I asked for essay recommendations in my server, and one of the suggestions was Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses written by Louis Althusser and translated from French by Ben Brewster. I’m assuming that this is a Marxist essay, given that it’s hosted on marxists.org and it references Marx.

It appears to make the argument that in order for production to be possible, it must both be productive and also reproduce the conditions under which the same production can be continued.

Althusser points out several factors that need to be reproduced:

• The human labor (people, skills, knowledge, technique, etc)
• Submission to the rules of the established order

In particular, it seems to argue that the way society is organized (like religion, education, politics, etc) are the way they are in order to reproduce the current order of production.

I had a very hard time understanding what Althusser was trying to say though, and I only got as far as the heading “Ideology has no History” before I decided to stop.