representative, and equality at the polls, has in the end produced – not by dint of the power of ‘ideas’, but as a result of class struggle – the ideological apparatus in which the political ideology of the rights of man has materialized and become – except for Marxist criticism – a ‘self-evident truth’ that is accepted without visible coercion by the electorate or, in any case, the overwhelming majority of the electorate. We plainly have to do with an apparatus here, since it presupposes an entire rule-bound material dispositive, from the electoral rolls through the paper ballot and the voting booth to election campaigns and the parliaments that result from them, and so on. But we also plainly have to do with an ideological apparatus, since it functions without violence, ‘all by itself’, ‘on the ideology’ of its agents, who accept its rules and practise them by observing them, convinced as they are that they must ‘fulfil their duty to vote’ and that that is ‘normal’. Subjection and consensus are one and the same thing. This ‘self-evident truth’, imposed by bourgeois ideology, is accepted as a ‘self-evident truth’ by the voters; they consider themselves voters and take their places in the system. They ‘play the game by the rules’.
If this analysis is accurate, no one can affirm, on any grounds whatsoever – as some have ‘hastily’ done, in order to lock me into a theory that supposedly rules out all possibility of revolutionary action – that all parties, including the parties of the working class, are, as parties, so many Ideological State Apparatuses, integrated into the bourgeois system and therefore incapable of waging their class struggle.
If what I have just said is right, it is, on the contrary, clear that the existence of political parties, far from negating the class struggle, is based on it. And if the bourgeoisie constantly strives to exercise its ideological and political hegemony over the parties of the working class, that, too, is a form of class struggle; the bourgeoisie succeeds to the extent that the working-class parties fall into the trap, either because their leaders are intimidated (the 1914–18 Union Sacrée) or simply ‘bought off’, or because the basis of the working-class parties is diverted from its revolutionary task by material advantages (the worker aristocracy), or, again, because it yields to the influence of bourgeois ideology (revisionism).
These effects of the class struggle appear even more clearly when we consider the revolutionary workers’ parties – for example, communist parties. Since they are organizations of the workers’ class struggle, the interests of the bourgeois class and its political system are utterly foreign to them, in principle (for they, too, can lapse into reformism and revisionism). Their ideology (on the basis of which they recruit) is inimical to bourgeois ideology. Their organizational form (democratic centralism) distinguishes them from bourgeois parties and even social-democratic and socialist parties. Their objective is not to confine their activity to parliamentary competition, but to extend the class struggle to all workers, from the economic sphere to politics and ideology, in forms of action that are specific to them and obviously have nothing to do with stuffing a ballot in a ballot box once every five years. Conducting the proletarian class struggle in all areas and far beyond the confines of parliament – that is a communist party’s task. Its ultimate vocation is not to ‘participate’ in government, but to overturn and destroy bourgeois state power.
We must insist on this point, since most Western European Communist Parties today declare themselves to be ‘parties of government’. Even if a communist party does happen to participate in a government (and it can be correct to do so in certain circumstances), it cannot, on any grounds, be defined as a ‘party of government’ – whether one is dealing with a government under the domination of the bourgeois class or a government under the domination of the proletarian class (‘dictatorship of the proletariat’).
This point is crucial; for a communist party has no business entering the government of a bourgeois state (even if this government is a ‘left’ government of popular unity bent on carrying out democratic reforms) in order to ‘administer’ the affairs of a bourgeois state. It joins the government, in this case, in order to widen the scope of the class struggle and prepare the fall of the bourgeois state. But it also has no business entering a government of the dictatorship of the proletariat on the assumption that its ultimate vocation is to ‘administer’ the affairs of this state, when it should be preparing its decline and demise. For if it devotes all its forces to such ‘administration’ – that is, if the party is virtually intertwined with the state, as is the case in the countries of Eastern Europe – it will not be able to help destroy that state. A communist party can consequently not conduct itself on any grounds whatsoever as an ordinary ‘party of government’, that is, as a state party, since that comes down either to serving the bourgeois state or to perpetuating the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat – when its mission is, on the contrary, to help destroy it.
It will be seen that even if a revolutionary party demands its place in the political Ideological State Apparatus in order to carry the echoes of the class struggle into parliament, and even if it ‘participates’ in government, when conditions are favourable, in order to accelerate the development of the class struggle, it is defined neither by its place in an elected parliament nor by the ideology realized in the bourgeois political ideological apparatus. The truth of the matter is that a communist party has an altogether different ‘political practice’ than bourgeois parties.
A bourgeois party enjoys the resources and support of the established bourgeoisie, its economic domination, its exploitation, its state apparatus, its Ideological State Apparatuses, and so on. It does not need, in order to exist, to make a priority of uniting the masses that it wants to rally to its ideas: it is, first and foremost, the bourgeois social order itself which sees to this task of persuasion, propaganda and recruitment, ensuring the bourgeois parties their mass base. The bourgeoisie’s political and ideological grip is such – has been so firmly established, and for so long – that, in ‘normal’ times, the choices are virtually automatic – allowance made for the variations affecting the parties of the different fractions of the bourgeoisie. Most of the time, the bourgeois parties need only do a good job of organizing their electoral campaigns, during which they mobilize effectively and rapidly, in order to reap the benefits of this domination, transformed into electoral convictions.
That, moreover, is why a bourgeois party does not need a scientific doctrine, or even any doctrine at all, in order to exist: it needs only have a handful of ideas borrowed from the stock-in-trade of the dominant ideology in order to rally supporters convinced in advance, out of fear or self-interest.
In contrast, a workers’ party has nothing to offer its members: neither sinecures nor the material advantages with which the bourgeois parties buy off their clientele when it hesitates. It presents itself for what it is: an organization of workers’ class struggle, whose sole strengths are the class instinct of the exploited, a scientific doctrine, and the free will of members who have made a commitment to it on the basis of the party statutes. It organizes its members with a view to waging the class struggle in all its forms: economic (in conjunction with trade union organizations), political, and ideological. It defines its line and practices, not solely on the basis of the revolt of exploited workers, but on the basis of the balance of power between the classes, which it analyzes ‘concretely’ thanks to the principles of its scientific doctrine, enriched by all its experience of the class struggle. Hence it gives the widest possible consideration to the forms and power of the dominant class’s class struggle, on not just the national, but also a world scale. It is on the basis of this ‘line’ that it may deem it useful and ‘correct’ to enter a left government at a given moment, for the purpose of conducting its class struggle, in that government with its own objectives. At all events, it always subordinates the movement’s immediate interests to the working class’s long-term future interests. It subordinates its tactics to the strategy of communism, that is, the strategy of a classless society. Such are, at any rate, the ‘principles’.
Under these conditions, communists are right to talk about their party as a ‘party of a new kind’, completely different from bourgeois parties, and about themselves as ‘militants of a new kind’, completely different from bourgeois politicians. Their political practice – illegal or legal, parliamentary or ‘extra-parliamentary’ – has nothing to do with bourgeois political practice.
It will doubtless be objected that the communist party constitutes itself the way all other parties also do: on the basis of an ideology, which the party itself calls, moreover, proletarian ideology. That is true. In the communist party as well, ideology plays the role of ‘cement’ (Gramsci) for a particular social group, unifying it in its thinking and practices. In the communist party as well, this ideology ‘interpellates individuals as subjects’ – to be very precise, as militant-subjects: one needs only a little concrete experience of a communist party in order to have seen this mechanism and this dynamic artwork. In principle, it no more seals an individual’s fate than any other ideology does, given the ‘play’ and the contradictions among the various ideologies. But what is known as proletarian ideology is not the purely ‘spontaneous’ ideology of the proletariat, in which proletarian ‘elements’ (Lenin) are combined with bourgeois elements and, more often than not, subordinated to them. For in order to exist as a class conscious of its unity and active in its fighting organization, the proletariat needs not just experience (that of the class struggles it has been waging for more than a century) but also objective knowledges, the principles of which Marxist theory provides it. It is on the twofold basis of these experiences, illuminated by Marxist theory, that proletarian ideology is constituted: the mass ideology capable of unifying the avant-garde of the working class in its class-struggle organizations. It is therefore a very special kind of ideology. It is an ideology, because, at the level of the masses, it functions the way any ideology does (by interpellating individuals as subjects). It is, however, steeped in historical experiences illuminated by scientific principles of analysis. It presents itself as one of the forms of the fusion of the workers’ movement with Marxist theory, a fusion that is not free of tensions or contradictions; for between proletarian ideology as it exists at any given moment, and the party in which it is realized, there can exist a form of unity that is obscure to Marxist theory itself, although Marxist theory is an integral component of that unity. Marxist theory is then treated as if it were simply an authoritative text, that is, a password or a dogma; at the limit, it can quite simply disappear, albeit proclaimed as the theory of the party, and give way to a pragmatic, sectarian ideology that serves only partisan and state interests. No long speeches are needed here to recognize the situation currently reigning in the parties marked by the Stalin period, and to conclude that ‘proletarian ideology’ is itself the stake of a class struggle that saps the proletariat’s own principles of unity and action when the dominant bourgeois ideology and bourgeois political practice penetrate the organizations of proletarian class struggle.
An ideology, to be sure. Proletarian ideology, however, is not just any ideology. For every class recognizes itself in a particular, by no means arbitrarily chosen ideology, the one that is rooted in its strategic practice and capable of unifying and orienting its class struggle. Everyone knows that the feudal class, for example, recognized itself, for reasons that need to be analyzed, in Christian religious ideology, and that the bourgeois class, similarly, recognized itself in legal ideology, at least in the period of its classic domination, before the very recent developments of imperialism. The working class, for its part, recognizes itself – even if it is receptive to elements of religious, moral and legal ideology – above all in an ideology of a political kind: not in bourgeois political ideology (class domination), but in proletarian political ideology, that of the class struggle for the abolition of classes and the construction of communism. It is precisely this ideology, a spontaneous ideology in its earliest forms (utopian socialism) and, later, after the fusion of the workers’ movement with Marxist theory, an informed ideology, which constitutes the ‘kernel’ of proletarian ideology.
It is obvious that such an ideology did not result from a teaching that ‘intellectuals’ (Marx and Engels) dispensed to the workers’ movement, which adopted it because it recognized itself in it. Were that the case, we would have to explain how bourgeois intellectuals managed to work this miracle: a theory tailored to the proletariat’s measure. Nor was that ideology, as Kautsky claimed, ‘imported into the workers’ movement from without’; for Marx and Engels would not have been able to conceive of their theory if they had not erected it on class theoretical positions, a direct consequence of the fact that they belonged organically to the workers’ movement of their day. In reality, although Marxist theory was of course conceived by intellectuals with vast knowledge, they conceived it within and from within the workers’ movement. Machiavelli says that ‘to understand Princes, one has to be people’. An intellectual who is not born people has to become people to understand Princes, and he can only do so if he shares the people’s struggles. That is what Marx did: he became an ‘organic intellectual of the proletariat’ (Gramsci) as a militant in its earliest organizations, and it was from the proletariat’s political and theoretical positions that he was able to ‘understand’ capital. The false question of the injection of Marxist theory from without thus becomes the question of the dissemination inside the workers’ movement of a theory conceived inside the workers’ movement. Of course, this ‘dissemination’ was the result of a very long class struggle, with many rude shocks – and it continues today despite dramatic divisions, determined by imperialism’s class struggle.
To sum up the essentials of this analysis of the nature of the revolutionary party, we can return to the thesis that the class struggle has primacy over the state apparatus and Ideological State Apparatuses. Formally, a party such as the communist party may seem to be a party like others, if it enjoys the right to send representatives to the parliament by playing the electoral game. Formally, it may seem to ‘play the game by the rules’ of the political Ideological State Apparatus when it intervenes in parliament or even ‘participates’ in a popular unity government. Formally, it may even seem to ratify those rules and, with them, the whole ideological system realized in them: the bourgeois political ideological system. The history of the workers’ movement offers enough examples of revolutionary parties which, ‘playing the game’, are ‘taken in’ by it, and abandon the class struggle in favour of class collaboration under the influence of the dominant bourgeois ideology. The ‘formal’ can thus become ‘real’ under the impact of the class struggle.
This standing risk reminds us of the condition that the workers’ movement had to accept in order to come into existence: the domination of the bourgeois class struggle over the workers’ class struggle. We have a mistaken notion of class struggle if we suppose that it results from the working class’s revolt against social injustice, inequality, or even capitalist exploitation; in a word, if we reduce class struggle to the working class’s struggle against given conditions of exploitation and the bourgeois class’s response to that struggle. This would be to forget that the conditions of exploitation have primacy; that the process of creating the conditions for exploiting workers is the fundamental form of bourgeois class struggle; that, consequently, exploitation is already class struggle; and thus that the bourgeois class struggle has primacy. The whole history of primitive accumulation can be considered the production of the working class by the bourgeois class, in a process of class struggle that creates the conditions for capitalist exploitation.
If this thesis is on the mark, we can clearly see in what sense the bourgeois class struggle dominates the workers’ class struggle from the very outset; why the workers’ class struggle was so long in taking form and finding its forms of existence; why the class struggle is fundamentally unequal; why it is not waged through the same practices by the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; and why the bourgeoisie imposes, in the Ideological State Apparatuses, forms meant to forestall the revolutionary activity of the working class or to subject it to itself [s’asujettir].
The working class’s great strategic demand for autonomy reflects this condition. Subjected [soumis] to the domination of the bourgeois state and the effect of intimidation and ‘self-evidence’ of the dominant ideology, the working class can win its autonomy only on condition that it free itself from the dominant ideology, that it demarcate itself from it, in order to endow itself with forms of organiazation and action that realize its own ideology, proletarian ideology. Characteristic of this break, this radical distance taken, is the fact that it can be achieved only by a protracted struggle which must take the forms of bourgeois domination into account and combat the bourgeoisie within its own forms of domination, but without ever being ‘taken in’ by the game represented by these forms, which are not simple, neutral ‘forms’, but apparatuses that realize the existence of the dominant ideology.
As I said in my 1970 Note:2
For if it is true that the ISAs represent the form in which the ideology of the dominant class must necessarily be realized [if it is to be politically active], and the form in which the ideology of the ruled class must necessarily be measured and confronted, ideologies are not ‘born’ in the ISAs, but from the social classes at grips in the class struggle: from their conditions of existence, their practices, their experience of the struggle, and so on.
The conditions of existence, the (productive and political) practices and forms of the proletarian class struggle have nothing to do with the conditions of existence, the (economic and political) practices and forms of the capitalist and imperialist class struggle. This gives rise to antagonistic ideologies, which, like the (bourgeois and proletarian) class struggles themselves, are unequal. This means that proletarian ideology is not the direct opposite, inversion, or reversal of bourgeois ideology – but an altogether different ideology that is the bearer of different, ‘critical and revolutionary’ ‘values’. It is because proletarian ideology is, all the vicissitudes of its history notwithstanding, already the bearer of such values, which are already realized in the organizations and practices of workers’ struggle, that that ideology prefigures what the Ideological State Apparatuses of the transition to socialism will be and, for that very reason, also prefigures the abolition of the state and Ideological State Apparatuses under communism.