“Polanyi talked in really compelling terms about fictitious commodification. He was worried that things were being put up for sale when they had an essence before their marketised form. Think of labour markets. We all exist within labour markets of one form or another, we’ve become more and more familiar with using the language of labour markets, but there is a non-commodified essence to the human form before it becomes labour. We’re just people and we have needs as people. Those needs as people might very well clash with the needs that we have to demonstrate as labour.
“The BMJ [British Medical Journal] has, for example, documented a whole catalogue of new psychological illnesses over the last 10 or 20 years that come with new forms of work. So as the labour market makes more and more demands of us, the less and less able we are to function as human beings; we lose some of that essential human essence.