Commodity fetishism is a concept through which Marx argued that social relations of production become relations among objects. For instance when a commodity is produced there is a certain amount of labor that is engaged in it apart from the raw materials that go as ingredients into its making. The social relations of production or the labor process that goes into the production of commodities is hidden and appears to us as a relation between objects .

This renders the commodity a fetish, which may be loosely called an obsession, something that is given a value additional to what it is used for. For instance we have religious fetishes, objects in religion that have become fetishes like totems, idols, and there may also be intellectual products that become fetishes.

Commodity fetishism therefore occurs when the system of exploitation of labor that goes into the production of an object is hidden as the commodity begins to have a certain aura or fetish around itself as a consequence of this concealment of the realities of the production process. Here objects become subjects and subjects become objects. So objects under the commodity fetishism theory become so important that they replace the social relations of productions i.e., labor transformed into the object per se or the commodity.