Commodity fetishism

Commodity Fetishism is a theoretical concept first described by Karl Marx in Capital, vol. I. It encompasses the relationships behind a property of the Commodity; specifically how the value-form (i.e. price, exchange value, etc.) of a commodity is considered to be an inherent quality within itself instead of as the product of human social relations.

The introduction and reproduction of the value-form is dialectically tied to the process of commodity production. The value-form transforms social relations between producers (e.g. workers, laborers) into a social relation between things (e.g. money). This generates a metaphysical relationship between people and abstracts individual labor, making it a "standard of homogenous human labor."

Below Marx gives insight into this topic and ties religion to the overall concept

"...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"