Ideology masks class by dissolving classes into individual subjects then rebinding them as nation

Evidence

Gramsci, following Marx, suggested that there were “two, great floors” to the superstructures—civil society and the state. … One way of thinking the general function of ideology, in relation to these two spheres, is in terms of what Poulantzas calls separation and uniting . In the sphere of market relations and of “egoistic private interest” (the sphere, preeminently, of “civil society”) the productive classes appear or are represented as (a) individual economic units driven by private and egoistic interests alone, which are (b) bound by the multitude of invisible contracts—the “hidden hand” of capitalist exchange relations. As we have remarked, this re-presentation has the effect, first, of shifting emphasis and visibility from production to exchange, second of fragmenting classes into individuals, third of binding individuals into that “passive community” of consumers. Likewise, in the sphere of the state and of juridico-political ideology, the political classes and class relations are represented as individual subjects (citizens, the voter, the sovereign individual in the eyes of the law and the representative system, etc.); and these individual political legal subjects are then “bound together” as members of a nation , united by the “social contract,” and by their common and mutual “general interest.” (Marx calls the general interest “precisely the generality of self-seeking interests.”) Once again, the class nature of the state is masked: classes are redistributed into individual subjects: and these individuals are united within the imaginary coherence of the state, the nation, and the “national interest.” It is surprising how many of the dominant ideological regions accomplish their characteristic inflections by way of this mechanism. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 911

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Poulantzas’s separation-and-uniting mechanism: the twin move of dissolving classes into individuals and then uniting individuals under nation/general interest.
• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely paradigm-level insight about how ideology works through a double operation of fragmentation and imaginary re-unification — applicable far beyond Marxism to nationalism, markets, branding.
• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to understanding dress/morality panics as ideology masking class: the same separation-and-uniting structure explains how sumptuary anxiety re-frames class resentment as moral concern.
• XREF: connects to: Class structure persists while class consciousness has been politically disavowed — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1908