Before the nineteenth century, most people made their own clothes or altered second-hand clothes. The wealthy had clothes specially made for them.

While depression remains stigmatised, burnout’s connection to professional duty and to success allows people to identify with it without social sanction.

These acts of re-labelling are often inspired by the work of sociologist Arlie Hochschild. Hochschild’s 1983 The Managed Heart described how certain jobs involve the management of a worker’s own internal emotional states.

New technologies and labour-saving processes can be good things: the problem is who owns the technology required for these processes and in whose interest that technology is developed and run.

However, this is not a book about people’s subjective preferences so much as the conditions in which those preferences are formed, and the background of possibilities against which they exist, such as the lack of other sources of possible fulfilment and sociability. It is a consideration of the ways in which capitalist work curtails people’s freedo

Not only has the safety net of the welfare state been frayed, its use has been massively stigmatised.16 None of this does very much to get people into work, although schemes in which people work for free are, presumably, a profitable arrangement for employers.

These problems cannot be solved by consumer attempts to change patterns of demand. The model of outsourcing allows brands and producers to dodge accountability. As stories of abuse in the garment industry re-emerge, new consumer campaigns in the style of the Consumers’ League are popping up. Sometimes these campaigns are little more than a branding

At the moment, the infrastructure of production is geared towards maximising profit. The terms on which workers are hired and what they do in their role is decided by management. In unionised industries, trade unions can negotiate what these terms are, but rarely do workers get to decide for themselves what they do. The quality, variety and even ju

This doesn’t mean we can easily abandon them though, but rather that marketing, social pressure, the expectation that our identity be expressed through consumption (and the evisceration of other avenues for its expression) conspire to make these ‘needs’ feel urgent and deep.