Formal market equality between buyer and seller masks exploitation inside the enterprise.

Evidence

If in spite of that Marx has always been (rightly) understood as seeing production as the key to understanding the other processes, that is because the mainstream of economic thought before and since (and including Michaels) persists in absolutizing consumption and the market. The affirmation of the “primacy of production,” (whatever that might mean exactly), offers the most effective and powerful way of defamiliarizing and demystifying ideologies of the market itself and consumption-oriented models of capitalism. As a vision of capitalism, then, the affirmation of the primacy of the market is sheer ideology. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 475 (#expands, via linked claim)

Here, Adorno largely follows Marxian theory: ‘The illusion in the process of exchange lies in the concept of surplus-value’, a concept which is based on the appropriation of surplus-value by the purchasers of labour-power in compliance with the exchange of equivalents. He suggests that also at the point of indifference – between nature and society, as well as between classes – everything is in keeping with like for like. Both classes appear equal from the perspective of exchange, and nothing in their formal equality suggests that the class-relation first constitutes itself in the exchange of labour-power for wages. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1363 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Workers’ only meaningful choice under capitalism is to work or starve. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 552; The capitalist enterprise is politically autocratic, not democratic. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 549; Market ideology conceals exploitation by making exchange stand in for production (+4 more)

Related

• Marx held that market equality masks a coercive inequality at work (similarity 0.86)
• Capitalist-worker exchange is formally equal but substantively unequal (similarity 0.86)
• Market ideology conceals exploitation by making exchange stand in for production (similarity 0.84)
• Exchange becomes totalized across society by encroaching on production (similarity 0.83)
• Formal equality in exchange masks how the class relation is constituted (similarity 0.82)
• Labor is the commodity whose surplus value is expropriated and realized through market exchange (similarity 0.82)
• Formal political equality and market exchange produce economic domination when property is unequal (similarity 0.81)
• Capitalist exploitation is distinct because it is implicit (similarity 0.81)
• Surplus-value emerges where equivalent exchange opens a gap over reproduction costs (similarity 0.81)
• Distinguishing labour-capacity from labour resolves the wage contradiction Marx inherited (similarity 0.80)
• Capitalism’s socialized labor is experienced by individuals as alien market relations (similarity 0.80)
• Marx maintains inequality and unfreedom are inherent realizations of exchange-based freedom. (similarity 0.79)
• Fulfilling the concept of free exchange reveals it as its own opposite (similarity 0.79)
• Capitalist production relations are reproduced socially and ideologically, not just economically (similarity 0.79)
• Commodity fetishism presents social labour relations as properties of things (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Market ideology conceals exploitation by making exchange stand in for production #corroborates (0.92)
• Market-centered accounts of capitalism function as ideology masking production #expands (0.90) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 475
• Formal equality in exchange masks how the class relation is constituted #corroborates (0.88) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1363
• Capitalist-worker exchange is formally equal but substantively unequal #corroborates (0.85) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1365