Kohei Saito: Planning Against Climate Fascism

As the climate crisis deepens, the dominant response is increasingly shaped not by justice or solidarity but by scarcity management, border violence, and the protection of privilege. Climate facism is a political form in which ecological breakdown becomes the pretext for authoritarian control, militarised exclusion, and the unequal distribution of survival. In this context, the central question is no longer whether planning will return, but what kind of planning will govern the future. Rejecting the false choice between market solutions and technocratic state control, this lecture argues for counter-planning: a democratic, egalitarian, and ecologically grounded reorganisation of production, consumption, and social reproduction.  In opposition to an economic system that is inevitably dependent on ever-increasing energy and resource consumption, to top-down climate policy that leaves basic needs at the mercy of the markets, and to elitist managerialism, counter-planning sees the struggle as one to reclaim social coordination from capital and transform it into democracy at all levels.

Kohei Saito is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tokyo. He received his Ph.D. from Humboldt University in Berlin. In 2024/25 Saito was fellow at The New Institute in Hamburg as Chair of the program Beyond Capitalism: War Economy and Democratic Planning. He works on ecology and political economy from a Marxist perspective. His book, Capital in the Anthropocene (2020), selling more than half a million copies in Japan, has been credited for inspiring a resurgence of interest in Marxist thought in Japan, as well as in the USA and Europe.

Opening remarks by Johan F. Hartle, Rector of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Moderated by Prof. Dr. Ulrich Brand, Professor of International Politics at the University of Vienna
Followed by comments by Astrid Schöggl and Lisa Mittendrein. 

Ulrich Brand, Professor of International Politics at the University of Vienna, Board Member of “Diskurs. Das Wissenschaftsnetz”

Lisa Mittendrein, of Attac Austria, is organizing the series of talks titled The New Era Won't Come on Its Own.

Astrid Schöggl, deputy head of the Climate, Environment, and Transportation Department at the Vienna Chamber of Labor.

A collaboration between the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna, the Austrian Foundation for Development Research, Attac Austria, the Chamber of Labour Vienna, the Department of Development Studies at the University of Vienna and Democracy Center Vienna.