There follow just a few words on a vast subject. I beg the reader’s pardon for their presumptuousness and, at the same time, their extremely schematic character.1
So far we have seen, in very broad outline, what a mode of production is. And we have understood that we had to rise to the standpoint of reproduction in order to understand the existence and functioning of the superstructure (law-state-ideology), which is erected on the infrastructure or ‘base’ of a mode of production.
We have discovered, contrary to ideas that we once developed and repeated after a certain number of classic texts, that it is not enough to represent the relationship between the base on the one hand and the legal-political superstructure and ideological superstructure on the other – by means of the spatial metaphor of the topography of an edifice, despite the very great services, indispensable in some cases, that this topographical representation in ‘levels’ or ‘instances’ can render. We have come to the conclusion that we have to rise to the standpoint of the reproduction of the conditions of production in order to see what the ‘function’ and ‘functioning’ of the superstructure are. For while mere observation of the mechanisms of the economic base (we are here discussing the capitalist mode of production alone) enables us to account for the reproduction of the conditions of the productive forces, labour-power included, it by no means enables us to account for the reproduction of the relations of production.
We know that what characterizes a mode of production in the last instance is ‘the relations of production and exchange specific to it’ (Marx). Since the relations of exchange are a function of the relations of production, a mode of production is ultimately characterized by the relations of production.
Hence we can advance the following very simple proposition: a mode of production subsists only insofar as the reproduction of the conditions of production is ensured. Among these conditions of production, the reproduction of the relations of production plays the determinant role.2
The superstructure ensures the conditions of this reproduction (by means of the Repressive State Apparatus) and this reproduction itself (by means of its Ideological State Apparatuses). It follows, as we saw, that the entire superstructure is grouped around, and centred on, the state, considered in its two aspects as a class force of repression and a class force of ideologization. It further follows that ideology, which we earlier tended to treat as an ‘instance’ clearly distinct from the legal-political, must itself be brought into relation with the state and conceived of, in the unity masking its complex diversity, as the State Ideology.
If this is right, the problem of the duration of a social formation dominated by a given mode of production (in the case before us, the capitalist mode of production) depends on the ‘duration’ of the superstructure that ensures the conditions of that reproduction as well as that reproduction itself – that is to say, the duration of the class state, considered as the unity of its repressive apparatus and ideological apparatuses.
Given these conditions, it is no wonder that every revolution in the relations of production either a consequence and confirmation of the disintegration of the state (which can be brought down by an ‘accident’ such as the Barbarian invasions – but I am here advancing a hypothesis that is at once very partial and, what is more, very precarious, if not doubtful) or is the effect of the overthrow of the existing state pursuant to a conquest of state power, that is, the confiscation of its apparatuses and their replacement. That is why political struggle inevitably revolves around the state: this is an altogether classic Marxist thesis, implying, where a capitalist social formation is concerned, a capitalist class struggle to maintain state power and reinforce the state apparatuses (among other ways, by reforming them), and a proletarian class struggle to take state power, destroy the state’s bourgeois apparatuses, and replace them with proletarian apparatuses under the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In the strong sense, consequently, a social revolution consists in dispossessing the dominant class of state power – that is, of control over the state apparatuses that ensure the reproduction of the prevailing relations of production – and establishing new relations of production, the reproduction of which is ensured by the destruction of the old state apparatuses and the (long and difficult) construction of new ones. Examples of revolutions in the strong sense (social revolutions) are the 1789 bourgeois revolutions in France, the 1917 Russian socialist revolution, the 1949 Chinese socialist revolution, and so on.
But there are also revolutions in the weak sense. They do not affect the relations of production, that is, state power and the whole set of state apparatuses, but only the political Ideological State Apparatus. Examples of these ‘revolutions’ in the weak sense are the 1830 and 1848 revolutions in France. They consisted in ‘revolutionizing’ the political ideological state apparatus: very precisely, in replacing the constitutional monarchy of Charles X, based on the Charter, with the parliamentary monarchy of Louis-Philippe in 1830, and, in 1848, in replacing Louis-Philippe’s parliamentary monarchy with a parliamentary republic. Thus they involved only modifications to the political Ideological State Apparatus, accompanied, of course, by modifications to other Ideological State Apparatuses, such as the schools. These ‘revolutions’ were obviously only the effect of the two stages in which the bourgeoisie’s and petty bourgeoisie’s class struggle rid itself of the landed aristocracy’s political representatives at the head of the state. In sum, they represented a family class struggle between dominant classes.
In contrast, although the coup d’état of 2 December [1851] was also a ‘revolution’ of this kind, formally speaking, it has not been deemed worthy of the honourable title of ‘revolution’ because it was not the result of popular mass action, but the work of a few individuals conspiring to bring off a coup de main. Only Pétain, taking his cue from Mussolini, Hitler and Franco, had the shameless cynicism to confer the name national ‘revolution’ on the political promotion that France’s military defeat at the hands of the Nazi armies netted him towards the end of his career. He thereby demonstrated the servility of an imitator, which should not be mistaken for a sense for ideas. In contrast, De Gaulle, who was both cultivated and prudent, had the political ‘tact’ not to call his 13 May 1958 coup d’état a ‘revolution’. Yet, formally speaking, it was one, because, like Pétain’s, it changed something of importance in the political Ideological State Apparatus, reducing the parliament to an echo chamber and universal suffrage to a plebiscitary role.
These are, however, intra-bourgeois affairs, since the ‘personalization of power’3 was never anything more than a simple variant of the impregnable (to date) state of the capitalist class: it answered to the needs of 1960s French imperialism. Let us therefore return to revolutions in the strong sense, those which transform the existing relations of production while destroying the state and its apparatuses.
It is easy to see that, if a mode of production lasts only as long as the system of state apparatuses that guarantees the conditions of reproduction (reproduction = duration) of its base, that is, its relations of production, one has to attack the system of the state apparatuses and seize state power to disrupt the conditions of the reproduction (= duration = existence) of a mode of production and establish new relations of production. They are established under the protection of a new state and new state apparatuses which ensure the reproduction (= duration = existence) of the new relations of production, in other words, the new mode of production. When it is a question of the socialist revolution, this new state passes into the hands of representatives of the proletariat and its allies, who hold state power, that is to say, control the state’s apparatuses. This is the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
This schema is simple, clear, and convincing. But it is formalistic. For we know that the revolutionary conquest of the bourgeois state, its destruction, and its replacement by the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat are not the effect of a simple logical argument, or of simple exhaustion of the old system of the capitalist relations of production, but are, rather, the effect of a mass class struggle, which can only be a long-term class war, to employ Mao Zedong’s accurate formula, an excellent summary of Marx’s and Lenin’s theses. A moment ago, we evoked the absolute conditions which guarantee that this class struggle of the popular masses will culminate in victory, a lasting victory. Now I would like to add a few words on one particular condition of this class struggle.
This condition becomes intelligible only if we once again recall the distinction between the Repressive State Apparatus and the Ideological State Apparatuses; the difference in the way they function (the repressive apparatus functions primarily on violence, while the ideological apparatuses function primarily on ideology); and the distinction thanks to which there exists only one Repressive State Apparatus, but several Ideological State Apparatuses.
We may put forward a thesis in the light of these different distinctions. It can be presented in two points:
1) The hard core of the state is its repressive apparatus. It is endowed with a force and a power of resistance that are by definition meant to be ‘fail proof’.
The core of this hard core is made up of paramilitary repressive corps (police, riot police, and so on) and the army (as well as the armies of the fraternal imperialist states that readily cross frontiers when they are ‘called’ to the rescue). This is the ultimate core, the ‘last bastion’, in that it comprises the dominant class’s argument of last resort, the ultima ratio of pure violence.
It is also a ‘core’ in the sense that it comprises the densest element and is subject in its turn to iron discipline (discipline is ‘what makes the armed forces strong’)4 and the most severe sort of internal repression (deserters and mutineers are shot). It is when this core itself is disabled, when it breaks down and disintegrates (as it did in Russia in 1917, under the impact of the terrible wartime suffering and the Russian defeats) that the state totters on the brink of the precipice, with no last resort available to it (apart from the fraternal states’ armies: consider the intervention of the French, Czech and English armies, among others, in Russia in 1917–18).5
This innermost core can be sapped by another, purely internal weakness. When it is not a professional army (note that De Gaulle was in favour of a professional army, in opposition to the tradition of 1789, defended later by Jaurès), it is made up of conscripts, that is, ‘privates’ of popular extraction who, like the ‘Brave Soldiers of the 17th Regiment’ facing the winegrowers in southern France before the First World War, may ‘refuse to fire’,6 or ‘refuse to march’,7 like the ‘boys’ in the army in Algeria, who ‘nicked’ their officers during the [1961] Generals’ Putsch. All in all, however, the police, the riot police and the army are designed to weather the storm, and it is terribly difficult, if not impossible, to make a dent in them, except in the case of a lost war or a revolution.
2) The Ideological State Apparatuses, in contrast, are infinitely more vulnerable.
Since they realize the existence of the State Ideology, but piecemeal and in disorganized fashion (for each of them is relatively autonomous), and since they function on ideology, it is in them and their forms that much8 of the protracted war represented by the class struggle takes place, the class struggle which can eventually succeed in overthrowing the dominant classes, that is to say, in wresting state power from their hands.
Everyone knows that the class struggle in the Repressive State Apparatus – the police, the army, and even the administration – is in ‘ordinary’ periods, if not a virtually lost cause, then, at least, a sharply limited undertaking. In the Ideological State Apparatuses, on the other hand, class struggle is possible, serious, and can go a very long way, for militants, and later the masses, acquire their political experience in the Ideological State Apparatuses before fighting the class struggle out ‘to the finish’. It is no accident that Marx said that people become conscious of their interests and fight out their class struggle in ideology. We have, so far, only formulated this intuition of genius by the founder of scientific socialism in somewhat more exact terms.
I would, precisely, like to make a few remarks on the class struggle in the Ideological State Apparatuses. However, lest they confuse the reader, we need to recall a few fundamental facts first.
We have already discussed the class struggle of workers’ organizations in the political and associative Ideological State Apparatuses, upholding the classic thesis that the political class struggle should be deeply rooted in the economic class struggle, the struggle ‘for bread-and-butter demands’. We talked about enterprises in this connection, capitalist enterprises in the case to hand.
Well then! Let us set out from what is going on in French firms in 1969 in order to make it clear how Marxist theory accounts for things in all their complexity, so that we can try to provide a scientific explanation of the matter.
The fact that 1969 France is a capitalist social formation means that the capitalist mode of production operates in it in dominant fashion, and therefore that production (which takes place in enterprises) is dominated and regulated by capitalist relations of production. These relations of production are, at the same time, relations of capitalist exploitation.
This is reflected concretely, empirically, in the fact that the buildings belonging to an enterprise (for instance, the factory), the material processed in the enterprise (which can consist of semi-finished goods), the machine tools, and so on, in short, the enterprise’s means of production, belong to their capitalist owner, who can direct the enterprise’s production himself or entrust that task to a salaried director.
This is reflected, at the same time (for it is quite simply the same thing, but regarded, now, from the proletarians’ standpoint), in the fact that the enterprise ‘hires’ workers (and other staff who are not workers: typists, accountants, engineers, supervisory personnel, and so on) on a daily, weekly or, more rarely, monthly basis as wage-workers. Wage-workers are individuals who, since they do not possess means of production, cannot produce anything with ‘their own means’ (their own two hands) and, consequently, can only sell the use of their two hands to the owner of an enterprise which, precisely, houses means of production.
Once this basic situation, brought about by capitalist relations of production, has been well understood, we need to understand why these relations of production are simultaneously relations of exploitation.
They are relations of production because, if the ‘free’ workers were not ‘put in relation’ with the means of production, there would be no production at all. Unfortunately for us, or for them, the means of production do not work all by themselves; they (like God) need people, and not just any people: they need qualified people9 (common labourers, professionals, workers with various levels of skills, supervisors, technicians, engineers, and so on, including the ‘conductor of the orchestra’, that is, of the organization of production, who can be the capitalist in person or his number-one ‘manager’).
But these relations of production are simultaneously relations of exploitation – of the exploitation specific to the capitalist mode of production. It takes the form of the extortion of surplus labour in the form of surplus-value.
Marx indicates that the relations of production are simultaneously capitalist relations of exploitation by saying that the process of the capitalist production of goods is simultaneously a process of ‘production’ of surplus-value.
Such is the material ‘basis’, that is, not only the material condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production, but its material existence tout court. It is in the process of production itself that the process of exploitation takes place. There is no capitalism without this material basis for exploitation, this material basis for relations of production that are identical to relations of exploitation. One has to say this over and over again in a day and age in which certain dreamers are once again spouting the old anarchist refrain that reduces the capitalist mode of production to repression, or, still worse, to ‘authority’!
I said the material existence tout court of the capitalist mode of production. However, when, in this analytical approach, we examine matters more closely, it appears that to say existence is to say duration, and therefore subsistence in time, and therefore reproduction of the conditions of production and, above all, reproduction of the relations of production. We know all this already, just as we know that the state apparatuses, both repressive and ideological, intervene at the level of the reproduction of the relations of production.
We now come to the subject before us: the nature of the forms of class struggle in the Ideological State Apparatuses. We shall take seriously Marx’s formula which has it that it is in ideology that people become conscious of the class struggle and fight it out.
Let us begin by noting that Marx says ideology, whereas we say Ideological State Apparatuses. This terminological difference will be problematic only for those who have a bourgeois-idealist conception of the nature of ideology (like the conception typical of the Enlightenment).
For, despite appearances, that is, despite ideological prejudices about ideology and ideas, ideology does not exist in ideas. Ideology can exist in the form of written discourses (books) or oral discourses (sermons, courses, speeches, and so on) that are supposed to be vehicles for ‘ideas’. But, precisely, one’s ‘idea’ of ‘ideas’ governs what occurs in these discourses. To anticipate demonstrations we will be making later, let us say that ‘ideas’ by no means have, as the ideology of ideas tends to suggest, an ideal, idea-dependent [idéal, idéelle], or spiritual existence; they have a material existence. It would take too long to provide a general demonstration of that here. We can, however, verify it in the case of the Ideological State Apparatuses, if we are granted the following proposition, which is itself very general.
Ideology does not exist in the ‘world of ideas’ conceived as a ‘spiritual world’. Ideology exists in institutions and the practices specific to them. We are even tempted to say, more precisely: ideology exists in apparatuses and the practices specific to them. This is the sense in which we said that Ideological State Apparatuses realize, in the material dispositives of each of these apparatuses and the practices specific to them, an ideology external to them, which we called the primary ideology and now designate by its name: the State Ideology, the unity of the ideological themes essential to the dominant class or classes.
Of course, these apparatuses and their practices take as their objects and objectives the individuals who occupy the posts of the social–technical division of labour in production and reproduction. Ideology therefore exists, by way of ideological apparatuses and their practices, precisely in the practices of these individuals. I say their practices: this includes both what are called their ‘ideas’ or ‘opinions’, including their ‘spontaneous’ ‘ideas’ about the practice (productive, scientific, ideological, political, and so on) that the division of labour assigns them, but also their ‘customs’ or ‘habits’, that is, their concrete comportment, whether ‘conscious’ or ‘unconscious’.10
It is because the dominant class’s ideology thus attains individuals themselves in their most inward ‘consciousness’ [conscience] and their most private or public ‘conduct’ that Ideological State Apparatuses can ensure the reproduction of the relations of production down to the most ‘secret’ levels of individual consciousness/conscience (professional, moral, paternal, maternal, religious, political, philosophical, and so on and so forth). We shall see, in the next chapter, by virtue of what general mechanism it does so.
Of course, since Ideological State Apparatuses are the realization of the dominant ideology (the dominant class’s ideology, on which the unity of the state confers the unity of the State Ideology), all talk of dominant ideology automatically implies that there also exists something that likewise involves ideology, but is dominated, and thus involves the dominated classes. Hence we suspect that ideology and, therefore, the Ideological State Apparatuses in which it exists, bring social classes ‘on stage’ [‘mettent en scène’ des classes sociales]: the dominant class and the dominated class (and also what we shall provisionally call the ‘middle classes’). These are, in the capitalist mode of production, the class of capitalists (and its allies) and the class of proletarians (and its allies).
Hence, we conclude that the class struggle unfolds in the forms of the Ideological State Apparatuses, although it goes far beyond those forms.
Everyone knows that the class struggle unfolds in the political Ideological State Apparatus (struggle between political parties, and so on). Everyone? No. For only a minority of the population realizes that what everyone calls ‘politics’ is in fact the form that the class struggle takes in the political system, which we call, in our terminology, the political Ideological State Apparatus.
On the other hand, only the best-trained militants are aware that the class struggle simultaneously unfolds in the associative Ideological State Apparatus, in the form of the economic class struggle. (The same remark applies here, too: how many people know that the ‘struggle for bread-and-butter demands’ is the economic form of the class struggle? How many people know that employers’ associations such as the National Confederation of French Employers, for their part, wage their capitalist class struggle in its economic form?)
I am afraid that I will surprise some readers when I tell them that the class struggle also unfolds in all the other Ideological State Apparatuses; for instance, the schools, the Church, news and information, publishing, entertainment, and … the family itself. Of course, it does so in forms specific to each of these ideological apparatuses.
Moreover, because we have found reason to affirm that, in capitalist social formations, the scholastic Ideological State Apparatus, hence the school system, or, more precisely, the dyad school-family, is dominant, I do not think there is any need for a long demonstration to make our contemporaries see that the class struggle unfolds there as well. The May 1968 events and all the ensuing events took it upon themselves to provide empirical verification of our thesis. Or, rather, these events, in addition to the radical novelty that they introduced into this class struggle, whose existence the vast majority of people had never so much as suspected, showed that the class struggle had always existed, naturally in specific forms, in Ideological State Apparatuses such as the schools, family, Church, and so on. The sole difference is that the balance of power in this class struggle was spectacularly reversed in May, and that this revealed or, at least, sowed the suspicion that the class struggle waged in the school-family dyad and even the Church had been, overwhelmingly, the class struggle of the bourgeois class’s ‘representatives’: the elementary school teacher, flanked by school inspector, father, priest, and so on.
To convince oneself of this, it is enough to read the newspapers. The muscular ‘raids’ that groups from the Association of Parents of Schoolchildren have staged on the schools in ‘support of’ outraged reactionary teachers and principals with their backs to the wall well and truly show that all these worthies are seeking vengeance for the secondary school students’ – their own children’s – ‘scandalous’ revolt. This thirst for vengeance and this revolt clearly show what is what: before secondary-school and college students’ ideological revolt, the class struggle of the bourgeoisie’s representatives or agents in the scholastic and familial apparatuses enjoyed an overwhelming advantage – so overwhelming that no one so much as suspected that it was a question, in the silence and the ‘peaceful’ order of the lycées and universities,11 of a form – specific, to be sure, but a form – of the class struggle.
I hasten to reassure parents, secondary-school teachers and, soon, elementary school teachers, especially if they are militant advocates of the separation of Church and state. They are not the only ones to have experienced the class struggle, out in the open at last, in their respective apparatuses. The same phenomena are occurring in the Church, not only in the form of ‘scandalous’ ‘incidents’ between congregation and clergy, or some members of the lower clergy and the high clergy, or even some prelates (above all in Latin America) and the Vatican, even after Vatican II, but also (oh horrors!) in the seminaries themselves, over which the political leaders of the Church (who have long experience in public relations …) have cast the veil of ecclesiastical discretion, as befits everything bearing on the sacraments and what is holy. People are raising ‘holy hell’ in the seminaries, and the effects are irreversible here, too.
However that may be, we may say that when the balance of power in the class struggle is reversed in the number-one Ideological State Apparatus (or, at least, in one part of it, the least dangerous for the bourgeoisie – for elementary schools, the essential component of the scholastic apparatus because these schools furnish the workers, have not yet been infected by the revolt), the apparatus charged, above all others, with reproducing the relations of production – above all others because it is the dominant apparatus – the least one can say is that this is a sign of the times.
What is it a sign of? It is a sign, as Lenin used to put it, that the revolution is on the agenda. This does not mean – the nuance is crucial – that the situation is revolutionary (we are still a long way from that).
Let us now take some distance from events that are still too recent to allow us truly to assess them. Let us take our distance from them in order to make the following observation.
It is no accident that all the major social revolutions which we know at all well and in sufficient detail – the 1789 French Revolution, the 1917 Russian Revolution, and the 1949 Chinese Revolution – were preceded by a long class struggle that unfolded not only around the Ideological State Apparatuses in place, but also in these ideological apparatuses. This class struggle was at once ideological, economic and political, to employ distinctions that are classic the masters of Marxism. It is enough to consider the eighteenth century in France, the nineteenth century in Russia, or the half-century that preceded the 1949 Chinese Revolution.
Before the 1789 and 1917 revolutions, we observe extremely violent struggles in the dominant Ideological State Apparatuses: especially around the Church and even in the Church, then in and around the political apparatus, and, later, in publishing and news and information. All these struggles mesh, criss-cross, sustain one another, and confusedly target a final goal unknown to most of the combatants: the destruction of the apparatuses that ensure the reproduction of the prevailing relations of production for the purpose of establishing new state apparatuses and, under their protection, new relations of production whose reproduction will be ensured by the new [ideological] state apparatuses.
The economic struggle always remains in the shadows: that is its destiny, for it is the most important class struggle. The political struggle eventually rages out in the open, regrouping all the forces in order to lead them in the final battle, the battle for state power: that is its destiny, for that is its function. The ideological (the so-called ideological) struggle, that is, the class struggle in the news and information apparatus and the publishing apparatus (the struggle for freedom of thought, expression, the press, and the dissemination of progressive and revolutionary ideas) generally takes place in advance of the open forms of political struggle; indeed, it takes place very far in advance of them.
Suffice it to consider the history of the centuries that preceded the French Revolution, bearing in mind that the bourgeois class struggle, which was merely progressive before becoming pre-revolutionary, took its meaning, at the time (as always) only as a function of the struggle of the dominant class in the same domains. Consider the incredible violence of this ‘ideological’ class struggle waged by the feudal class and its state apparatuses, first and foremost the Church; its path is littered not just with bans and recantations, but also with torture and burnings at the stake. Galileo and Giordano Bruno, to cite just those two names, while leaving aside the untold multitudes massacred during the Wars of Religion (intense class struggles waged in the religious Ideological State Apparatus, pitting heretics against the orthodox); the throngs of the ‘possessed’, of ‘witches’, of ‘madmen’ condemned to torture or the Great Confinement of which Michel Foucault was the first person in France to have the courage to give us an idea.12 Consider the universal outcast that Spinoza was before his death, and for three centuries thereafter (cast out of his Church and out of philosophy, a demon to burn or bury alive: since they could not burn him, they buried him).
We have to bear in mind this terrible past of the pre-revolutionary bourgeoisie’s ideological class struggle if we are to put the undoubtedly glorious but infinitely less heroic eighteenth-century Enlightenment back in its proper place. This was a period in which, with the help of books that were signed by their authors or were anonymous, were printed in France or abroad, and were disseminated under the counter or with the complicity of an ‘enlightened’ minister, one could wage an open struggle in books and gazettes, as well as in theatres and operas, against the Church and despotism, even if that despotism was ‘enlightened’ in its turn. (The despotism of the absolute monarchy had many adversaries on the right – à la Montesquieu – and very few on the left – à la Meslier or Rousseau. It also had a number of partisans, some sincere, others tactical: Diderot.)
Let us, however, leave these historical examples at that and return to our thesis. It allows us, perhaps, if not to understand, then at least to ‘situate’, albeit in an altogether provisional form (I am more keenly aware of this than anybody), phenomena that are the ‘antecedents’ of any social revolution.
We may say that these phenomena include all forms of the class struggle conducted in the Ideological State Apparatuses, in line with the modalities specific to each of these apparatuses. We may say that, of all these Ideological State Apparatuses, it is the Ideological State Apparatus dominant in the reproduction of the relations of production which is (or under normal circumstances should be) the number-one object of the class struggle. That explains why the long class struggle of several centuries’ duration was centred on the Church and the positions it defended, a struggle marked by mass slaughters and unimaginable measures of violence, terror, repression, extortion and intimidation – the protracted war that paved the way for the final 1789–93 assault, a political assault, on the feudal state and its apparatuses.
In attacking the apparatuses specialized in reproducing the relations of production, the bourgeoisie sapped, from within, the most vulnerable part (not only because it was diversified, but also because it was in direct, daily contact with the popular masses) of the state apparatuses. Once the Ideological State Apparatuses had been undermined, it remained only to take the last bastion of the state by force: state power, dug in behind the last battalions of the royal guard.
It seems to me that one could undertake an analysis of the same sort for both the 1917 Revolution, after making due allowance for the differences, and the 1949 Chinese Revolution, with considerable differences (there was no church in China, at least not in the Western sense of the word).
If our interpretation is on the mark, we have to rise to the standpoint of reproduction not only in order to grasp the function and functioning of the superstructure, but also so as to have the concepts that will allow us to understand the concrete history of revolutions a little better (so that we can at last found the science of their history, which is at present still much more like chronicle than science): the history of revolutions that have already been made and of others that must still be made. This will also enable us to understand a little better the conditions that must be realized if we are to establish, under the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Ideological State Apparatuses required concretely to prepare the transition to socialism – that is, the gradual disappearance of the state and all its apparatuses – instead of floundering around in ‘contradictions’ that are more or less successfully camouflaged under ‘policed’ designations, of which contemporary history offers us all too many examples.
One last remark before we conclude this chapter, a remark that is also a warning. We have in no sense just put forward a short treatise on the practice of revolution that might be cast in the form of the following rules:
1) begin by unleashing the class struggle in the Ideological State Apparatuses, while seeing to it that the ‘spearhead’ of the struggle is directed against the dominant Ideological State Apparatus (today the school);
2) combine all forms of the class struggle in all Ideological State Apparatuses in order to undermine them to the point of making their function of reproducing the relations of production impossible, and then,
3) with all the popular forces marshalled under the leadership of the revolutionary political party, the party of the revolutionary class, launch an assault on state power by destroying its ultimate apparatus, its repressive apparatus (police, riot police and so on, and the army).
That would be absurd, and infantile to boot, because voluntaristic, adventuristic and idealist. Events cannot be commanded that way. And even if, by chance, they could be, this is the place to recall that everything we have just described in discussing the class struggle in the Ideological State Apparatuses concerns the superstructure alone, which is determined and secondary, not determinant in the last instance. The base is determinant in the last instance. What happens or what can happen in the superstructure thus depends in the last instance on what happens (or does not) in the base, between the productive forces and the relations of production. That is where the class struggle has its roots. Thus we can see that it infinitely exceeds the forms of the Ideological State Apparatuses in which it comes into view.
It is a fact that, as the phrase goes, the superstructure ‘reacts back on’ the base. This fact, however, is merely stated. We have tried to shed a little light on this ‘reciprocal action’, which is, fundamentally, not a reciprocal action at all, since the specific relation in which the superstructure stands to the base is that of reproducing the conditions of its functioning. It is doubtless in the light of this concept and of the effects of the class struggle that we should re-examine the cases flagged with the descriptive term ‘reacts back on’ or ‘reciprocal action’.
This, however, does not at all provide us with the key to what happens in the base itself; very precisely, to what happens in the base (in the unity forces of production/relations of production) that is capable of fostering and then unleashing the class struggle, which, in the superstructure, begins by attacking the Ideological State Apparatuses, before proceeding to launch an assault on the Repressive State Apparatus, in order to culminate in the seizure of state power by the revolutionary class.
There are, fortunately, a number of indications in Capital and The Development of Capitalism in Russia about what happens in the base that is of decisive importance for unleashing the revolutionary class struggle in the superstructure, and for its victory. It must, however, be admitted that we are far from having worked out the theory of this process. It will be agreed that it is not with concepts as descriptive and tautological as the concepts of correspondence and non-correspondence between productive forces and relations of production that we can seriously hope to resolve the crux.
On this precise point, then, the question is in suspense. We will, one day, have to propose a solution to it.
1 Be it recalled that I continue to speak from the standpoint of reproduction in general, leaving out of account the fact that, in a capitalist regime, reproduction is always reproduction on an extended scale. The latter point, which is crucial, will be discussed in Volume 2.
2 Given the limited scope of the present discussion, I here leave the reproduction of the productive forces aside. One cannot discount the possibility that certain social formations have disappeared in history as a result of ‘accidents’ – which have to be studied very closely, of course, since there is no such thing as an ‘accident’ properly speaking – that made reproduction impossible, even simple reproduction of the productive forces, or of this or that element determinant of the productive forces, at the time. This hypothesis might enable us to account for the disappearance of what the ideologues of history call ‘civilizations’. We are indebted to Valéry for the insight that they were mortal … since they died.
3 [TN: De Gaulle was often charged, notably by communist critics, with having established a regime centred on his undemocratic or even proto-fascist exercise of ‘personal power’].
4 [TN: This catchphrase comes from the French Armed Forces’ General Code of Discipline, in force from 1933 to 1966.]
5 The armies of fraternal states, however, are not always reliable. Consider the ‘Black Sea Mutineers’ of the French fleet that intervened in 1918: André Marty, Charles Tillon and hundreds of others.
6 [TN: ‘The Brave Soldiers of the 17th Regiment’ is part of the refrain of ‘Glory to the 17th Regiment’, a song celebrating mutineers who refused to fire on striking winegrowers in south-western France in 1907.
7 [TN: The French equivalent of ‘march’, marcher, is the same word that is used in the phrase ‘ideology makes subjects go [marcher] all by themselves’. See Chapter 2, n. 27.
8 In Volume 2, we shall see that the class struggle goes far beyond the Ideological State Apparatuses. We must keep this classic thesis carefully in mind in order clearly to understand the limits of the class struggle in the Ideological State Apparatuses, our subject here.
9 Non-qualification is a defined type of qualification.
10 Certain eighteenth-century philosophers who had made considerable progress in the ‘theory’ of what we call ideology understood that there is a certain practical relationship between, in their terms, ‘opinions’ and ‘customs’; they even glimpsed the fact that ‘customs’ are more important than ‘opinions’ because they resist opinions. They even saw that ‘laws’ are often powerless to affect ‘customs’ when they are not ‘in harmony with them’. One had to be a right-wing dissident (Montesquieu) or a left-wing dissident (Rousseau) to perceive these realities.
11 And, I shall take the risk of adding, in families.
12 Histoire de la Folie, [Paris], Plon, [1961]. We have so far ignored what can, we think, justifiably be called, in our capitalist social formations, the ‘medical’ Ideological State Apparatus. It deserves a study in its own right. Foucault’s remarkable book, spurned by our medical authorities (unfortunately for them, they cannot burn it), provides us with the genealogy of important elements of this apparatus. For the history of ‘madness’, which is the history of a repression, is, even tempered by Pinel’s humanism and Delay’s pharmacology, an ongoing history. It goes very far beyond what many doctors find it convenient to call ‘madness’.