Only here and only now can we at last answer our central question, which has been left in suspense for many pages: how is the reproduction of the relations of production ensured? In topographical terms (base, superstructure), we can say that it is ensured by the superstructure, by the legal-political superstructure and the ideological superstructure. However, since we have argued that it is imperative to go beyond this still descriptive terminology, we shall say: it is ensured by the exercise of state power in the state apparatuses, the Repressive State Apparatus on the one hand and the Ideological State Apparatuses on the other.
Let us also take what was said earlier into account. It can be assembled under the following three points:
1) All the state apparatuses function on both repression and ideology. The difference is that the Repressive State Apparatus functions in overwhelmingly preponderant fashion on repression, whereas the Ideological State Apparatuses function in overwhelmingly preponderant fashion on ideology – with all the requisite nuances in each case.
2) Whereas the Repressive State Apparatus constitutes an organized whole whose various components are centralized under a commanding unity – that of the class struggle politics applied by the political representatives of the dominant classes holding state power – the Ideological State Apparatuses are multiple, distinct, relatively autonomous, and prone to providing an objective field to contradictions which express, in forms that are as a rule limited, but in some cases extreme, the effects of the clashes between the capitalist class struggle and the proletarian class struggle, as well as their subordinate forms (for instance, the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the landed aristocracy in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, or the struggle between the big and the petty bourgeoisie, and so on).
3) Whereas the unity of the Repressive State Apparatus is ensured by the fact that it is organized in centralized, unified fashion under the leadership of representatives of the classes in power who carry out those classes’ class-struggle politics, the unity of the various Ideological State Apparatuses is ensured by the dominant ideology, that of the dominant class. To account for its effects, we have to call it the State Ideology.
If we agree to take these characteristics into account, we can represent the reproduction of the relations of production in the following way, along the lines of a kind of ‘division of labour’.
The role of the Repressive State Apparatus, insofar as it is a repressive apparatus, consists essentially in guaranteeing by force (physical or not) the political conditions for the reproduction of the relations of production. The state apparatus not only has a very large part in its own reproduction;1 it also, and above all, guarantees the general political conditions for the operation of the Ideological State Apparatuses by means of repression (from the most brutal physical force to simple administrative orders and prohibitions, open or tacit censorship, and so on).
For the Ideological State Apparatuses, by definition, ensure the reproduction, as such, of the relations of production, behind the shield’ of the Repressive State Apparatus. It is here that the State Ideology comes massively into play, the ideology of the dominant class holding state power. It is by way of the dominant ideology, the State Ideology, that the (sometimes grating) ‘harmony’ between the Repressive State Apparatus and the Ideological State Apparatuses is ensured, as well as that among the different Ideological State Apparatuses.
We are thus led to envisage the following hypothesis, as a consequence, precisely, of the diversity of the Ideological State Apparatuses in their single, because shared, role of reproducing the relations of production.
We have listed a relatively large number of Ideological State Apparatuses in contemporary capitalist social formations: the religious apparatus, scholastic apparatus, familial apparatus, political apparatus, associative apparatus, news and information apparatus, publishing apparatus, ‘cultural’ apparatus (including sport), and so on. In contrast, in the social formations dominated by the mode of production based on ‘serfdom’ (commonly called feudal), we observe that, while there existed a single Repressive State Apparatus which, not only in the absolute monarchy, but, indeed, in the earliest known states of antiquity, was formally very similar to the one we know today, the number of Ideological State Apparatuses was smaller, and they were individualized differently.
For instance, we observe that the Church (the religious Ideological State Apparatus) combined a number of functions which have today devolved upon several distinct Ideological State Apparatuses that are new with respect to the past we are evoking here. Alongside the Church, there existed a familial Ideological State Apparatus, which played an incomparably bigger role than it does in capitalist social formations. The Church and family were not, despite appearances, the only Ideological State Apparatuses. There also existed a political Ideological State Apparatus (the Estates General, the Parlement, various political factions and Leagues, the ancestors of modern political parties, and the whole political system of the free communes and then the villes). There also existed a powerful ‘proto-associative’ Ideological State Apparatus, if we may hazard that necessarily anachronistic expression: the powerful merchants’ and bankers’ guilds as well as journeymen’s and other associations. Even publishing as well as news and information undeniably underwent development, as did entertainment; initially integral parts of the Church, they became more and more independent of it.
In the pre-capitalist historical period that we are examining in very broad outline, there patently existed a dominant Ideological State Apparatus, the Church, which concentrated within itself not just religious, but also educational functions, and a very large part of the functions of information, ‘culture’ and publishing as well.2 The absolutely dominant position of the religious Ideological State Apparatus explains why all ideological struggle from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, beginning with the first shocks of the Reformation, was concentrated in anti-clerical, anti-religious struggle.
The main objective and result of the French Revolution was not just to transfer state power from the feudal aristocracy to the mercantile capitalist bourgeoisie, destroy part of the old Repressive State Apparatus, and put a new one in its place (for example, the national popular army), but also to attack the number-one Ideological State Apparatus, the Church. Hence the civil constitution of the clergy, the confiscation of church property, and the creation of new Ideological State Apparatuses to replace the religious Ideological State Apparatus in its dominant role.
Naturally, things did not happen all by themselves. Witness the Concordat, the Restoration, and, throughout the nineteenth century, the long class struggle that the industrial bourgeoisie waged against the aristocracy to establish bourgeois hegemony over functions earlier fulfilled by the Church. We can say that the bourgeoisie relied on the new political, parliamentary-democratic Ideological State Apparatus, established in the first years of the Revolution and restored, after long, violent struggles, for a few months in 1848 and for decades after the fall of the Second Empire, in order to conduct its struggle against the Church and wrest its ideological functions from it – in a word, in order to ensure not only its political hegemony, but also its ideological hegemony, essential for reproducing capitalist relations of production.
That is why we believe we are justified in advancing the following thesis, with all the risks it involves. We think that the Ideological State Apparatus that has been elevated to the dominant position in mature capitalist formations, at the end of a violent political and ideological class struggle against the old Ideological State Apparatus, is the scholastic ideological apparatus.
This thesis may seem paradoxical, since it plainly seems to everyone – according, that is, to the ideological representation that the bourgeoisie was at pains to forge for both itself and the classes it exploited – that the Ideological State Apparatus dominant in capitalist social formations is not the school, but the political Ideological State Apparatus, that is, the parliamentary democratic regime, accompanied by universal suffrage and struggles between parties.
Yet history, even recent history, shows that the bourgeoisie has been and is still easily capable of accommodating highly variegated forms of its political Ideological State Apparatus, other than parliamentry democracy: the First and Second Empires, the constitutional monarchy based on the Charter (Louis XVIII and Charles X), parliamentary monarchy (Louis-Philippe), or presidential democracy (De Gaulle), to consider only France. Matters are even clearer in England. There, the Revolution was especially ‘successful’ from the bourgeois standpoint. For, in contrast to what happened in France, where the bourgeoisie – thanks, be it noted, to the petty aristocracy’s stupidity – had to consent to be brought to power by peasant and plebeian ‘journées révolutionnaires’, for which it had to pay dearly, the English bourgeoisie was able to strike, more or less adroitly, a ‘compromise’ with the aristocracy, ‘sharing’ possession of state power and the state apparatus with it for a very long time. (Peace to all men of good will in the dominant classes!) In Germany, things were even more striking. Here, the imperialist bourgeoisie made its sounding entrance onto the stage of history behind a political Ideological State Apparatus in which the Imperial Junkers (symbol: Bismarck), their army, and their police provided it with a shield and leading personnel, before it put itself in the hands of the very ‘national’, very ‘socialist’, but … not particularly ‘democratic’ political apparatus known as Nazism.
Thus we believe we have solid reasons for thinking that, behind the ‘theatre’ of the political struggles which the bourgeoisie has offered the popular masses as a spectacle, or imposed on them as an ordeal, what it has established as its number-one, that is, its dominant, Ideological State Apparatus is the scholastic apparatus, which has in fact replaced the previously dominant Ideological State Apparatus, the Church, in its functions. We may even say that the school-family dyad has replaced the Church-family dyad.
Why is the scholastic apparatus the dominant Ideological State Apparatus in capitalist social formations, and how does it function? We shall explain that in a forthcoming book.3 For the moment, suffice it to say that:
1) All Ideological State Apparatuses without exception contribute to the same end: the reproduction of the relations of production, that is, of capitalist relations of exploitation.
2) Each of them contributes to this single end in its own way. The political apparatus does so by subjecting individuals to the political State Ideology: indirect (parliamentary) or direct (plebiscitary or fascist) ‘democratic’ ideology. The news and information apparatus does so by stuffing every ‘citizen’ with his daily doses of nationalism, chauvinism, liberalism, moralism, and so on, by means of the press, radio and television. The same goes for the cultural apparatus (the role of sport in fostering chauvinism is of the first importance), and so on. The religious apparatus does so by reminding us, in sermons, the grand ceremonies of birth, marriage and death, and so on, that man is only ashes unless he loves his neighbour enough to turn the other cheek to the neighbour who smites him on the first. The scholastic apparatus does so … we shall soon see in detail how. The familial apparatus … but let us leave it at that.
3) This concert is dominated by a single score, in which we hear a few ‘false notes’ (among others, those of the proletarians and their organizations, which are terribly discordant, and those of petty-bourgeois dissidents or revolutionaries as well): the score of the State Ideology, the ideology of the current dominant class, which knows very well how to integrate into its music the great themes of the humanism of the Great Ancestors, who wrought the miracle of Greece before Christianity, and, thereafter, the Grandeur of Rome, the Eternal City, as well as the themes of interest, particular and general, as is only proper. Nationalism, moralism and economism. Pétain said, more cynically: Work, Family, Fatherland.
4) In this concert, nevertheless, one Ideological State Apparatus well and truly plays the dominant role, although no one, or almost no one, lends an ear to its music: it is so hard to hear! This is the school.
From nursery school on, the school takes children from all social classes and, from nursery school on and for years thereafter, the years when children are most ‘vulnerable’, stuck fast as they are between the scholastic and familial Ideological State Apparatuses, pumps them full, with old methods and new, of certain kinds of ‘know-how’ (French, arithmetic, natural history, science, literature) packaged in the dominant ideology, or, simply, of the dominant ideology in the pure state (ethics, civics, philosophy). Somewhere around the age of fourteen, an enormous mass of children are dumped ‘into production’, to become workers or small peasants. Another segment of the school-age population sticks with it and somehow manages to go a bit further, only to fall by the wayside and find jobs as lower-level supervisory personnel or junior managers, white-collar workers, minor or middle-level civil servants, and petty bourgeois of all kinds. A last group makes it to the summit, either to sink into intellectual underemployment or semi-unemployment or to fill the posts of agents of exploitation or agents of repression, professional ideologues (priests of all kinds, most of whom are convinced ‘secularists’), and also agents of scientific practice.
Every mass that falls by the way is by and large, a few errors and miscarriages aside, practically provided with the ideology that suits the role it is to play in class society: the role of the exploited (with a highly ‘developed’ ‘professional’, ‘moral’, ‘civic’, ‘national’ and apolitical ‘consciousness/conscience’); the role of agent of exploitation (knowing how to order workers around and talk to them), agent of repression (knowing how to issue orders and exact obedience ‘without discussion’, or how to put the demagogy of political leaders’ rhetoric to work), or professional ideologue (knowing how to treat consciousness/conscience with the appropriate respect, that is, the appropriate contempt, threats and demagogy, couched in the accents of Morality, Virtue, ‘Transcendence’, the Nation, France’s World Role, and so on).
Of course, many of these contrasting virtues (modesty, resignation and submissiveness on the one hand, and cynicism, contempt, confidence, self-importance and arrogance, even smooth talk and suavity on the other) are also acquired in families, in the Church, in the army, from good books, from films, and even in the stadiums. No other Ideological State Apparatus, however, has a captive audience of all the children of the capitalist social formation at its beck and call (and – this is the least it can do – at no cost to them) for as many years as the schools do, eight hours a day, six days out of seven.
The relations of production of a capitalist social formation, that is, the relations of exploited to exploiters and exploiters to exploited, are primarily reproduced in this process of acquiring what comes down, in the end, to a handful of limited types of know-how, accompanied by massive inculcation of the ideology of the dominant class. I here anticipate demonstrations that we shall soon be providing when I say that the mechanisms that produce this result, vital for the capitalist regime, are of course covered up and concealed by a universally reigning ideology of the school, since it is one of the essential forms of the dominant bourgeois ideology: an ideology which depicts the school as a neutral environment free of ideology (because it is … not religious) where teachers respectful of the ‘conscience’ and ‘freedom’ of the children entrusted to them (in complete confidence) by their ‘parents’ (who are free in their turn, that is, are the owners of their children) set them on the path to adult freedom, morality and responsibility by their own example, and provide them access to learning, literature, and the well-known ‘emancipatory’ virtues of literary or scientific humanism.
I beg the pardon of those teachers who, in impossible or appalling conditions, are striving to turn the scientific and political weapons that they manage to find in the history and knowledge that they ‘teach’ back against the ideology and the system and practices in which they are trapped. They are heroes of a kind. But they are very rare. How many others (the immense majority!) do not even begin to suspect the ‘work’ that the system (which overwhelms and crushes them) forces them to do, or, worse, put their whole heart and all their ingenuity into performing it with extreme conscientiousness (the celebrated new methods!): in, say, the ‘pilot’ classes of nursery school and elementary school, secondary school and trade school.
So little do they suspect it that they are helping, by their very devotion, to sustain and cultivate this ideological representation of the school, which makes the school today as ‘natural’ and useful-indispensable or even beneficial for our contemporaries as the Church was ‘natural’, indispensable and generous for our ancestors of a few centuries ago. The fact is that the Church has today been replaced by the school: it has succeeded it and occupies its dominant sector, even if there are certain limitations on that sector (because the school system is carefully flanked by the Church, which is not mandatory, and by the army, which is mandatory and … free, like school). It is true that the school can count on help from the family, despite the ‘snags’ that are troubling the family’s previous functioning (ever since the Manifesto announced its disintegration) as an Ideological State Apparatus. That functioning was once sure; it no longer is. Since May, bourgeois families of the highest rank themselves know something about that – something irreversible that is shaking them up, and, often, even has them ‘trembling’.
1 Just as there once existed hereditary monarchical dynasties, there exist, in the capitalist state, dynasties of politicians and dynasties of military men (consider the naval officers who are traditionally recruited, like the diplomatic corps, from the strata of the old aristocracy).
2 Over and above its other functions, if one may put it that way, for the Church was directly involved in feudal exploitation and possessed immense ‘ecclesiastical fiefs’; thus it was an economic power.
3 Schools, forthcoming in Autumn 1969 (Maspero). [EN: This project was not realized. See Etienne Balibar’s preface to the present volume.] Let us, however, here and now point out the very big difference between the capitalist school system and the feudal Church: the former, unlike the feudal Church, is not an ‘economic power’ and takes no part in capitalist exploitation. To be sure, we cannot say as much, even with all the required nuances, about certain domains of scientific research.