Kohei Saito‘s new book has been released in Japanese in April, titled “人新世の「黙示録」” (English: “The Apocalypse of the Anthropocene”), by the publisher Shueisha. You can find the Japanese version here.
It has also been translated and published in German in June under the title “Am Ende des Fortschritts. Überleben in den Ruinen des Kapitalismus” (English: “At the End of Progress. Survival in the Ruins of Capitalism”) by the publisher dtv. You can find the German version here.
In the book Saito presents his vision of a “dark Socialism” as the only viable way to adapt to climate collapse while ensuring equality and democracy. Part of this vision is a democratically planned economy, for which he is drawing on the analogy of war-time economies, but reoriented towards massive climate change mitigation and adaption efforts. To make his case, the book includes an in-depth discussion of the socialist calculation, Hayek’s critique of planning and Marx’s critique of capitalist market economies.
Both versions have garnered siginificant media responses, which we will try to post about. As we don’t have anyone speaking Japanese on our content team we can’t reliably cover the Japanese media response for now, but if you are someone who would like to help us with that, please reach out to us via hello@indep.network.