June 14, 2018:
Althusser now departs from inherited Marxist thinking not only about Ideology, but also the State. He argues that the Marxist tradition contains merely "indications" of concepts not yet produced. Thus "The State" in classical Marxism is the organization of armed force in service of the ruling class; its principal function is repression of dominated classes on behalf of the class that rules. Althusser insists that, like the base/superstructure metaphor, this is a description, not a concept. He argues that this particular description is distorted, because it presents the state as a simple instrument in the service of the conscious objectives of a class which is capable of thinking as a subject: idealism of the subject married to instrumentalist pseudo-theory. Althusser now tries to develop a concept "in the full sense" by "adding something" to the classic definition.