If crises in recent years have again cast into doubt the compatibility of capitalism with democracy and environmental stability, what is the socialist alternative? Now, some thirty years after the demise of the Soviet Union, how do contemporary socialist theorists imagine a socialist future? What is socialist democracy? What mechanisms would guide socialist investment, production, and distribution? How would a socialist society overcome the environmental crisis? These are the questions that animate this workshop on the latest developments in socialist theory.
Devising new frameworks demands an interdisciplinary approach to incorporate lessons from the historical experience of actually existing socialist societies with the insights available from contemporary ecology, economics, psychology, and computer science. This means recovering a usable past from a wide array of traditions, from planning in Kerala and Bangladesh, theoretical debates among Soviet cybernetics, the practical use of Chile’s Cybersyn or French indicative planning, and the crisis of the Cuban ‘Special Period’. This workshop is meant to encompass a broad Left from anarchism to state-socialism to Keynesian social democracy. Rather than dismissing utopian theorising as mere recipes for the ‘cook-shops of the future’, we recognize that such intellectual work is a necessary part of radical politics.
If you wish to read the papers that will be discussed in the workshop, please contact MW Fellow Troy Vettese.
The deadline for registration (on premise only) is 25 May, 9.00 AM CEST.