Rethinking Marx for the Climate Crisis

September 29, 2026

Rethinking Marx for the Climate Crisis

Kohei Saito and Pankaj Mishra on the Myth of Infinite Economic Growth

The philosopher Kohei Saito, who grew up in a middle-class milieu in Tokyo, cycled through a series of formative experiences that deepened his commitment to Marxism. First, as he told Pankaj Mishra in this conversation, there was the political fallout of the 2001 Iraq War; then an education in the United States that exposed him to global inequalities; then the encounter with the 2008 financial crisis and the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. He was driven to re-examine Karl Marx's unpublished notebooks in Berlin to uncover forgotten ecological arguments. That perspective evolved further, Saito observed, after youth-led climate justice movements forced him to question the myth of infinite economic growth. Looking ahead to building a international alternative to global capitalism, Saito and Mishra emphasized that true sustainability requires the Global North to adopt "degrowth communism" while learning from non-Western traditions and the Global South.

The GGD Conversations series is a collaboration between the Georgetown Global Dialogues and Equator.

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.

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.