We here take up a question which is as important as it is hard to present properly, that is to say, without giving rise to the least misunderstanding.
That is why we wish to repeat here, in the same terms, a solemn statement that we included in our ‘Preliminary Remark to My Readers’. It is a question, in the political and associative Ideological State Apparatuses, of the class struggle. But beware: it is not a question of the whole class struggle, nor even of the terrain in which the class struggle has its roots. It is a question of a domain in which the class struggle assumes legal forms, the conquest of which was itself the result of a history of class struggle that was necessarily external to those legal forms. Once they are conquered, the class struggle is pursued in them within the more or less narrow limits that they impose and, in any case, within rigorously defined limits. At the same time, the class struggle unfolds, massively, outside these forms.
That the system of political and trade union forms which the dominant class has either taken control of in its class struggle, or has been forced reluctantly to concede as an effect of the conquests of the proletarian and popular class struggle, or, again, has incorporated into the dominant class’s state apparatus as Ideological State Apparatuses, so that it is, above all, the State Ideology that is realized in these apparatuses – all this can be effortlessly understood. But it can just as easily be understood that the class struggle that has imposed these apparatuses, around which and in which part of the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is unfolding today, profoundly marks certain of their component parts, conferring, in particular, an exceptional position, within these apparatuses’ legal forms themselves, on certain institutions of proletarian class struggle. Examples are provided by the proletariat’s organization of political class struggle and its organization of trade union class struggle.2
An exceptional position is an antagonistic position. For the bourgeoisie did not, after the tumultuous events that we shall discuss in a moment, recognize the existence of reformist and then revolutionary workers’ parties with joy and gladness. The same holds a fortiori for its recognition of the existence of trade union organizations of the economic class struggle. The bourgeoisie knows that what is at stake, behind these organizations’ legal forms of existence, goes infinitely beyond those legal forms themselves. It is given proof of this whenever a crisis that is at all serious brings into the broad light of day the reality that the legal existence of these organizations expresses but also obscures: the fact that the class struggle is not confined, and for good reason, to this or that communist party’s oppositional activity in parliament, or this or that trade-union confederation’s ‘negotiations’ with the bosses or the government; the fact that an extremely violent class struggle is waged without let-up in every domain of the practice of production and also well beyond production, although it is silent and, observed from the outside, invisible, since it does not find sanction in existing legality. This exceptional position both reflects and betrays a position that is – in principle – antagonistic (except when the organizations in question lapse into class collaboration). We are thus confronted with the following paradox.
Within an Ideological State Apparatus such as the apparatus of the political system, there can exist a proletarian party (as is already the case in a number of countries) whose ideology is, albeit radically antagonistic to the State Ideology, realized in the forms and practices of the Ideological State Apparatus in which that proletarian party figures. The fact remains that this antagonism unfolds in the very forms imposed by the State Ideology (for example, bourgeois democracy, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in the forms of a parliamentary or presidential democratic apparatus). This singularly complicates the proletarian party’s task. However, as Lenin has shown, this complicated task is not therefore impossible, on the absolute condition that certain imperative conditions are met. The first of them is that the proletarian party should not sink into ‘parliamentary cretinism’ or ‘bourgeois-democratic cretinism’ and, a fortiori, that it should not allow its ideology of proletarian class struggle to be sapped by the State Ideology, the ideology of the dominant class. It must, rather, know how to make use of the political Ideological State Apparatus, including some of its forms and certain elements of its ideology (for example, certain democratic slogans), in order to foster, by way of elections and also from the high tribune of the bourgeois parliament, the development of the class struggle, which basically unfolds outside these legal, bourgeois-democratic forms. The same holds a fortiori for workers’ trade-union activity.
If things are very clear in this regard, we can set out on our analysis of the political and associative Ideological State Apparatuses.
To provide, straight away, a classic point of reference for my thesis, I shall refer to a well-known text of Lenin’s, drawn from a speech he delivered on 30 December 1920: ‘The Trade Unions, the Present Situation and Trotsky’s Mistakes’, which one would do well to read in its entirety, and also supplement with a second text, a speech delivered shortly after the first (on 25 January 1921): ‘Once Again on the Trade Unions’. Lenin is here talking about trade unions under the dictatorship of the proletariat, and thus about their existence in the framework of the proletarian state, which is a state in the strong sense, under the control of the Bolsheviks and their allies and endowed with the repressive and ideological apparatuses characteristic of any state. Lenin declares:
[T]he trade unions have an extremely important part to play at every step of the dictatorship of the proletariat. But what is their part? I find that it is a most unusual one, as soon as I delve into this question, which is one of the most fundamental theoretically. On the one hand, the trade unions, which take in all industrial workers, are an organisation of the ruling, dominant, governing class, which has now set up a dictatorship and is exercising coercion through the state. But it is not a state organisation; nor is it one designed for coercion, but for education. It is an organisation designed to draw in and to train; it is, in fact, a school: a school of administration, a school of economic management, a school of communism. It is a very unusual type of school, because there are no teachers or pupils; this is an extremely unusual combination of what has necessarily come down to us from capitalism, and what comes from the ranks of the advanced revolutionary detachments, which you might call the revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat.3
A few pages later, Lenin adds these remarkable statements:
Comrade Trotsky falls into error himself. He seems to say that in a workers’ state it is not the business of the trade unions to stand up for the material and spiritual interests of the working class … We now have a state under which it is the business of the massively organised proletariat to protect itself, while we, for our part, must use these workers’ organisations to protect the workers from their state, and to get them to protect our state.4
Let us single out Lenin’s central statement here. He says, in so many words, that ‘the trade unions … are an organisation of the ruling, dominant, governing class, which has now set up a dictatorship and is exercising coercion through the state’. But, he goes on, the Soviet trade union ‘is not a state organisation; nor is it one designed for coercion … it is, in fact, a school’.
When we look between the lines of a text about the trade unions of the proletarian state for an answer to the question about the status trade-union organizations (we shall see which ones) can have under the bourgeois state, it appears that Lenin’s formulation almost exactly coincides with our own, inasmuch as it distinguishes the state’s coercive action from Soviet trade unions’ non-coercive action. For Lenin, proletarian unions have an ideological/educational mission: they are to act as a ‘school of communism’. Keeping things in proportion, that is, paying due attention to the obvious differences between proletarian and bourgeois Ideological State Apparatuses, and with the aforementioned reservations, we may regard the trade union and associative system as an Ideological State Apparatus, and discuss the political system in terms of the same concept.
We shall begin with the political Ideological State Apparatus, for reasons that will appear.
The communist parties and the political Ideological State Apparatus: democracy for the people and socialist revolution
Of course, this does not at all mean that a political party such as the Communist Party, because of its topographical inscription in the system of the political Ideological State Apparatus, is necessarily reduced to the role of fulfilling the bourgeois state’s wishes, or to the role of His Majesty’s opposition.5
The latter role is played to perfection, with all the requisite tact, by the ‘loyal managers of the capitalist system’ known as the social-democratic parties. They did not need to hear Léon Blum’s marvellous phrase to understand that they had a ‘vocation’ on – of course – ‘the human scale’.6 This famous ‘human scale’ does indeed offer a sizeable advantage: it allows those who scale its rungs, that is, progressively attain the bourgeois honours (or even the honours of the nobility: Mr Attlee was well and truly elevated to the ‘dignified rank’ of Lord by Her Most Gracious English Majesty!), quite simply to ‘rise above’ the ‘small-minded’ ‘class struggle’ standpoint in order to practice, in all serenity, proper class collaboration (consider Mr Wilson today).
Lenin struggled hard enough, using vehement language ruthless enough, against the people who, even in the communists’ ranks, might be tempted by these mirages – that is, the impossible miracles of purely parliamentary-democratic activity (‘parliamentary cretinism’) – to dispel all conceivable ambiguity. Since, today, everyone is thinking about the ‘transition’ to socialism, it must be recalled that there is no parliamentary road to socialism. Revolutions are made by the masses, not by parliamentary deputies, even if the communists and their allies should fleetingly, by some miracle, attain a majority in the parliament.
For the bourgeois state will never consent to be seized and destroyed (for it is a question of seizing the state, not of ‘bringing down the government’ or simply ‘changing’ the ‘regime’) by 450 parliamentary deputies armed with nothing but their bare hands, even if they come marching out of the Palais Bourbon sporting their tricoloured sashes. It will never consent, that is, to be seized and destroyed by a simple parliamentary majority, except in some unprecedented situation conceivable, perhaps, once socialism has triumphed over five-sixths of the globe. In the present state of things, it is literally unimaginable, in the short or even the middle term.
For the bourgeois state is something altogether different from the mere government. The state disposes of many ideological apparatuses besides its political ideological apparatus (in which the government has its place), which is, after all, just one apparatus among a multitude of others (the Church, the schools, news and information, and so on). Furthermore, it has the day-to-day repressive apparatus at its beck and call: the police, specialized repressive units (riot police, mobile security forces, and so on), as well as its repressive apparatus ‘of last resort’, the army, an organization of hundreds of thousands of people marshalled in the infantry, armoured divisions, air force, and navy – to say nothing of the armies of the ‘fraternal’ imperialist states, which can cross borders (land or other borders) to help out at the right moment.
Even ignoring these extreme cases, the simple experience of the Popular Front or the post-1945 Three-Party government7 proves that a simple government of popular democracy8 is at the mercy of simple financial procedures (for example, the capital flight that sounded the knell of the Popular Front) or political procedures (the socialist Ramadier’s 1947 dismissal of the communist ministers), unless the popular masses intervene directly and forcefully on the political stage to stymie or foil the manoeuvres of the capitalist class struggle and force the parliament to take radical measures which, in that case, change the course of history, lending existing democracy, class character and setting it on an irreversible course in the form of actions that ultimately culminate in the socialist revolution properly so called.
Lenin said that one had to know how to anticipate, accept and practice transitional periods in order to reach the Revolution. He himself ‘practiced’ this theory at the head of the Bolshevik Party between February and October 1917. This was the period in which Kerensky presided over a bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parliamentary majority that had been ‘democratically’ elected after the February 1917 events, which had ‘overthrown’ the Czarist regime without overthrowing the feudal-capitalist Russian state, even if its state apparatuses, beginning with the army, had been severely undermined. This very peculiar period of ‘democratic’ transition, during which the Bolsheviks, albeit a tiny minority in the parliament, were able to win over the masses, mobilize them, and rally them to their leadership in a few months thanks to their correct line and correct actions, was truly a period of transition towards socialist revolution, not, after big electoral successes and even very big victories of popular mass struggles (as in 1936), a period of transition towards the restoration of democracy against the people – that is, reactionary bourgeois democracy – culminating in Pétain’s fascism.9
If the Communist Party and its allies should, one day in our future, win a majority in legislative elections, and if the bourgeoisie were to allow them to assume the responsibilities of ‘government’ in the framework of existing bourgeois legality, one must be aware:
1) that they would thereby open up the prospect of democracy for the people (popular democracy or new democracy);
2) but that, for as long as the bourgeois state remained in place, with its repressive apparatus intact, and with its Ideological State Apparatuses, including the bourgeois political Ideological State Apparatus, the actions of the popular masses, assuming that they are educated, mobilized and committed to a struggle based on a correct line, would determine the nature of the transitional period thus initiated;
3) that, depending on the balance of power and the political line that the popular masses were mobilized to follow by the Communist Party, this transitional period could lead to either a victorious bourgeois reaction (after a few popular successes) or the triumph of the socialist revolution;
4) that without the seizure of state power, without a dismantling of the Repressive State Apparatus (what Marx and Lenin called ‘smashing the machine of the bourgeois state’), without a long struggle to smash the bourgeois Ideological State Apparatuses, revolution is unthinkable, or can only triumph for a time, as was seen in Central Europe in the 1920s.
Thus, for us, no parliamentary ‘transition’ to socialism is even conceivable, for such a transition is impossible. Nor is it conceivable that the ‘transition’ to socialism can be brought about by combining mass political action whose sole objective is ‘to isolate the bourgeoisie’ in general and the action of an electoral majority ‘that professes socialism’ or even wants socialism.
If it is supposed that bourgeois dictatorship can be overcome by ‘isolating the bourgeoisie’ without seizing state power, without smashing the bourgeois state apparatuses, the bourgeoisie, even if it is ‘isolated’, will know, whatever the tendency of the government in power, how to use the existing state apparatuses, first and foremost the police and army; and it will find itself a chief of state capable of commanding the still intact state apparatus – if need be, by means of a coup d’état such as that of 13 May10 or of some other kind.
If the masses do not decisively intervene, not to ‘isolate the bourgeoisie’, but to disarm/dismantle the Repressive State Apparatus, the transitional period initiated by an electoral victory promising democracy for the people will be, rather than a transition towards socialism, a ‘transition’ towards bourgeois reaction in, without a doubt, its most violent form: openly dictatorial and tendentially fascist. In that case, the Repressive State Apparatus and Ideological State Apparatuses, the political state apparatus included, will be put to ‘full use’ by a bourgeoisie that will have dropped its mask, with the requisite massacres as well as the mass arrests that have become classic in a ‘reaction’ of this type, perfected by the bourgeoisie in the century-and-a-half or more in which it has ruled France (Thermidor, 1815, June 1848, the Commune, Daladier, Laval-Pétain). What ultimately comes into being after such events obviously is not just the bourgeoisie’s creature; but we know that there are massacres and overtly dictatorial regimes, whether they are called fascist or neo-fascist, that can crush the mass movement for years.
Again, Lenin issued enough warnings, in terms categorical enough, to all unconditional partisans of the ‘putsch’ and even the ‘insurrection’, to the effect that it was not just foolish, but even criminal not to utilize all forms of struggle – not just all legal forms, but also all parliamentary-democratic, and thus electoral, forms11 – in such a way that whatever parliamentary-democratic action is undertaken by the communist party in the framework of the bourgeois political Ideological State Apparatus is something other than class collaboration. Lenin insisted, however, that the absolute condition for this was that such action be one form of struggle among others, subordinate to the system of mass class struggles led by the communist party.
If we interpret these well-known theses of Lenin’s in the light of our distinction between the Repressive State Apparatus and Ideological State Apparatuses, and if we take into account the fact that a democratic system (in which a parliament elected by universal suffrage in a political contest among different parties designates a government representing the parliamentary majority12) is part of the political Ideological State Apparatus, we will, I think, better understand the real but narrow limits on the parliamentary-democratic activity of the communist party.
When the party is in the opposition, its [parliamentory] activity is always confined to the framework of democratic legality prevailing in the political Ideological State Apparatus at a particular moment in history. That activity does not directly impact, or does not effect at all, the state’s other ideological apparatuses. Despite all the bills the party may propose, its activity has virtually no effect on the news and information apparatus (no one can claim that ‘democracy’ extends to the regime of radio, TV, or the press), the publishing apparatus, the religious apparatus, the scholastic apparatus,13 and so on. What is more – this is the most serious limit on the party’s activity, the absolute limit – it obviously puts not the least dent in the repressive apparatus. And if a ‘democratic’ government in which the party participates is able to exact obedience from the radio-TV regime and a part of the administration, it is with many reservations, and on condition that it remain within the confines of a ‘politics’ ensuring, at the very least, the ‘defence of the national currency’ and other ‘national interests’. It is a different story as far as the police and, a fortiori, the army are concerned: they ‘obey’ when they want to, and know how to blow the whistle when they judge that the situation threatens to reach the critical point for bourgeois class domination. The army then steps in directly, as was seen with the Algiers Putsch that brought De Gaulle to power, although the existence of the bourgeois state was not even in jeopardy, only the unity of the dominant class, the unity of a bourgeoisie divided by the Algerian people’s struggle for national liberation. What would have happened if the bourgeois class state itself had been threatened by the French popular masses?
The distinction between the Repressive State Apparatus on the one hand and the Ideological State Apparatuses on the other, as well as the thesis that the latter include the political Ideological State Apparatus, within which the struggles of parliamentary democracy take place, thus grounds and illustrates Leninist principles concerning the distinction between the communists’ activity in a parliament or even a parliamentary government (where the existence of the state is not in question) and the masses’ revolutionary activity for the conquest of the bourgeois state by way of, first, the destruction of its Repressive State Apparatus and, subsequently, its Ideological State Apparatuses.
To grasp these ‘fine points’, it suffices to consider:
1) the (seemingly paradoxical) validity of our classification of the political system of bourgeois democracy – including, consequently, the political parties that bourgeois democracy encompasses and, therefore, the party of the working class as well14 – under the concept of the political Ideological State Apparatus;
2) the possibility that a revolutionary party such as the Communist Party can and should find its place in the ‘play’ of the system of the Ideological State Apparatus comprised by the political apparatus (a place circumscribed by very narrow objective limits, to be sure) and pursue objectively revolutionary politics there, on the absolute condition that the party’s parliamentary politics in the forms of ‘bourgeois democracy’ be subordinated to its overall politics, which can only consist in mobilizing the proletarian masses and their natural allies15 for the purpose of seizing bourgeois state power and transforming it into the power of a socialist state.16
The possibility, for the party of the working class, to intervene in revolutionary (non-reformist) fashion in the ‘play’ of the system of the political Ideological State Apparatus, rests on the possibility of circumventing the law even while respecting it.
Very precisely, in the case of the parliamentary struggle in bourgeois democracy, it is a question, for the party of the working class, of invoking the constitutional law recognized by the bourgeoisie itself so as to make it produce effects of agitation and propaganda favourning overt struggle against the bourgeoisie’s politics. In other words, it is a question of taking bourgeois democracy at its word in order to help (only to help, for one must steer clear of all forms of ‘parliamentary cretinism’) the masses to engage ever more deeply in a course of action that will ultimately overturn bourgeois democracy in favour of the socialist democracy in which, during the dictatorship of the proletariat, the dictatorship of the working class and its allies will be exercised over their class enemies.
Stalin happened to utter a ‘historic’ phrase when he declared that the communist parties should ‘pick up the banner of democratic freedoms’ that ‘the bourgeoisie had dropped’. However, he spoke a little too quickly; for history has shown that even a man like De Gaulle, who is contemptuous of those freedoms, also knows how to ‘wave’ the flag of democratic freedoms in skilful speeches that, as election results prove, still have a certain effect. De Gaulle can find successors to wave the same flag! Stalin’s remark likewise betrays his failure to see that, as Lenin has shown, there is democracy and democracy, and that the question of the nature of democracy is, in the last instance, a class matter.
The same holds for Stalin’s other ‘historic’ phrase about ‘the banner of national independence’ ‘abandoned by the bourgeoisie’, which ‘the party of the working class’ was supposed to ‘pick up’. Here, too, he spoke a little too soon, for De Gaulle, who is not in the least contemptuous of national independence, has proven that he knows very well – as the electoral results prove here, too – how to ‘wave’ ‘the flag of national independence’ to the appropriate kind of anti-American music. Stalin’s remark also betrays his failure to see that, as Lenin has shown, there are nations and nations, and that the nature of a nation is, in the last instance, a class matter.
Under no circumstances should we forget that the themes of democratic freedoms and national independence are, first and foremost, integral parts of the bourgeois State Ideology, especially in periods when the communist party can rightfully invoke them against bourgeois policies.
Thus the reader will allow permit me to take for granted, or, at any rate, to treat as well-supported hypotheses, the propositions advanced in the preceding discussion, namely, that there exists a specifically political Ideological State Apparatus, and that it is constituted, in the French capitalist social formation, by the realization of the bourgeois State Ideology (here liberal-democratic-nationalist ideology) in the system comprising the electoral system, political parties, parliament, and so on.
The same demonstration applies to the associative Ideological State Apparatus, which falls under the same theory, but with an important difference that leads us to make a new remark.
As early as 1791, as everyone knows, the 1789 bourgeois revolution strictly outlawed, with the Le Chapelier Act, associations of labourers, the former journeymen who were soon to become the new workers, that is, proletarians. The Civil Code clearly recognized the right to use and abuse all (material) goods. As for the ‘good’ of association for journeymen and workers, a law was required expressly to prohibit the free use of it!
The working class conquered the right to association in a long, fierce, bitter, bloody struggle. Notwithstanding the ‘individualistic’ Civil Code, that right was enshrined in the Labour Code recently created to that end. Even civil servants employed in the administration or various Ideological State Apparatuses (such as the scholastic state apparatus or the news and state information apparatus) eventually saw their right to association enshrined in the 1946 constitution, a circumstance that will give us some idea of the ‘lag’ affecting this ‘branch’ of the law …
This should remind us of a parallel phenomenon. Parliamentary democracy, in which suffrage was initially based, under the Constituent Assembly,17 on tax-based qualifications, went through a jolting series of ups and downs in the course of the nineteenth century before finally gaining general acceptance with the ‘misunderstanding’ that led to the proclamation of the Third Republic, which would doubtless have become a monarchy again for some time if had it not been for the stupidity of Mac-Mahon and his friends.18 This proves that the Ideological State Apparatuses are very sensitive in nature and made of very sensitive stuff, since it takes so much time and so many struggles to replace old ones with new ones and establish them in their apparently definitive function; this also proves that they can be highly vulnerable as soon as they are shaken up by the conjuncture. In that respect, they differ from the Repressive State Apparatus, which displays superb continuity and constancy, inasmuch as it has not changed for centuries, which have nevertheless seen many different ‘regimes’, class regimes all.
We can make the same demonstration, then, for the associative Ideological State Apparatus. We must, however, introduce a new stipulation.
When we talk about political parties, we know that they extend from the right to the far left. The existence of parties of the right, centre and ‘left’, and the fact that they have loyally shown up at all the major historical occasions of the capitalist class struggle to shield the bourgeois state with their bodies plainly shows that there is a connection of some kind between the political parties and the system of parliamentary democracy on the one hand, and, on the other, the dictatorship of the bourgeois state. We need only take one more step to understand Lenin’s formula: bourgeois democracy is the ‘dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’.
When we talk about unions, however, things are not as self-evident. The word makes everyone think first of trade unions, and of the most combative of them: the CGT and, for a few years now, the CFDT.19 We tend to forget that workers’ unions are not the only kind of unions in existence. There are also unions of civil servants employed by either the Repressive State Apparatus (tax inspectors’ union, and so on, and even a police union) or the Ideological State Apparatuses (unions of primary school, secondary school, and college teachers, and so on).20
Yet there also exist unions of supervisory personnel and syndicates of small and middle-sized businesses. Above all, there exist very powerful ‘professional’ associations of employers, crowned by the most powerful of them all, the National Confederation of French Employers [CNPF].
To make our thesis about the existence of an associative Ideological State Apparatus very clear, we would do well to look at things from the other end, beginning, not with the class-struggle workers’ union (the CGT, the only trade union to include this definition in its statutes), but with the CNPF, and proceeding back down the ladder. When we do, we discover that there exist an unbelievable number of employers’ syndicates or interest groups charged with ‘defending the interests’ of a profession.21
The system made up of these organizations forms an apparatus that realizes an ideology of ‘defence of the interests of …’ a profession! Naturally, this ideology goes hand in hand with an ideology of the inestimable services that the profession in question renders the public and the national interest. It thereby realizes one of the grand themes of the State Ideology, that of the general and national interest in freedom of enterprise and the defence of lofty moral values. ‘Defence of the profession’ is, for associations of middle employers and big employers, a fig leaf hiding their class objective.
That a workers’ union waging an economic class struggle was able, at the price of battles lasting more than a century, to ‘win recognition’ in such company, and that it can, moreover, wage a genuine class struggle in the margins of the very recent juridical legality22 of the Labour Code, is the fruit of a kind of heroism: the heroism, precisely, of the working class.
History proves that this trade union has been the constant target of indescribable pressure and repression, shameless blackmail, dismissal of activists, as well as corruption and pay-offs pure and simple (FO,23 as is now official, was created with CIA money); and it has been a victim of the concomitant splits, not to mention the standing temptation to lapse into the economism of the 1906 Charter of Amiens (‘No politics in trade unions!’) or into anarcho-syndicalism (‘Down with political parties! Politics is the business of trade unions alone!’).24 This, however, merely provides additional empirical evidence for our thesis about the existence of an associative Ideological State Apparatus.
Better, this allows us to make a remark that may seem rather paradoxical when one considers the Marxist tradition.
It is often said that, according to Marx and Lenin, the workers’ movement is capable of organizing, by itself, without the help of Marxist theory, organizations of trade union struggle capable, after weathering the trying ordeals of their apprenticeship, of leading fights that go beyond the merely local level or corporatist limits to attain the national level. On the other hand, the argument goes, things are infinitely harder when it comes to making the transition to political organization. And there is a tendency to add that this is only natural, since the workers who daily experience the economic exploitation whose victims they are are not equally familiar with the mechanisms of political class struggle, and thus of political oppression and the ideological subjection exercised by the capitalist state.
There exists, consequently, a tendency, at least on the part of some proletarian political leaders who are not of proletarian origin, and, a fortiori, among people, especially intellectuals, of petty-bourgeois origin, to consider the economic struggle as, in some sort, ‘natural’, but subordinate, and to believe that the political struggle is much harder to set in motion. It is, however, not certain that the reality of the matter corresponds point for point with this judgement. That is why we chose to begin by discussing the political Ideological State Apparatus, before going on to discuss the associative Ideological State Apparatus.
The reason is simple. The terribly hasty promulgation of the Le Chapelier Act can put us on the right track. The reason is that the same bourgeoisie which demanded the benefit of the freedom to organize politically, and which thus imposed at a very early stage, by means of its own class struggle, in which it did not ‘turn up its nose’ at support from the ‘people’ (consider 1789–93; 1830; 1848), its own political Ideological State Apparatus in opposition to the feudal aristocracy’s – the same bourgeoisie took great pains, from the word go (1791), to repress by means of law and the worst sort of violence the slightest inclination to organize or to wage economic struggle on the part of those it exploited, the proletarians.
It must be understood that the bourgeoisie discovered that it was incapable of preventing the popular masses – for the good reason that it could not do without them – from taking part in the bourgeois political class struggles against, first, the feudal class in 1789–93, and then against the landed aristocracy throughout much of the nineteenth century, above all the first half of it.
It was the French bourgeoisie’s ‘historical bad luck’ that it had to do with a nobility and feudal Church that were particularly tenacious, hard-headed, and even ‘dumb’ (the proto-Poujadist ‘revolt’ … of the petty aristocracy in the years 1770–80 really spoiled everything). The result is well known: the violent revolt of the peasantry (‘Peace to the huts, war on the castles!’), with the castles in question going up in smoke all over the place – for the peasants went about their business with a vengeance – the repetition of the ‘journées révolutionnaires’ in the cities, the reign of the plebeians in the streets and over Paris, the Committee of Public Safety and the Terror meeting the challenge of the frankly counter-revolutionary war that had been unleashed by the fraternal feudal states at the appeal of the highest-ranking French aristocracy (with the King and Queen heading the list, prior to their execution).
Without the decisive support of the popular masses, including the horrid, ominous ‘Fourth Estate’25 that Mathiez has described,26 the bourgeoisie of the Third Estate would have been able neither to overturn ‘feudal’ relations of production and exchange, nor to take power and destroy the feudal state of the absolute monarchy in order to create its state apparatuses, nor, finally, to exercise power in order to establish its own relations of production and its law.
Engels says somewhere that France is an exemplary country in that to be sure, class struggles are carried to an extreme there, with utter clarity. It is exemplary for the proletariat, but not at all for the bourgeoisie. From the bourgeois standpoint, the 1789 revolution was, in comparison with the English Revolution, a ‘dirty revolution’ that, politically, exacted infinitely too high a price from the bourgeoisie; the damage it caused had to be ‘repaired’ as best it could be, under the worst of conditions. Above all, those unspeakable popular masses, peasant masses that were becoming increasingly urban and plebeian, had to be put back in their places; they had of course been vitally necessary for the bourgeoisie, but they were definitely a little too confident (and how was one supposed to prevent that?) that ‘their day had come’.
A few good mass shootings, Thermidor, the White Terror and, finally, Bonaparte the Saviour (the De Gaulle of his day), crowned Emperor in exchange for the Civil Code and the French bourgeoisie’s pre-imperialist wars throughout Europe, settled matters. But at what a price! A twofold price, at least.
First, the bourgeoisie had had to pay the price represented by Napoleon Bonaparte I. It thus inaugurated an original tradition, the typically French tradition of Bonapartism, disagreeable but rational and indispensable bourgeois solution designed to put the plebeian masses back in their place (in 1798 and again in 1852, a tradition pursued down to 1958, with De Gaulle’s 13 May).27 This was a solution, certainly, but a costly one, for it showed one and all that bourgeois political ‘liberalism’ could take the overt form, to the advantage of the bourgeoisie itself, of a non-democratic or non-parliamentary personal dictatorship that, while serenely grounding itself on the Grand Parliamentary-Democratic Principles of 1789, betrays whenever its class domination is threatened the contempt in which it holds those principles.
Second, the bourgeoisie had to pay the price for setting the popular masses a ‘bad example’ that might prove contagious and, worse, be repeated. For, in its class struggle against the aristocratic reaction of the Restoration (Louis XVIII, Charles X), the bourgeoisie did not ‘turn up its nose’ at the workers and common people of Paris who, side-by-side with the petty bourgeoisie, ‘did the work’ on the Trois Glorieuses in July 1830.28 Once again, then, ‘journées révolutionnaires’ on which the people poured into the streets and invented both the barricades and the art of fighting on them.29 Nor did the bourgeoisie ‘turn up its nose’ at the proletariat’s help in 1848, when, ‘for the first time the proletariat as such, in its first organizations, marched out to battle, launching an assault on the Orleanist monarchy alongside the petty bourgeoisie, and glimpsed, hopefully, albeit still from a very great distance, something that spoke of ‘socialism’, even if it had to be discerned through the disavowals of a Louis Blanc and the sham of the ‘National Workshops’.
Every time, the bourgeoisie had to resign itself to the idea of armed intervention by the popular masses – by the petty bourgeoisie, to be sure, but also by craftsmen, journeymen and, finally, in 1848, the proletarians themselves, in their first class organizations. Every time, it had to resign itself to the paradoxical fact that its own bourgeois class struggle was educating the proletariat and preparing it for violent political class struggle, which it would one day wage in its own interests.
Need we as well say something about the Commune? At stake this time was the Empire, which had become an encumbrance for the bourgeoisie in view of its inappropriate authoritarianism and the catastrophic consequences of its annexationist, adventurist foreign policy. This time, too, the help of the popular masses – proletarians who were increasingly well organized and politically conscious, despite their ideological divisions (partisans of Proudhon, of Blanqui, and so on) – proved necessary (although it was making the bourgeoisie increasingly uneasy) to bring down the Empire and proclaim the Republic. To top things off, the defeat also did its part. The defeat? But what then becomes of nationalism, a key component of the bourgeois State Ideology?
This is where the French bourgeoisie found its cross: in the encounter between a military defeat and a popular revolution (think of 1917 Russia!). The national resistance that the people of Paris put up against the Prussian occupier, the appeal to the popular masses to liberate the nation from foreign armed forces, was no longer the work of the patriotic petty bourgeoisie or, obviously, the big bourgeoisie of Mr Thiers in Versailles, which was colluding with the victorious Prussians. It originated in a fact without precedent: it was the work of the Parisian proletariat, which, for the first time in history, assumed the leadership of the patriotic resistance and the revolution. The consequence was the Commune: a transition from the popular national struggle against the occupier to the first socialist revolution in history: that reckless, unheard of, excessive, inconceivable, mad, but formidable experiment, a source of practical inventions and theoretical discoveries without precedent, which changed the entire course of the international workers’ movement in a phenomenal way.
For, this time, it was not one or another government or form of bourgeois state that was at issue, but the bourgeois state as such, in its apparatuses. It was from the Paris Commune that Marx derived the irrefutable empirical confirmation of his theses on the necessity of seizing state power, destroying the state apparatuses, and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat at the head of a new state, a proletarian state, fitted out with new – proletarian – state apparatuses.30
Everyone knows how the bourgeoisie went about ‘rewarding’ the common people of Paris for their decisive help in 1830: by confiscating the Trois Glorieuses for Louis–Philippe’s benefit. It rewarded the proletariat for its decisive help in February 1848 by massacring proletarians in June 1848 and then pursuing the repression with the sentences of 2 December: death sentences, prison terms, mass deportations. Everyone knows how the bourgeoisie responded to the Paris Commune’s patriotic resistance and revolutionary audacity: by murdering tens of thousands of men and women who were murdered in broad daylight with everyone’s full knowledge. They were stood up against Parisian walls in plain view of the beautiful ladies whom these comforting massacres helped to get over their ‘dreadful’ fright, unforgettable and unforgotten, unforgotten even today.
However one assesses these terrible events, the bourgeoisie, once it had basically secured its political victory over the aristocracy, once it felt strong enough to tolerate its existence, that is, to control or even assimilate it, found itself unable to prevent the creation of workers’ political parties (in the 1860s and 1870s in Germany, and later, in the 1880s, in France), because its constitutional law formally authorized them. A workers’ political party, even a socialist party, need not be dangerous, if it plays the democratic game. The proof is that the German Social-Democratic Party’s huge electoral successes, and the real, if more modest, successes of the Parti ouvrier français and, later, the Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière, culminated, as is well known, in the two Unions Sacrées, the one that the German Social-Democratic Party concluded with the German imperialist state and the one that the French Socialist Party concluded with the French imperialist state (with Guesde serving as minister without portfolio in the first war cabinet) after Jaurès was assassinated. This shows that what has, since Lenin, been known as imperialism always has the last word about even the most spectacular electoral successes of the workers’ parties, Marxist parties not excepted.
The bourgeoisie is very adept at manoeuvring within its political Ideological State Apparatus, not only by utilizing the right electoral techniques to put more deputies in parliament the fewer votes it has in the country, but, above all, by dividing the working-class forces. Thus it tolerated the Communist Party in France after the First World War (while imprisoning its leaders every now and then), but alongside the Socialist Party, and constantly used the Socialist Party against the Communist Party. It knows the score and is not as stupid as Mr Guy Mollet once had the audacity to say. (The audacity? Rather, the complicity: to create the impression that the French bourgeoisie is stupid is also a way of deceiving the workers as to its real strength once again, and thus of once again serving the bourgeoisie.)
The division of the workers’ political parties went hand-in-hand with the division of the workers’ trade union organizations. Such is the bourgeoisie’s constant tactic.
This is irrefutable proof that what the bourgeoisie fears above all things is (listed in order of increasing importance):
1) political unity between the workers’ parties;
2) trade union unity between the workers’ unions;
3) and, above all, above all, unity between these two forms of unity, that is, the fusion, behind a unified line and a unified leadership, of the mass trade union activity and mass political activity of the working class and its natural allies.
These stages (1, 2, 3) may be regarded as absolute thresholds and touchstones. Hence we must advance the following thesis:
The bourgeois class struggle reaches the level ‘state of alert’ with the first event (political unity between the workers’ parties). It reaches the level ‘state of emergency’ with the second event (trade union unity between the workers’ unions). It reaches the level ‘martial law’ with the third event (unity of the economic and political class struggles of the masses of workers and their allies). For, at that point, one stage following another, it is the bourgeois state itself that is directly at issue.
The bourgeoisie can ‘tolerate’ a great deal, including an active communist party, active trade unions, a general strike, even if it is relatively politicized, as in May 1968, and the simultaneous ideological revolt of the young people in school (in one segment of the scholastic Ideological State Apparatus). But under no circumstances can it tolerate the mortal threat against the state itself (state power, the state apparatuses taken as a whole, with the Repressive State Apparatus that forms their core) represented by the irresistible popular power that looms up behind the unity of the workers’ parties and the unity of the labour unions, that is, the real fusion of the economic and political struggles of the popular masses in the cities and countryside. May 1968, albeit miles from achieving this fusion, warned the bourgeoisie that it had to exercise extreme vigilance in the face of this mortal threat.
The bourgeoisie is not at all stupid. It does everything it can to fend off this mortal threat; and, as a good Cartesian, it ‘divides up difficulties’, that is, applies a strategic, patient, tenacious, shrewd policy of dividing, first, the political workers’ movement; second, the trade-union movement; and, finally, the relations between them. To do this, it need only rely on the social-democratic parties and the class-collaborationist trade unions against the communist parties and the trade unions of economic class struggle. History verifies this empirically, beyond all question. It is up to communists, first of all, and then up to proletarians and their natural allies, to learn the lesson that this history has to teach. It is a vitally important lesson for the cause of the period of transition to socialist revolution and the socialist revolution itself.
We have now made many observations on familiar topics of the workers’ parties’ struggle in the framework of the political Ideological State Apparatus. It is time to say a word about the specificity of the struggle of workers’ organizations in the framework of the associative Ideological State Apparatus.
Since politics is in the foreground, and since the political struggle always represents a higher level of ‘consciousness’ than trade union struggle does, there is a tendency, as I have pointed out, to regard trade union struggle as both easier and less important – when it is not considered a secondary, if not, indeed, somewhat contemptible business.
It is enough, for example, to read through the ‘literature’ that has been turned out for years by a handful of ‘revolutionary’ theorists of the UNEF,31 but also of certain splinter groups and the PSU,32 not to mention ideologues such as Serge Mallet33 and others, or the organs in which they publish (Le Nouvel Observateur), in order to learn about a great ‘Revelation’ from them, namely, that ‘quantitative’ demands must be clearly distinguished from ‘qualitative’ demands. The former, the ‘quantitative’ demands, which have to do with the ‘defence of the material interests’ of wage-earners and coincide with or comprise the major objectives of the economic class struggle of the workers’ trade union organization (the CGT), are considered to be basely materialistic and without ‘horizon’ or ‘global strategic revolutionary’ ‘perspective’ (to use these theorists’ jargon). They are therefore treated as somewhat contemptible.
The other demands, in contrast, the ‘qualitative’ demands, are noble and worthy of Universal History, that is, of the interest that these theoreticians bestow on them in order to elaborate their ‘global strategy’ of World Revolution, in which the proletariat had better hold on to its hat, that is, hold to the position they assign it.
If I mention these errors or asininities, it is because they wreak havoc, not only among ‘intellectuals’ (students and others),34 but also in other strata of the petty bourgeoisie (supervisory personnel and engineers, progressive members of both categories included) and even in certain working-class strata. The CFDT’s slogans themselves often echo the distinction between ‘quantitative’ and ‘qualitative’ demands, to the advantage of the latter, of course, since the distinction was invented to that end.
In sum, only politics is noble and worthy of being practiced, since it is revolutionary, whereas material trade union demands are ‘basely’ materialistic and non-revolutionary – it is all they can do not to dispatch someone to tell the workers they should be ashamed of themselves for demanding money with which to buy fridges, tellies, or even a car, since we know, as the good bourgeois theory of ‘consumer society’ has it, that these things are, in and of themselves, ‘alienating’ for the class struggle, because they ‘corrupt the souls’ of their owners. The counter-argument leaps to the eye: as everyone knows, the handful of ‘theorists’ (CFDT, PSU, or ‘intellectuals’, a few students included) who graciously share with us the revelation that has been bestowed on them, all go without fridges, tellies and cars themselves, not to mention vacations on the Balearic Islands, the Riviera, or in Greece, so that they will not be ‘alienated’ or ‘corrupted’ and can continue to be the ‘pure’ thinkers, if not leaders, of the proletarian revolution they are, inasmuch as they have themselves decreed that they are its ‘thinkers’ and ‘leaders’ …35
If, however, we abandon the ‘global’ perspective adopted by these ‘theorists’, and simply pay a little attention to the trade union struggle, its history displays a crucially important feature. We have stated the reasons that ultimately compelled the bourgeoisie to concede that the workers’ political parties, even the Communist Party, have a legal right (which is, to be sure, at the mercy of the first ban to come along) to exist (at least for the time being). The same reasons have produced a completely different result in the domain of the workers’ trade union struggle, which comes under the associative Ideological State Apparatus.
The workers’ economic class-struggle organizations have not benefited, unlike the workers’ political class-struggle organizations, from the events of the long, spectacular class struggle between bourgeoisie and feudal aristocracy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus they have not benefited from the instructive bourgeois precedents and examples of the political class struggle, or the occasional articles of liberal, egalitarian, bourgeois constitutional law, the grand principles of which were laid down from 1789 on. For the bourgeoisie not only had no need for assistance from the workers’ economic class struggle; on the contrary, it had everything to fear from it, since this economic class struggle, which targeted capitalist exploitation, in fact targeted, directly, the material basis for the existence of capitalism and thus for bourgeois society and the bourgeoisie’s political domination. The bourgeoisie could therefore risk no political compromise whatsoever with the workers’ economic class struggle, because it lives exclusively on the exploitation of workers. That is perfectly logical. However, the immediate conjuncture requires that we dot the ‘i’s here, since people are currently peddling old mistakes which, albeit long since refuted, are still dangerous.
Let us here recall a fundamental classic thesis: the material basis (the infrastructure, as Marx says, or ‘the base’) for the existence of every capitalist social formation is economic exploitation – economic exploitation, not repression. Marx, Engels and Lenin, particularly in their relentless struggle against anarchism, which claimed the opposite (and still does in the persons of its petty-bourgeois ‘theorists’ of the ‘avant-garde’, that is, of the historical rear-guard), always carefully distinguished exploitation from repression, in other words, the economic base on the one hand, in which the economic relations of production of capitalist exploitation hold sway, and, on the other, the political superstructure, in which, in the last resort, the repressive power of the capitalist state holds sway.
It is here that the metaphor of the edifice (base or infrastructure and superstructure or upper floor resting on the base) renders absolutely decisive theoretical and political service to working-class activists. It can even render important, salutary service to a number of those who, rather than letting themselves be ‘intimidated’ by the authoritarian methods of ideological ‘leadership’ utilized by a handful of intellectuals, the self-appointed theorists and leaders of the ‘revolutionary movement’, agree to reconsider the question, seriously, scientifically, calmly and honestly.
For the distinction between base and superstructure, as well as the thesis that the superstructure, and thus all forms of repression (all of which depend on the state apparatuses), are determined in the last instance by the base (that is, by the material exploitation of the proletariat and other workers working in relations of production that are relations of capitalist exploitation and nothing else) – this distinction puts things definitively back in place.
This is an elementary truth of Marxism. Those who today call it into question are nothing other, in this respect,36 than pure and simple revisionists.
For what is determinant in the last instance, and thus primary, is exploitation, not repression. What is determinant in the last instance are the relations of capitalist production (which are simultaneously relations of capitalist exploitation). What is determined, and thus secondary, is repression: namely, the state, which is repression’s ultimate centre, from which all forms of repression emanate: both the repression that is exercised by the Repressive State Apparatus – physical repression both direct (the police, army, courts, and so on) and indirect (the administration) – and all forms of ideological subjection due to the Ideological State Apparatuses.
And if, as we have tried to show, if not, indeed, to prove, the superstructure’s effective function is to ensure the reproduction of the conditions of production through the system of the various forms of repression and ideologization, all of which are ascribable to the capitalist state, it follows that reproduction is merely the condition for the continuing existence of production. This means that it is in production, and in production alone, not in reproduction, that exploitation is carried out, the material condition of existence for the capitalist mode of production.
If the state is, as Engels puts it, a ‘concentrate’ of society, it is such only in consequence of its role in reproduction, and because we can, on that grounds, discover in it the significance of the political class struggles of which it is the object and objective. But these political class struggles are not materially grounded in the existence of the state.
They are grounded in the existence of irreconcilable antagonistic classes, whose existence as antagonistic classes is grounded in, and determined by, the material conditions of class economic exploitation. On the one side stands the class of exploiters – exploiters because they have the means of production in their hands; on the other stands the class of the exploited, exploited because they have no means of production and are forced to sell their labour-power as if it were an ordinary ‘commodity’ – even in our supposed ‘consumer society’.
Therein resides the essential, albeit paradoxical, difference distinguishing the working class’s economic class struggle from the (more or less officially recognized or tolerated) forms of its political class struggle.
The paradox is that, in order to destroy the class relations of capitalist exploitation, the working class must seize bourgeois state power, destroy the state apparatus, and so on, because the state is the key to the reproduction of capitalist relations of production. To overthrow the infrastructure of exploitation, therefore, the proletariat and its allies must take state power and destroy the state machine. This proposition is perfectly correct from the standpoint of the proletarian class war, which must direct the political attack against the state, because the state is that which guarantees the conditions of reproduction of the system of exploitation; or, in short, that which maintains the capitalist system upright, by perpetuating it.
However, as every soldier knows very well, a country’s last military defence (this or that strategic battlefield) is not the country itself; nor does the battle for this ultimate bastion sum up the whole of the war that preceded it. The same applies to the class war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. What decides it is whether state power remains in the hands of the bourgeoisie or is seized by the proletariat. That, however, is the culminating point of a very long battle, an incessant, daily, extraordinarily difficult battle, a sort of interminable trench warfare that can never be abandoned and is usually masked by the spectacular political battles in the foreground. This silent, obscure, interminable, bloody trench warfare is the economic class struggle.
In this war, the bourgeoisie gives, in principle, no quarter. From 1791 on, it has been waging preventive battle, outlawing, with the Le Chapelier Act, all ‘associations’ of journeymen and craftsmen and, later, workers. One must read the stupefying history, as recounted by honest historians,37 of the workers’ economic class struggle associations. Banned, they had initially to be organized behind the screen provided by various unlikely associations (relief associations, associations of mutual aid, ‘correspondence’ societies, or even associations for the fight against alcoholism), generally in legal grey zones, when they were not purely and simply illegal – with, on the one hand, all the obscure heroism, incessant sacrifice, tenacity, imagination and subterfuge, and, on the other, the pitiless condemnations or, quite simply, mass killings (Fourmies,38 to cite just one bloody example) that this entailed – since these practices were, at the time, expressly prohibited by repressive bourgeois law.
Simply to take the measure of this difference, let us simply note that it was infinitely harder for workers’ unions to secure recognition of their legal, concrete existence and ‘rights’ in the associative Ideological State Apparatus than it was for workers’ political parties to gain recognition in their Ideological State Apparatus. The workers’ unions had to assert their de facto existence in the face of the most cynical sorts of bourgeois legality and repression, in heroic, protracted battles, before they were formally recognized in 1884, and actually recognized … only under the Popular Front, in 1936! It was only in 1946, after the Resistance, that French civil servants’ right to organize unions was recognized! It was at Grenelle,39 in May 1968 (!), that shop committees were granted a legal right to exist … in companies employing more than 200 workers!
Is there any point in adding that, since the law is the law, and since applying it consists in respecting it while circumventing it, the bourgeoisie did not and still does not hesitate to make use of all the procedures in its power against union activists, by subjecting them to sanctions or, quite simply, firing them? Or that labour inspectors either collude with employers or are quite simply helpless in the face of the procedures employers use? Or that some employers write off, as overhead expenses, the fines they are condemned to pay by the labour courts for ‘unfair dismissal’ of ‘people with bad attitudes’ who are just a little too politicized? Is there any need to add, on top of everything else, that the bourgeoisie is a past master at exploiting the divisions between trade union organizations, which it carefully cultivates (divisions between the CGT, CFDT, CFTC, CGC,40 and FO, to say nothing of ‘company unions’ such as those at Simca or Citroën)?
Thus it is no wonder, to take 1969 France as our example, that it is often easier to be a member of the Communist Party in France – that is to say, for certain activists, to carry a party card in their pockets, hold occasional meetings outside the firm, distribute leaflets or the party cell newspaper by mail or in some other discreet way – than to be a genuine trade union activist. For trade union activity can only be carried on in the firm, in the broad light of day, collectively, it is true, but also individually, under the constant, terribly vigilant surveillance of engineers, supervisors and foremen who in the overwhelming majority of cases are the direct agents, in forms that are sometimes brutal, but sometimes infinitely subtle, of the bosses’ exploitation and repression.
The thesis that I am advancing by way of these empirical remarks is simple and classic in the workers’ movement. It has been defined in very clear terms by Lenin and the Red International of Labour Unions.41 It runs as follows.
The economic class struggle, which cannot by itself determine the outcome of the decisive battle for the socialist revolution, that is, the battle for state power, is not a secondary or subordinate struggle. It is the material basis for the political struggle itself. Without bitter, uninterrupted, day-to-day economic struggle, the political class struggle is impossible or vain. There can be no concrete political class struggle capable of carrying the day that is not deeply rooted in the economic class struggle, and in it alone, because the economic class struggle is, to hazard a somewhat metaphorical expression, the base, determinant in the last instance, of the political struggle itself, which is for its part – for such is its function – the only one that can lead the popular masses’ decisive battle. Primacy of the political class struggle, then; but this primacy will remain a hollow phrase if the basis for political struggle, the economic class struggle, is not waged daily, indefatigably, profoundly, and on the basis of a correct line.
Obviously, this thesis pulverizes those of petty-bourgeois ‘theorists” about the primacy of ‘qualitative’ over ‘quantitative’ struggles, and also Marxist pseudo-theses about the ‘trade-unionist’42 ‘limits’ on the workers’ class struggle when it is left to itself. The latter theses are ascribed to Lenin when he is read a little too hastily.
For Lenin by no means says that the working class, when left to itself, can wage only an economic class struggle. The trade unionism of which Lenin speaks is a political struggle, but one waged on the basis of an incorrect political line, a reformist line, which confines itself to calling on the bourgeois state and bourgeois government to make reforms, without ever calling the existence of the bourgeois class state into question. Trade unionism is the utilization and perversion of the struggle of workers’ trade union organizations for the benefit of a reformist political line, that is, a class-collaborationist political line. In this case, too, there exists a close relationship between trade unions and party: what would Labour in England be without the trade unions? We can even grant that there exists a certain implantation of Labour in the big British trade unions; we must, however, immediately add that the major trade union leaders, the Bevins, Bevans, Wilsons, and so on, once they are in power (that is, at the head of Her Gracious Imperialist Majesty’s government), are never slow to cut themselves off from their ‘roots’ in the trade union struggle, and then to ‘contain’ that struggle, before overtly combating it. This is always what happens when one is a ‘government socialist’, that is, a flunky of the bourgeois state.
It is, therefore, completely wrong to interpret Lenin’s statement that ‘trade unionism’ is the furthest limit that the workers’ movement can attain on its own power as if it referred to the spontaneous economic class struggle of the workers’ movement. It refers to something completely different: the absolute limit of the spontaneous political struggle of the workers’ movement, which trade unionism pushes into the reformist trap of class collaboration. At the limit, trade unionism can set out to conquer the ‘government’ – but never the capitalist state. The result is that it becomes the ‘loyal manager of the capitalist regime’.
We must, then, establish the facts again. And, because the trade union struggle is today under attack from certain ‘avant-garde theoreticians’ and is also, in effect, treated as secondary by certain communists, who, be it added, cultivate for that reason an equally false notion of their role in the political struggle, we must also emphatically rehabilitate the trade union struggle, which takes on the character of a direct economic class struggle when big workers’ union federations (such as the miners, metal workers, rail workers, construction workers, and so on) are involved. (In civil servants’ unions, for example, the relationship to economic class struggle is not direct.) We must establish the facts again, and understand why no communist political class struggle is possible unless it is deeply implanted in the masses’ economic class struggle, and unless the communists take up a correct position and carry out correct actions in the economic class struggle, that is, in the struggle for ‘bread-and-butter demands’.
We have brought out the principle that ultimately justifies this thesis: because the whole capitalist regime rests in the last instance on direct economic exploitation of the working class and other wage-earners who are not workers, both urban and rural, the anti-capitalist struggle inevitably takes the path of a direct struggle against direct exploitation. It also takes the path, secondarily, of a struggle against indirect forms of exploitation.43
Because this struggle can be led as a mass struggle, it is led by mass organizations, which are by nature distinct (by virtue of their statutes, operating rules – the broadest possible trade union democracy – and practices) from the communist parties. It is plainly a question of the masses, for exploitation affects all workers and labourers without exception; it is their daily lot, they experience it directly every day. Thus it is by way of the struggle for material demands that the masses can be rallied to objective actions against the capitalist system. The masses: not just the vanguard of the proletariat, not just the proletariat, but also the non-proletarian wage-workers in town and country, poor peasants, small peasants in the process of becoming proletarians, and all those, including many civil servants working in the Ideological State Apparatuses (teachers, for instance) or even certain Repressive State Apparatuses (for example, some categories of civil servants in the administration), who are objectively victims of capitalist exploitation.
It is the masses who make history. But if the masses can lead history to the victory of the socialist revolution only in the political class struggle and under the leadership of the political organization of the vanguard of the proletariat, it is clear and correct that the masses, when they go into motion, will not accept the party’s political leadership unless they have long since been unified and mobilized in the struggle against the economic exploitation of the capitalist regime by a long, hard, heroic, tenacious, unspectacular, trade-union struggle for bread-and-butter demands on the basis of a correct line.
This is an unmistakable sign. If a communist party disappears, as a party, from the enterprises, that is proof that its line and practice were not correct with respect to its own political function and its function vis-à-vis the trade unions. If, in the enterprises, the party cell ‘hides’ behind the trade union; a fortiori, if it purely and simply disappears, leaving it to the trade union (which can on no grounds assume this function) to ‘stand in for the party’; if the party contents itself with ‘supporting workers’ struggles’ (read, trade union struggles), instead of leading them, which is its role; in short, if, at the national level, the party finds itself, in its non-electoral practice, objectively lagging behind the activity and initiatives of the organization of economic class struggle – this is, in all cases, a sign that ‘something is wrong somewhere’.
For the party must be ahead of the masses by, not ten miles or a thousand miles, as the famous ‘revolutionary’ ‘avant-garde theorists’ about whom I have already said a word would have it (speaking on behalf of their ‘organization’, which exists only in their imaginations), but, as Lenin’s formula has it, by one step, and one step only. What holds at the national level holds a fortiori at the level of each enterprise. This presupposes correct definition of the communists’ political line vis-à-vis the shop committee, as well as correct practice of it. To forge ties with the masses in the enterprise, the communists have to concern themselves, down to the details, with concrete trade union demands and questions, without, however, substituting themselves for the trade union; they have to carry out the work that is theirs, the work of political explanation, propaganda, agitation and organization. This presupposes, as its absolute condition, that the party exists in the enterprise, that it makes its presence felt there in actual fact and as such (with its own initiatives, its cell newspaper, and so on). It presupposes that everyone in the enterprise knows and appreciates it, that it has a correct line there and occupies the position it should vis-à-vis the masses organized in the trade union: one step ahead of the masses, and thus one step ahead of the trade union organizations.
For, to go back to what we have said about the union between the mass economic struggle and mass political struggle, in short, to discuss this fusion again, which is a deadly terror because it is, objectively, a mortal threat to the very existence of the capitalist system, this politically revolutionary fusion will never come about in forms capable of ensuring its victory if one does not begin to forge it, far in advance, at the very heart of the enterprises. But the material basis for this fusion is the implantation of the political class struggle in the economic class struggle, which is, I repeat, determinant in the last instance. In more concrete terms, it is the implantation of the activity of the communists who are members of the shop cell in the activity carried out by the members of the shop committee to win concrete material demands.
This is the basic principle of the communists’ political practice with respect to the trade unions. The old militants who were formed in France by the CGTU and the Leninism of Maurice Thorez have not forgotten it; they know it. They have to teach it to the many young militants who have flocked or will flock to the CGT44 and then the party. This is not, be it added, their personal affair. It is the number-one task of political education, which the whole party should take in hand, assuming responsibility for it and carrying it through to the end. I am well aware, we are all well aware, that this is no easy task. That is especially true in the present conjuncture, in which bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology, which always has an influence on the working class, because it is and remains the dominant ideology, never ceases to suggest two deviations to the workers’ movement: the economistic deviation on the one hand and the hyper-political, ‘revolutioneering’ deviation on the other (whether anarcho-syndicalist or anarchist).45 It is especially true in the present conjuncture, in which imperialism’s death agony also assigns a high priority to the task of forming activists for the anti-imperialist struggle in France itself,46 and in particularly delicate conditions at that (the split in the international communist movement and the resulting enfeeblement of proletarian internationalism).47 In any case, this educational task remains the number-one task of political education, and must be carried out.
Implant the political class struggle as deeply as possibly in the economic class struggle, in the trade union struggle for the masses’ material demands: such is the golden rule of the revolutionary struggle.
The workers’ movement, in its fusion with Marxist theory, learned this golden rule in the course of struggles which cost the international working class unimaginable sacrifices. The workers’ movement owes its great historical victories (the 1917 Russian Revolution, the 1949 Chinese Revolution) to its respect for this golden rule. Its great historical defeats (for example, that of the German social-democracy before and after 1914, the defeats of the Central European revolutions in the 1920s, and so on) occurred because it forgot it or disdained it.48
It is clear that, even if this golden rule is neglected, the popular masses can still, in such-and-such a critical conjuncture, ‘mobilize’, or even launch a very powerful movement, capable, if the situation happens to be ‘revolutionary’, of taking state power by assault. However, if, by accident or for any other reason, the party has not forged profound ties with those masses through a very long practice of implanting the political class struggle in the economic class struggle, the movement of the popular masses can either fail to lead to the seizure of state power or, even if it should have the good fortune to take state power, risks not being able to keep it.
For one has to go that far to give concrete content to the Marxist-Leninist thesis that it is the masses who make history. Since the history that interests us is the history of the Revolution, the masses must be mobilized and led towards truly revolutionary objectives. Only the party of the vanguard of the proletariat can do that. But the party can assume this leadership role (which presupposes that it explains things to the masses, and mobilize and organize them) only if it has forged deep ties with them, if it is at one with them. Nothing but the deep, irreversible implantation of the political class struggle in the economic class struggle, and thus in ‘bread-and-butter trade union demands’, can guarantee that it will be able to establish such ties.
This classical thesis restores the trade union struggle as such, which is determinant in the last instance, to its true place. It does so at a time when some consider that struggle to be secondary, if not contemptible, while others would like to transform it into a pure and simple political struggle. I appeal to the activists of good will to whom I am alluding here (there are many among those whom people call ‘far leftists’49 without making the necessary distinctions, especially among lycée and college students as well as young intellectual workers) to think about the content of this classical thesis, about the fact that this classical thesis is the tried and tested result of a century of class struggle by the workers’ movement across the globe, and about the fact that this result has cost hundreds of thousands of anonymous worker militants an unheard of price, paid in dedication, sacrifice and blood. Simply, they remained at their posts in a combat infinitely harsher, riskier and more dangerous than the one facing the younger generations of today, thanks to the sometimes tragic sacrifices of their elders, whether they perished or survived.
Let us briefly return to our thesis about the distinction between the Repressive State Apparatus and the Ideological State Apparatuses.
For there is another difference (apart from the one between repression and ideologization) between the Repressive State Apparatus and the Ideological State Apparatuses. It is that while there is one Repressive State Apparatus, there are several Ideological State Apparatuses. This difference is important.
The state apparatus that we are identifying as repressive presents itself as an organic whole; more precisely, as a centralized corps that is consciously and directly led from a single centre. It must be borne in mind that this repressive apparatus, a ‘specialized component’ of which we singled out in discussing the physical (and other) sanctions imposed by the law, has a centralized organic dispositive that is particularly conspicuous in France, whose chief of state has announced that he is not interested in ‘inaugurating chrysanthemums’. At the head of the Repressive State Apparatus, then, is the real chief of state. Under his direct orders is the government50 (as well as the farce of the current parliament: the appearances of a ‘parliamentary’ regime must be maintained, since ‘democrats’ have attached importance to it since 1789). Under his or their orders are the administration, the army, the police, the judiciary (the story goes that it is independent), the courts, the prisons, and so on.
When it comes to repression, of course, there is a division of labour among these different ‘corps’, which are merely members,51 and repression is exercised in different or even very different forms by them. A civil servant in the central administration does not, even if he is a tax inspector, use the same ‘methods’ as a policeman; a customs officer does not use the same methods as an army officer, and so on.
But the fact remains that all of these members belong to one and the same corps of repressive agents under the orders of those who hold state power, the political representatives of the dominant class, who implement its class politics. (In France today, this dominant class is the imperialist French bourgeoisie.) We may therefore say that the Repressive State Apparatus comprises an organic whole, because it is organized/unified under a single leadership: that of the political representatives of the class in power.
It is a different story with the Ideological State Apparatuses. They exist in the plural and have a relatively independent material existence.
The Church is, despite the schools it still has, its chaplains in the public schools, and its ideological representatives in the state school system, an Ideological State Apparatus that can no longer, in 1969, be conflated with the school. That is the result of a ferocious class struggle which opposed, throughout the nineteenth century, the landed aristocracy allied with the Church on the one hand, and, on the other, the capitalist bourgeoisie that emerged from the French Revolution in alliance with the petty bourgeoisie. It was a very dearly purchased result that, today, is established fact.
Similarly, although the Church has its publishing houses and ‘shows’ (masses, processions, pilgrimages, and so on), as well as ideological representatives in the other apparatuses, it cannot be identified with the Ideological State Apparatuses comprising publishing, the cultural apparatus (spectacles of all kinds), or the news and information apparatus.
The same may be said of all the Ideological State Apparatuses, the political apparatus included. Despite the inevitable overlaps between them, they are objectively distinct, relatively autonomous, and do not form an organized, centralized corps with a single, conscious leadership. For example, there is no longer a Ministry of Religion in France, and De Gaulle, in spite of ‘His Highness’, does not command Archbishop Marty’s Ideological State Apparatus, his complicity with Marty notwithstanding, the way he commands Edgar Faure’s Ideological State Apparatus or the news and information Ideological State Apparatus, the most effective part of which, the RTF, has been presided over by Mr d’Ormesson, ‘in complete independence and objectivity’.52
If these Ideological State Apparatuses are distinct, relatively autonomous, more or less malleable, and under more or less direct state control (even when they are state institutions, like the schools or radio, they are not all equally malleable, at least not in certain periods; they even ‘grate’ on certain occasions, terribly), what makes them Ideological State Apparatuses? Above all, the ideology that is realized in them. This ideology, being the dominant ideology, is that of the dominant class, the class that holds state power and directly and imperiously commands the Repressive State Apparatus.
At this point, we need to return to Marx’s and Lenin’s theses on the state and the ideology of the dominant class. We can now better evaluate their import and scope.
To put things in a nutshell:
1) Marx’s and Lenin’s theory holds that the state is the ‘concentrate’ and the ‘machine’ of the dominant class’s domination. If we take Marx and Lenin at their word, this means that the superstructure is centred, concentred, on the state, as a class superstructure. This thesis thus allows us to rectify the useful, but overly cut-and-dry, distinctions of the ‘topography’ on which we insisted only recently, especially those between the legal-political and ideological superstructures. That distinction remains correct, but on condition that we stipulate, from now on, that the difference between these superstructures exists and exists only under the domination of an absolutely determinant unity: that of the state, of state power and the state apparatuses, repressive and ideological.
2) Marx’s and Lenin’s theory holds, consequently, that the dominant ideology, that of the dominant class, is also, despite its internal variations and the differences between the apparatuses in which it exists, arrayed around, and concentrated in the form of, the ideology of the dominant class, the class holding state power. Hence it is concentrated in the form of an ideological unity which, despite the contradictions internal to this unity, can and should be called the ideology of the class state in question. Thus what makes for the unity of the various Ideological State Apparatuses is the fact that they realize, each in its own domain and each in its proper modality, an ideology that, notwithstanding its differences or even its internal contradictions, is the State Ideology.
Definition: the state is therefore, under the power of the state, 1) the Repressive State Apparatus, and 2) the Ideological State Apparatuses. The unity of the State Apparatus and the Ideological State Apparatuses is ensured by the class politics of those who hold state power, acting directly in the class struggle by means of the Repressive State Apparatus and indirectly by means of the realization of the State Ideology in the Ideological State Apparatuses.
What is the State Ideology? We will discuss it at greater length in Volume 2. Suffice it to say, for the moment, that the State Ideology brings together a certain number of major themes, borrowed from various ideological ‘regions’ (religious, legal, moral, political, and so on), in a system that sums up the essential ‘values’ which the domination of the class holding state power needs in order to make the exploited and the agents of exploitation and repression, as well as the agents of ideologization, ‘go’; that which it needs, therefore, in order to ensure the reproduction of the relations of production. As far as the bourgeois state is concerned, the essential themes brought together in the State Ideology seem to me to be the following:
1) Nationalism: the theme of France, of France’s World Role, of the Mission and Grandeur of France. France becomes, as need dictates, ‘the Eldest Daughter of the Church’;
2) Liberalism: the theme of free enterprise above all, and the theme of Freedom in general, of the Defence of Freedom in the world, of the Free World, and so on;
3) Economism: the theme of interest, not only the national interest (see above), but also the theme of the defence of the interests that … one and all have in the ‘general progress of the sciences and technologies’ and the national economy. Appendix: ‘The Ideology of Work’;53
4) Humanism, the obligatory counterpoint to the theme of Economic Interest; it forges the synthesis between Nationalism and France’s Mission, Man’s Freedom, and so on.
Every Ideological State Apparatus ‘accommodates’, in its fashion, some or all of these themes, their component parts and their resonances.
1 [TN: See Chapter 7, n. 1.]
2 [TN: See Chapter 7, n. 2.]
3 Vladimir Lenin, ‘The Trade Unions, the Present Situation and Trotsky’s Mistakes’, in Lenin, Collected Works, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1965, vol. 32, p. 20 [Althusser’s emphasis].
4 Ibid., p.24.
5 Be it recalled that the class struggle goes infinitely beyond those of its effects which are inscribed in the forms of the Ideological State Apparatuses. Here we are analyzing those effects alone, to the exclusion of all others.
6 [TN: The Human Scale (L’échelle humaine) was the title of a book Blum published in 1945. It features a polemical account of the differences between the communists’ inhuman socialism and the socialists’ ‘socialism on a human scale’. Echelle also means ladder.]
7 [TN: For the first eighteen months of the existence of the post-war French Fourth Republic, with the exception of a brief interlude from December 1946 to January 1947, successive French governments were formed by the PCF, the Socialists of the Section Française de l’Internationale ouvrière, and the conservative Mouvement républicain populaire.]
8 In Marxist doctrine, a democracy can only be characterized by its class nature: bourgeois democracy, petty-bourgeois democracy (bourgeois democracy’s appendage and fig leaf), or popular democracy, democracy for the people.
9 A correct line does not always triumph in six months. Transitional periods can be long and can unfold in stages. The international balance of power can impede their progress. With no correct mass line, however, it is pointless to invoke the need for a transition, which, in that case, is just idle chatter.
10 [TN: See Chapter 7, n. 6.]
11 Let us not forget that in 1908, at a critical moment in the history of the Russian workers’ movement, Lenin was for maintaining the Social-Democratic deputies in the Duma. He was opposed by the leftist-rightist Bolsheviks known as the Otzovists, who were for recalling them. [TN: ‘Leftist-rightist’ means ostensibly leftist but actually rightist; see Louis Althusser, ‘Lenin and Philosophy’, in Lenin and Philosophy, London, New Left Books, 1971, p. 24.]
12 Although the government is elected by parliament, which is part of the political Ideological State Apparatus, the governemnt is part of the Repressive State Apparatus. That is normal. See p. 136 of this edition.
13 One need only consider all the bills for educational reform proposed by the Communist Party. They have never been translated into reality. That is normal.
14 It succeeded in gaining recognition only after a long class struggle, throughout which it was constantly maligned as ‘the party of a foreign country’ or the ‘Separatists’ Party’.
15 These natural allies are, in order of priority: 1) the small, poor and proletarian peasantry; 2) segments of the rural and urban petty bourgeoisie – some middle peasants as well as craftsmen, small merchants, employees, intellectual workers, secondary school and college students, and so on.
16 [EN: Crossed out: ‘This possibility attests a necessary effect of the existence of bourgeois law (here, bourgeois democracy’s constitutional law) that we noted in passing when we noted that the essence of law consists in being applied, that is, respected and circumvented. This will have come as no surprise to jurists or politicians.’]
17 [TN: La Constituante, the National Constituent Assembly created shortly after the French Revolution began.]
18 [TN: Edmé Patrice de Mac-Mahon, who led the forces that bloodily suppressed the Paris Commune, was elected president of France in 1873. He proved unable to restore the monarchy shortly after his election, although the National Assembly was then dominated by monarchists.]
19 [TN: The Confédération française démocratique du travail, the second largest French trade-union confederation after the CGT, is the successor organization to the French Christian Labour-Union Confederation (CFTC). The CFDT was formed in 1964, when the CFTC majority adopted a class-struggle line and changed its name. The CFDT and CGT collaborated between 1966 and 1970.]
20 On the other hand, there are no unions or political parties in the army, the Great Mute Organization in which only generals have the right to speak, when, let us note, they are authorized to do so by the Minister of the Armed Forces, except on 18 June [1940, when De Gaulle made, in London, a radio declaration repudiating the French government’s cessation of hostilities with the Axis powers], 13 May [1958], or during putsches such as the Algiers putsches. and so on.
21 [TN: Crossed out: ‘The most resplendent jewels in the French associative apparatus are, incontestably, the Order of Physicians, the Order of Architects, the Order of Notaries, and so on.’ See Chapter 11, n. 5 and ‘Note on the ISAs’, p. 218 below.]
22 It poses serious ‘logical’ ‘problems’ as far as the jurists’ requirements of systematicity, formalism and universality are concerned!
23 [TN: CGT-Force Ouvrière, the third biggest French union, was created in 1947 with US assistance following a split in the CGT.]
24 ‘Apoliticism’ is one of the themes of the State Ideology realized in the associative Ideological State Apparatus. It proclaims: ‘ “Apolitical” defence of the interests of the Profession … in the interests of the Nation!’ The struggle against trade union apoliticism is thus the touchstone of the ideological class struggle of a workers’ trade-union organization. The history of the CGT illustrates this struggle: it was apolitical when it was founded, was combated by the CGTU, and was then reunified on the basis of a rejection of apoliticism. [TN: Adopting the Charter of Amiens in 1906, the CGT declared its complete independence of both the state and all political parties. On the CGTU, see n. 44 below.]
25 The most ‘plebeian’ segment of the common people, led by Marat, Duchêne and countless other vigorous, courageous popular agitators. On the horizon was the communism of a Babeuf or a Buonarotti, which was still in search of its theoretical and political positions, as well as its forms of organization and action.
26 [TN: Albert Mathiez, La Révolution française, Vol. 3, Paris, 1922.]
27 Pétain was something else again: same end, but different means. The Bonapartist and fascist solutions should not be confused. De Gaulle has so far adopted not the fascist, but the Bonapartist solution, and, what is more, the ‘liberal’ Bonapartist solution, for the ‘solution’ represented by his Bonapartism is distinguished by the fact that it has restored (as it did, moreover, in 1945 as well) the terribly jeopardized unity of the bourgeois class itself. The French bourgeois class split very dangerously down the middle between 1940 and 1945, in the face of the Nazi invasion, and in 1958, when confronted with the Algerian insurrection. In both cases, De Gaulle’s historic role consisted in ‘putting the pieces back together’ – that is, restoring the unity of the French bourgeoisie. Furthermore, beginning in 1958, he has presented French imperialism with the non-parliamentary democratic plebiscitary state demanded by the monopolies.
28 [TN: The ‘Three Glorious Days’ of 27, 28 and 29 July, 1830, when an uprising toppled Charles X, putting an end to the Bourbon monarchy of the French Restoration.]
29 In May 1968, the people remembered that the street can belong to the people. they have not forgotten. They will not forget.
30 We should reread Lenin’s State and Revolution. Whenever it is a question of destroying the bourgeois state apparatuses, the example of the Commune surges up – its example and practical political inventions.
31 [TN: Union nationale des Etudiants de France, the biggest student union in France.]
32 [TN: The Parti socialiste unifié, a small party founded in 1960, was close to the CFDT. Its candidate in the June 1969 presidential elections, Michel Rocard, joined the Socialist Party five years later and held the post of prime minister from 1988 to 1991 under the Socialist President François Mitterrand.]
33 [TN: Sociologist, former member of the PCF, founding member of the PSU, author of La nouvelle classe ouvrière (Paris, 1963) / The New Working Class (Nottingham, 1975).]
34 [TN: The published French text (étudiants d’âge ou autres) is garbled. The only partially crossed-out manuscript version reads: ‘students of normal age or those who hang on as students for the sake of the “cause” ’ (that is, in order to be able to continue to play a political role in the UNEF).]
35 By what miracle do some intellectuals and ‘students’ possessed of all the advantages of consumer society manage to escape the ‘alienation’ that the same objects of consumer society cause among workers? Answer: they escape it because they, for their part, are ‘conscious’ of their alienation. It is not, however, consciousness that determines being, but being that determines consciousness (Marx). This truth admits of one and only one exception: that of the intellectuals who feel the need to believe that, in their case, and in their case alone, consciousness determines being.
36 I say, emphatically, in this respect, and in this respect alone. For the masses of young people, for example, bear no responsibility for the erroneous declarations of a tiny handful of ‘leaders’. What is more, the ideological revolt of young workers and young people in the schools is, at bottom and as far as the great mass goes, profoundly progressive. It should be judged on the basis of the objective tendency informing it in the national and global class struggle – not on the basis of a simple mistaken formula put forward by someone who is temporarily a personality. This holds a fortiori for proletarians and other wage-workers in the CFDT.
37 See Jean Bruhat, [‘Le mouvement ouvrier français au début du XIXe siècle et les survivances de l’Ancien Régime’], La Pensée, [no. 142, December 1968].
38 [TN: The site of a massacre of May Day demonstrators perpetrated in 1891 by French army units in a centre of the textile industry in the Pas de Calais.]
39 [TN: The Grenelle accords crowned negotiations involving the French government, employers’ organizations and trade unions. The concessions made to the labour movement, although rejected by much of the rank-and-file as insufficient, were subsequently institutionalized.]
40 [TN: The CGC (Confédération générale des cadres) was founded in 1944 to defend the interests of supervisory personnel.]
41 [TN: The RILU or Profintern, in existence from 1921 to 1937, was affiliated with the Third International. The manuscript includes a note here: ‘See the documents in the appendix’. See Chapter 5, nn. 5 and 7.]
42 [TN: ‘Trade-unionist’ is in English in the original, as is ‘trade unionism’ in the following paragraph.]
43 For ‘non-proletarian wage-workers’, for example: white-collar workers, civil servants in various state apparatuses, and so on.
44 [TN: The CGTU (CGT unitaire) resulted from a 1921 split led by revolutionaries in the CGT, which had rallied to the Union sacrée in 1914. The strong anarchist and libertarian currents in the CGTU grew gradually weaker as it settled into the PCF orbit in the first half of the 1920s. The CGT and the CGTU were reunited in 1936. Maurice Thorez was the PCF’s General Secretary from 1930 to his death in 1964.]
45 [TN: ‘Anarcho-Maoist’ has been crossed out and replaced by ‘anarchist’.]
46 Not only with correct slogans – ‘Victory for the Vietnamese people! Victory for the Palestinian Resistance!’, and so on – but also in practical struggles. Think of the dockers’ refusal to load war materiel for the Indochina Expeditionary Corps and of the many different actions undertaken by the working class in this period; think of Henri Martin, and so on. [TN: Martin, a communist sailor, was imprisoned for treason in 1950 for agitating inside the armed forces against the French colonial war in Indochina. He was freed in 1953 after a broad PCF-led campaign.]
47 At the point we have reached in this regard, it is clear that we should objectively take stock of the current ‘blockage’ produced on both sides by the split, and of its effects, and that we should take action in the field of these effects itself, without underestimating the split (that would be a serious political error that would directly serve imperialism), in order to conduct a real struggle against imperialism, and thus for the international revolution.
48 Obviously, other causes were also to blame for these failures. I shall ignore them here.
49 [TN: Gauchistes, which had heavily negative connotations in PCF circles, designated a broad range of radical leftists at the time Althusser wrote, including Trotskyists, Luxemburgists, anarchists, Guevarists, and Maoists, some of whom he himself had inspired.]
50 The government really belongs to the Repressive State Apparatus, even if it formally belongs, in parliamentary democracy, to the political Ideological State Apparatus, since it is ‘elected’ by the parliament. But its ‘formal’ inclusion in the political Ideological State Apparatus can fool only those who, lapsing into ‘parliamentary cretinism’, believe that an ‘elected’ government stands above state power and the state apparatuses.
51 [TN: The French word corps means, among other things, (human) body.]
52 [TN: The French equivalent of ‘highness’ is hauteur, which also means haughtiness and tallness; De Gaulle was both haughty and tall. François Marty became archbishop of Paris in March 1968 and was made a cardinal on 28 April 1969. De Gaulle appointed Edgar Faure Minister of Education after the May events. Wladimir d’Ormesson was named head of French state radio and television (RTF) after it was reorganized as the Office de la Radiodiffusion et de la Télévision Française (ORTF) in 1964, for the ostensible purpose of giving it greater autonomy.]
53 [EN: This projected appendix is not to be found in the manuscript.]