[incr_me]

The reason Marx developed the more advanced category of commodity fetishism was, in a way, to expose the real alienation in the fantasy that one could opt out of "alienation" by becoming a baker, bike repairman, etc. The heart of a heartless world, indeed.

[hliyan]

I've heard people describe commodity fetishism as replacing social relationships with relationships to things you own (e.g. your car, your iPhone etc). Is this accurate?

[incr_me]

The issue is not primarily psychological attachment to objects, but that private labor (labor carried out independently by separate producers, whose social validity is only realized through exchange) takes on the appearance of its opposite: labor in a directly social form through exchange. Through exchange, the values of commodities appear to individuals not as a relation between producers, but as a property inherent in things themselves. Use-value appears as value, concrete labor appears as abstract labor, private labor appears as social labor.

This has a ton of effects. Some of the most important: it obscures exploitation (profit appears to derive from capital/risk/trade/etc., i.e. anything but labor), it naturalizes capitalism (markets, competition, money, and wage labor seem transhistorical), it disempowers producers (alienation), and it produces ideological mystification in general (people attribute to greed, unfair exchange, moral failure, production scale, division of labor, or technologies what should be attributed to the specific historical form of labor).

So your example is probably a third-order effect of commodity fetishism.

This condensation of the concept really sucked. I suggest struggling through Capital Vol. I, Ch. 1.