What Is The State?
Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
Verso, 288pp, £19.99, ISBN 9781781681640
reviewed by Daniel Whittall
In the quest for the clearest exemplification of Louis Althusser’s conceptualisation of the State, as formulated in On the Reproduction of Capitalism, one could do much worse than to settle on the Mark Duggan case. Duggan, as is now well known, was executed on the streets of London by officers of the Metropolitan Police. The Met, ensured that their public relations operation went into overdrive immediately, putting out a systematic campaign of disinformation. In the immediacy of the event, press coverage – on the back, no doubt, of Met press releases – assured the concerned public that Duggan was an armed criminal, and that he had fired at the police. Yet the jury in the trial of the officer accused of shooting Duggan accepted that Duggan was unarmed when shot – in direct contravention of sworn statements by police officers. No matter. The bulk of the press, with some honourable exceptions, harangued Duggan as a scourge of London – at one point he was, apparently, amongst Europe’s most violent criminals (this from the State broadcaster, the BBC), in spite of possessing a criminal record that most small-town crooks would see as laughably pathetic. And yet, despite finding repeated flaws in police evidence, a jury came to the decision – not unanimously, it must be recalled – that Duggan was not killed in cold blood, in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
In Althusser’s terms, the killing of Mark Duggan was an exemplary instance of the Repressive State Apparatus deploying pure violence in order to secure its authority and to maintain its control. Yet what was to follow – from the campaign of disinformation stemming from the Met, to the media reportage, popular cultural discussion of the case and the final legal decision, all take their place as exemplary instances of the operation of the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs).
Althusser defined the Ideological State Apparatuses as ‘a system of defined institutions, organizations, and the corresponding practices’ that ‘do not, by definition, use physical violence’. In this sense, ISAs constitute a series of institutions and practices through which the State achieves its aims, but they are simultaneously at one step removed from the State itself because, as Althusser puts it, they ‘function not “on violence”, but ”on ideology”’. In framing the place of the ISAs in these terms, Althusser directly contests the ‘bourgeois’ split between so-called ‘public’ and ‘private’ institutions, indicating that the dominant ideology on which the bourgeois State operates is constituted by scholastic, familial, religious, political, associative, press, publishing and wider cultural apparatuses that might, in some instances, be dominated by institutions that are themselves already a part of the State, but are just as often placed outside of the State’s direct modes of operation.
Althusser’s essay on the ISAs has become his most widely read and oft-cited text. The original French version of ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ appeared in La Pensée in 1970. In English, the essay first appeared as a chapter in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays in 1971. Yet the essay itself consisted of fragments from a larger project, written initially in 1969, which was never published in Althusser’s lifetime. It is that project which has now, for the first time, been translated into English by GM Goshgarian for Verso, and appears as On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.
The first draft of the book was written in haste in the wake of May ’68, and Althusser would return to the manuscript and revise it in later years. It was written, as Etienne Balibar makes clear in the foreword to the present volume, as a contribution to an internal debate within a group of Marxist thinkers and activists, including Balibar himself. The group settled on the idea of the ‘state apparatus’, derived from Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, and proposed to adapt this concept to explore the place of the ‘scholastic apparatus’ – universities and schooling – within the present conjuncture. In the event, Althusser’s book was to provoke what Balibar describes as a state of ‘paralysis’ amongst the group, divided as they were, and not only over some of the theoretical arguments being put forward, but also over their relationship to the French Communist Party (PCF), which Althusser was determined to contest from within, whilst others sought to make alternative political homes outside.
Understanding Althusser’s conceptualisation of the ISAs requires that On the Reproduction be situated within the twin circumstances of Althusser’s own theoretical development and the historico-political conjuncture at which it was first written. In 1965 Althusser published For Marx and, with Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital. These texts offered polemical and densely argued reinvigorations of Marxist thought, positing an ‘epistemological break’ between what Althusser termed, bluntly and misguidedly, an ‘early’ humanist Marx and a ‘late’ scientific Marx. It is as a further contribution to his attempted renewal of Marxist thought that On the Reproduction ought to be read. With capitalism in its heartlands having passed through two decades of relatively uninterrupted growth – arguably the most successful period in its history – Althusser’s work appeared at a time when the wheels were beginning to come off. As we read his work amidst the wreckage imposed by a renewed bout of capitalist crises, and in the throes of a newly resurgent attempt to reinvigorate Marxist thought and anti-capitalist politics, there is much to be learned from a return to Althusser’s body of work, both positively and negatively.
Capitalism may have been approaching renewed crisis in the 1960s, but it was not alone. The 1960s simultaneously represented an acute moment of crisis for leftist forces attempting to escape capitalism. Organised Communism remained wracked by the crises that Stalinism had wrought upon it, and May 68 provided as much evidence of the distance that organised Communism now had from the most radical political movements as it did of capitalist crisis. Althusser positioned his own contributions as an attempt to enact a leftward move against what he saw as the continuing Stalinism of the PCF. That Althusser remained with the PCF, unlike many of his closest political associates, substantiates, historically and empirically, the theoretical difficulty of moving beyond Stalinism. Such difficulties persist in On the Reproduction, wherein Althusser continues to quote approvingly Stalin’s theoretical writings on dialectical materialism, despite at the same time suggesting that Stalinism itself was the institutional embodiment of a theoretical error in the conceptualisation of the modes of production.
Althusser’s practical political choices may seem to bear little relation to a particular text written in the heat of struggle. Yet it is from the standpoint of his decision to remain within the PCF that criticism of his work on the ISAs must be approached. Early on in On the Reproduction, Althusser argues that ‘the vast majority of philosophies are forms of resignation or, to be more precise, forms of submission to the ‘ideas of the ruling class’, and thus to class rule’. As such, Althusser develops here his argument that ‘the characteristic task of each and every philosophy is to represent, in theory, a given class position.’ Powerful as this stance is, especially in the context of the redefinition it marks in his own work, where philosophy had previously been defined as a ‘theory of theoretical practice’, it loses much of its force in the context of Althusser’s continuance within the PCF. For what else does this mark but a resignation, an acceptance that for all the criticisms that Althusser himself was beginning to develop of organised Communism, he could see no future for radical politics outside of its embrace? One does not have to side with the reformist politics of the PCF at the time in order to acknowledge that Althusser’s vehement rejection of anything he perceived as ‘humanist’ or ‘unscientific’ placed constraints on his ability to understand and articulate the material role of workers themselves as capital’s antagonists, and of subjective action in the maintenance of capitalist authority.
And yet, in spite of the criticisms of Althusser’s own political decisions, and the constraints they place upon his philosophical writings, these works remain of great importance, it seems to me, for at least two reasons. Firstly, the resonances of his work are to be found in many places, and have had extremely productive after-effects. Take, for example, the work of Michel Foucault, whose own preoccupations with the diverse apparatuses through which power and authority operate can be read as having at least some of their origins in Althusser’s work on ideology, despite Foucault’s own drift away from Marxism in the 1970s. Warren Montag, in his superb recent book Althusser and his Contemporaries (Duke University Press, 2013), has suggested that ‘almost immediately after’ the publication of Althusser’s initial essay in La Pensée, ‘the terms of Foucault’s critique of ideology changed,’ and in the longer run Foucault’s work on power reads as an attempt to probe the limit points of Althusser’s distinction between the Ideological and Repressive State Apparatus.
Secondly, Althusser’s writings, particularly during the late 1960s in which he was wrestling with how to respond to the simultaneous crises of capitalism and organised Communism, present us with the choices that we ourselves face today, albeit in a different form. For good reason, organised Communism is no longer the force it once was. Yet the same question that pre-occupied Althusser and his contemporaries – namely, what modes of political organisation, and associated modes of thought, are appropriate for any attempt to overthrow capitalism? – remain the horizon of leftist thought now. The tension between theory and practice, which Althusser sought and, ultimately, failed to overcome, continues to preoccupy any scholar-activist at work today.
Both capitalism and its organised opponents have changed significantly since the 1960s. Yet both remain in crisis. Jacques Ranciere is only one amongst many to have suggested that one of the lessons we might learn from Althusser is that responding to such crises, by asserting dogmatically that there exists a scientifically definable, ‘orthodox’ Marxist-Leninist line on how to contend with such crises, is unlikely to bear much fruit. Returning to Althusser’s conceptualisation of the State, in particular, the relationship between ideology, institutions, and specific practices, need not entail that we cast out any role for individual agency or the active engagement of particular subjects with the world around them. Many of the problems with Althusser’s text stem from the rhetoric in which he couches his theoretical formulations. His restructuring of the Marxist tradition offered little room for diversity within this tradition. And yet, it is only armed with a more complex conceptualisation of the State, one which enables us to appreciate the central role that ideological apparatuses play in the maintenance of State, and thus of capitalist, power might today’s anti-capitalist movements be able to enact the kind of transformations – in Althusser’s terms, the establishment of ‘new relations of production that abolish concretely the exploitative effects of the previous relations of production, together with their class effects’ – that Althusser and his generation remained so unable to effect.
In Althusser’s terms, the killing of Mark Duggan was an exemplary instance of the Repressive State Apparatus deploying pure violence in order to secure its authority and to maintain its control. Yet what was to follow – from the campaign of disinformation stemming from the Met, to the media reportage, popular cultural discussion of the case and the final legal decision, all take their place as exemplary instances of the operation of the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs).
Althusser defined the Ideological State Apparatuses as ‘a system of defined institutions, organizations, and the corresponding practices’ that ‘do not, by definition, use physical violence’. In this sense, ISAs constitute a series of institutions and practices through which the State achieves its aims, but they are simultaneously at one step removed from the State itself because, as Althusser puts it, they ‘function not “on violence”, but ”on ideology”’. In framing the place of the ISAs in these terms, Althusser directly contests the ‘bourgeois’ split between so-called ‘public’ and ‘private’ institutions, indicating that the dominant ideology on which the bourgeois State operates is constituted by scholastic, familial, religious, political, associative, press, publishing and wider cultural apparatuses that might, in some instances, be dominated by institutions that are themselves already a part of the State, but are just as often placed outside of the State’s direct modes of operation.
Althusser’s essay on the ISAs has become his most widely read and oft-cited text. The original French version of ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ appeared in La Pensée in 1970. In English, the essay first appeared as a chapter in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays in 1971. Yet the essay itself consisted of fragments from a larger project, written initially in 1969, which was never published in Althusser’s lifetime. It is that project which has now, for the first time, been translated into English by GM Goshgarian for Verso, and appears as On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.
The first draft of the book was written in haste in the wake of May ’68, and Althusser would return to the manuscript and revise it in later years. It was written, as Etienne Balibar makes clear in the foreword to the present volume, as a contribution to an internal debate within a group of Marxist thinkers and activists, including Balibar himself. The group settled on the idea of the ‘state apparatus’, derived from Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, and proposed to adapt this concept to explore the place of the ‘scholastic apparatus’ – universities and schooling – within the present conjuncture. In the event, Althusser’s book was to provoke what Balibar describes as a state of ‘paralysis’ amongst the group, divided as they were, and not only over some of the theoretical arguments being put forward, but also over their relationship to the French Communist Party (PCF), which Althusser was determined to contest from within, whilst others sought to make alternative political homes outside.
Understanding Althusser’s conceptualisation of the ISAs requires that On the Reproduction be situated within the twin circumstances of Althusser’s own theoretical development and the historico-political conjuncture at which it was first written. In 1965 Althusser published For Marx and, with Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital. These texts offered polemical and densely argued reinvigorations of Marxist thought, positing an ‘epistemological break’ between what Althusser termed, bluntly and misguidedly, an ‘early’ humanist Marx and a ‘late’ scientific Marx. It is as a further contribution to his attempted renewal of Marxist thought that On the Reproduction ought to be read. With capitalism in its heartlands having passed through two decades of relatively uninterrupted growth – arguably the most successful period in its history – Althusser’s work appeared at a time when the wheels were beginning to come off. As we read his work amidst the wreckage imposed by a renewed bout of capitalist crises, and in the throes of a newly resurgent attempt to reinvigorate Marxist thought and anti-capitalist politics, there is much to be learned from a return to Althusser’s body of work, both positively and negatively.
Capitalism may have been approaching renewed crisis in the 1960s, but it was not alone. The 1960s simultaneously represented an acute moment of crisis for leftist forces attempting to escape capitalism. Organised Communism remained wracked by the crises that Stalinism had wrought upon it, and May 68 provided as much evidence of the distance that organised Communism now had from the most radical political movements as it did of capitalist crisis. Althusser positioned his own contributions as an attempt to enact a leftward move against what he saw as the continuing Stalinism of the PCF. That Althusser remained with the PCF, unlike many of his closest political associates, substantiates, historically and empirically, the theoretical difficulty of moving beyond Stalinism. Such difficulties persist in On the Reproduction, wherein Althusser continues to quote approvingly Stalin’s theoretical writings on dialectical materialism, despite at the same time suggesting that Stalinism itself was the institutional embodiment of a theoretical error in the conceptualisation of the modes of production.
Althusser’s practical political choices may seem to bear little relation to a particular text written in the heat of struggle. Yet it is from the standpoint of his decision to remain within the PCF that criticism of his work on the ISAs must be approached. Early on in On the Reproduction, Althusser argues that ‘the vast majority of philosophies are forms of resignation or, to be more precise, forms of submission to the ‘ideas of the ruling class’, and thus to class rule’. As such, Althusser develops here his argument that ‘the characteristic task of each and every philosophy is to represent, in theory, a given class position.’ Powerful as this stance is, especially in the context of the redefinition it marks in his own work, where philosophy had previously been defined as a ‘theory of theoretical practice’, it loses much of its force in the context of Althusser’s continuance within the PCF. For what else does this mark but a resignation, an acceptance that for all the criticisms that Althusser himself was beginning to develop of organised Communism, he could see no future for radical politics outside of its embrace? One does not have to side with the reformist politics of the PCF at the time in order to acknowledge that Althusser’s vehement rejection of anything he perceived as ‘humanist’ or ‘unscientific’ placed constraints on his ability to understand and articulate the material role of workers themselves as capital’s antagonists, and of subjective action in the maintenance of capitalist authority.
And yet, in spite of the criticisms of Althusser’s own political decisions, and the constraints they place upon his philosophical writings, these works remain of great importance, it seems to me, for at least two reasons. Firstly, the resonances of his work are to be found in many places, and have had extremely productive after-effects. Take, for example, the work of Michel Foucault, whose own preoccupations with the diverse apparatuses through which power and authority operate can be read as having at least some of their origins in Althusser’s work on ideology, despite Foucault’s own drift away from Marxism in the 1970s. Warren Montag, in his superb recent book Althusser and his Contemporaries (Duke University Press, 2013), has suggested that ‘almost immediately after’ the publication of Althusser’s initial essay in La Pensée, ‘the terms of Foucault’s critique of ideology changed,’ and in the longer run Foucault’s work on power reads as an attempt to probe the limit points of Althusser’s distinction between the Ideological and Repressive State Apparatus.
Secondly, Althusser’s writings, particularly during the late 1960s in which he was wrestling with how to respond to the simultaneous crises of capitalism and organised Communism, present us with the choices that we ourselves face today, albeit in a different form. For good reason, organised Communism is no longer the force it once was. Yet the same question that pre-occupied Althusser and his contemporaries – namely, what modes of political organisation, and associated modes of thought, are appropriate for any attempt to overthrow capitalism? – remain the horizon of leftist thought now. The tension between theory and practice, which Althusser sought and, ultimately, failed to overcome, continues to preoccupy any scholar-activist at work today.
Both capitalism and its organised opponents have changed significantly since the 1960s. Yet both remain in crisis. Jacques Ranciere is only one amongst many to have suggested that one of the lessons we might learn from Althusser is that responding to such crises, by asserting dogmatically that there exists a scientifically definable, ‘orthodox’ Marxist-Leninist line on how to contend with such crises, is unlikely to bear much fruit. Returning to Althusser’s conceptualisation of the State, in particular, the relationship between ideology, institutions, and specific practices, need not entail that we cast out any role for individual agency or the active engagement of particular subjects with the world around them. Many of the problems with Althusser’s text stem from the rhetoric in which he couches his theoretical formulations. His restructuring of the Marxist tradition offered little room for diversity within this tradition. And yet, it is only armed with a more complex conceptualisation of the State, one which enables us to appreciate the central role that ideological apparatuses play in the maintenance of State, and thus of capitalist, power might today’s anti-capitalist movements be able to enact the kind of transformations – in Althusser’s terms, the establishment of ‘new relations of production that abolish concretely the exploitative effects of the previous relations of production, together with their class effects’ – that Althusser and his generation remained so unable to effect.