This is why it is actually wrong to assume that Marx criticizes the production and exchange of things in themselves, since not every object produced is a commodity, and not all exchanges are of the specific type described by Marx; rather, Marx criticizes the particular social relations that underlie the production and exchange of things in a capitalist society. Likewise, it is wrong to conclude that commodity fetishism refers to an obsessive fascination with the objective form of the commodity itself. Rather, the fetishism Marx refers to is, in essence, the fetishization of money as a substitute for abstract human labor power that has achieved an “autonomy of representation,” and thus constitutes a human social construction that has achieved a seemingly independent aspect. an existence that turns upside down and exerts on its creators a palpable force that appears autonomous to them. Thus, for Marx, "fetishism" primarily refers to the "secret" of the process of exchanging qualitatively different objects through their reduction to a common denominator in the form of money that facilitates this exchange. But money mediates this exchange only to the extent that it represents labor, which is the true source of exchange value