The exchange sphere masks exploitative production relations and produces the illusion of isolated individuals

Evidence

This does not mean, of course, that each member of a society is conscious of such an abstract notion of unity. It means that he is absorbed in innumerable, specific relations and in the feeling and the knowledge of determining others and of being determined by them. — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 169 (#expands, via linked claim)

It was, in this sense, that “experience” was conceived, not as an authenticating source but as an effect: not as a reflection of the real but as an “imaginary relation.” It was only a short step—the one which separates For Marx from Althusser’s “Ideological State Apparatuses”—to the development of an account of how this “imaginary relation” served, not simply the dominance of a ruling class over a dominated one, but (through the reproduction of the relations of production, and the constitution of labor-power in a form fit for capitalist exploitation) the expanded reproduction of the mode of production itself. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 195 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The sphere of exchange generates capitalism’s spontaneous commonsense and bourgeois theory; Ideologies act on people structurally through a process that escapes them; Ideology’s imaginary relation functions to reproduce capitalist production relations — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 195 (+10 more)

Related

• Exchange is a change within each party, not a thing between them. (similarity 0.81)
• The sphere of exchange appears dominant though production actually determines capitalism. (similarity 0.81)
• Individuality paradoxically emerges through the exchange process that levels it. (similarity 0.81)
• Exchange itself, not utility or scarcity, creates economic value. (similarity 0.81)
• Ideology’s imaginary relation functions to reproduce capitalist production relations (similarity 0.81)
• Marx conceived social unity as constructed out of difference, not identity (similarity 0.81)
• What people are coincides with what and how they produce (similarity 0.80)
• Human essence is the ensemble of social relations, not an individual abstraction (similarity 0.79)
• Market ideology fragments classes into individual consumers and hides production (similarity 0.79)
• Individual motives become social only through forms of mutual interaction (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Social unity is felt through concrete relations rather than abstract awareness #expands (0.78) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 169
• The sphere of exchange generates capitalism’s spontaneous commonsense and bourgeois theory #expands (0.75)
• Ideology’s imaginary relation functions to reproduce capitalist production relations #expands (0.70) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 195
• Ideologies act on people structurally through a process that escapes them #expands (0.55)