Keynote presentation

Keynote speaker was Andreas Malm from Lund University, Sweden, and among the many contributors in the parallel sessions was former student of Applied Philosophy at AAU, Tobias Skiveren, who is currently assistant professor at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University.   

Tobias Skiveren has send us this impression of the conference:

• In the beginning of October, the Center for Applied Philosophy at Aalborg University (my own old hood) arranged the annual conference for the Danish Society for Marxist Studies. The keynote speaker was Andreas Malm, an ever-more influential figure in environmental humanities and ecocriticism specifically, whose road to fame has been to push the eco-Marxist agenda. In so doing, however, Malm has also launched a rather one-sided rejection of alternative theoretical formations, like, for instance, the philosophical trend known as “new materialism,” one of my own main interests. In my presentation at the conference, I criticized this rejection for being both dogmatic and unproductive, taking Malm’s book The Progress of This Storm as my main target. The paper was well-received, although countered by a number of Malm's more sympathetic readers. Still (or perhaps for that precise reason), it was a true pleasure to take part in the conference and listen to the many thoughtful contributions. The atmosphere was super nice and friendly – even for a non-Marxist like me.

Andreas Malm's keynote presentation was under the headline "climate brakdown as it unfolds - the view from 2021". The abstract of the talk reads as follows:

• In the summer of 2021, the climate crisis took another turn for the worse, with an unbroken string of extreme weather events hitting countries from Madagascar to Russia, Germany to the US. And yet, after the brief slowdown of 2020, business-as-usual was again resurgent, with fresh investments in oil and gas and coal across the board. This talk will offer some preliminary reflections on the current conjuncture of climate breakdown and politics. It will consider inter alia the inert power of fossil capital; the apparent swing from far-right denialism to capitalist climate governance in the US; the ubiquity of mechanisms of denial; the absence of the climate movement in the global North since the outbreak of Covid-19 and prospects for its return; what tactics the next cycle of climate unrest could and should deploy, and, last but not least, the looming spectre of solar geoengineering.