Auerbach Lecture: Marx’s Communism in the Age of the Planetary Crisis – With Kohei Saito
Date: Monday, 9 December 2024 | 18:00 (CET)
Venue: Japanisches Kulturinstitut Köln, Universitätsstr. 98, 50674 Köln
The Anthropocene is marked by a planetary environmental crisis. Since we did not act in the last decades despite various warnings, the time left to respond to the catastrophe has almost run out. There is an urgent need to rethink the entire paradigm of society, economy and political, when it is too late to save the planet. Radical ideas are necessary because the existing system is not able to offer a solution. Marx’s idea of “degrowth communism,” though barely known in the past, sets up such a new theoretical framework beyond green capitalism, environmental imperialism and colonial extractivism. His last attempt to consciously overcome productivism and Eurocentrism inherent to historical materialism represents the same difficulty of the 21st century, which is characterized by a myth of eternal growth and infinite technological development.
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; German: Systemsturz, 2023), has been credited for inspiring a resurgence of interest in Marxist thought in Japan, as well as in the USA and Europe.
