It is necessary, therefore, to set aside, once and for all, the ideological shibboleths of the 20th century that necessarily reduced our economic choices to oversimplified ones between ‘the state’ and ‘the market’. It must, of course, be asked as to what the agency or modality for the actualisation of such a vision would be. Such a question would certainly be very pertinent given that conventional Communist or Marxist parties everywhere have reduced themselves to irrelevance due to their refusal to change. A moment’s reflection, however, would show us that it is not that these parties have not changed; just that they have changed in the wrong way, by surrendering to capital, by buying into its vision of the future—of the new consumption utopia. Where they have not changed is in taking on board questions of ecology, caste, gender, sexuality—not just as matters of political expediency but as questions that would actually recast their theoretical frameworks. These parties, with their rigid and top-down organisational forms, have found themselves singularly incapable of entering into any meaningful dialogues with movements around the questions of caste, gender, sexuality, mass dispossession and ecology, where all the real action is. Strangely, alongside radical-sounding anti-capitalist rhetoric, the parties have espoused a politics of social conservatism; they have avoided taking on the forces of patriarchy and Manuvaad even as they refuse to rethink their fascination with productivism and take the question of climate change seriously.