“SOCIALISM is dead; Long Live Socialism,” wrote fellow Berkeley scholar Roger Burbach in 1997, bravely predicting socialism’s rise in new forms even as older ones were falling. As capitalism’s damaging toll on humans expands hugely, the search for alternatives to the beast assumes urgency. Many think this means ending wage labour, profits and private capital, which they wrongly see as capitalism’s core.

But sociologist Karl Polyani argued that these had existed even before capitalism for long. Capitalism rose only in the 17th century when capital’s interests became society’s dominant logic to replace other human concerns, with a false promise that its sway ensures common welfare.

Capitalism expands its profits by penetrating all human spheres and coaxing humans to satisfy all their needs via markets that they are satisfying via family, community, state or nature for free, arguing that market solutions better cater to all human needs. But the ills of this idea, spread cunningly by owners of big capital, are visible now in high inequity, environmental loss, resource wars and irrelevance of millions of workers as AI spreads fast, as capital’s dehumanising interests hold sway even over human realms that transcend commercial logics.........

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