Louis Althusser published "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation as an effort to understand anti-capitalistic uprising that was happing in his time. The issue Althusser is concentrating is how the working class fought off to transform the corrupt-abusive-ruling capitalist rule into a communist rule. .
To understand the problem he uses the method of Ideology, mixing and comparing one ideology to another. He analyzed how these ideologies functioned in society and what institutions served as the vehicle for their functions. To do this he concentrated on the works of Karl Marx.
He started out with the Reproduction of the means of Production. He states that inorder to reproduce you must have the raw material. But this capitalist does not have the resource for he or she does not reproduce the material, other capitalist do. He concludes that this is the form in which the reproduction of the product produces. He then went on the reproduction of labor. He states the the reproduction of labor goes beyond the firm. And in order to obtain labor power, the firm must provide wages for the capitalist in order for the worker to sustain a daily life: to support his family and the worker itself in order for the worker to be back for the next working day. He then concluded that in this work is assigned in a specially are when the worker has the skills, then worker become allianated.
Althusser then stated to sets of apparatus in which it has help the mode of production. He named them the Repressive State Apparatu (RSA) and the Ideological State Appratus (ISA). He defined the RSA as a group ( government, administration, the army and etc.) who maintains a total control of the means of force and applied to support the capitalist structure. Thus he means that they unite and use represion to those who are against capitalism. The other set, the ISA (family, church, schools and etc.
