Today’s polycrisis – a combined crisis of capitalism, ecology and democracy – demonstrates the insufficiency and malfunctioning of neoliberal market fundamentalism. With the deepening of the legitimacy crisis of neoliberal capitalism, it is worth asking what will potentially come next.

Will there be a utopian potential to establish a new emancipatory communist society? Or will there be a new form of capitalist domination? Or will there be a new digital feudalism? What is the role of the state in such a transition?

This workshop examines this critical conjuncture from a Marxist perspective. Ryuji Sasaki argues that it is too naïve to hope for a post-capitalist future because there will be “rentier capitalism,” while also criticizing technofeudalist discourses. Alyssa Battistoni reconstructs the Marxian state theory in the age of climate crisis. She examines limits of the capitalist state as well as highlights the possibilities of non-reformist reforms through the state planning. Søren Mau defends the utopian communist thinking with an attempt to go beyond the classical Marxist arguments against “writing recipes for the cookshops of the future."