political parties and trade unions within the complex of the ideological state apparatuses under the domination of the ruling ideology (the ideology of the ruling class), i.e., the subordinate but unavoidable and so quite necessary function whereby the ruling class is assured of 'contact' and 'dialogue' with its class adversary, i.e. the proletariat and its allies, a function to which a proletarian organization cannot of course simply conform).

This example helps explain how the relationships of unevennesssubordination between different ideological state apparatuses (and the regions, objects and practices which correspond to them) constitute, as I have been saying, the stake in the ideological class struggle. The ideological aspect of the struggle for the transformation of the relations of production lies therefore, above all, in the struggle to impose, inside the complex of ideological state apparatuses, new relationships of unevenness-subordination ⁴ (this is what is expressed, for example, in the slogan 'Put politics in command!'), resulting in a transformation of the set of the 'complex of ideological state apparatuses 'in its relationship with the state apparatus and a transformation of the state apparatus itself. ⁵

To sum up: the material objectivity of the ideological instance is characterized by the structure of unevenness-subordination of the 'complex whole in dominance' of the ideological formations of a given social formation, a structure which is nothing but that of the reproduction/transformation contradiction constituting the ideological class struggle.

At the same time, where the form of this contradiction is concerned, it should be specified that, given what I have just said, it cannot be thought of as the opposition between two forces acting against one another in a single space. The form of the contradiction inherent to the ideological struggle between the two antagonistic classes is not symmetrical in the sense of each class trying to achieve to its own advantage the same thing as the other: if I insist on this point it is because many conceptions of the ideological struggle, as we have seen, take it as an evident fact before the struggle, as we have seen, take is an evident fact before the struggle that 'society' exists (with the 'State' over it) as a space, as the terrain of that struggle. This is so because, as Étienne Balibar points out, the class relation is concealed in the operation of the state apparatus by the very mećhanism that realizes it, such that society, the state and subjects in law (free and equal in principle in the capitalist mode of production) are produced-reproduced as 'naturally evident notions'. This flushes out a second error, the first one's twin, concerning the nature of this contradiction and opposing reproduction to transformation as inertia is opposed to movement: the idea that the

-144-