We live in an era of intensifying, nested and complex crises. Many believe that capitalism is a major causal factor of those crises. There are therefore calls to rethink, reform, or even replace capitalism by some other socio-economic mode of surplus value production. At the same time, many social thinkers, philosophers, economists, journalists and practitioners have been pointing out that capitalism’s original promise was precisely to be a system of problem-solving. In this context, it has a moral grounding and thus provides a framework of ethical duties on which it has also been delivering in the form of technoscientific and economic progress since the industrial revolution.

In this workshop, we want to seize the opportunity of the publication of Colin Mayer’s new book "Capitalism and Crises – How to Fix Them" in order to explore the prospects of recoupling moral and economic progress by way of both democratic and economic measures.

We thereby focus on the tasks and challenges of the ongoing socio-ecological transformation in the context of a crisis of capitalism itself in order to identify pathways of rethinking and reforming capitalism’s practices and the associated theoretical frameworks within which we approach its socio-economic reality.