The collective belief that the value of things is measured by money; ‘the true source of their value—human labour—is not visible. Consumers perceive commodities as natural, as having a life of their own, rather than as socially produced’ (Leslie (2009) in J. Agnew and D. Livingstone, eds). Kosoy and Corbera (2010) Ecol. Econs. 69, 1229 provide an excellent overview of this term, and S. Aitken and G. Valentine (2006), p. 63, claim that ‘commodity fetishism has itself become a commodity’.