My Book Pick: Apocalypse in the Anthropocene
Aichi Insurance Physicians’ Newspaper
September 5, 2026
Kohei Saito
Shueisha
Published April 6, 2026
More than two centuries after the Industrial Revolution, humanity faces an existential crisis driven by a rapacious form of capitalism that continues to consume the Earth's finite resources. The present era was named the Anthropocene in 2000.
This book opens with a warning: “The future is fascism!” It then examines the crisis from a variety of perspectives across ten chapters:
A Permanent Economy of Scarcity Caused by Climate Collapse
Fascism Under Techno-Capitalism
The “End of the World” and Accelerationism
Does a Planned Economy Lead to Totalitarianism?
Breaking Free from “Hayek's Spell”
Is Digital Socialism Possible?
Hayek's Blind Spots and a “Green War Economy”
Dictatorship in Marx's Late Writings
The Road to Ecological Dictatorship
The Hope of Dark Socialism
The book concludes with an afterword titled “The Apocalypse of the Nameless.”
Saito proposes a form of “participatory planned economy” fundamentally different from the system that collapsed in the Soviet Union. He also points to several existing experiments that offer glimpses of how such an alternative might work. His argument is compelling and draws the reader in from beginning to end. Returning to Marx's original writings without falling into dogmatism, Saito also engages with significant domestic and international developments as they unfold.
Born in 1987, Saito belongs to Japan's so-called “employment ice age generation” and has no direct experience of the democratization struggles of the twentieth century. Philosophers may rarely take center stage in politics. Yet perhaps this very distance from political power has enabled him to develop ideas aimed at overcoming the destructive consequences of capitalism.
This book is the product of a rare intellect that offers a glimmer of hope in an increasingly dark age.
