Outline: Louis Althusser- Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

The works listed here (nearly 500 books and articles) can be viewed and downloaded immediately. I wanted to offer everyone interested the chance to read the fundamental economic works of Marx and also a wide variety of old and recent works about the most important problems of Marxist economic science. I tried to represent all currents of thoughts from within the Marxist economic sciences, along with their mutual critics or about other currents (neo-classicism or “heterodox” schools) from the whole of the economic sciences. I think that, along with these, one should also have access to the main critical works against the Marxist economic theory. All voices must be heard in a dialogue, even if it is a polemic, and Marxists should be capable of coming up with a proper answer to those critics and not to deny them just because they belong to the enemy camp. True science can only benefit from this type of dialogue. I am not against a social role of economics, but against its politicization during research. The goal of science must be the truth, and this goal must reign over the others, which cannot be adequately achieved otherwise. This could be also expressed as a necessity of turning practical consequences of the Marxian economics not into political ‘weapons’, but into social ‘tools’. Psychologically, this would be a passage from a destructive, negativist, and sometime resenting approach, to a constructive, participative, and empathic one. We need neither science for science, nor science with (political) tendency, but SCIENCE FOR TRUTH.

Nagorik

Las Torres de Lucca, 2023

In the global contemporary political context, diverse social struggles are being alienated from each other to the point that the illusion of capitalism as the only possible socioeconomic system is blurring all horizons of social change. In this article, we will aim to redefine the common causes of social struggles, by demonstrating their intersectionality and interdependence. In order to do so, we will engage with a number of concepts from Marx's philosophy. In the introduction, we will examine the notion of value, claiming that Marx's value theory is not simply a labor theory of value, but that it rather reflects the parallax structure of production and circulation, crystallized in the ultimate value-form of money. Having obtained these preliminary insights, we will go back to the phenomenon of labor in capitalism, to reinterpret, in the first section of the article, the Marxian distinction between productive and unproductive labor. From this will follow the first concrete examples of the intersectionality of social struggles against the abstraction of capital: namely, showing that gender and racial struggles have certain common causes, rooted in the Gramscian hegemony. In the second section, we will examine the distinction that Marx establishes between the formal and the real subsumption. The latter, we will claim, is decisive for understanding how capital structures the quasi-totality of our social relations. Following an interpretation of Maren Ade's film Toni Erdmann, we will propose some possible means of intersectional struggle against real subsumption, that will find their theoretical backing in the concept of subversive universals. The concluding remarks will address the nuclear logic of the distribution and accumulation of capital, a symptom that survives throughout history preserved and driven by the omnipresence of ideology, and stress again implicitly the importance of common struggle in the unfreezing of emergence of a new revolutionary subject.

Some recent Marxist contributions, among them the so-called New Solution to the " transformation problem, " call into question the idea of labor-power as a fully-fledged commodity. Yet, the rejection of the commodity nature of labor-power compromises Marx's whole explanation of the origin of surplus-value on the basis of the exchange of equivalents. It can be shown, however, that it is possible to offer a positive case for the commodity-nature of labor-power which is consistent with Marx's broader dialectical investigation of the determinations of the value-form. This requires building upon the arguments that Marx explicitly put forward in his economic works, but also going beyond them, albeit on the basis of those arguments themselves. Furthermore, this novel approach that treats the reproduction of labor-power as a commodity determined by the self-valorization of capital proves to be very valuable in shedding light on two classic Marxist controversies, namely: the debate on domestic labor and the one on skilled labor.

Mediations, 2017

In " e Spectre of Ideology," Slavoj Žižek identifies three axes around which the term ideology has been mobilized: first, "ideology as a complex of ideas (theories, convictions, beliefs, argumentative procedures)"; second, ideology in its material form, in institutions, structures, and even bodily practices; and finally, what Žižek calls "the most elusive domain, the 'spontaneous' ideology at work at the heart of social 'reality' itself." 1 As an example of the second -ideology in its material form -Žižek offers an example of what he means right away, as soon as he names the axis: Althusser's Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), those set of institutions, coordinated by the State, in which ideology is manifested materially, via the practice or practices of that apparatus. With respect to the third -"spontaneous" understandings of ideologyinstead of an example he provides a cautionary note: "it is highly questionable if the term 'ideology' is at all appropriate to designate this domain -here it is exemplary that, apropos of commodity fetishism, Marx never used the term 'ideology.'" 2 Althusser's On the Reproduction of Capitalism is a detour of a book, bookended by a desire named at the outset and a conclusion (of sorts) reached in the final chapter. We are told in the introduction that the overall aim of the book is to outline "a scientific definition of philosophy"; to reach that goal, there first needs to be a long analysis of how the superstructure functions to reproduce relations of production. Žižek might associate Althusser's ISAs with the materiality of ideology, and the core part of this newly translated book certainly confirms this view. But by the time we make it to the concluding chapter, "On Ideology," it's clear that the careful work of materializing ideology has, at least in part, been undertaken in order to figure its spontaneous operations. At the core of the various articulations that Althusser offers of ideology (with all of their tricky and at times inconsistent metaphors), of its links (at least structurally) to psychoanalysis, of its constitution of subjects -even of the very need for subjects in a discussion of ISAs -is a fascination with a single problem. How is it that subjects "go" -or rather: how is it that they manage to "go

In order to address the relationship between class domination, social practices, and ideologies, Louis Althusser approaches the social formations from the point of view of reproduction. His project is firmly founded on theorizing the reproduction of domination and its mechanisms. For him, the economic modes of production in a capitalist society, function not only through the reproduction of the labor power skills and structure, but also within the reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology that provides the necessary conditions for workers exploitation and repression. In his view, no class can hold state power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over the ideological sphere.

LOUIS ALTHUSSER builds on the work of Jacques Lacan to understand the way ideology functions in society. He thus moves away from the earlier Marxist understanding of ideology. In the earlier model, ideology was believed to create what was termed "false consciousness," a false understanding of the way the world functioned (for example, the suppression of the fact that the products we purchase on the open market are, in fact, the result of the exploitation of laborers). Althusser explains that for Marx "Ideology is [...] thought as an imaginary construction whose status is exactly like the theoretical status of the dream among writers before Freud. For those writers, the dream was the purely imaginary, i.e. null, result of the 'day's residues'" (Lenin 108). Althusser, by contrast, approximates ideology to Lacan's understanding of "reality," the world we construct around us after our entrance into the symbolic order. (See the Lacan module on the structure of the psyche.) For Althusser, as for Lacan, it is impossible to access the "Real conditions of existence" due to our reliance on language; however, through a rigorous"scientific" approach to society, economics, and history, we can come close to perceiving if not those "Real conditions" at least the ways that we are inscribed in ideology by complex processes of recognition.

Problems of Economic Transition, 1991

Respublica Litereria , 2019

The history of economic thought is a juggernaut of blueprints penned by Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Lenin, Keynes, Hayek, Ricardo, Mill and many pundits who developed unparalleled thoughts throughout the centuries. The forces of the market-state chemistry and capital-labour relations have been the dominant focus of research that inform the vicissitudes witnessed in the inability of economic principles to explain the global crises witnessed in the 21st Century. One of the differences between neoclassical and Keynesian economics is about the determinants of long run growth. Indeed, there is no natural mechanism producing convergence towards an economy’s potential state. For the value of a commodity, says Marx, is the amount of labour it has within itself. However, no matter what its form, it is eventually reducible to labour, and all commodities, in this perfect system, will be priced accord-ing to the amount of labour, direct or indirect, that they contain. Globalisation saw the systematic deployment of outsourcing production in countries offering cheap labour, minimised corporate tax burdens and other incentives for transnational corporations, and the invention of the trade in economic derivatives. Meanwhile, neoliberal political economy gradually became the new orthodoxy, increasing its impact through right wing think tanks and government advisors and spreading its influence in academia and economic thought. Neoliberalism has promoted a self-centredness pushing Smith-style individualism to an extreme, turning selfishness into a virtue, as Ayn Rand has done. The Economist, in its article, “The resurgent left - Millennial socialism, undergirds a new kind of left-wing doctrine is emerging. Socialism is storming back because it has formed an incisive critique of what has gone wrong in Western societies. Whereas politicians on the right have all too often given up the battle of ideas and retreated towards chauvinism and nostalgia, the left has focused on inequality, the environment, and vesting power in citizens rather than elites. The millennial socialist vision of a “democratised” economy spreads regulatory power around rather than concentrating it. Nevertheless, like the socialism of old, it suffers from a faith in the incorruptibility of collective action and an unwarranted suspicion of individual vim. Rapid and sustained poverty reduction requires inclusive growth that allows people to contribute to and benefit from economic growth. Rapid pace of growth is unquestionably necessary for substantial poverty reduction, but for this growth to be sustainable in the end, it should be broad-based across sectors and inclusive of the large part of a nation’s work force. This implies a direct link between the macro and micro determinants of growth. The micro dimension captures the importance of structural transformation for diversification and competition, including creative destruction of jobs and firms. Key words: Globalisation, Democratic Socialism, Millennial socialism, Keynesianism, Neoliberalism,

Philosophica, 1972