ABSTRACT
Althusser, we have seen, views a ‘social formation’—a near equivalent of the sociological concept of ‘society’—as consisting of a number of distinct but interrelated levels of ‘practice’—the economic, the political and the ideological-each of which is relatively autonomous in relation to the others. The decisive concept here is that of ‘practice’:
By practice in general I shall mean any process of transformation of a determinate given raw material into a determinate product, a transformation effected by a determinate human labour, using determinate means (of ‘production’).1
