Seminar: "Degrowth communism", by Kohei Saito

The REAL-Postgrowth project (Post-growth – REAL – A Post-Growth Deal) is excited to announce that researcher Kohei Saito, presents a public talk as part of our monthly public seminar series.

Seminar: "Degrowth communism" 

Speaker: Kohei Saito, University of Tokyo

Facilitation: Giacomo D´Alisa

• Date: Monday, November 3rd 2025
• Time:  12.30 - 14h (CET)
• Venue: Sala Montseny (Z/022 & Z/023) ICTA-UAB & Online- https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82709338021?pwd=iFWuwofDhG1BdxwynaMwcLGLn7Qr6Z.1

Kohei Saito is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tokyo. He received his Ph.D. from Humboldt University in Berlin. In 2024/25 Saito is fellow at The New Institute in Hamburg as Chair of the program “Beyond Capitalism: War Economy and Democratic Planning”. He works on ecology and political economy from a Marxist perspective. His book, Capital in the Anthropocene (2020), selling more than half a million copies in Japan, has been credited for inspiring a resurgence of interest in Marxist thought in Japan, as well as in the USA and Europe.

In recent years, groundbreaking interpretations of Marx’s theory of freedom – as ‘free disposable time’ and ‘socialist republicanism’ – have emerged. While these contributions are significant, they fall short of updating Marx’s vision of communism for the Anthropocene, owing to their neglect of the sphere of nature. The domination of nature is intrinsically linked to the domination of fellow human beings, rendering any separation between these realms untenable –especially amid today’s planetary ecological crisis. From 1868 onwards, Marx began to move beyond his earlier productivist and anthropocentric conception of freedom. His vision of degrowth communism in the 1880s introduces the notion of ecological freedom, which transcends the capitalistically constituted dualisms of society/nature, productive labour/unproductive nature, and freedom/necessity. Intriguingly, Marx’s degrowth communism revives insights from his early 1840s writings, where he first sought to articulate an ecological and decolonial conception of freedom.