Commodity fetishism is the Marxist term for the process by which relationships between people become relationships between commodities. That is to say, the long narrative of the box of cereal, the pair of shoes, the smartphone you pick up from a store shelf is mystified by the scale and complexity of capitalism.
You don't see the sweating South American farmer, the Bangladeshi textile worker working her hands into claws, or the exploited African cobalt miner. You see a product, new and gleaming and brightly wrapped, interpretable only by its relationship to other products: a phone is worth X boxes of cereal is worth Y pairs of shoes. The people vanish, as if by magic.
