인류세 시대 일본의 탈성장 담론과 좌파적 상상력: 사이토 고헤이(斎藤幸平) 현상을 중심으로

초록

This article examines how climate-crisis discourse in Anthropocene Japan has been articulated and contested, focusing on what has come to be known as the “Kohei Saito phenomenon.” Following the publication of After Capital in the Anthropocene (2020), Saito emerged as a prominent public intellectual who rearticulated degrowth through Marxist political economy, contributing to the visibility of climate politics across academic, media, and public arenas. The article first reconstructs the theoretical logic of “degrowth communism,” highlighting its critique of green growth and greenwashing, its analysis of capitalism’s triple mechanism of externalization—technical, spatial, and temporal—and its redefinition of affluence in terms of expanded access to social goods, commons-based provision, and increased free time. Rather than treating degrowth as an ethical injunction or individual lifestyle choice, Saito frames it as a structural transformation of political economy. The article then traces how these claims are repositioned within Japan’s discursive field through debates over frugality, institutional pathways, the tension between electoral politics and social movements, and accusations of a romanticized “return to the past.” By examining intellectual exchanges, public controversies, and critical responses, the analysis situates Saito not as an isolated theorist but as a nodal point within a broader discursive configuration. Finally, the article situates the reception of Saito’s discourse in the context of post–3/11 Japan and the COVID-19 pandemic. It argues that climate-crisis discourse in contemporary Japan is structured less as a coherent policy agenda than as a conflicted terrain of competing imaginaries of affluence, freedom, and security, revealing both the possibilities and the limits of degrowth-oriented critique in a society marked by prolonged stagnation and political inertia.

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