The Prime Minister has recently denounced ‘the growing tendency to commodify human beings through identity politics‘. In doing so, he raises a number of important questions. The claim of ‘commodification’ of human beings and their relations is a powerful one. The idea that humans or their essential relationships risk reduction to being treated as things (‘reification’, from German Verdinglichung) and thereby alienated from others was, indeed, one of Marxism’s central critiques of capitalism. In support of this thesis, Marxists could point to such charmless commercial terms as ‘human resources’ (assets on the company books) and, in contemporary discourse, to the claims that we should ‘open up’ our economies and suffer the consequent loss of lives to the coronavirus in order to avoid economic damage.