How Can Solidarity Be Rebuilt After the Failures of Progressivism?

May 6, 2025

How Can Solidarity Be Rebuilt After the Failures of Progressivism?

Pankaj Mishra in Conversation with Verónica Gago, Hisham Matar, and Kohei Saito

The backlash against identity politics, the rise of populist parties, and the growth of inequality within and across nations have deepened global divides. With the historical failures of progressivism, can social solidarity be rebuilt though invoking a shared history of frailty, cruelty, suffering, and mutual dependence? Pankaj Mishra explored these questions in conversation with Verónica Gago, Hisham Matar, and Kohei Saito.

This event was co-sponsored by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and was the final of three webinars in advance of the Georgetown Global Dialogues in Rome.

Participants

Kohei Saito

Kohei Saito is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Tokyo and a leading contemporary Marxist thinker. His most recent book, Capital in the Anthropocene (2020), has sold more than half a million copies in Japan and was published in English as Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto in January 2024. Saito’s previous book, Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (2017), which creatively explored the ecological dimension of Marx’s thought and its contemporary relevance, won the Deutscher Memorial Prize.

Verónica Gago

Verónica Gago, a professor of social sciences at the University of Buenos Aires and the National University of San Martín, is a prominent political theorist and activist working on issues of feminism and the global political economy. Her most recent books include A Feminist Reading of Debt (2021, with Luci Cavallero), Feminist International (2020), and Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies (2017). She is also a leader in Argentina’s #NiUnaMenos (Not One Women Less) movement as both a theorist and an activist.

Hisham Matar

Hisham Matar, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, explores themes of exile, identity, and belonging. His memoir The Return (2016) received a Pulitzer Prize in 2017. He is also the author of In the Country of Men (2007), shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011); and A Month in Siena (2019). His most recent novel, My Friends (2024), won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction in 2024, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has been translated into over 30 languages.

Pankaj Mishra

Pankaj Mishra (moderator) is a renowned Indian author, essayist, and literary critic with a global readership. Two of his prize-winning books, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals who Remade Asia (2012) and Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017), explore the history of colonialism and its enduring legacies in our contemporary global era. Mishra is also the author of two critically acclaimed novels: The Romantics (1999) and Run and Hide (2022). His columns and essays have appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books, among other outlets. Mishra is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.