Koehi Saito (JP) in conversation with Matthias Dressler-Bredsdorff
The young, eco-socialist philosopher Kohei Saito reads Marx's ideas in the light of the global climate crisis. Concepts such as "degrowth communism" have made him an unexpected best-selling world star.
"Many are the Marxists who over time have studied the lists of Marx's last readings and raised their eyebrows: What was the man up to? What was the point of all the geology he plowed through, the endless ethnological works on primitive societies and agriculture in Germany?”
This is what Matthias Dressler-Bredsdorff writes in his review of Kohei Saito's Marx in the Anthropocene in Information, referring to Marx's notebooks, which he spent most of his time on at the end of his life, and which have only been published here 140 years after his death. And it is here that Saito found the seeds that would germinate into his reading of Marx's texts as fundamentally concerned with the well-being of the world and the climate under capitalism.
These are interesting questions, and some that are essential in our time, where the intersection between the green and the red is still something that is hotly debated. That is why the Royal Danish Library invited Kohei Saito to The Black Diamond and Matthias Dressler-Bredsdorff to interview him. Look forward to an evening where we gain insight into what an eco-socialist future could look like and why Marx spent so much time on farming in Germany.
Participants
Kohei Saito
The Japanese philosopher and associate professor at the University of Tokyo and one of the world's leading Marxist thinkers, Kohei Saito, who published the book Capital in the Anthropocene in 2020, has become a world name in record time. In his home country, his latest book has sold over 5 million copies.
Matthias Dressler-Bredsdorff
Matthias Dressler-Bredsdorff (b. 1988) is a lecturer and writer at Dagbladet Information. Former associate professor at the Sorbonne in Paris, as well as critic at Politiken. He works at the intersection of culture, literature and politics and has interviewed writers and intellectuals from all over the world.
