The sphere of exchange appears dominant though production actually determines capitalism.

Evidence

Often, though by no means exclusively, the question of appearances or of “real relations”/“phenomenal forms” is linked, in Capital , with the distinction between production and exchange. In the “1857 Introduction” and throughout Capital Marx insists on the necessary relation between the circuits of exchange (where value is realized) and the conditions pertaining to it, and the circuits of capital through production and the conditions pertaining to that. These, he says, must not be thought of as “identical.” They are complementary but different, articulated with each other, but each still requiring its own conditions to be sustained. Hence the “unity” which these processes exhibit is not a unity of identity, but “unity of the diverse”—the “concentration of many determinations.” Now, though these processes remain linked in their differences, and each is necessary for the “self-expansion and realization of value,” production is the determining level: “consumption appears as a moment of production.” The sphere of exchange is, however, what appears to dominate, to provide the “real” level of social relations under capitalism. It is also the sphere in which the myriad everyday “exchanges” of capitalist market relations take place, dictated only by the hidden but miraculous hand of the market. It is thus the sphere of capitalism’s “common sense”—that is, where our spontaneous and everyday commonsense perceptions and experiences of the system arise. It is also the starting point of bourgeois theory, both vulgar political economy and, after that, marginal economics which deals principally with the domain of circulation. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 518

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains Marx’s distinction between production and exchange as ‘unity of the diverse’ and locates where commonsense perceptions of capitalism arise.
• XREF: This maps closely to Marx’s own ‘1857 Introduction’ Grundrisse passages and to the theory of fetishism in Capital Vol I chapter 1, familiar ground for the reader.
• ADDENDUM: The claim that exchange appears as the ‘real’ level while production determines connects to the economics-of-ideas lens the reader wants for these essays.