Market ideology is real practice, not fantasy, because it legitimately misrepresents production

Evidence

The market of course, really exists . It is not the figment of anyone’s imagination. It is a mediation which enables one kind of relation (social) to appear (i.e., really to appear) as another kind of relation (individual) (Grundrisse ). This second relation is not “false” in the sense that it does not exist: but it is “false” in the sense that, within its limits, it cannot express and embody the full social relation on which the system ultimately rests. The market re-presents a system which requires both production and exchange as if it consisted of exchange only. That of course was the key premise of much of political economy. It therefore has the function, at one and the same time, of: (a) transforming one relation into its opposite—the “camera obscura ”; (b) making the latter, which is part of the relations of production and exchange under capitalism, appear as, or stand for , the whole—this is the theory of fetishism , developed in the first chapter of the first volume of Capital ; (c) and also making the latter—the real foundations of capitalist society, in production—disappear from view , the effect of concealment . Hence, we can only “see” that labor and production are realized through the market: we can no longer “see” that it is in production that labor is exploited and the surplus value extracted. These three “functions” make market relationships under capitalism, simultaneously, “real” and ideological . — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 890

Categorization

• DEFINE: The three-fold function (camera obscura, fetishism, concealment) defining what ideology-as-real-practice means — a decisive refinement of Marx’s theory of ideology.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that market ideology is simultaneously ‘real’ and ‘ideological’ — that a practice can be a true but structurally limited representation — is nuanced, paradigm-shifting, and resists one-sentence summary. Top-tier material.
• XREF: Connects to commodity fetishism in Capital Vol. 1 and to later critical political economy (Étienne Balibar, and more recently the ‘form of appearance’ debates in value-form theory). — connects to: Mass production really means producing the masses, not producing massively — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 227; The marketplace is an aberrant artifice that conceals consumption’s real sources — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 726