Seminarium: On Utopian Thought and Practice GU Participants: Sören Mau, Independent, Paula Mulinari, Malmö University, Carl Cassegård, University of Gothenburg Chair: Johan Alfonsson, University of Gothenburg/Halmstad University Note! Time and place: 15.15-17.00, Husaren

Marx famously wrote that he had no intention of writing "recipes for the cook-shops of the future". Many Marxists have since been sceptical of utopian thinking. In recent years, however, in the shadow of resurgent fascism, accelerating climate change, genocide and deepening inequality, the need to imagine a world beyond capitalism has become urgent. In the wake of these developments, utopian thinking has attracted renewed interest.

During this seminar, utopia will be discussed from three different perspectives, presented by Sören Mau, Carl Cassegård and Paula Mulinari, who each work with utopian thought.

Sören Mau revisits the standard Marxist objections to utopianism: that it is ineffective, impossible or undesirable. Those objections largely held in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, but our historical moment calls for a re-evaluation of the political potential of utopian thinking, and for a renewed capacity to imagine a life beyond capitalism.

If utopia is a keyword for politics today, so is catastrophe. In Marxist and socialist thought, utopia has been imagined not only as the negation of a catastrophic present but as the continuation of progress, above all of the productive forces. Carl Cassegård asks whether socialist utopia can be salvaged from the premise of material affluence and the domination of nature, and whether a conception of freedom worth striving for can be worked out on a devastated earth.

For utopian thought to become more than theory, it has to translate into practice. Paula Mulinari turns to the workplace, examining the utopian thinking that workers articulate through workplace struggles, utopia less as a recipe for the future than as something already at stake in conflicts over how work is organised.