Marx in an Age of Breakdown: An Interview with Kohei Saito about Capital from Zero

by Howard Prosser

Few thinkers have contributed more to this renewed engagement than Kohei Saito, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tokyo, whose previous book Slow Down sold over half a million copies in Japan and carried ecosocialist ideas well beyond the academy. His Capital from Zero, now available in English, began as the companion text to a television series. It is at once a rigorous return to Marx’s core categories and an original intervention in debates on ecology, the commons, and digital capitalism. In the conversation that follows – conducted in May 2026 – Saito discusses Marx’s contemporary afterlives, the problem of growth, the intensification of reification under digital capitalism, and where critical thought might turn from here.

What Is a Crisis?

by Phumlani Pikoli (Johannesburg)

Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the world has been in a state of panic, fearing the unprecedented times we face. The idea that the pandemic has induced some pre-pubescent existential crisis is laughable, however.

As the world has been forced to sit and reckon with its own systemic failures and global structures of existence the real crisis is, ‘what does it mean to be a human supporting the failed system of global capitalism’? After all, is democracy not a rich person’s game?

Videos: 2018 Castoriadis in the Antipodes Symposium

These videos record several papers and the keynote lecture from the 2018 Castoriadis in the Antipodes Symposium. Continuing the tradition into its 11th year, the event celebrated and examined the intellectual contribution of Cornelius Castoriadis. Speakers include Craig Browne (Sydney University), Peter Murphy (La Trobe University), Sean McMorrow (Monash University) and Vrasidas Karalis (University of Sydney. This event was presented by Thesis Eleven Forum for Social and Political Theory and held at the Melbourne Greek Cultural Centre, December 2018.