Market relations are real yet systematically hide their basis in 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. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 890

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Marx’s distinctive sense that market ideology is not fantasy but a real, partly-true appearance — a misconception (that ideology = falsehood) that many readers carry.
• XREF: Connects to Marx’s theory of fetishism and the ‘camera obscura’ concept, and foreshadows Hall’s articulation theory of ideology as developed across his later essays. — connects to: The marketplace is an aberrant artifice that conceals consumption’s real sources — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 726; What the market does is merely direct labor and resources into elite control — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 604