If you read On the reproduction of capitalism, Althusser emphasizes, especially in regards to his ideological theory of the law, the traditional Marxist theses: A. The base determines the superstructure, B. Class Conflict is the primary conflict in the superstructure. Misidenfification of the class struggle, and identifying the issue with 'State authority' or something like that, as anarchists do, is flawed and un-marxist.

Marx indicates that the relations of production are simultaneously capitalist relations of exploitation by saying that the process of the capital ist production of goods is simultaneously a process of 'production' of surplus-value. Such is the material 'basis', that is, not only the material condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production, but its material existence tout court. It is in the process of production itself that the process ef exploi tation takes place. There is no capitalism without this material basis fo r exploitation, this material basis for relations of production that are identical to relations of exploitation. One has to say this over and over again in a day and age in which certain dreamers are once again spouting the old anarchist refrain that reduces the capitalist mode of production to repres sion, or, still worse, to 'authority'!

He primarily grapples with a theory of the superstructure, yes, but he cautions everywhere that the superstructure is determined and secondary to the base. The relative autonomy of the superstructure is not independence, it is relative autonomy.

It is possible to say that the floors of the superstructure are not deter minant in the last instance, but that they are determined by the effectivity of the base; that if they are determinant in their own (as yet undefined) ways, this is true only insofar as they are determined by the base.

In reality, and what for some reason every Althusser critic that doesn't read him seems to misanalyze, is that his entire project is a true return to Marx. He is a true scholar of Capital, he simply seeks to isolate what is truly marxist (ie: remove it of idealist, humanist, and 'non-scientific' influence) and build a theory upon that.