stating that these contradictory conditions are constituted, at a given historical moment and for a given social formation, by the complex set of ideological state apparatuses contained in that social formation. I say complex set, i.e. a set with relations of contradiction-unevennesssubordination between its 'elements', and not a mere list of elements: indeed, it would be absurd to think that in a given conjuncture all the ideological state apparatuses contribute equally to the reproduction of the relations of production and to their transformation. In fact, their 'regional' properties -- their 'obvious' specialization into religion, knowledge, politics, etc. -- condition their relative importance (the unevenness of their relationships) inside the set of ideological state apparatuses, and that as a function of the state of the class struggle in the given social formation.

This explains why the ideological instance in its concrete materiality exists in the form of 'ideological formations' (referred to ideological state apparatuses) which both have a 'regional' character and involve class positions: the ideological 'objects' are always supplied together with 'the way to use them' -- their 'meaning', i.e. their orientation, i.e. the class interests which they serve -- which allows the commentary that practical ideologies are class practices (practices of class struggle) in Ideology. Which is to say that, in the ideological struggle (no less than in the other forms of class struggle) there are no 'class positions' which exist abstractly and are then applied to the different regional ideological 'objects' of concrete situations, in the School, the Family, etc. In fact, this is where the contradictory connection between the reproduction and the transformation of the relations of production is joined at the ideological level, in so far as it is not the regional ideological 'objects' taken one by one but the very division into regions (God, Ethics, Law, Justice, Family, Knowledge, etc.) and the relationships of unevennesssubordination between those regions that constitute what is at stake in the ideological class struggle.

The domination of the ruling ideology (the ideology of the ruling class), which is characterized, at the ideological level, by the fact that the reproduction of the relations of production 'wins out' over their transformation (obstructs it, slows it down or suppresses it in different cases) thus corresponds less to keeping each ideological 'region' considered by itself the same than to the reproduction of the relationships of unevenness-subordination between those regions (with their 'objects' and the practices in which they are inscribed): ³ this is what entitled Althusser to propose the apparently scandalous thesis that the set of ideological state apparatuses in a capitalist social formation includes also the trade unions and the political parties (without further specification; in fact all he meant to designate was the function attributed to

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