Marx located ideology in how the wage form appears spontaneously to thought

Evidence

However, looking—to use the spatial metaphor again—“upward,” Marx then notes that it is these phenomenal relations which constitute the basis of civil society and the politico-juridical relations: that is, the superstructures. And from that level, also, arise the various forms of ideological consciousness. “On the surface of bourgeois society,” Marx writes, “the wage of the labourer appears as the price of labour, a certain quantity of money that is paid for a certain quantity of labour.… This phenomenal form which makes the actual relation invisible and indeed shows the direct opposite of that relation forms the basis of all the juridical notions of both labourer and capitalist, of all the mystifications of the capitalist mode of production, of all its illusions as to liberty , of all the apologetic shifts of the vulgar economists .… The exchange between capital and labour at first presents itself to the mind in the same guise as the buying and selling of all other commodities,” he adds a little further on. Finally, he concludes, “The former [the ‘phenomenal form’] appear directly and spontaneously as current modes of thought: the latter [the real relations] must first be discovered by science.” — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 520

Categorization

• DEFINE: The wage as price of labor is Marx’s paradigm case of a phenomenal form generating systematic juridical and liberal-ideological notions from the base up.
• XREF: This ‘spontaneous current modes of thought’ point is the germ of what later becomes ideology-critique and common-sense analysis — ties to Gramsci and to the reader’s Frankfurt School material on how everyday categories encode domination.
• SEED: What does it mean that phenomenal forms arise ‘spontaneously’ as modes of thought while science must ‘discover’ real relations — usable angle on why markets feel self-evidently fair to most people.