Althusser’s theory of ideology

The work of Louis Althusser has proven controversial in the International Socialist tradition,
as well as throughout Marxist thought worldwide. In recent years, a revival of interest in his
work has taken place. In the past decade, Althusser’s late work Philosophy of the
Encounter was translated and published, as well as significant discussions of his work. These
include the second edition of Gregory Elliott’s standard study, important books by Warren
Montag and Mikko Lahtinen, the lengthy collection titled Encountering Althusser, and the
ongoing publications of the journal Décalages.1 The recent translation of the entirety of the
manuscript On the Reproduction of Capitalism, from which the famous essay “Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses” was extracted, is an occasion to review some of Althusser’s
ideas in the hopes of determining whether his work has made legitimate contributions to the
struggle for socialism from below.

On the Reproduction of Capitalism is a relatively late work of Althusser’s, inspired by the mass
uprising of workers and students in 1968.2 Committed to his membership in the French
Communist Party (PCF), Althusser accepted its conservative response to the movement and
refused to support the strikes or demonstrations. For this reason, many of Althusser’s students,
who had previously viewed his ideas as a vital new development in revolutionary politics,
bitterly rejected him. He had garnered a reputation as an oppositional, radical figure among
Communists and the Left more broadly, but was unable to act beyond the dictates of the party
bureaucrats.

Why was Althusser unable to break from the PCF? This practical perspective is even more
peculiar when we are aware that he fought a lifelong struggle against the party’s leadership and
its dominant outlook.3 Nonetheless, he remained committed to this organization because it was
a mass working-class party. While his membership in the PCF is often claimed as evidence that
he was a doctrinaire Stalinist, Althusser actually hoped to drastically change the party from
within, to render it a legitimate organ of the working-class masses that formed its base of
support. He believed that abandoning the party would lead to isolation from the working class,
and for this reason he felt that a renewed revolutionary Marxist outlook needed to be built
through an oppositional role within it. As Ian Birchall writes, “Alignment with the working
class could not be envisaged other than in terms of the organisations which, for better or worse,
continued to hold the loyalty of the majority of conscious and active workers.”4 While Birchall
himself disagreed with this analysis, it was a widely held belief among French revolutionaries
of this generation.

Historically, this turned out to be impossible. Althusser greatly underestimated the degree of
bureaucratization that had taken hold, his perspectives remained marginal, and the party lost
its once-great support in the French working class. While this was a serious error, he is still to
be credited with articulating perspectives that he hoped could win predominance in a political
institution supported by the French labor movement.

Althusser believed that the best hope for the resuscitation of the party was represented by the
ideas and practices championed by Mao Zedong and his adherents.5 He argued that the Soviet
Union had experienced a “Stalinist deviation” rooted in economism.6 His interest in Mao,
however, was fairly superficial, and his ideas can be assessed on their own merits. While he
remained limited by his inheritance of Stalin’s notion of socialism in one country and his failure
to fully consider the criticisms of Stalinism made by Leon Trotsky and his tradition, Althusser’s
theory of ideology remains useful.

In On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Althusser attempts to register in theory what he had

been unable to support in practice: that is, the new revolutionary potential that had suddenly
appeared in French culture. Despite Althusser’s commitment to the masses, his writing style is
often quite difficult and many of his works draw considerably on the epistemology of
science. On the Reproduction of Capitalism is one on his most accessible books, and has more
immediate political consequences. For this reason, it is a good choice for someone
unacquainted with his project to develop an initial familiarity. Althusser believed that Marxism
was widely distorted by false interpretations that depended on humanism and economism.
According to Althusser, both Stalinist orthodoxy and the philosophy of Western Marxism
believed that Marx conveyed insight into human species-being and the overcoming of human
alienation through a historical process of economic development. He argued Marx himself had
broken from the humanism of his early work, developing a scientific understanding of history
only in his mature writings. Following from this, Althusser claimed that an understanding of
the Russian Revolution that depended on Hegelian dialectics misunderstood Lenin’s real
insight into revolutionary practice.

Marx and Lenin, Althusser argued, understood history as overdetermined by a complex and
multiple series of social and political factors, without an underlying humanist or economic
guarantee for change. The revolution could only be the product of multiple interrelated social
conflicts, rather than an overcoming of one basic contradiction in human experience. In his
view, while the mode of production is determining of society, it can never be analyzed in
isolation. While he intended his theory to explain and develop a revolutionary outlook, his
rejection of humanism created the sense that agency was illusory. Without a theory of human
alienation, his approach risked positing the eternity of capitalism. His work in the wake of 1968
was meant to remedy this and to explain cultural struggles in terms of a new understanding of
ideology.

Althusser’s theory of ideology

An essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” was extracted from this book and has
been widely distributed, anthologized, and translated.8 In it, Althusser argues for a materialist
understanding of ideology. Rather than considering ideology as mistaken ideas about the world,
for him ideology is essentially practical. “Ideology does not exist in the ‘world of ideas’
conceived as a ‘spiritual world,’” he writes. “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.”
Althusser delineates a number of these apparatuses, most prominently the church, the school,
trade unions, and the family. These social institutions have the capacity to not only inculcate a
worldview that is conducive to bourgeois domination, but also enforce these beliefs by means
of a series of rituals, habits, and customs, which are more or less compulsory. Because
acquiescence to the ruling ideology is bound up in practical obedience, rather than intellectual
orthodoxy, Althusser insists that “ideology has a material existence.”

In Althusser’s view, these ideological apparatuses can properly be described as belonging to

the state, even if they appear formally separate from it. He argues that the state actually has
two components: a repressive state apparatus, which includes the army, the police, and the
courts, and enforces class domination directly, and the ideological state apparatuses (ISA),
which maintain complicity and identification with class society. Controversially, Althusser
argues that the domestic sphere of family life is included in the domain of the state, because it
functions to maintain and develop an ideology that will maintain psychological adherence to
and participation in class society. It is probably not coincidental that his theory was elaborated
from the French context, where a strong centralized state has always overseen education as
well as ecclesiastical functions. In this context, it seems rational to view the church and the
school system as ideological state apparatuses. In the political culture of the United States, this
seems more counterintuitive, because there is such a long history of anti-state tendencies,
particularly on the right. So the immediate reaction is to find Althusser’s theory peculiar or
even simply wrong, prima facie. This may be one reason why his thought has not been as
influential in the United States as it has been in Europe or in South America. A strong post-
Althusserian tendency in North American thought has only appeared very recently, with the
work of people like Warren Montag.

It may seem that Althusser’s theory applies better to nations with very strong bureaucratic
states, and greatly limited in its explanatory power if we apply it to the United States or to other
situations in which state power is constrained and localized. Strictly speaking, however,
Althusser’s argument is that the public/private distinction with regard to power and class
domination is an idealist effect of bourgeois law that a Marxist perspective cannot accept. For
him, a private school system, an independent church authority, privately owned media, or even
the family, all operate as functions of the state regardless of their apparently private-sector
status.

From his point of view, even homeschooling operates as an extension of the state. How is this
possible? According to his argument, the state is not a discrete institution or bureaucratic entity
but rather an ensemble of all practices that maintain the potential for the reproduction of
relations of production. This means that the most paranoid Tea Partier, the angriest secessionist
libertarian, or the most die-hard Randian is actually a servant of the state who extend its power
ideologically and perhaps even its repressive force insofar as they can function as part of an
armed paramilitary militia. This is a very counterintuitive thesis to North Americans, but it
might have validity. For example, Fox News, which is certainly private media, nothing like
public television, and maintains a strongly “oppositional” status toward the Democratic Party,
but functions nonetheless as a clear organ of state propaganda, even more so than state-owned
media in other countries. Or, one can consider variousreligious groupings , such as
evangelicals, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which are also independent
yet simultaneously act as an adjunct to state initiatives.

Althusser argues that ideology has a profound relationship with subjective experience. He
writes, “all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects.” What he
means by this is that the practices and beliefs inherent to ideology produce a sense of identity.
Our conscious experience of the world and sense of individual personhood is always bound up
in effects of the social institutions that have raised and educated us. Furthermore, it is in the
nature of ideology to conceal this basically artificial and imposed nature. Rather than viewing
our immediate experiences as conditioned, they appear to be “free” or obvious interpretations
of the world. Althusser’s point is not that an obscure veil of appearance inevitably conceals the
real world. Rather, he argues that this mediated experience of the world is constructed
according to a rational purpose, that is, to “ensure the reproduction of the relations of
production.” In his analysis, ideology is basically tasked with “knotting together of
superstructure and base.” It is the cultural necessity that maintains the durability of a mode of
production. This leads to ambiguity on the question of ideology outside capitalism. Althusser
believed that ideology was a basic aspect of subjective experience, thereby persisting even in
a post-capitalist society. However, because his theory and description of ideology are rooted in
capitalism, it is very unclear in his work which aspects of ideology are contained in the
capitalist mode of production, in contrast to a more general conceptual claim.

Althusser is often charged with holding an elitist perspective. Some commentators believe that
this way of conceiving of ideology effectively prevents agency for ordinary people, because
they are inevitably deluded and controlled by the ideological state apparatuses. For example,
Kevin B. Anderson writes that Althusser’s theory is incapable of registering the existence of
“a rebellious individual subject whose rebellion touches off wide support within an entire
subjected group,” for example, someone like Rosa Parks.9However, Althusser states very
clearly that the ISAs are not permanent or stable; their ability to produce ideological practices
is always limited and threatened by a basic contradiction: class struggle. In fact, Althusser’s
entire project is rooted in the recognition and advocacy of organized struggle against
oppression and exploitation, and the means by which class struggle appears in less
economically based forms of oppression and subject formation. Jeanne Theoharis has shown
that Rosa Parks’s rebellion was not the product of a spontaneous individual moment of
freedom, but the consequence of an entire conscious mass movement.10 This can be understood
in Althusserian terms as the appearance of class struggle in ideology. Effects of class struggle
appear within ideology, and class struggle presents the possibility of a complete overthrow of
bourgeois ideology. In an appendix to On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Althusser responds
to the criticism of his work that it is merely descriptive and “functionalist”; that his analysis
tends to make everything explained and reified by apparatuses. In response, Althusser insists
that his entire theory depends on the primacy of class struggle. In fact, there would be no need
for ISAs at all if resistance and struggle were not always present and in need of pacification.

Althusser’s point is that the economy is fundamentally structured by exploitation, and this
exploitation always produces conflict. Ideology is a second-order formation that strives to
ensure the continuation of the capitalist mode of production and continuing working-class
adherence to a system that oppresses them. However, he argues that ideology cannot maintain
an unbroken domination, because it is produced by apparatuses that are enmeshed in material
class society. Because these apparatuses are bound up in labor, they cannot be fully owned and
controlled by the capitalist state, and they are not fully reconcilable into a consistent social
whole. As a result, ideology carries with it proletarian values, as well as bourgeois domination.
The proletarian elements that have been distorted in capitalist ideology can be strengthened
and clarified to the degree that eventually the entire edifice can be overthrown in a
revolutionary process. But because individual experience is always constituted by ideology,
this process of liberation must always take place as part of a commitment to working-class
activity, not as a personal break with delusion and conformity.

Terry Eagleton defended the value of Althusser’s insight by clarifying that his advocacy of
theory over experience depends on this recognition of working-class theory.11 His argument
was not that academic intellectuals had a superior insight; in fact, his theory of ideology
presupposes that academic Marxism is in the grips of a particularly complex and advanced
form of bourgeois ideology, in need of disruption by contact with working-class activity.
Althusser argues that the basic contradictions and irrationalities of the capitalist system will
also interfere with the ability of ideology to fully capture a convincing experience of the world.
These inherent contradictions produce “ideological sub-formations.” He argues that it was
exactly these contradictions and sub-formations that characterized the eruption of discontent
and insurrection by French workers and students in May 1968. In the later stages of the Russian
Revolution, insists Althusser, Vladimir Lenin understood this basic framework, and that is why
he was so interested in reforming education and social institutions under the rubric of the
cultural revolution.12
For Althusser, class struggle takes place within ideology, and Marxist science can discern this
process. He argues that the capacity to understand ideology from a scientific point of view is
also a product of class struggle and the historical achievement of the workers’ movement. Many
of Althusser’s readers have not understood that many of his most difficult writings are actually
an attempt to introduce the effect of the workers’ movement into the academic philosophy of
science (which necessarily involves difficult, specialized terminology), not an effort to dictate
workers’ activity from above. Althusser says this explicitly: “The characteristic task of Marxist
philosophy is to represent, in theory, the proletarian class position.”

Althusser’s work has proven enormously influential over the past half-century. Why have his
ideas proven so inspirational? One striking effect of his analyses is the emphasis on the
necessity of cultural norms in order to reproduce capitalist social relations. A consequence of
this is that Althusser posits the family as a basic ideological state apparatus and a site of the
reproduction of productive relations. While he does not flesh out the gendered aspects of this
understanding of the family, the obvious result of this insight is the beginnings of social
reproduction theory. It is by no means accidental that Lise Vogel and Martha E. Gimenez, two
of the feminist thinkers who have contributed the most to social reproduction theory, describe
Althusser as a decisive figure. Both Vogel and Gimenez credit Althusser’s innovations with
stimulating her ability to rethink gendered work within the capitalist economy.13 Judith Butler
has also made use of Althusser’s theory of ideological state apparatuses in order to better
understand the means by which oppressed groups are given social identities.14 His work is of
great value for understanding mechanisms of oppression by means that avoid reductionism
while never forgetting the determining role of relations of production.15

Althusser’s emphasis on the necessity of ideology in reproducing productive relations is tied

to another controversial innovation. Deemphasizing the more deterministic role allotted to
productive forces in the “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, he
argued that relations of production must be considered primary. This anticipates and affects the
perspective of contemporary historians described as political Marxists, whose outlook has
sparked such stimulating recent debate in the International Socialist tradition.16 From a
somewhat different point of view, Gilbert Achcar applied Althusser’s approach to history and
revolution in his study of the causes and nature of the Arab uprisings of 2011–2013.17
By all means, and according to most contemporary studies, Althusser’s polemics read as
extraordinarily tendentious in certain aspects. For example, he collapses together all
“humanists” into one revisionist camp, he rejects Hegelian dialectics completely, and he posits
a sharp, absolute break between the early and mature work of Marx.18 Many of the European
thinkers who were deeply marked by his insights came to reject his positions on one or more
of these issues. On all of these matters, Althusser had a worthwhile point to make, although he
drastically overstated it: He saw humanism as a means of avoiding the radical nature of class
struggle, and his notion of a break in Marx’s thought in 1845 is a useful heuristic for
understanding a serious change in method. He did not read many of the more serious exponents
of Hegelian Marxist humanism, such as Georg Lukács, very well, and as a result some of his
criticisms are unconvincing.
However, the reader must be aware that when Althusser speaks of humanism, he almost always
has in mind his own struggle within the PCF and the opportunist definition of humanism
disseminated by Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, and Roger Garaudy, the Stalinist
theorist of the PCF.19 He hastily assimilates this into quite heterogeneous currents, which can
make his perspective appear more unique and aberrant than it ought to. Althusser intended his
writings as theoretical interventions in his own conjuncture, and as a result some of his
statements, taken out of context, can produce a brittle, hyperbolic schema, easily dismissed.
Patient reconstruction of his argument can reveal deeper insights than might initially appear;
we owe it to the rigor of our tradition to read him more charitably than he himself did his
opponents.