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 fascism 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. Against green growth, carbon markets, and elite-led managerialism, counter-planning names the struggle to reclaim social coordination from capital and transform it into collective decision-making oriented toward care, sufficiency, and climate justice.

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 is 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.