May 5, 2025 | 12:00–2:00 PM EST
attend virtually: LIVESTREAM LINK
The Posthumanism Research Institute is excited to announce an upcoming talk as the culmination of a reading group held throughout the year. Kohei Saito, author of Marx in the Anthropocene, will be joining us to discuss the intersections of Marxism and degrowth!
In February 2023, Japanese Philosopher Kohei Saito published Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism. A best seller by any standard, Marx in the Anthropocene has sold over half a million copies and provoked debates about Marx’s conception of nature, and the politics of Anthropocene discourse.
There is a common conception that Marx was indifferent to nature because of his focus on labor as the primary originator of value. Nature is construed as a mere object to be put to use towards human advantage, the mere ‘raw material’ for production. The more pressing political struggle concerned the ownership of production and conditions of production, rather than what materials were used in the production process, or the environmental consequences of production. Labor, not nature, was the revolutionary battleground.
But towards the end of Marx’s life, he grew increasingly interested in biology, chemistry and geology, as explored in his notebooks, letters, and lesser-known later writings where showed greater respect for agrarian and pre-Capitalist societies than previously thought. He writes: “Since the earth is finite, it is obvious that there are absolute biophysical limits to capital accumulation.”
In addition to providing a window into Marx and Marxism, the book also analyzes arguments for ‘degrowth’, which challenges prevalent and long-standing measures of economic growth such as GDP, and the demand that all social forces be oriented towards economic growth, in which we are compelled to want more and more.
Saito questions the viability of technological solutions to environmental problems and emphasizes the need to move beyond recycling and electric cars.
Attending Instructions:
Simply enter your name and join the meeting—no account is needed. You may ask your questions in the chat board. We will review them and provide answers at the end.
