A helpful touchstone in this regard is the work of the economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi. Writing in the 1940s, Polanyi argued that in capitalism there are real commodities and what he called ‘fictitious commodities’.41 A ‘real’ commodity, he said, was something that was originally brought into being explicitly for sale on the market: commoditization, in other words, was intrinsic to it. Commodities were ‘fictitious’, by contrast, if they were treated by society as commodities by being bought and sold in markets, but had not been created with such commoditization in mind. Rather, the market
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