The Marxist tradition is categorical: from the Manifesto and the Eighteenth Brumaire on (and in all the later classic texts, above all Marx on the Paris Commune and Lenin in State and Revolution), the state is explicitly conceived as a repressive apparatus. The state is a repressive ‘machine’ that enables the dominant classes (in the nineteenth century, the bourgeois class and the ‘class’ of big landowners) to ensure their domination over the working class in order to subject it to the process of extorting surplus-value (that is, to capitalist exploitation).
The state is thus, above all, what the Marxist classics have called the state apparatus. This term covers not only the specialized apparatus (in the narrow sense) whose existence and necessity follows, as we have seen, from the requirements of legal practice – that is, the police, courts and prisons – but also the army, which, apart from its ‘national defence’ role (the proletariat has paid for this experience with its blood), intervenes directly as the auxiliary repressive force of last resort when the police (and its specialized corps: the riot police, and others) are ‘overwhelmed by events’. Presiding over this ensemble are the chief of state, the government, and the administration.
Presented in this form, the Marxist-Leninist ‘theory’ of the state touches on the essential point, and there can be no question at all of not recognizing that this is indeed the essential point. The state apparatus, which defines the state as a repressive force of execution and intervention ‘at the service of the dominant classes’ in the class struggle waged by the bourgeoisie and its allies against the proletariat, is well and truly the state, and this well and truly defines its basic ‘function’.
Nevertheless, here too this presentation of the nature of the state remains descriptive, as we have already noted about the metaphor of the edifice (base and superstructure).
Since we shall often have occasion to use this adjective (‘descriptive’), a word of explanation is in order to eliminate all ambiguity.
When, in discussing the metaphor of the edifice or the Marxist ‘theory’ of the state, we say that these are descriptive conceptions or representations of their object, we have no negative ulterior motives. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that great scientific discoveries cannot avoid going through a first phase of what we shall call descriptive ‘theory’. This would be the first phase of every theory, at least in the domain that concerns us (that of the science of social formations). Accordingly, one could – and, in our view, one must – regard this phase as a transitional phase necessary for the development of the theory. We inscribe the fact that it is transitional in our expression ‘descriptive theory’, bringing out, by way of the conjunction of the two terms employed, the equivalent of a kind of ‘contradiction’. For the term theory is partially ‘at odds’ with the adjective ‘descriptive’ attached to it. This means, to be very precise, 1) that the ‘descriptive theory’ really is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the irreversible commencement of the theory; but 2) that the ‘descriptive’ form in which the theory is presented requires, precisely as an effect of this ‘contradiction’, a development of the theory that goes beyond the form of ‘description’.
Let us clarify this idea by returning to the subject to hand, the state.
To say that the Marxist ‘theory’ of the state at our disposal remains largely ‘descriptive’ means, first and foremost, that this descriptive ‘theory’ is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the real commencement of a Marxist theory of the state, and that this commencement provides us with the essential point, that is, the decisive principle [of] every later development of the theory.
But that is not enough. We shall say that a theory is ‘descriptive’ when we can perfectly well bring the vast majority of observable facts in the domain on which it bears into correspondence with its definition of its object. Thus the definition of the state as a class state that exists in the repressive state apparatus sheds a very revealing light on all the facts observable in the various orders of repression in whatever domain: from the massacres of June 1848 and the Paris Commune, of Bloody Sunday and May 1905 in Petrograd, of the Resistance, of Charonne,1 and so on, through the simple (and relatively harmless) interventions of a ‘censorship’ that banned Gatti’s play on Franco or the translation of Diderot’s La Religieuse into the cinematographer’s moving pictures,2 to all the direct or indirect forms of the slaughter of the popular masses (imperialist wars), their exploitation, and the subtle everyday domination in which is revealed, in the forms of political democracy, for example, what Lenin called, after Marx, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. That is the first aspect of the definition of a ‘descriptive theory’.
In its second aspect, it is, obviously, a stage in the constitution of a theory which itself demands that we ‘go beyond’ that stage. For it is clear that, while the definition in question really does provide us with the means of identifying and recognizing the facts of oppression by linking them to the state conceived as Repressive State Apparatus, this ‘linkage’ gives rise to a very special kind of obviousness, about which we shall soon have occasion to say a word: ‘Yes, that’s really how it is, that’s really true!’3 And although accumulating facts under the definition of the state multiplies examples, it fails to advance the definition of the state – the scientific theory of it – by a jot.
If this definition were to remain at the first stage, in which it functions as a ‘descriptive theory’, it would risk finding itself in unstable equilibrium, as if it were poised on a narrow mountain ridge, on the point, that is, of falling to one side or the other. This instability and the attendant risk of a fall have been very well analyzed in a recent book.4 Here we shall note only the book’s reminder that, precisely because of the instability of the ‘descriptive theory’ of the state, certain Marxists, and by no means the least of them, have ‘fallen’ to the wrong side of the path on the ridge by presenting the state as a mere instrument of domination and repression in the service of objectives, that is, of the dominant class’s conscious will. This is a bourgeois, instrumentalist-idealist conception of the state reinforced by a bourgeois idealist (humanist) conception of social classes as ‘subjects’. Such a conception has nothing to do with Marxism, because it perverts what is ultimately the most valuable thing the ‘descriptive theory’ gives us. Hence the need to ‘fall to the right side’ of the mountain path … or, to drop the metaphor, the need to develop the descriptive theory into a theory in the full sense.
Here, too, we have to be careful.
To develop this descriptive theory into a theory in the full sense, that is, in order to grasp the mechanisms of the state in its functioning, rather than merely identifying and ranging the facts of repression under the concept of state apparatus, we think it is imperative to add something to the classic definition of the state as state apparatus.
What must be, if not added, then at least made very precise, is, to begin with, the fact that the state (and its existence in its apparatus) is intelligible only as a function of state power. The whole political class struggle revolves around the state: around the possession, that is, the seizure or conservation of state power by a certain class or ‘power bloc’, in other words, an alliance between classes or class fractions.5 This first stipulation accordingly requires us to distinguish between, on the one hand, state power (conservation of state power or seizure of state power), the objective of the political class struggle, and, on the other hand, the state apparatus.
We know that the state apparatus can remain in place even after political events which affect the possession of state power without affecting or modifying the state apparatus. This is proved by the nineteenth-century bourgeois ‘revolutions’ (1830, 1848) or coups d’état in France (2 December 185[1], 13 May 1958), the collapse of regimes (the fall of the Empire in 1870 or of the Third Republic in 1940), the political rise of the petty bourgeoisie (1890–5 in France) like and so on. Even after a social revolution, like that of 1917, a large part of the state apparatus remained in place after an alliance of the proletariat and poor peasantry seized state power. Lenin repeated that often enough; it was an anguishing preoccupation of his to the day he died.
The book we have cited offers an illuminating, detailed discussion of this point.6 It may be added that this distinction between state power and the state apparatus has been an explicit part of the ‘Marxist theory’ of the state from Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire on.
To summarize the ‘Marxist theory of the state’ on this point, let us recall that the classics of Marxism have always maintained that:
1) the state is the (repressive) state apparatus;
2) state power and state apparatus must be distinguished;
3) the objective of the class struggle has to do with the possession of state power and, consequently, use of the state apparatus holding state power as a function of their class objectives by the classes (or alliances of classes or class fractions); and
4) the proletariat must seize state power in order to destroy the existing bourgeois state apparatus. In a first phase, the phase of the dictatorship of the proletariat, it must replace it with an utterly different, proletarian state apparatus, before going on, in later phases, to set a radical process in motion, the destruction of the state (the end of state power and all state apparatuses).
From this standpoint, consequently, what we just proposed to add to the ‘Marxist theory’ of the state is already there, black on white. It seems to me, however, that this theory, even completed in this way, remains partly descriptive, although it now contains complex, differential elements whose play and functioning cannot be grasped without the help of a decisive theoretical enrichment.
What has to be added to the ‘Marxist theory’ of the state is therefore something else. Here we shall be advancing cautiously on a terrain on which Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao have long since preceded us, but without systematizing, in theoretical form, the decisive progress that their experiences7 and procedures implied. Why? Because these experiences and procedures were restricted in the main to the terrain of political practice.
By that, we mean to suggest that the classics of Marxism in fact treated the state, in their political practice, as a reality that is more complex than the definition of it given in the ‘Marxist theory of the state’, even when that definition is completed as we have just completed it. Thus they acknowledged this complexity in their practice without expressing it in a corresponding theory.
We would like to try to sketch that corresponding theory.
We know very well the sort of objection we will be opening ourselves up to, since we cannot put forward a single proposition that is not already contained in the records of the political practice of the proletarian class struggle. Thus it can be objected at every turn that we are not adding anything new at all; and in a sense, that is perfectly true. We nevertheless believe that we are adding something new – doubtless very little, since we are merely giving theoretical form to something that has already been recognized in the practice of the proletarian class struggle. Yet we know, thanks to the same Marxist classics, that this ‘very little’ (casting the practical experience of the class struggle in theoretical form) is, or can be, very important for the class struggle itself. Without revolutionary theory (of the state), no revolutionary movement.
We shall lay our cards on the table. We are going to advance and defend the following thesis.
To produce a theory of the state, it is imperative to take into account not only the distinction between state power (and those who hold it) and state apparatus, but also another ‘reality’ that must clearly be ranged alongside the Repressive State Apparatus, but is not conflated with it. We shall take the theoretical risk of calling it the Ideological State Apparatuses. The precise point on which our theoretical intervention bears is thus these Ideological State Apparatuses in their distinction from the state apparatus in the sense of Repressive State Apparatus.
Be it recalled that the state apparatus comprises, in ‘Marxist theory’, the government, administration, army, police, courts and prisons, which together constitute what we shall henceforth call the Repressive State Apparatus. ‘Repressive’ should be understood, at the limit (for there exist many, very varied and even very subtly occulted forms8 of non-physical repression), in the strong, precise sense of ‘using physical violence’ (direct or indirect, legal or ‘illegal’).
What, then, are the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs)? The following provisional list will give us a rough idea of them:
1) the Scholastic Apparatus
2) the Familial Apparatus
3) the Religious Apparatus
4) the Political Apparatus
5) the Associative Apparatus
6) the Information and News Apparatus
7) the Publishing and Distribution Apparatus
8) the Cultural Apparatus
This list is provisional because, first, it is not exhaustive (see Chapter 12) and, second, because it may be that apparatuses 7 and 8 are just one apparatus. The reader will perhaps bear with this last hesitation, for I have not yet made up my mind on this point, which calls for further research.
This list (in which, for example, the family figures) and these terms will not fail to cause surprise. Let us be patient and proceed in orderly fashion in order to arrive at a provisional but clear definition.
First remark: one can observe, empirically, that there exist ‘institutions’ or ‘organizations’, as they are called, corresponding to each ISA. For the scholastic ISA: the various schools and their various levels, from the primary to the tertiary, the various institutes, and so on. For the religious ISA: the various churches and their specialized organizations (for example, youth organizations). For the political ISA: the parliament, the political parties, and so on. For the information and news ISA: the press (the various newspapers or newspaper groups), the RTF,9 and a large number of publications and organizations. For the familial ISA: all the institutions that have to do with the family, including the famous associations of parents of schoolchildren, and so on. For the cultural ISA: all kinds of entertainment, sport included, as well as a series of institutions that may dovetail with what we have called the publishing ISA.
Second remark: for each ISA, the various institutions and organizations comprising it form a system. That, at any rate, is the thesis we are putting forward. We shall see what constitutes the unity of the system in each case. If this is right, we cannot discuss any one component part of an ISA without relating it to the system of which it is a part. For example, we cannot discuss a political party, a component part of the political ISA, without relating it to the complex system of the [political]10 ISA. The same holds for a trade union, which is a component part of the system constituted by the associative ISA, and so on.
Third remark: it can be seen that the institutions existing in each ISA, the system they form, and, consequently, each ISA, although defined as ideological, is [sic] not reducible to the existence ‘of ideas’ without a concrete, material support. I mean by this not only that the ideology of each ISA is realized in material institutions and material practices; that is clear. I mean something else: that these material practices are ‘anchored’ in non-ideological realities. Take the family: it is an ISA, but the ideology that it realizes is ‘anchored’ in a reality that is not purely ideological. For the family is the site of the biological reproduction of representatives of the ‘human race’, of their rearing and training, and so on (let us say that it reproduces the existence of labour-power). But the family is clearly also something else. Even in our capitalist societies, in which it is now ‘disappearing’, it preserves, at least in certain now disintegrating sectors, the role of a production unit (for example, in the countryside: ‘family farms’). In the mode of production based on serfdom, the family was the dominant production unit. In our mode of production, this is a survival. On the other hand, the family still is a unit of consumption in our societies. It is not the only kind of unit of consumption there is, but, of those in existence, it is a kind that still plays an extremely important part and it is not about to disappear (it subsists in the socialist regimes with which we are familiar, albeit in transformed or waning forms). For example, the cultural ISA: the ideology that it realizes is anchored in practices either aesthetic (the theatre, film, literature) or physical (sport) that are not reducible to the ideology for which they serve as a support. The same holds for the political and associative ISAs: the ideology they realize is ‘anchored’ in a reality irreducible to that ideology – here, the class struggle. The same holds for the ISA we are calling the scholastic apparatus: the ideology it realizes is ‘anchored’ in practices that make it possible to acquire and use objective ‘know-how’ irreducible to that ideology. An ISA such as the religious apparatus, in contrast, does in fact seem to ‘exist’ up in the air, as a function of the pure and simple ideology that it realizes. But this is by no means certain. Later, we shall attempt to say why.
These three remarks will allow us to state a provisional definition. It foregrounds the ‘reality’ (namely, ideology) which unifies, in systems, the various institutions or organizations and the various practices present in each ISA. We shall say that:
An Ideological State Apparatus is a system of defined institutions, organizations, and the corresponding practices. Realized in the institutions, organizations, and practices of this system is all or part (generally speaking, a typical combination of certain elements) of the State Ideology. The ideology realized in an ISA ensures its systemic unity on the basis of an ‘anchoring’ in material functions specific to each ISA; these functions are not reducible to that ideology, but serve it as a ‘support’.
When the time comes, we will explain what we mean by the State Ideology, the existence of which accounts for the fact that the ISAs are ideological apparatuses and state apparatuses, and also for the unity that makes each ISA a specific system distinct from the other ISAs.
We can now come back to the concept that we are proposing – Ideological State Apparatus – in order to examine each of its three terms and justify the fact that we have associated them in our concept.
Readers will doubtless be surprised at seeing these ‘realities’ (diverse institutions or ‘activities’) designated as apparatuses, a concept that obviously brings the expression state ‘apparatus’ to mind; and they will be intrigued at seeing us attach the adjective ‘Ideological’ to the term ‘Apparatuses’, only to discover, finally, at the tail end of this expression, the state itself: Ideological State Apparatuses. It is as if we wanted to bring out that the ideological is, as it were, ‘stuck in the middle’ of the expression Appareil … d’Etat,11 with the small ‘difference’ that the term state apparatus tout court is in the singular, whereas our ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ are in the plural. All this obviously calls for explanation.
In presenting our explanation, we shall set out from this singular situation in which Idéologie is ‘stuck’ between Appareil … and Etat, precipitating the passage from the singular (state apparatus) to the plural (Ideological State Apparatuses).
We shall go straight to essentials. In our capitalist societies, what distinguishes the Ideological State Apparatuses from the Repressive State Apparatus is the following difference.
Whereas the Repressive State Apparatus is by definition a repressive apparatus that makes direct or indirect use of physical violence, the Ideological State Apparatuses cannot be called repressive in the same sense as the ‘state apparatus’, because they do not, by definition, use physical violence. Neither the Church nor the school nor political parties nor the press nor radio and television nor publishing nor entertainment nor sport have recourse to physical violence in order to function with their ‘clientèle’. At any rate, the use of physical violence is not manifest or dominant in them.
It is ‘of our own free will’ that we go to church or school (although school is ‘mandatory’),12 join a political party and obey it, buy a newspaper, switch on the TV, go to a cinema or a stadium, buy and ‘consume’ records, paintings or ‘posters’, and literary, historical, political, religious, or scientific works. This is to say that Ideological State Apparatuses are distinguished from the state apparatus in that they function, not ‘on violence’, but ‘on ideology’.
We have already uttered this sentence in discussing the way law ‘functions’ on ‘legal-moral ideology’. We know what that means: these apparatuses apparently function ‘all by themselves’, without recourse to violence. In fact, they function thanks to means other than violence, namely, on ideology or, rather, ideologization. With that, we have very clearly marked the distinction that sets the state apparatus apart from the Ideological State Apparatuses.
It remains to explain why we consider it imperative to use the apparently enigmatic term ‘state apparatuses’ to designate these ‘institutions’ and ‘activities’ (churches, schools, the political system, radio and TV, the theatre, the press, publications, and so on). Why State … Apparatus? And why this plural (State Apparatuses)?
Our affirmation becomes still more enigmatic when we take the trouble to note (and it is in our ‘interest’ to note this ourselves, for, if we do not, others will not fail to take issue with us) that if some of these ‘institutions’ are now state institutions (in our country, the school, certain theatres, radio and television), not all of them are. The Church, in our country, is officially separate from the state, as are some schools, and so on.
The press, political parties, trade unions and other associations, the vast majority of cultural institutions and activities (entertainment, sport, publications, the arts) are ‘free’, that is, part of the private ‘sector’, not the state sector. Better, in certain capitalist countries, a large proportion of the schools (for example, two-thirds of higher education in the USA), and even radio and television (in the USA and Great Britain), belong, or can belong, to the private sector. By what right, then, do we say that these ‘institutions’ or ‘activities’ fall into the category of Ideological State Apparatuses?
We have to clear away the following objection: By what right do we list private institutions such as those that belong to the religious apparatus, political apparatus, cultural apparatus, and so on, among Ideological State Apparatuses?
This objection is in fact based on a distinction drawn in bourgeois law, the distinction between public and private. This distinction concerns only the status, that is, the definition, of the legal persons who hold formal title to this or that institution. Such persons can be individual private legal persons (Mr Gallimard)13 or collective private legal persons (the Dominican Order); collective state legal persons (our state educational system), and so on.
The legal grounds for personhood are legal grounds: since law is universal and formal, we already know that it abstracts, by its nature, from the content of which it is the ‘form’. But since it is precisely that content that matters to us here, the objection based on the private / public distinction is trivial.
Our point is that the ‘legal’ objection that might be raised against us is not germane. Our subject is not ‘law’, but something quite different – at the limit of the class struggle and class relations – which the law is perfectly incapable of encompassing, even if it sanctions certain of its formal aspects, since that is its function.
To put this in a way Marxists will understand (even certain non-Marxists know this, since they sometimes find themselves saying it): Marxists are well aware that the state itself, despite all the articles of constitutional law defining it (it is exempt from the Civil Code and that is no accident!), is always the state of the dominant class. It is not that the state is the dominant class’s ‘property’ in the legal sense, inasmuch as class does not yet figure, as far as I know, among the legal personalities recognized by law, although they are numerous: it is quite simply because the state is its state, the bourgeoisie’s state, in the sense that the bourgeoisie holds state power and exercises it by way of the Repressive State Apparatus and Ideological State Apparatuses.
Let us take another example which, this time, will not admit the least objection. The papers that are legally owned by Mr Prouvost,14 like the peripheral radio and television channels that are owned by Mr Sylvain Floirat and others and come under15 the private sector (and are therefore part of the Civil Code), have a ‘right’ to exercise their imaginations a bit; this credits the notion that they are ‘free’ and independent. But everyone is aware that they know perfectly well how to toe the bourgeois state’s political line when they have to – that is to say, day in, day out, and with great fanfare on the ‘big days’ – and to disseminate, in variants suited to their respective audiences, the grand themes of the bourgeois state’s never-ending ideological litany: the grand themes of the State Ideology.
Thus the private / public distinction cannot call our thesis about the Ideological State Apparatuses into question. All the private institutions we have mentioned, whether owned by this or that individual or the state, function willy-nilly as component parts of determinate Ideological State Apparatuses, under the State Ideology, in the service of the state’s politics, the politics of the dominant class. They do so in the form specific to them: that of apparatuses that function primarily on ideology – not on repression, like the Repressive State Apparatus. That ideology is, as I have said, the State Ideology itself.
I mention, for good measure, one last argument, which completely invalidates the ‘legalistic’ objection that might be raised against our concept of Ideological State Apparatuses. The ‘legalistic’ argument applies, at best, to ‘institutions’. But as we have said, and repeat here, an institution is not an Ideological State Apparatus. What constitutes an Ideological State Apparatus is a complex system that encompasses and combines several institutions and organizations, as well as their practices. Whether they are all public or all private, or whether some are public and others private, is a secondary detail, because what interests us here is the system they form. This system, its existence, and its nature owe nothing to law; they are indebted to the altogether different reality that we have called the State Ideology.
Precisely because we are foregrounding ideology, we have to draw a distinction of great importance.
May we make a personal confession here? For years, we were baffled by a very brief hint of Stalin’s that practically came down to saying, ‘ideology and the institutions corresponding to it’. What in the world did that mean? Was it not an astonishing slip and, what is more, an idealist slip, to grant that institutions could, in a list, follow their ideology,16 that ideology could, in some sense, ‘produce’ institutions, when a right-thinking materialist should, putting the horse before the cart, have talked first about the institutions, and then (only afterwards: because determined in the sense of derived) about the ideology corresponding to them? For do we not in fact daily see the institutions we know (the Church, the schools, the political parties, and so on) ‘producing’, precisely, the ideology that ‘corresponds to them’ because they need it? Does a Sunday gardener not ‘produce’ on his little fenced-off plot of land the vegetables and flowers that his wife ‘needs’?
I am afraid that, on this point at least, I will have to show a little personal gratitude to Stalin for his hint, which I cite from memory.17 For, in order to grasp the new concept that we are proposing (Ideological State Apparatuses), it is necessary to grant the paradoxical fact that institutions do not ‘produce’ the ideologies corresponding to them. Rather, certain elements of an ideology (the State Ideology) ‘are realized in’ or ‘exist in’ the corresponding institutions and their practices.
Let there be no mistake. We do not deny that the institutions in question ‘produce’, internally and in their practices, certain forms of ideology that would be inexplicable without references to those practices. Thus we shall say that religious practice ‘produces’, inside the Church, certain forms of ideology: ecclesiastical ideology, for example. But there are other ideologies in the Church, to stick with that example: these days, it is teeming with them. Consider Isolotto,18 the ‘letter’ by the 360 French priests,19 Father Cardonnel’s Lenten sermon,20 Frères du Monde21 – and, lest we forget, Esprit,22 which long ago had its ‘avant-garde’ moment. Consider all the extraordinary developments in the religious ideology of certain groups among the lower clergy and even a few members of the high clergy in some Latin American countries, to say nothing of Father Torres,23 who died fighting with the guerrillas.
Thus we shall say that scholastic practice produces particular forms that may be termed scholastic ideology (the ideology of elementary school teachers, realized in the publications and initiatives of the SNI,24 or of teachers in secondary schools and higher education, and so on), and many other forms that we cannot, for material reasons, discuss here. We shall do so elsewhere.25
For example, political parties, too, produce forms of internal ideology. There is no need to draw the reader a picture: since we have already mentioned Stalin, let us simply note that the ideology of a certain practice of the USSR’s political leadership became manifest, at a certain point in the country’s history, in what is called the ‘personality cult’, a purely, ‘discreetly’, descriptive term (as if a ‘personality’ could by itself ‘produce’ the ideology of its ‘cult’, and so on). We could go on indefinitely, discussing entertainment, sport, news, publishing, and so on; that would be fascinating. The examples already adduced, however, are enough to make our thesis clear. We must now state it, not negatively, but positively.
We shall therefore say that a distinction must be made here. We must distinguish between, on the one hand, the determinate elements of the State Ideology that are realized in, and exist in, a determinate apparatus and its practices, and, on the other, the ideology that is ‘produced’ in this apparatus by its practices. To mark this distinction terminologically, we shall call the former ideology the ‘Primary Ideology’, and the latter – a by-product of the practice in which the Primary Ideology is realized – the ‘secondary, subordinate ideology’.
Let us note another important point. We shall say that this secondary ideology is ‘produced’ by the practice of the apparatus that realizes the Primary Ideology. But that is just a convenient way of putting it: for no practice in the world produces ‘its’ ideology all by itself. There is no ‘spontaneous’ ideology, although it can be useful, in other words, terminologically convenient when making a specific point, to use the expression ‘spontaneous’ ideology. In the case to hand, these secondary ideologies are produced by a conjunction of complex causes. Among them are, alongside the practice in question, the effect of other, external ideologies, other external practices and, in the final instance, the effects – however veiled – of the class struggle, even its remote effects, which are in fact very close. No one will presume to deny it if he pays a little attention to what has been going on for a while now in the ideology of certain religious circles, in and around ‘schools’ (from May on), and in families (since May).
Thus, if we want to understand what ‘institutions’ (the Church, the schools, and so on) are, and, on top of that, what the secondary ideological sub-formations ‘secreted’ by the practices of these institutions are, we have to set out from the ideological formations deriving from the State Ideology and realized in those institutions and their practices. For it is these ideological formations which provide us with the key to both the institutions in question and their practices, and also some of the causes that produce the ideological sub-formations that we see emerging in those practices.
Doubtless none of this is very easy to envisage in the immediate notions offered us by the ‘self-evident truths’ in which we live, since we live in ideology,26 even if we also have a few scientific concepts in our heads. But we have to think it.
The initial form of the ‘thought’ that occurs to us will of course be couched in terms of the famous common-sense schemes that Hegel already dismissed as drivel: the interaction schemes. Someone will say, straining to make a big ‘concession’ in the first part of his statement: True, the primary ideological formations (religious ideological formations, and so on) are realized in institutions. But he will add: ‘since there is action and reaction everywhere in the world’, institutions produce the secondary ideology that we observe in them by reacting back on the primary formations. It is with fustian of this sort that we make our peace with the ‘dialectic’! The reader will not be surprised to learn that, inasmuch as action and reaction are ‘the night in which all cows are grey’, because they effectively mean that ‘everything is in everything and the other way around’, we shall be sending our grey cows back into their night.
We think, on the contrary, that it is necessary to keep a firm grip on the first part of the statement, ‘primary ideological formations are realized in institutions’, while temporarily leaving aside an element (that is, while abstracting from an element, as Marx does in order to carry out his scientific analyses in Capital) that can only confuse everything, since it is secondary, subordinate, and derivative – namely, the internal ideological formations that we have identified as by-products.
We shall say that a church is, qua ‘institution’, a realization of religious ideology. We shall say that a school (or educational system) is a realization of ideology. (What kind of ideology? Let us leave the question in abeyance.) We shall say that a political party is a realization of a political ideology, and so on. The same goes for all the institutions we have listed. But beware: a church, a school, a party do not each constitute one Ideological State Apparatus; rather, each forms a component part of different systems, which we term Ideological State Apparatuses: the religious system, scholastic system, political system, and so on.
We shall add, at the risk of repeating ourselves: the ideological formations that we can correlate with the practices at work in these institutions are not the product of the primary ideologies realized in these institutions, but by-products of that ideology [sic], insofar as they are the ‘products’ of practices at work in those institutions. It is perfectly plain that there also exist direct relations between the primary ideological formations, which are external to the institutions, and the secondary ideological sub-formations internal to them. However, these relations cannot be conceived in terms of action and reaction – for the good reason that these relations do not always exist, and, when they do, are realized in accordance with laws altogether different from the so-called dialectical laws of interaction. To put it very precisely, they are realized as a result of the intervention of another reality that we have not yet been able to discuss (because it is unfortunately impossible to say everything at once). We can, anticipating, call this reality by its name: the class struggle and its ideological effects.
Provisionally, then, we shall content ourselves with our thesis, because we want to proceed in proper order: the Ideological State Apparatuses are the realization, the existence, of the ideological formations dominating them.
Since I just introduced the clarification ‘functioning primarily on’, a word of explanation is in order. It will account for the use of the common term ‘apparatus’ in two different expressions: Repressive State Apparatus, Ideological State Apparatus.
I think I can claim that all state apparatuses, repressive and ideological alike, function simultaneously on repression and on ideology, but with one very important distinction that precludes confusing the repressive apparatus with the Ideological State Apparatuses. The Repressive State Apparatus, for its part, functions in overwhelmingly preponderant fashion on repression (at the limit, direct physical repression), while functioning secondarily on ideology.
The army and police, for instance: internally, they train their own recruits both by repression and ideological inculcation; externally, they act by violent repression, but also by ‘discussion’ and ‘persuasion’. The latter watchwords appear black on white in the circulars issued by police chiefs and army generals possessed of a modicum of good sense. In May 1968, Mr Grimaud, the Paris police chief, ‘conducted discussions’ in person with the ‘wild ones’ during the battles in the Place Maubert. The army and police also operate with the help of their own ‘ideological aura’ (‘Join the Army and learn a trade!’) and the prestige of their uniforms (‘Join the riot police and you’ll stand guard over the beaches!’), and so on.
Similarly, we may say, but the other way around, that the Ideological State Apparatuses, for their part, function in overwhelmingly preponderant fashion on ideology, while functioning secondarily on repression, even if it is, at the limit – but only at the limit – quite attenuated and more or less symbolic.
Let us give a few examples of this secondary repressive functioning of apparatuses that function in overwhelmingly preponderant fashion on ideology. The school and the Church, to take only those two examples, ‘train’ not just their officiants (teachers and priests), but also their wards (schoolchildren, the faithful, and so on) with the appropriate methods of punishment (once exclusively and often still physical, and also, of course, ‘moral’): expulsion, selection, and so on. News and information, publishing, and entertainment carry out, with or (much more subtly) without the backing of the law, daily censorship, which is unremitting and extremely vigilant, since this censorship lodges itself in advance in the heads of authors who take the precaution of censoring themselves, in the name, of course, of their ‘professional conscience’ and ‘decency’, or ‘the proper behaviour’ that one owes the fatherland, the dead, and families – leaving aside Virtue, which has lost a bit of its lustre these days, since ‘intellectual freedom’ has to be lodged somewhere – for instance, in (two-bit) eroticism.
I do not think I need to multiply illustrations for the reader to understand, from the ones just adduced, that very subtle combinations of repression and ideologization, explicit or tacit, are forged in and among all the state apparatuses, whether they are primarily repressive or primarily ideological, and that these very subtle combinations would allow us, if we succeeded in analyzing their mechanisms, to account for the mainifest pacts and unambiguous (or even ambiguous) objective forms of complicity that are forged among the various state apparatuses, not only on Major Occasions, when the bourgeois state is threatened by open working-class struggle, but every single day of our humdrum lives.
A little police or a lot; a little army on the move here; a little UNR or CDR27 there; a little Paul VI or Archbishop Marty in their sector: a little France-Soir in its; a little or a lot of De Gaulle, Couve, Faure, ‘Cardinal’ Daniélou on the radio;28 a little Grand Rabbi on Israel; a little Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber on the American challenge; a little Louis Armand on Teilhard de Chardin;29 a little Siné for the Club Med on the back of the bus; Publicis posters of naked young mothers or tomato juice on all the walls; inspired articles or works by our great ideologues, living or dead, in Le Figaro and the bookshops;30 the obligatory Sermons on Literature, Humanism, and Our Lord in the universities and the churches alike … In the domain of ideologization, all this constitutes the multiform arsenal of a power whose centre is and remains the state, that is to say, the (bourgeois) holders of state power, who exercise their class power through the various specialized apparatuses with which the state is endowed.
Let us take the example of contemporary France.
The state, under the class leadership of the representatives of French imperialism (‘France is great, France is beautiful, France is generous!’31), who hold state power in France and are in command of its apparatuses, executes their class politics by means of those apparatuses, repressive and ideological. The apparatuses ‘conscientiously’ do their daily duty. They constantly lend one another a hand, in an overtly and tacitly ‘concerted’ operation, and in the forms required by the ticklishness or brutality of the situation.
That this does not take place without ‘contradictions’, and that, in particular, the ideological sub-formations ‘produced’ in the apparatuses by their own practice should sometimes ‘make the gears grate and grind’ is inevitable.32 It would even appear that the police ‘hesitated’ at a certain point in May and that people in high places did not have much confidence in how the troops would have acted had it become necessary to call on their services. Everyone knows that, because ‘protest’ is infectious, some priests and even some teachers are balking, now that their pupils, those little devils, who (my God, but why?) no longer have any respect for ‘authority’ and are no longer inclined to take the moon for green cheese – to the utter dismay of the Most Respectable Associations of Parents of Schoolchildren,33 a component part of a redoubtable Ideological State Apparatus.
But, somehow or other, when an Ideological State Apparatus such as the school or family is ailing, the others, thank the Lord, manage to hold out for a while, and, with De Gaulle’s help, and if the dominant ideology is still functioning properly among broad sectors of the ‘population’, the bourgeois state manages to hold up, and its various apparatuses do, too. For how long? That is another story: until state power and the state apparatus themselves are taken by storm in what is known as a revolution.
But, precisely, since we have just invoked revolution, we can spell out what we meant by ‘grating’ in the ISAs. We may say that the ‘stuff’ of which the ISAs are made is such, and that they ‘function’ in such a way, that we must consider them to be relatively fragile apparatuses, given the shocks of the class struggle which affect them through the ideological sub-formations anchored in certain aspects of their practices. In this they differ from the repressive apparatus, made of completely different ‘stuff’ that is much harder to put a dent in.
Rather, we should say that the ISAs are apparently fragile apparatuses. For we have to say, at the same time, that they are extraordinarily strong and tough.
It is enough to read the texts that Lenin wrote in the last years of his life in order to see how profoundly he was haunted by this problem after the victory of the revolution. The repressive apparatus of the feudal-capitalist state (army, police) had basically been destroyed. This did not hold for the administration. Yet that was not Lenin’s essential concern. His essential, anguished concern was, above all, with the proletarian state’s Ideological State Apparatuses: its political apparatus (the party, the Soviets: the number one problem being their connections to the masses, their capacity to control the state administrative apparatus and root out its ‘bureaucratic’ tendency); its trade union apparatus (here, too, the number-one problem was, what should a trade union be? A non-coercive apparatus, a ‘school of communism’ that could reliably ensure, via a series of ‘transmission belts’, the right connection to the masses); finally, its scholastic apparatus, which was, for Lenin, the problem of problems, for he knew that the scholastic ISA is determinant, since it has the future in its power: the younger generations.
What conclusion should we draw from this tragic concern of Lenin’s after the seizure of state power and the destruction of the better part of the bourgeois Repressive State Apparatus? The conclusion that follows.
It is not enough to destroy the repressive apparatus; it is also necessary to destroy and replace the Ideological State Apparatuses. New ones have to be put in place, urgently; otherwise – Lenin was right – the very future of the revolution will be jeopardized. For it is extremely hard to replace the old ISAs (in this case, the Russian bourgeois ISAs), and it takes a long time. A long time is needed, for example, truly to establish a whole new proletarian political, trade union, and school system. One must first know exactly what to put in place, what new systems to invent,34 and how to put them in place. The right line must be found for each of these systems, down to the details. Finally, competent personnel loyal to the revolution have to be trained to apply the new, revolutionary politics in each new ISA: in short, to imbue the practice and consciousness of all Soviet citizens with the new State Ideology, proletarian ideology.
If one does not succeed in this and, a fortiori, if one does not make a serious, thoroughgoing attempt, with no concessions, to come to grips with this crucial problem, what happens?
The old (bourgeois) ISAs remain in place, wholly or partially, or they are hardly undermined. If the old personnel remains in place, whatever one does and whatever one claims, the old-model ISAs, either intact or half reformed, pursue their old ‘work’ in new institutional forms. The proletarian ideology of the proletarian state is not realized; that is, the masses are not imbued with proletarian ideology and the gigantic ‘school of communism’ that the new ISAs should represent does not go into operation. Instead, what remains of the old ISAs in fact continues to imbue the masses with the old bourgeois or petty-bourgeois ideology, even alongside new elements that clash with that ideology, elements that it is their mission to inculeate.
In this matter, Lenin, who abhorred ‘decrees’, was perfectly well aware that things could not be settled by ‘decree’ or from on high. He also knew that there existed no prefabricated, ready-made, a priori plan or line for establishing these new ISAs. He knew that it was a task that had to be worked on every minute; better, that it was a long experimentation involving huge risks, to which all available resources of intelligence, imagination and political dedication had to be committed, a long struggle that would brook no weakness or failure, a struggle that could not be waged simply by dint of coercive administrative measures, but that called for detailed knowledge, for education and persuasion, as well as explanation, constant explanation: a struggle that could not be carried out by a handful of militants, however lucid and courageous, but that depended on appeals to the masses, to their judgement and their reactions, their initiatives and inventions.
If this struggle is not won (it can certainly not be won in the space of a few months or even a few years), and, a fortiori, if it is not truly, seriously begun, on the right political mass basis, the future of the ‘construction of socialism’ may encounter forbidding obstacles and may even be compromised.
If, instead of functioning ever more clearly on proletarian State Ideology, the new proletarian Ideological State Apparatuses continue to function, by some mischance, on the old bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology or a questionable ‘mix’ of the old and new ideologies – if the old ideology is not rooted out – who can prove to us that the old ideology will not, even under the official facade of socialist state institutions (formally and officially socialist), survive, reproduce itself, and spawn a terribly dangerous effect – insinuating itself for good and all into one or another weak spot in the relations of production or the political relations of the socialist state?
What becomes of the Soviets in that event? What becomes of the trade unions? What becomes of the proletarian school system?
When Lenin made such frequent reference, couched in the terms of a dramatic, solemn warning, to the danger of capitalist ‘survivals’ in a socialist regime, to the terrible onus of ‘tradition’ and, in particular, of petty-bourgeois ideology, he plainly had in mind the reproduction of capitalist relations of production owing to the survival and re-emergance of ‘petty production’.
But he was surely also thinking of these questions, which haunted him, and which he hoped would find a temporary solution in the proper ‘functioning’ of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate: the questions of ideology, whose fate in the new proletarian state’s new Ideological State Apparatuses was still far from settled.
Lenin died before he could see to settling these decisive questions. He handed them down to his successor, Stalin. Did Stalin settle them? Where are the Soviets, the trade unions, and the proletarian school system today, after Stalin, in the USSR?
If Stalin neglected these questions, as a number of effects give us reason to believe he did (precisely the effects of the ‘personality cult’), have they been seriously and thoroughly re-examined since? To spell out our preoccupation: is it not, to a great extent, the fact that these questions were not settled or were only ‘half-settled’ which explains the ‘principles’ now commanding Soviet politics, its difficulties, the problems it is having with the ‘reform of planning’, and even some of its otherwise incomprehensible impasses and ‘initiatives’, such as the military intervention in Czechoslovakia?
To close this long analysis, let us try to summarize our results.
We can now put the essential elements of the state in place.
The number-one question when it comes to the state is the question of the possession of state power. The whole political class struggle revolves around this question.
In a class social formation, possession of state power is always possession of state power by a social class or an alliance of social classes, the exploiting class or classes – the proletarian class in the transitional phase of the dictatorship of the proletariat that should lead to socialism, a social formation dominated by a mode of production without classes.
With possession of state power comes power over the state apparatuses, which constitute the very ‘nature’ of the state.
The state apparatus comprises two types of apparatuses:
1) The Repressive State Apparatus (the government, administration, army, police, and specialized repressive corps: gendarmerie, courts, judiciary, prisons, and so on). This apparatus is a single, centralized corps.
2) The Ideological State Apparatuses (in our social formations, scholastic, religious, familial, political, associative, cultural, the news and information apparatus, and so on). These apparatuses are multiple, relatively independent, and unified as a distinct system by all or part of the State Ideology.
The Repressive State Apparatus ‘functions’ primarily on repression (physical or not). The Ideological State Apparatuses function primarily on ideology. The overall unity of the system formed by all the state apparatuses is ensured by the unity of the class politics of the class holding state power and by the State Ideology corresponding to the fundamental interests of the class (or classes) in power. The object of the politics of the class in power and of the State Ideology (dominant ideology = ideology of the dominant class) is to guarantee the conditions for the exploitation of the exploited classes by the dominant classes, above all the reproduction of the relations of production in which this exploitation takes place, since these relations of production are the relations of exploitation of the class social formation under consideration.
Thus everything is clearly based on the infrastructure of the relations of production, that is, the relations of class exploitation. The base or infrastructure of the class state is thus well and truly, as Lenin said, exploitation. The effect produced by the superstructure is simultaneously to ensure the conditions under which this exploitation is carried out (Repressive State Apparatus) and the reproduction of the relations of production, that is, of exploitation (Ideological State Apparatuses).
There can be no question of examining the functioning of the individual Ideological State Apparatuses in an essay whose sole aim is to establish that they exist and to indicate their function. Indeed, each Ideological State Apparatus, if its mechanisms are to be fully clarified, merits detailed, thoroughgoing analysis. We shall soon provide a first example with an analysis of the capitalist scholastic apparatus.
What matters to us here is, first of all, to understand how ideology brings off the feat of making things and people ‘go all by themselves’. However, before we can get to that point, that is, before we can sketch a theory of the functioning of Ideology in general, it is imperative, to avoid all misunderstanding, that we make a few remarks about what we call, using a term that may surprise readers, especially Marxist readers, the political and associative Ideological State Apparatuses.
1 [TN: A Paris underground station in which nine demonstrators against the French colonial war in Algeria were killed by the police in 1962.]
2 [TN: Armand Gatti, La passion du général Franco, banned from the stage by the French government in 1968; Jacques Rivette, Suzanne Simonin – la Religieuse de Denis Diderot, banned by the French government in 1966. The film was shown and the play was performed in France despite the bans.]
3 See below, ‘On Ideology’ [Chapter 12].
4 Nikos Poulantzas, Pouvoir politique et classes sociales [Paris, Maspero, 1968; Political Power and Social Classes, trans. Timothy O’Hagen, London, Verso, 1975], Chapter 11.
5 See Poulantzas, who provides a very good commentary on Marx and Lenin.
6 See Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes.
7 [TN: Expériences, which also means ‘experiments’.]
8 [TN: Crossed out, ‘Example: the administration’.]
9 [TN: Radiodiffusion-Télévision française, French state television and radio.]
10 [TN: The word is missing in the manuscript.]
11 [TN: In the French term corresponding to ‘Ideological State Apparatus’, Appareil Idéologique d’Etat, ‘apparatus’ comes first and ‘state’ comes last, the object of a prepositional phrase which literally means ‘of the state’.]
12 Let us therefore say that we (apparently) ‘pursue our educations’ beyond the ‘mandatory’ period ‘of our own free will’.
13 [TN: Gaston Gallimard (1881–1975), owner of a major French publishing firm.]
14 [TN: Jean Prouvost (1885–1978), a media magnate who at one point or another owned most or all of the right-wing newspapers Paris-Soir, Paris-Match, and Figaro, the TV guide Télé 7 Jours, and Radio-Télé Luxembourg.]
15 [TN: In the mid-1950s, Sylvain Floirat (1899–1993) bought the radio station Europe 1, which had acquired a mass audience by the early 1960s, when the French state became the indirect owner of about a third of it. In 1969, some of its reporters were fired for excessively sympathetic coverage of the May events. Privately owned ‘peripheral television’ broadcast to France from countries nearby, such as Monaco and Luxemburg.]
16 One may find this list, in which we found our ‘hint’, in Joseph Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938) [New York, International Publishers, 1970].
17 [EN: Crossed out: ‘Because, without it, the author of these lines might never have arrived at the theses he is here expounding.’]
18 [TN: A Christian community established in the mid-1950s by worker-priests in the proletarian Florence suburb of Isolotto and maintained in the 1960s over the politically motivated protests of the Church hierarchy.]
19 [TN: A 1967 open letter urging clergymen in the United States to pressure their government into negotiating an end to the Vietnam War.]
20 [TN: Jean Cardonnel (1921–2009), a Dominican who in 1968 delivered a sermon titled ‘The New Testament and Revolution’ in the Mutualité, a big Paris conference centre, prompting the Church hierarchy to try to prevent him from speaking in public.]
21 [TN: A radical journal published by Franciscans in Lyon from 1959 to 1974.]
22 [TN: On 5 May 1967, Althusser gave a talk on Marxism and the workers’ movement to a group associated with this left-leaning Catholic journal in which he had published extracts from his first book in 1959 and, in 1962, the essay on Bertolazzi and Brecht later collected in For Marx.]
23 [TN: Camilo Torres Restrepo (1929–1966), a priest and Marxist sociologist who joined the Colombian National Liberation Army (ELN) in 1966.]
24 [TN: The Syndicat National des Instituteurs, then the main schoolteachers’ union.]
25 See Schools, Maspero, forthcoming in autumn 1969. [EN: See Chapter 2, n. 26.]
26 If I may be allowed to add a supplementary ‘definition’ of ideology to the list of famous definitions, I would say, by paraphrase: ‘Man is by nature an ideological animal.’
27 [TN: Union pour la Nouvelle République, the Gaullist ruling party, in existence from 1958 to 1976; Comités de Défense de la République, created by an alliance of Gaullists and the far right in May 1968 to show support for De Gaulle, notably in a big demonstration staged in Paris on 30 May.]
28 [TN: France-Soir was a conservative, middle-brow daily. Maurice Couve de Murville became Prime Minister after the June 1968 elections; Edgar Faure was his Minister of Education. The French Jesuit Jean Daniélou, a moving spirit behind Vatican II, became a Cardinal on 28 April 1969, as did the Archbishop of Paris since March 1968, François Marty.]
29 [TN: Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, a journalist and politician, published The American Challenge in 1968 and, in October 1969, became General Secretary of the left-liberal Radical Party. The Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) was a palaeontologist whose spiritual philosophy found favour with certain Marxist humanists in the PCF. Louis Armand wrote a Preface for André Monestier’s Teilhard ou Marx? (Paris, Lettres Modernes, 1965).]
30 [TN: Siné (Maurice Sinet), a French political cartoonist who also designed advertisements for the Club Med, co-founded the satirical review L’Enragé in May 1968 and published work in Action (see Chapter 12, p. 178) in the same period. Publicis is a big advertising agency. Le Figaro, founded in 1826, is France’s main highbrow conservative daily.]
31 [TN: The phrase is De Gaulle’s.]
32 And for good reason, if we recall the effects of the class struggle that operate in them to ‘produce’ these ideological sub-formations.
33 For a laugh, although it is in fact no laughing matter, let us note that while every schoolchild (orphans excepted) has a father and mother, not every father and mother considers themselves (thank God!) the parent of a schoolchild. To come forward as the parent of a schoolchild is a political act, by virtue of which one joins this or that association, with a certain political tendency, obviously. It is doubtless no coincidence that the aforementioned Associations of Parents of Schoolchildren – which are of different shades (for one association can, under cover of ‘secularism’, be more ‘open’ [TN: Crossed out, ‘less reactionary’] than another) – are, as one says, ‘very concerned’ about the ‘disorder’ reigning in the schools. Other associations (the CDR and the Gaullist organization of the modern university) cultivate a still saltier discourse: their word is ‘gangrene’. High school and college students will not fail to note the delicacy of the language some of their parents (parents of schoolchildren, precisely) use in talking about their own progeny. Things have come to such a pass that one wonders what has become of the family virtues: I mean, of course, the virtues of the aforementioned parents of schoolchildren. When will an Association of Children of Parents of Schoolchildren be founded to denounce the ‘gangrene’ that threatens, on the parents’ side of the line, the traditional paternalistic virtues of (among others) familial understanding, generosity and tolerance? I am not joking; what is going on in families these days should be far greater cause for ‘concern’ for our worthy vice-principals [TN: responsible for school discipline] than what is going on in the schools. The reader would do well to recall this when we speak, as we shall in a moment, of a certain school-family dyad. It is also no wonder that, in comparison with the big brouhaha about ‘disorder’ in the schools, the discussion of what is going on in families is much more discreet, ‘Honneur’ oblige. Family business is settled in the privacy of the family. It is, in fact, as if some parents of schoolchildren were demanding that the state settle the problems that they are having in their own families with their own children by … restoring ‘order’ in the schools! These are things that really should be kept hush-hush; for, if they were not, would we not have to admit that, in a certain regard, the family does indeed have something to do with an Ideological State Apparatus and that the class struggle even produces some of its effects in families? We think so. Interestingly, the ‘facts’ themselves are coming forward to lend support to our thesis.
34 For, with the exception of the Paris Commune, there were no precedents and there was no theory.