After a breakup a friend will inevitably turn to you over a drink, look you in the eye and declare, “It’s time to move on.” Others join in approval. Your increasingly desperate calls to just be left alone are met by deaf ears, and your excuse that you never meet anyone when you go out no longer holds any water. “It’s easy to meet people,” they say, “I mean, haven’t you tried Internet dating?”

Marx argued that capitalism overcomes its tendency toward stagnation through commodification — the “transformation of relationships, formerly untainted by commerce, into commercial relationships, relationships of exchange, of buying and selling.” This extension of the market provides new channels for investment and profit that help capital avoid recession and depression.

This transformation of social relationships into commercial relationships has a dual character. The market, particularly during the early days of capitalism, was expanded physically — boundaries were geographically stretched by sail ship, colonial whip and surveyor stick; but the market was also extended through the reconfiguration of relationships and cultural practices toward the extraction of value and profit.