The Revolutionary Aspect: Transformation Inherent in the State Apparatus

Hey guys, this is my seminar paper based on this week's reading. I created a synthesis of Althusser and Lukacs that, in my opinion, also complicates--perhaps modifies--Althusser's assertions about the State apparatus. I've been having some formatting problems when I copy and paste the text from my word processor, so hopefully this comes out looking normal on the blog.

-Rob

The Revolutionary Aspect: Transformation Inherent in the State Apparatus

In his structuralist analysis “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Louis Althusser demonstrates the ways in which the ruling class uses the state’s public and private organizations to implement an ideology that facilitates the perpetuation and reproduction of a hierarchical class structure based on the exploitation of the working class. He defines the state “as a force of repressive execution and intervention ‘in the interest of the ruling classes’ in the class struggle conducted by the bourgeoisie and its allies against the proletariat” (1339). However, both the “repressive” and “ideological” means through which the state seeks to subjugate the labor classes leave room for “contradictions” through which “the resistance of the exploited classes is able to find means and occasions to express itself” (Althusser 1343). This effect can be seen in Gyorgy Lukacs’ “The Historical Novel,” which depicts, essentially, how a reworking of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century state ideologies made possible an “increasing consciousness of the historical character of development” (915). Once equipped with this “increasing consciousness,” Europeans rejected “reactionary” historical movements, and developed a sense of historical progress. Revolution can then be seen as a movement that is intrinsic in the otherwise oppressive nature of Althusser’s notion of the “State apparatus.” Historical events demonstrate that the state’s ideology alters human consciousness and births conflicting ideologies that allow for the exploitation of contradictions, and, ultimately, an eerily Freudian transformation toward Marx’s proposal “of the destruction of the State” (1340).

The historical awareness that, according to Lukacs, arose during and following the Napoleonic Wars was the result of heavy ideological campaigns dispensed by European State apparatuses. States inadvertently exploded their own monarchical and feudal institutions with the ideologies that were invented in order to win the wars—the systems meant for, as Althusser says, “reproduction of the conditions of production” (1336) actually informed the conflicting subversive ideology of “an uninterrupted process of changes” that would eventually overtake feudal class constructions and absolute monarchs (Lukacs 913). Althusser writes that “political class struggle revolves around…the seizure and conservation of State power by a certain class or by an alliance between classes or class fractions” (1340). During the Napoleonic Wars, retaining control of the State meant that the ruling class had to build larger armies, and recruit soldiers with propaganda that connected “the war with the entire life and possibilities of the nation’s development” (Lucaks 914). Those who enlisted in the army were exposed to a hierarchal system that was not based on class—“the highest positions in the army” Lukacs writes, “[were] open to all”—and citizens exposed to the propaganda had an “awakening of national sensibility” that allowed them to historicize their place in national history, and provided a conceptualization “of the decisive role played in human progress by the struggle of classes in history” (Lucaks 915, 917). Lukacs analysis demonstrates how an ideology built around Althusser’s concept of “conservation” actually carried with it—in its nationalist propaganda and “open” military class structure—the demise of feudalism and monarchies, but, as Althusser points out, the State itself has historically prevailed over such revolutions.

Even if no human can escape ideology, as Althusser suggests, Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci seem to allude to a frailty in any single dominant ideology that is absent in Althusser’s analysis. While he recognizes and speaks of “contradictions” in the ideological State apparatus, Althusser minimizes the potential of using such contradictions as vehicles for change by writing that the ruling ideology “is always in fact unified, despite its diversity and its contradictions” (1343). However, if every element of the ideological State apparatus always acts harmoniously in step with the ruling class, there would be no need for a massive “repressive State apparatus” that is, as Gramsci put it, “constituted for the whole of society in anticipation of moments of crisis of command and direction when spontaneous consent has failed” (1007). Security is necessary for when a competing ideology’s exploitation of an intrinsic contradiction threatens the State’s power—power that is only derived from general “consent” that the ruling ideology is valid. To see solidarity within any ideological State apparatus is to have “bird’s-eye view of a philosophy of history” (Lukacs 921). According to Lukacs, in a representation of any present time “the idea of the transitory nature of this society appears tangibly and plastically before us” (918)—in other words, the fluid nature of the present, caused by contradictions built-in to any ruling ideology, should be displayed in an accurate description of reality. Though the State “may survive political events which affect the possession of State power” (Althusser 1340), such as those that require use of the repressive State apparatus, it has only a delicate ideological grip on the movement of historical development that is “made up of the components of ceaseless class struggles and their bloody resolution in great or small successful or abortive uprisings” (Lukacs 921). This historical development is a generally linear—though turbulent, as Lukacs points out by noting any given moment has “successful or abortive” campaigns—evolutionary progression in accordance with what Althusser calls “the ‘Marxist theory of the State’” (1340).

Lukacs and Althusser both depend on a Freudian synthesis, though in Lukacs case it is not consciously Freudian, to elaborate their depictions of ideology’s role in societal formations. Lukacs’ recapitulation of Hegel’s “world spirit” (the spirit being the evolution of historical progress) finds a Freudian relationship between society’s conscious and unconscious within historical development. Quoting Hegel, Lukacs writes that “the spirit opposes itself and has to overcome itself, as the really hostile obstacle to its own purpose…is a hard, unceasing struggle against itself” (918). Just as Freud proposes that the subject has unconscious desires that are in constant strife with the conscious self, progress is society’s unconscious that is historically intrinsic in any dominant ideology until it at last overcomes the ruling, dominant, i.e. conscious ideology—resulting in the inevitable formation of a new unconscious out of the once unconscious, but now dominant, ideological formation. All of this seems to be a philosophical, though not chronological, extension of Althusser’s idea that “ideology is eternal, exactly like the unconscious” (1351). While ideology may be eternal, the realization of Marx’s “radical process, that of the destruction of the State” (1340), would end the Freudian dichotomy, expressed by Lukacs with the help of Hegel, of an unconscious “world spirit” of progress fighting against its own conscious ruling ideology: the inherent unconscious present in the contradictions of State apparatuses will continue evolving the nature of the State until there is no longer a state to revolutionize.

Althusser presents the State apparatus as a ubiquitous and suffocating ideological machine, but Lukacs’ account of the self-destruction of feudalism during the Napoleonic Wars demonstrates that the State crumbles upon the contradictions of its own ideology. European States exposed cracks built-in to their fundamental ideologies by issuing nationalist propaganda and structuring the army without consideration for class; the result was the increased consciousness of the working class and a sense of historical ownership that ultimately led to a capitalist revolution. This trend is as timeless as ideology itself, because, as Lukacs depicts, in any present moment ideologies are engaged in a struggle, or, as Gramsci says, “competition,” for “consent given by the great masses” that results in control of the State apparatus (1007). Though Althusser asserts that the State always survives this upheaval, Lukacs observes through Hegel that society is moving towards that moment when, according to Althusser’s paraphrasing of Marx, there is no State apparatus left to destroy itself: then society’s unconscious has realized its freedom. While Lukacs says that Hegel “sees the total life of humanity as a great historical process” (918), the Freudian nature of society’s progress seems to indicate the “great historical process” mirrors the “total life” of even a single human: a struggle for identity between a ruling ideology and a suppressed ideology of the realization of freedom and happiness.