Commodity fetishism

Commodity Fetishism is a theoretical concept first described by Karl Marx in Capital, vol. I. It expresses a specific character of the Commodity that occurs because of the value-form (i.e. price, exchange value, etc.) of a commodity applied on its production is seen as an inherent property of the commodity, instead of what is in reality human social relations. Further, because of this quality that is dialectically tied to the process of commodity production, the social relation created by the producers (i.e. workers) is transformed into a social relation between objects that is outside of the producers.

Commodity fetishism masks the labor relationships of producers under capitalism, especially those relationships in production and distribution.

"...for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion"