Jacques Bidet
The present volume contains, at last available to the public, ‘The Reproduction of the Relations of Production’.1 This is the manuscript from which Althusser extracted his famous text ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, first published in 1970 in the review La Pensée.
Althusser here explains, in systematic fashion, his conception of historical materialism, the conditions for the reproduction of capitalist society, and the revolutionary struggle that seeks to put an end to it. His propositions about ideology and the ‘apparatuses’, put back in the overall framework of his project and the context of his political thought, reveal their object and presuppositions.
This text may seem to be coming back to haunt us from another day and age. It does indeed bear witness, in part, to opinions that have become impossible to maintain today. Yet it continues to have, twenty-five years after it was written, a singular capacity for theoretical provocation. It confronts us with a question that is today less than ever possible to dismiss as obsolete: under what conditions, in a society that proclaims its devotion to the ideals of freedom and equality, is the domination of some people over others endlessly reproduced?
At first sight, Althusser’s manuscript presents itself as a didactic, militant text, and it is, at the same time, the best of introductions to his thought. As it unfolds, however, it gradually reveals that it also contains an original conceptual elaboration. Thus it calls for a reading at several levels: it is a political text that bears witness to its period; an introduction to the Althusserian categories for the analysis of capitalism; and a (novel) theory of the ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ and ideological ‘interpellation’.
The spirit of May 1968 runs through the entire text, that of a May that was as much the workers’ as the students’, a May that witnessed the biggest strike in French history. Communist memory was reinvigorated by the prospect of the radical changes that now seemed to be on the agenda. Althusser passionately embraced this moment and assigned it its place in the long-term course of the socialist revolution. His field of vision, in this text, encompasses ‘a century of class struggle by the workers’ movement across the face of the earth’ (‘hundreds of thousands of anonymous worker militants’, and so on, this page). It also encompasses an indubitable future: ‘We are entering an age that will see the triumph of socialism across the globe … the Revolution is already on the agenda. One hundred years from now, perhaps only fifty years from now, the face of the world will have changed: the Revolution will have carried the day from one end of the earth to the other’ (this page). Althusser has his eye on ‘the many young militants who have flocked or will flock’ to the political struggle (this page). Indirectly, he is addressing them.
This will not fail to surprise readers who know only Althusser’s philosophical texts. The essential reference, in the conception of the trade union and political struggle under capitalism, the schema for the conquest of power by the ‘proletariat and its allies’, and the conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat, is to Leninism, ‘the Leninism of Maurice Thorez’ (this page). The reference to Leninism finds expression in a return to the vocabulary of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Third International: ‘the masses’, ‘organized in the trade union’, must be ‘led towards truly revolutionary objectives’ by ‘the party of the vanguard of the proletariat’ (this page). Althusser expressly places himself in the line of what he calls the ‘classics of Marxism’. ‘Here we shall be advancing cautiously on a terrain on which Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao have long since preceded us, but without systematizing, in theoretical form, the decisive progress that their experiences [expériences, which also means ‘experiments’] and procedures implied. Why? Because these experiences and procedures were essentially confined to the terrain of political practice’ (this page). ‘Stalin neglected these questions’ (this page). One rubs one’s eyes in disbelief. Stalin’s name disappears from the piece published in La Pensée. The fact remains that there is something surrealistic in this imaginary repetition of Leninism in an altogether different place and time – in a time, notably, in which the party that Althusser called his was proposing, as if its validity were self-evident, an utterly different strategy, founded on the idea of a march towards socialism by way of a gradual, legal process of public appropriation of the major means of production.
Yet the political pathos, and the accompanying strain of exaltation, declarations of fidelity or ostentatious allegiance, and defiance of realism, should not prevent us from making our way through the book and noticing that it is also the vehicle of a theoretical investigation of great importance. That is not to say that there is not a close relation between this particular vision of history and the set of concepts it offers for an understanding of the structure and social essence of capitalism. In any case, whatever we make of the emphatic reference to ‘Marxist-Leninist philosophy’ (this page), ‘our philosophy’ (this page), it soon becomes clear that, although what is in question here is indeed Marxism and Leninism, Althusser’s thought can by no means be classified as ‘Marxism-Leninism’ in the ordinary sense of an orthodoxy. It is equally clear that it deserves to be revalued today as an autonomous source of intellectual stimulation.
The great importance of the theoretical intervention makes itself felt every time that Althusser underscores the merely ‘descriptive’ nature of traditional theory: the topography of base and superstructure (this page–this page); the correspondence between productive forces and relations of production (this page, this page); or the Marxist ‘theory’ of the state (this page), law (this page), or ideology (this page–this page). On all these subjects, which is to say, the doctrine as a whole, Althusser proposes to go beyond the form of ‘description’ (this page–this page), a form by nature ‘unstable’, and move towards ‘theory in the full sense’ (this page–this page, this page). Behind the show of modesty – the author offers us ‘unprecedented clarifications’, but only of ‘certain limited points’ (this page) – it is a question, ultimately, of producing, where we have nothing more than description, a theory in the true sense of the word.
The first chapter introduces Althusser’s thesis about philosophy as a form that presupposes social conflict and scientific work, and about the history of philosophy as a sequence of conjunctures in which novelty arises at the conjunction of decisive ‘political-economic and scientific’ ‘events’ (p. xxx). It situates Marx’s contribution in the ‘scientific’ realm: the discovery of the ‘continent of history’ (this page) and the invention of a theory capable of providing a basis for diverse social sciences.
The following chapters provide – even if they offer, to a certain extent, nothing more than a reprise of ‘classical theses’ (this page) – an articulated presentation of the major categories commanding Althusser’s interpretation of historical materialism. Every ‘social formation’ is characterized by a ‘dominant mode of production’ (this page). In the relationship between the relations of production and the productive forces that comprise the base, the former play the determinant role (Althusser develops this point in Appendix 1). In the model as a whole, the base, not the superstructure (‘Law, State, Ideologies’), is ‘determinant in the last instance’ (this page).
The specific contribution that this manuscript makes resides, of course, in the argument about ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ and ‘ideology’ developed in Chapters 5 to 12.
Publication of the present volume should offer an occasion to revisit these themes, and also, no doubt, to re-evaluate them. For putting the fragments included in the text published in La Pensée back into Althusser’s discourse as a whole brings out the close connection between his thesis on ideology (and its materialization in apparatuses) and his conception of the course of modern history. In and of itself, this is a matter of strict logic. A theory of structural reproduction has, as its corollary, a theory of the transformation of the structure: it tends to show the constant conditions in which variation occurs, and eventually puts an end to those constant conditions. Althusser’s conception of ongoing variation, like his conception of the transition to socialism, shapes, in its turn, his conception of the conditions for the reproduction of capitalism as well as his idea of the structural constant. Ultimately, it is a question of a single theory, but a theory with double entries: reproduction and revolution. Hence the new light shed by the previously unpublished sections.
It seems to me important to grasp that the pivot of the theoretical dispositive is the question of law, the subject of Chapters 5 and 11, and its presumed disappearance, the correlative of the disappearance of commodity relations in the course of the socialist revolution. I would like to suggest that the questions that Althusser has brought out have lost nothing of their contemporary relevance, and have yet to find pertinent answers at the level at which he poses them.
The idea of law, introduced before that of the state, is nevertheless dependent on the theory of the state as an instrument of the dominant class’s domination. The state apparatus, far from being ‘traversed by the class struggle’, is, Althusser repeats, an apparatus of domination in its entirety. What holds for the pre-capitalist modes of production holds for capitalism as well: here, too, power is exercised by the dominant class. The struggle of the dominated class has, to be sure, an impact on society. Only the dominant class, however, exercises ‘power’. Power is to be understood – as Althusser was to write a little later – as the ‘excess’ of this class’s force over that of the dominated class: ‘class domination does indeed find itself sanctioned in and by the state, in that only the Force of the dominant class enters into it and is recognized there. What is more, this Force is the sole “motor” of the state, the only energy to be transformed into power, right, laws and norms in the state’.2 Law, far from countering domination, is simply a moment of domination. This is the radical thesis commanding the problematic of the ideological apparatuses: law is produced by the conversion of violence into power in the state machine.
Chapter 5, ‘Law’, none of which Althusser included in the text he published in La Pensée, makes two statements. One is rather classical, but Althusser formulates it with remarkable clarity. It is the idea that the relations of production comprise the law’s (absent) content. Yet law, which exists only as a function of class relations, recognizes only individuals (this page). The relations of production are therefore not legal relations; they are not defined by the mode of ‘ownership’. The revolution, for its part, is not a modification of legal relations, a transition from private to collective ownership of the means of production. It consists in a practical, common ‘appropriation’ by freely associated men and women. This, however, leads Althusser to make a more problematic statement, according to which this revolution signifies, simultaneously, but in a single process, the disappearance of law and the disappearance of commodity exchange: ‘The withering away of law can only mean the withering away of commodity exchanges, exchanges of goods in the form of commodities … and their replacement by non-commodity exchanges’ (this page).
Here Althusser inscribes himself in the tradition of the communism associated with the Second and Third Internationals, expressing it in all its coherence. To be sure, he rejects the notion that planning can provide an alternative to the market. Rather, he attempts to define a third term, an external term that appears, notably, in the form of ‘the intervention of the masses’; planning is only a ‘subordinate means’ to that end (this page n. 10). He translates ‘the Soviets plus electrification’ as political intervention plus the planning of the productive forces (ibid.). He fails to take into account, it seems to me, that the planned social order, inasmuch as it opens the way, specifically, to appropriation from the centre, is irreducible to a determination of the ‘productive forces’ (or of technological rationality), but itself constitutes, like the social order based on commodity exchange, a configuration of the ‘relations of production’, that is, potentially, of class relations.
Here certain ambiguities of Marx’s resurface; they have to do with the relation between the question of law and that of the market. One cannot, Althusser writes (the passage has, admittedly, been crossed out; but that is only further evidence of its author’s uncertainty, this page n.3), speak of socialist law, for ‘the law that subsists … is still bourgeois law, for the only law there is is based on commodity relations and is thus bourgeois law. The socialist mode of production will abolish all law. Marx understood this perfectly’ (this page n.3). It seems that Althusser here even goes beyond Marx. For he presents the law as, purely and simply, a condition of domination, inasmuch as it puts class relations into play. Similarly, bourgeois democracy is, in his view, merely ‘the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in the form of a parliamentary or presidential democratic apparatus’ (this page), with the result that ‘the essence of [class struggle] unfolds outside these legal, bourgeois-democratic forms’ (this page).
A central theme of this text is that the topography, the metaphor of base and superstructure, is insufficient and deceptive. For this metaphor suggests that the economic base determines everything else, whereas, in Althusser’s view, it is the social relations of production which characterize a mode of production in the last instance; their reproduction is ensured by the ensemble Repressive State Apparatus plus Ideological State Apparatuses.
The power of the thesis about the Ideological State Apparatuses is due, first of all, to the fact that it flows from an interpretation of society as penetrated or saturated by class relations and subject to a class power that is exercised through the whole set of institutions. This power is not exercised by way of state institutions alone, according to a schema in which those institutions would configure a public sphere that could then be opposed to the private sphere, the place where encounters between private individuals occur. It is exercised quite as fully by private institutions, such as churches, parties, trade unions, the family, private schools, cultural associations, and so on. Althusser’s 1970 text made no small contribution to creating a new (and ephemeral) awareness of the fact that the major social institutions are part and parcel of the relations of class domination.
It is well known that Althusser drew part of his inspiration from Gramsci, who uses the term ‘civil society’ – as opposed to ‘political society’, that is, the state organs in the strict sense – to designate the whole set of institutions, private and public, by means of which the pre-eminence of the ruling classes’ ideology, their ‘hegemony’, is realized. However, Gramsci, who assigns this notion of ideology the broad sense of a world-view, knowledge, culture and ethics, contends that civil society also provides the terrain on which the progressive struggle of the ascendant class, the proletariat, is played out, and, therefore, the terrain on which is played out the revolutionary process itself, which he assimilates to the conquest of hegemony. Althusser turns this conception of things around by presenting the ensemble of institutions as elements of the state machinery thanks to which the bourgeoisie secures its domination.
Obviously, Althusser is not unaware of the emancipatory potential associated with bourgeois law and bourgeois democracy. The references to Kant and Hegel that open the chapter on law (this page) bear the most conspicuous witness to this. Nor is he unaware of the socialist movement’s democratic impact on society as a whole (as is well known, he summons his readers to make a political commitment on the terrain of established institutions). However, he suspends this consideration, as it were, and endeavours, in a discussion marked by extreme tension, to formulate a fact that comes into view only when one thinks at the extreme: public institutions are the organs of a ‘class struggle’ in which one class subjugates the other and ensures that this domination will be reproduced. This is very close to Hobbes, with the difference – a major difference, it is true – that, for Hobbes, the state realizes the real pacification of society, putting an end to violence conceived as the war of all against all, whereas, for Althusser, it ensures, precisely, the exercise of social violence, conceived as the war one class wages on another.
Thus we have a war for the subjection [assujettissement] of one class to another, by way of a mobilization of commodity relations and law, which ‘sanctions’ these relations (this page). This is not, however, a functionalist thesis, as Althusser emphasizes in the ‘Note on the ISAs’ to be found near the end of the present volume. For the apparatuses are merely instruments of class struggle; the class struggle, accordingly, has primacy over the dominant ideology, over the apparatuses. Of course, ‘the state’s politics is ultimately determined by the dominant classes’s interests in the class struggle’ (this page). However, ‘the class struggle never ends’. There is no confining it to apparatuses that reproduce domination. The class struggle is bigger than they are.
Althusser adds that the law falls back on repression only in the last resort, and that, as a general rule, norms are internalized. In the form of moral ideology, norms present themselves by way of an (interior) voice that interpellates me – as, precisely, a subject.
Althusser significantly subverts the traditional Marxist problematic by inviting his readers to reconsider the classic way of talking about ideology alongside other elements of the superstructure, and by integrating ideology into the state as the State Ideology. The great interest of his analysis resides in the fact that it confers a status of materialist realism and social ontology on ideology, at the same time as it poses it as an ‘interpellation’ by means of which everyone is summoned and constituted socially as a subject. In other words, he proposes these two theses: 1) ideology does not have ‘an ideal, idea-dependent, or spiritual existence, but a material one’, for ‘an ideology always exists in an apparatus’ (this page), and Ideological State Apparatuses are the site of a ‘realization’ of ideology (this page); and 2) ‘every ideology has the function (which defines it) of “constituting” [concrete individuals as] subjects’ (this page).
I would here like to suggest, while referring the reader to texts in which I expound my views at greater length,3 that this is a theoretical contribution of fundamental importance, even if it calls, as I see it, for an immense conceptual reworking. I would further suggest that Althusser’s contribution has to do, very precisely, with the close relationship between the two theses just cited.
The reader will perhaps allow me to prolong Althusser’s discourse, subvert it once again, and suggest that it leads somewhere other than to the place to which he would take us.
For it is not an ‘inner voice’, the voice of conscience, that interpellates me. It is a public voice. That voice declares that I am a free subject. This discourse is precisely that of the modern constitution, of its necessary preamble: the declaration of the rights of man, which posits that everyone is ‘free-and-equal’ [librégal], declares that the subject is sovereign and that the sovereign is a subject, and adds that I myself am subject to myself as sovereign. The material existence of this interpellating discourse does not find its measure in the event that, historically, brought it into existence, or in the form in which it finds itself transcribed, or, again, in the locus in which it has been provisionally situated. Its ontological status, in the sense of social being, is defined by the institutional forms that it commands, the practices that are at one with those institutional forms, and, on the same grounds, the class struggle that is constitutive of modernity, for which the declaration of freedom-and-equality comprises the essential reference. This reference to interpellation is in fact recalled at every moment in the class struggle; the class struggle expressly appeals to it as a promise which, as such, should be kept.
Ideology and interpellation are ‘eternal’, in the sense in which Althusser intends that word: that is, they are constitutive of humanity. They display, however, diverse historical forms, in line with the historical diversity of the forms in which subjectivity has been constituted. And we must take the full measure of ‘modern’ interpellation.
As human interpellation, a merely human proclamation, it is merely a promise, a promise that everyone makes to everyone, a promise that each of us makes her own insofar as she recognizes herself as a citizen. It is a pact, nothing more than a pact.
The fact that this pact is not respected is what has generally escaped the attention of contract theorists of the state. Marx provides the dialectical formulation of this failure: the contractual relationship free-and-equal ‘is transformed into its opposite’ insofar as, realizing itself in the form of the market, it confers on the dominant, notably by virtue of their ownership of the means of production, the ability to dispose of those who dispose only of their labour-power or of insufficient means of production. Interpellation of free human beings, free to present themselves on the market, (always already) becomes a lure, an injunction to conform to the social order based on commodity exchange, to the legal forms that rule it, the representations that justify it, and the practices that they call for.
The promise, however, remains: the interpellation of the dominated subject as free, as a partner in the pact of freedom-and-equality [libertégalité]. It is an injunction to obey the natural, and therefore legitimate, order of the market; but it affirms, at the same time, that this liberty of the market-based order is, precisely, the liberty of the citizen. This also implies, in contradictory fashion, that the citizens together dispose freely of the social order and are therefore also summoned – in this mutual and yet ‘univocal’ interpellation that is interpellation – freely to create the world in the image of their freedom. Those who have risked the adventure, since, notably, 1917, have encountered the other limit: the public speech of freedom, as soon as it ceases to be cast in the form of the contractual and the social rationality of the market, lurches radically towards the other form, which initially presents itself as the general will, discovered at last, but which, with that as its justification, also runs the risk of translation into the terms of the social rationality of administered and planned reason, with other effects of subjection.
The grand forms of the ‘class’ relation in the modern age – of the class relation which, as Althusser clearly shows, constitutes for law, which does not talk about it, its very object in the last instance – can therefore only be interpreted if we set out from interpellation. A merely human interpellation, and thus a pact that has, in the institutional forms in which it is cast, a social-ontological status comparable to that of the class relations in which it ‘is transformed into its opposite’.
A strange paradox: today, one cannot talk about exploitation or mass poverty, the enslavement of the peripheral zones, or the extermination of peoples, without setting out from what claims to be the interpellation of freedom and equality. It should be noted that that is precisely what Marx does in Capital, which begins – not to didactic ends, but in conformity with a requirement for ‘thinking’ the modern world – by positing the Eden of commodity exchange, in which individuals recognize one another as free-and-equal.
That, however, means that they are also not subjected to that order. That is why this seeming ‘paradox’ is also the one thanks to which the perspective of emancipation remains open – yawning, unfathomable – that of the realization of the promise.4
1 Bidet gives the original title of Althusser’s manuscript, which went unpublished in the author’s lifetime. When the manuscript finally appeared, the French publisher retitled it Sur la reproduction, and the two French titles have been conflated for the English edition.
2 Louis Althusser, ‘Marx in His Limits’, in Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987, trans. G. M. Goshgarian, London, Verso, 2006, p. 109.
3 Jacques Bidet, Théorie générale, Paris, PUF, 1999; Explication et reconstruction du Capital, Paris, PUF, 2007; L’Etat-monde, Paris, PUF, 2011.
4 [Note to the 2011 second edition of Sur la reproduction] I suggest a later interpretation of Althusser’s thesis about ‘interpellation’ in a book in progress: Althusser et Foucault, révolution et résistance, interpellation et biopolitique.