Kohei Saito: "What gives meaning to our lives is not work, but free time."

BarcelonaMarxist, environmentalist, and proponent of degrowth: these are the three pillars of the thought of Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito (Tokyo, 1987), who, thanks to essays highly critical of capitalism such as Slow down. A new way of living (2020; in Catalan in Tigre de Paper) has become best-seller —has sold over half a million copies in Japan alone— and has been translated into some twenty languages. The author recently visited the CCCB in Barcelona with a new book, Capital from scratch (Paper Tiger, 2025; translated by Lola Fígols), where he analyzes the growing discrediting of capitalist logic, puts forward some proposals to correct the present and offers an unusual look at Karl Marx's most important work, The capital

How did someone like you, born in the late 80s, come to Marxism?

— Japan had a very strong Marxist tradition: it grew right after World War II, but lost a lot of popularity right after the fall of the USSR. I was born in 1987, and when I entered university in 2005, Marx was hardly mentioned: what was of interest was French postmodern theory. But then, three years later, with the start of the 2008 crisis, things began to change: unemployment skyrocketed, many people lost their homes, average wages fell... Since then, year after year it has become more evident that capitalism increases inequality, and this realization is happening in the midst of a crisis. It is very important to understand capitalism from a critical perspective to have clues about how to survive in our world.

What is the current state of socialist ideas in the world?

— Things are beginning to change, and we are seeing the first signs of a return to social democracy. Zohran Mamdani, for example, has just won the election for mayor of New York.I belong to the first generation that believed socialism should be reborn. Twenty years ago, when I started reading Marx, I was very much alone. Now it's different. A segment of the electorate has been awakened thanks to the 2008 crisis, but also thanks to movements like Occupy Wall Street [2011] and due to disasters like Fukushima [2011] and the COVID-19 pandemic [2020].

He says that part of the electorate has awakened, but another part votes for Donald Trump or supports far-right parties, which are growing in many countries. How does he explain this?

— These are signs that capitalism is weakening. Many people who voted for Donald Trump have only served to destabilize the capitalist system. It's curious because some of these voters support him because they're worried about making ends meet and fear losing everything. The future causes them so much anxiety that they end up thinking that if things aren't going well for them, it's the fault of immigrants, and they end up directing their hatred against them, or against groups like transgender people. I think it would be better if they looked at the root of the problem. Capitalism is ruining our lives.

In Capital from scratchIt analyzes our present through a rigorous examination of Marx's most emblematic book, written over 150 years ago. Tell me one of the important concepts in The capital that still affects our world.

— One of the most important would be wealth. In the capitalist world, wealth means having money to buy whatever we want: a car, a bigger house... In a society, however, wealth can be related to nature, community, biodiversity, knowledge, and culture. Capitalism reduces wealth to a commodity, according to Marx, and therefore commodifies everything, to the point that we end up being completely dependent on it.

We need money to buy everything we need and to pay numerous installments. And sometimes capitalism itself creates new needs for us.

— Or it privatizes natural resources that we end up having to pay for, such as water.

In the essay, he reminds us that capitalism has no limits.

— This is one of its major contradictions. Capitalism is based on perpetual and infinite growth in a world that is obviously finite and has limited resources.

To achieve this infinite growth, we either earn less than our labor is worth or we work longer hours. Marx explains this with the concept of surplus value, which he also addresses in the essay.

— Capitalism needs to grow endlessly to legitimize itself, and labor exploitation is just one facet of the problem: Marx reminds us that capitalism has altered our relationship with nature. In this respect, he was more than a century and a half ahead of his time in predicting climate change. Capitalism disrupts the balance between humans and nature: it is alienating, disruptive, and destructive. We have been witnessing the consequences of capitalism's unchecked expansion for years. It depletes natural resources, affects biodiversity, and triggers devastating natural phenomena such as hurricanes, torrential rains, and droughts.

Philosophers like Byung-Chul Han have warned in some of their books about how many workers exploit themselves beyond their job responsibilities. Capital from scratch It also points out that we even apply capitalist logic to the management of our savings by placing them in investment funds or playing the stock market.

— Capitalism invites us into constant commerce. At first, we thought Amazon was bad because it was destroying neighborhood bookstores, and we didn't like Starbucks either because it homogenized the coffee scene. After a while, many people changed their minds and say that Amazon delivers what you buy faster than anyone else and that you can find everything. Starbucks, for its part, invents coffees with flavors you can't find anywhere else. We've ended up normalizing the alienation to which capital subjects us. We believe that having more money is better than having less, and that's why one job isn't enough for us, and we invest part of our salary in investment funds or the stock market. The money we save by buying fast food instead of paying for a decent meal is invested in the bank. It's logical that we end up worrying about whether these investments are doing well or not, and that we want them to yield the highest possible return... The problem is that having more money has become our life's goal.

In the essay, he explains how small investors have ended up benefiting large ones.

— The stock market and the financial sector have exacerbated inequality like never before. This is the economist's pet project. Thomas PikettyIn Japan, a proposal has recently been made to increase taxes on investment gains from funds and the stock market, but many middle-class people oppose it because they have invested a significant portion of their savings. By accepting the logic of wanting to earn as much money as possible, the ability to criticize capitalism is lost. Its logic has become so internalized that it seems no alternative exists.

In one of the chapters ofCapital from scratch He poses the question of what is more urgent for people: a wage increase or more free time. What would Marx tell them?

— If we conducted a survey, most people would say that the most urgent need is a salary increase. Marx would say the opposite, and I agree. Before increasing salaries, we should have more free time. Why? Because when we have free time, that's when we can truly do what we want. Maybe you want to play in a band, and I want to play football. What gives meaning to our lives isn't work, but free time. We might like our work—if we're lucky—or we might hate it, but we work to pay the bills. A society that works hard but can't enjoy all that it potentially offers because it has less and less free time is broken. We never stop producing and producing. We create a lot of wealth... but we can't enjoy it. Don't you think that's a huge contradiction?

One of their proposals is degrowth.

— Why do we spend our lives accumulating wealth? It would be good if, at some point, we focused on our well-being, on nature, on sustainability. We need to shift the focus from economic growth to the growth of society.

Would this help us to be more satisfied with our lives?

— Yes and no, because if it's a change we make individually, it can do us a lot of harm. If we stop working, we'll quickly become impoverished... and perhaps our neighbor, on the other hand, will become rich. What's needed is to change the system. Globally. It's the governments that must act. If we paid less money for rent—which in cities like Barcelona, ​​New York, or Tokyo is undoubtedly exorbitant—or if public transportation were free, we would have fewer expenses and could start deciding whether to work less. We wouldn't need so much money to live decently.

He dedicates an entire chapter of his essay to analyzing why Marx would not have accepted the application of socialism in the USSR or in China.

— There are still people who say that Marx is outdated because Russian socialism collapsed. I think they're wrong, because in many places where socialism has been implemented, it hasn't been done according to Marx's vision. In Russia, capitalism was interpreted as being about private property and private ownership of the means of production, and the Soviets' proposal was, "What if we nationalize everything?" Then they found that state control ended up being absolute. If you look at the situation of the workers, it didn't change that much from one system to another. In capitalism, it's the employers who exploit the workers. During Soviet socialism, the workers were exploited by the Communist Party or by the bureaucrats.

What would Marx have wanted?

— Instead of emphasizing the nationalization of production, Marx advocated for a more democratic management. He believed this could only be achieved through some form of workers' association: this would create a system in which everyone could participate in making important decisions. Catalonia has many cooperatives, a type of solidarity economy that I find interesting.

How is Japan changing in that respect?

— There's a new law that allows for the creation of new worker cooperatives. Historically, these existed, but they weren't legally protected, so they opted to create structures similar to those of non-governmental organizations, but faced many obstacles to operating effectively. The new law allows for the revival of cooperatives, but on a small scale. Some manage policies related to care work, while others focus on forest management.

In 2019, while working on the latest project of the complete works of Marx-Engels - 65 of the 114 planned volumes have been published - he edited reading notes and comments from Marx's notebooks in which he detected an interest of the author in two topics that had been little discussed until then: the environment and pre-capitalist societies that are.

— In the last years of his life, Marx became very interested in ecology and sustainability in relation to the capitalist system. I explored this thesis in my first book, Nature versus capital [2017; in Spanish by Bellaterra Ediciones], and later I delved deeper into it Slow Down. A new way of living [2022], where I study climate change based on Marx's ecological critique of capitalism. Marx worked a lot during his later years, but published little, and those notebooks that I was able to read, transcribe, and edit allowed me to reconstruct the author from a different perspective, emphasizing the environment and those pre-capitalist societies that caught his attention.

Tell me a little bit.

— Marx was interested in studying non-Western or pre-capitalist societies. look The Russians are an example. They were small, agriculturally focused societies where private property didn't exist, only collective ownership, and where production was also collaborative. For a long time, they were self-managed. They were a model of a sustainable economy. Marx even wrote that these communes could be the basis of a future socialist revolution. The soviets put this into practice on a large scale and from a state perspective. This is the key difference. Marx spoke of a more harmonious relationship, on a smaller scale.

How can small-scale economies coexist in an increasingly globalized world?

— It's a good question, because we have global problems that need to be solved globally, like the climate crisis. And we need large-scale technologies and infrastructures like public transportation and the internet, which also need to be managed on a large scale. Changes in small structures could be a first step toward greater social transformation. In the 21st century, we need to keep imagining new ways to change society from a socialist perspective. Right now, I'm working on an essay about the connections between small-scale changes and state-level changes. The state must play a crucial role in implementing degrowth.