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Socialism is one of the great visions of a society in the modern era. Born in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the early days of industrialization, socialism is about achieving freedom and equality in real, practical terms. This article revisits three currents of socialist thought: utopian, Marxian and eco-socialist. Through a reading of these bodies of thought, this article will address the great challenge of our own time – the time of Covid-19 pandemic, a deadly virus that has wreaked havoc across state borders and continents. To envision a remedy to the current socio-historical situation, this article argues for a convergence between Marxian socialism and ecosocialism. Given the current darkness of the Covid-19 pandemic, what is needed is bold and imaginative thinking. To calibrate socialism as a solution to the pandemic-ravaged world, I argue that ecosocialism ought to embrace the utopianism of earlier socialist thought. Ecosocialist demands constitute a real utopia – a radical but possible transformation. Its seeming contradiction between idealism and attainability is the generative tension inherent in concrete utopias. The impact of such a transformation would be a re-integration of the economy into the ecological and the social world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zygmunt Bauman was undoubtedly one of the most prolific and renowned social theorists of the later part of the 20th and the early part of the 21st century. In his work spanning more than half a century, Bauman explored and tangled with some often overlooked topics within mainstream sociology such as freedom, the Holocaust, morality, art, immortality and utopia. In this article, the authors delineate the development of an unmistakable utopian mentality in Bauman's writings from the early pieces concerned with socialism and culture through the acclaimed body of work dealing with modernity and postmodernity to the most recent writings investigating, for example, the rise of 'Retrotopia'. Throughout Bauman's work, one will discover that utopia is always present – either explicitly or implicitly – as a critique of the world 'as it is' and the world we uncritically take for granted. In this way, Bauman urges his readers to consider that there is always possibility for change and that we are the human motors who can make it happen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizen's income is an idea that is currently gaining ground in many parts of the world. The prospect of disappearing jobs and social exclusion that the globalized world faces has given the idea of guaranteed income a new urgency. This article is a pilot sociological study of the citizen's income discussion in post-socialist Estonia. The article is based on qualitative research: interviews with experts from different fields and an analysis of print media. Four systematic approaches to citizen's income are differentiated in the paper. We analyze the views on the idea in order to explore their significance for the Estonian economic status quo and welfare state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]