I'm making this thread to try and explain the concept of commodity-fetishism which is very essential to understanding capitalism. I'm not super good at explaining, but hopefully this will provide enough insight.

First, a direct quote by Marx :

"Objects of utility become commodities only because they are the products of the labour of private individuals who work independently of each other. The sum total of the labour of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labour of society. Since the producers do not come into social contact until they exchange the products of their labour, the specific social characteristics of their private labours appear only within this exchange. In other words, the labour of the private individual manifests itself as an element of the total labour of society only through the relations which the act of exchange establishes between the products, and, through their mediation, between the producers. To the producers, therefore, the social relations between their private labours appear as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material relations between persons and social relations between things." - K.Marx

The products that we make using our labor are sold on the market. They fetch a price, and we use that money to buy other products. So far these are relations between things - products for money, money for products. But why are there any relations between these things at all? Because what these relations actually represent is the relation between producers. We only interact with other people, in the sphere of production and distribution, through the medium of objects, rather than directly. The objects themselves, relate with other objects socially, i.e. their relations are mediated not by interactions between individual objects, but there is something of a social character (which is later shown to be socially-necessary labor time) that determines their relations.

If I want something you made, I must sell something I made in order to gain money, which I use to buy something from you. This is an example of material relation between people. I make a chair which I can sell for $50, this $50 can be used to buy 10 dozen eggs. This is an example of social relations between objects. What is underlying all these however, is the social relation between people : People exert labor and produce things for others.

What is common among all economic systems is the fact that human beings exert labor to produce things they need or want. How the products of labor are produced and distributed is what determines the structure of society.

It is precisely because producers of one product do not have access to products of other people, that they have to exchange their products, to gain access to others' produce. Under capitalism, this becomes generalized, every single thing becomes an exchangable product (a.k.a a commodity). These things only become commodities because of the way producers relate to each other.

Now to ask a simplistic question - why is this a bad thing? Because it represent the domination of production over man, rather than man over production.

In capitalism, we are dominated by things. We work for money, we use money to buy stuff. If what we produce cannot sell, we cannot make money. Rather than organizing our relations with other people directly, we mediate our relations using things. At the same time, it is the things which are doing the job of mediating social relations.

This is precisely what socialism wants to end. It's not possible to describe the goal of socialism in one sentence, but to try, socialism is when the relations between human beings in their common endeavors to produce things they need and want, is direct, transparent and objective.

The social relations are no longer indirect i.e through things rather than between people. They are no longer mystified by abstract categories of profit, wage-labor, price, value etc but are made transparent. They are made transparent by becoming objective i.e. directly observable, calculable and exact.

What these relations would look like concretely, is to be decided by the working class. One solution, posited by Marx as well as by Dutch-German workers in the 1930s, is to use abstract labor, i.e labor-time of any type or intensity, calculated in simple number of hours, as a way to rationalize production, as this is similar to how capitalism itself rationalizes production. We simply calculate the toil of producing things in abstract labor-hours, and use this accounting method to decide how to organize production. In the early stage of socialism, the "price" of things can be made equal to the number of hours needed to produce them. Distribution can be done using labor-vouchers which are non-transferable claims to produce. This way the capitalist relations are completely destroyed, and replaced with direct, objective and transparent relations between people, their labor, and its produce.

The ultimate goal of communism, however, is to completely abolish value, meaning even labor-voucher system must eventually be destroyed, and value no longer has dominion over the production and distribution of goods, and therefore over man. We as socialists, must not make the mistake of fetishizing value, even if the system is self-imposed.

"Political economy has indeed analysed value and its magnitude, however incompletely, and has uncovered the content concealed within these forms. But it has never once asked the question why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value and why the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of value of the product. These formulas, which bear the unmistakable stamp of belonging to a social formation in which the process of production has mastery over man, instead of the opposite, appear to the political economists’ bourgeois consciousness to be as much a self-evident and nature-imposed necessity as productive labour itself." - K.Marx