Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
Within Marxist tradition the State is explicitly conceived as a repressive apparatus. A repressive state apparatus is the act of subduing the working class via enabling the ruling classes to be apart of surplus-value extortion. Legal practice through the use of the police, the courts, and prisons etc. keeps the working class from doing anything the ruling class deems unruly. The repressive state apparatuses function as a unified entity. Whenever an individual or a group of individuals challenge the dominant ideology of the state, the latter uses repressive state apparatuses in order to stabilize the former. According to Althusser, many of these encounters with the working class versus the ruling class ended in bloodshed. Usually the ideology aspect comes in after violence.
An example of this would be the Sanitation strike in Memphis in the 1960s. It was a strike for the black men sanitation workers but it was also one against the ruling class of Memphis. Mayor Loeb refused to take dilapidated trucks out of service and did not pay the men for overtime. Sanitation workers earned wages so low that many were on welfare and hundreds relied on food stamps to feed their families.The strike might have ended on 22 February, when the City Council, pressured by a sit-in of sanitation workers and their supporters, voted to recognize the union and recommended a wage increase. Mayor Loeb rejected the City Council vote, however, insisting that only he had the authority to recognize the union and refused to do so. Then the next day after police used mace and tear gas against nonviolent demonstrators marching to City Hall, Memphis’ black community was galvanized. People were committed to the use of nonviolent civil disobedience to fill Memphis’ jails and bring attention to the plight of the sanitation workers. By the beginning of March, local high school and college students, nearly a quarter of them white, were participating alongside garbage workers in daily marches; and over 100 people, including several ministers, had been arrested.
On the other hand, ideological state apparatuses are different in that morals and ethics prevent violence. ISAs function predominantly by ideology but can include punishment or repression secondarily. Although the ISAs appear to be quite disparate, they are unified by subscribing to a common ideology in the service of the ruling class; indeed, the ruling class must maintain a degree of control over the ISAs in order to ensure the stability of the repressive state apparatus. However, they are a little harder to control due to the plurality of them. They include educational institutions, religious institutions, family, media outlets, trade unions, cultural groups, political groups, legal groups etc.
For Althusser the education system is the most dominant form of the ISA. Children are shaped to fit into the ideology of the ruling class by being taught how to act and what to say. They then enter the work force which once again creates a reproduction of the current system. If a student speaks out of line at school or causes a fight, they are punished. This also means that ISAs are not purely just that. As mentioned above the ruling class will still have a way to influence these systems.
