Talk by Kohei Saito and Q&A with Rahel Jaeggi and Thomas Khurana
Topic
In recent years, there have been groundbreaking interpretations of Marx’s theory of freedom. Martin Hägglund’s “democratic socialism” revives the concept of “free disposable time” from The Grundrisse, while Bruno Leipold’s “socialist republicanism” highlights Marx’s consistent defense of freedom as non-domination. According to Kohei Saito, both approaches to conceptualizing post-capitalist freedom are important, but they fall short of updating Marx’s vision of communism adequate to the Anthropocene, as they don’t sufficiently address the sphere of nature. The domination of nature, he will argue, is closely tied to the domination of fellow human beings, making it impossible to separate these spheres, especially in the age of the planetary ecological crisis. Marx endeavored to move beyond his productivist and anthropocentric view of freedom, even in the 1870s. His notion of degrowth communism in the 1880s introduces a different kind of “ecological freedom,” which transcends the capitalistically constituted dualist worldview of society/nature, productive labor/unproductive nature, and freedom/necessity. In this sense, Marx’s degrowth communism is to Saito the first attempt to propose an ecological and decolonial vision of freedom, which remained unfinished. How to expand on its implications for the revival of critical theory and the collective survival on our finite planet Saito will discuss with Rahel Jaeggi and Thomas Khurana.
Speakers
Kohei Saito is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tokyo. Until June 2025, he was a Fellow at the New Institute, leading the programme ‘Beyond Capitalism: War Economy and Democratic Planning’. Kohei Saito is the author of the global bestseller Systemsturz. He researches ecology, the Anthropocene and political economy from a Marxist perspective and is a member of the editorial board of the Marx-Engels Complete Edition. His most recent book was published in German by dtv in May under the title Marx im Anthropozän.
Rahel Jaeggi is Professor of Practical Philosophy, Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She has been Director of the Centre for Social Critique in Berlin since 2018. Her research focuses on the concepts of alienation, commodification and reification, ideology, the way of life and solidarity, among others. Her most recent publication is Fortschritt und Regression (Suhrkamp, 2023).
Thomas Khurana is Professor of Philosophical Anthropology and Philosophy of Mind at the University of Potsdam. He is director of the Centre for Post-Kantian Philosophy in Potsdam. His research focuses on social philosophy and practical philosophy, philosophy of mind, philosophical anthropology and aesthetics; historically, his work draws on various traditions of post-Kantian philosophy. He is the author of Das Leben der Freiheit (Suhrkamp, 2017).