Louis Althusser Quotes

Ideology has very little to do with 'consciousness' - it is profoundly unconscious.

Philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory.

[T]he economic class struggle is a struggle against inessanlty intensified exploitation: not only against the brutal material form of exploitation, capitalism's tendency to reduce wages, and against the class 'techniques' for increasing productivity... but also around the question of the technical-social division of labor that prevails om enterprises, and against bourgeois ideology and repression.

In the battle that is philosophy all the techniques of war, including looting and camouflage, are permissible.

One of the goals of philosophy is wage theoretical battle. That is why we can say that every thesis is always, by its very nature, an antithesis. A thesis is only ever put forward in opposition to another thesis, or in defence of a new one.

However much an ideologue tries to bury [Lenin] beneath a proof by historical analysis, there is always this one man standing their on the plain of History and of our lives, in the eternal 'current situation.' He goes on talking, calmly or passionately. He goes on talking about something simple: his revolutionary practice, the practice of class struggle, about what makes it possible to act on history...not to demonstrate that revolutions are inevitable, but to make them in our unique present.

Without claiming to be exhaustive, I maintain that every philosophy reproduces within itself, in one way or another, the conflict in which it finds itself compromised and caught up in the outside world.