
Kohei Saito (Frankfurter Buchmesse 2024)
Kohei Saito is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tokyo, Chair of the program Beyond Capitalism: War Economy and Democratic Planning at the New Institute for the 24/25 Academic Year, and a leading contemporary Marxist thinker. He works on ecology and political economy from a Marxist perspective. His most recent book, Capital in the Anthropocene (2020), published in English as Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, has sold more than half a million copies in Japan and sparked an international debate about whether a revolutionary transformation of the global capitalist system is necessary to address the global climate crisis. Capital in the Anthropocene has also been credited with sparking a resurgence of interest in Marxist thought throughout Japan. 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.
He received his Ph.D. from Humboldt University in Berlin.