The world is already apocalyptic. Just not all at the same time.
To be overcome: the notion of apocalypse as evental, the ground-clearing revelatory trauma that immediately founds a new nomos of the earth. In its place combined and uneven apocalypse.
--Evan Calder Williams
[1]
I am not referring here to the microapocalypse of death: everybody dies, and even if everybody dies at the same time (I mean everybody), what is the problem? The earth becomes a cleared tape and why the angels grieve?
There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.
1. Catastrophic Events Articulating Apocalyptic Process
Due to the magnitude of calamity, there have been many discourses seeking to make sense of the Fukushima disaster and its aftermath: on the worsening dread of the crippled reactors; on radiation spread via distribution of irradiated food products and imposition of disaster debris by the central government; on the renewal of pro-nuclear, re-armament and market-centrist policies of the present Liberal Democratic Party administration; and finally, various types of voluntary actions of the people beginning from radiation monitoring of food and environment to information exchanges via internet to legal battles to street actions.
The attempt to understand the situationsleads to more questions, which are, in this particular context, to be asked from the vantage point of the on-goingstruggles fighting within and against what is causing all of this. This means that the post-Fukushima issues around nuclear power are formed in and as political, social and economic power relations, and that the way the people have been interacting with them is the main focus. No ideas fora solution can be properly addressed outside these processes. Or strictly speaking, what is at stake here is not a solution but a decomposition and recomposition of the power relations and the foundational apparatuses. In this situation, ‘struggles’ embody a category broader than ‘movements,’ proving a horizon upon which movements organize themselves by inducing political goals and strategies from struggles. As embodiment of class complexity, struggles consist of varied voluntary actions and projects covering all of our existential territories: environment, social relations, labor, reproduction of life, and individual mind and body. The anarchy of the struggles is a new significant development in Japan. And the questions can be answered only in the processes of the struggles. Therefore I shall limit myself to rendering the conditions that constitute problematics confronted thereby vis-à-vis a pair of intertwined contexts: the social process called the ‘postwar democracy’ that has a lot to do with this calamity and is now reorganizing itself, and the modus operandi of capitalism – which I call apocalyptic capitalism -- that drives Japan’s post-Fukushima socialization on the global horizon.
The Fukushima disaster consisted of a series of two
catastrophes: the so-called ‘natural disaster’ of the earthquake and tsunami, and the ‘manmade disaster’ of the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Plants
[4] . Thereafter the crippled plants have continued to release radioactive nuclides. Meanwhile it seems that nobody is capable of, and there is no way to assemble international efforts, to seal the sources of fission flows and liquidate the plants. Now the unstoppable radiation fall-out has contaminated a large part of eastern Japan, and is affecting the entire planet. The half-lives of radioactive nuclides will determine our existence for an unimaginable expanse of space and time.
This process is irreversible. But these nuclides are invisible and their effects on the body would not appear in an orderly manner, but likely in three, five, ten and fifteen year stages, so the process largely involves scientific, informational, affective and imaginary politics.
I would consider this process apocalyptic. We know that apocalypse used to mean a radical rupture or a messianic moment, either the end of or the emancipation of the world: while some evangelical Christians still believe in Armageddon as the settlement of the battle between God (Christians) and Satan (Moslems), our left-leaning minds tended to hope, for good reasons, for a total collapse of capitalism that would coincide with the ultimate revolution. But what Fukushima has materialized so far is the impossibility of such a moment; rather it has been the way the catastrophes as events are absorbed into a process which embodies new meanings of apocalypse. The word no longer means an immediate end of the world, but rather an unending process toward the pre-determined future of a radioactive planet. Here what is about to be taken away from us is the future as unknown and undetermined temporality from which we can create new planetary experiences.Also the mobile complexity of radiation expansion deprives us of a permanent connection with the land, which had once been assumed as the main horizon of the struggles for ‘the commons.’
But apocalypse also means a revelation–one of the positive aspects of the situation. That is, the people in Japan collectively find themselves in the predicament that they have to investigate and understand what is necessary to live with the radioactive environment and what is causing it. This latter is concerning the very process that prepares and absorbs the catastrophes: the nature of power operations driven by energy-centered capitalism and the way they have intervened in the planetary environment. On the one hand the process is embodied by the policies of the Japanese government, tacitly backed by the global governance, that prioritize the reconstruction projects for existing economic and industrial interests. On the other hand it is telling of how our everyday life has always been organized globally by the automatic expansion of capitalist operations, with all hazardous substances, calamitous incidents, wars of atrocity and immiseration imposed upon us all. Fukushima is everywhere.
In a nation whose history inscribes the memories of periodic earthquakes, the total defeat of an all-front war that it had initiated, and the nuclear attacks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, apocalyptic representations had obsessively appeared as collective imaginaries in films, comics, animé and literature, as if people had been awaiting the moment of such a rupture. Finally with Fukushima, though in the nastiest possible manner, this hidden wish has been fulfilled.
As some Japanese friends would testify, what has been conceived in people’s minds is not just desperation, sadness and anger; the catastrophic situation involves a more mixed state of affects. With the revelation of the fragility, frivolousness and absurdity in what was supposed to ground their everydayness as well as social systems, fissures have been opened, from which emerge not only despair and anger, but even expectations and joys of a people facing a possible collapse of the normal. Now they know that what invited the worst nuclear disaster is the regime called ‘postwar democracy,’ something that used to see itself as exceptional--with the Peace Constitution (Article Nine) and economic prosperity--but that was also constituted for domesticating the populace within a highly developed society of control, under the influence of the US global military strategy. For this reason, the collapse has been generating some sense of expectation for the unknown. We have not been able to develop a proper terminology to account for this schizophrenic mix of sadness, anger and delight, but in this explosion of affects exists the core of the complexity of the situation.
2. Fissures Running Across the Movements vis-à-vis the Hyper-object
The post-Fukushima struggles might be bundled together as an anti-nuclear movement, which however includes various bodies, forms and objectives: thus it is far beyond the single-issue anti-nuke movement we know – involving actions and projects such as anti-nuke demos, blockades against distribution of radioactive debris and restarting of power plants
[5] , innumerable lawsuits against the promoters of power generation, demands for medical compensation, commoners’ radiation monitoring and information exchange, voluntary evacuation, organizing nuclear workers etc. They are heterogeneous struggles waged, from varied existential territories and based upon a new class complexity. But inasmuch as they are assembled as movements, significant differences become visible in terms of their positions, orientations and beliefs.
In the past several years, from before the disaster, anarchist, anti-authoritarian and horizontalist principles had been introduced as leaderless, bottom-up and de-centered organizational method (based upon consensus process), into the new struggles among precarious workers, students and communities, on top of extant anarchist and libertarian Marxist groups. In the wake of the accident, the principles have been replaced by an
egalitarian populism and adopted by a broad coalition (the Metropolitan Coalition against Nukes), in order to gather many groups around the anti-nuke slogan. In June 2012, the coalition, as it turned out, was able to mobilize several hundred thousand participants for Friday protests in front of the Prime Minster’s official residence against the re-starting of Oi Nuclear Power Plant
[6] . The coalition included social democrats whose concern is heavily weighed on the elections and even nationalists who reclaim a new social conformity with their rising-sun flags. In this manner, the egalitarian populism has been spreading widely, which is both good and bad. Good, because the political climate has shifted from the hierarchical vanguardism of the old lefts, and achieved mass mobilization in a way comfortable for the many. Bad, because the mobilization involves the nullification of political articulations, and more than anything, because the objective to achieve maximal mobilization has not only dropped the efforts to expand the realm of tactics for the empowerment of the impetus, but also imposed strict rule over the action (time frame and behavior) sometimes in cooperation with the police. In consequence, the shared will to solidify the extra-parliamentary impetus has been weakened. More principled leftists criticized this orientation as responsible for making the entire movement nationalist and compromising with the power. Ever since, this conflict has repeated, to this day, as that between populists and leftists
[7] . But neither has been successful in creating a new force to fully confront the situation.
Meanwhile some former anarchists have chosen to give up their anti-authoritarian principles, reasoning that now the priority is to stop nuclear power and it is necessary to work with the specialists and authorities until this objective is achieved
[8] . It is true that most of us stumble over the judgment as to how to deal with the “hyper-object” (Timothy Morton) called radioactivity, that is beyond our perception, spatiotemporal senses and control
[9] . The first reaction is to think like those in power and rule would do, as an overseeing planner. This is a return of Leviathan (Thomas Hobbs) that we have long observed -- one cannot imagine but to ask for a superior judgment in confrontation both with
the fearless monster and
the state of anarchy[10] .
This has to do with the nature of nuclear power itself. No living soul can control nuclear fission, which can only be contained for the moment. The container as machine won’t last forever and the human labor power that drives it is essentially ephemeral and inexorably makes mistakes –or existentially refuses the work -- at some point. Therefore the uncontrollability is extended from inside a nuclear reactor to the society, indefinitely postponing a definite solution, in which process individuals as well as the entire society become the object of control. Not only is our self-management coerced, but also any one of us can be considered as a potential terrorist under surveillance. The necessity to control the populace, involving the dimension of bio-politics, prepares a shared premise toward the solution for both the ruling power and the anti-nuke movements.
In the context of post-Fukushima Japan, spreading under the egalitarian populism is an echo of the authoritarian position, which seeks to solve the aporia by an omnipotent knowledge that only scientists presumably have. On the one hand, there are pro-nuke scientists whose discourses are welcomed by the power, while being increasingly questioned and despised by the majority; on the other hand, there are a few groups of anti-nuke nuclear scientists – i.e.,Dr. Hiroaki Koide of Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute (KURRI)-- whose discourses are embraced as an indispensable point of reference by the majority. His long-time anti-nuke activities and knowledge are crucial from which we all have been learning a great deal. But his political position requires critical scrutiny, such as when he says: “adults and older people must positively accept contaminated food,” in order to save Fukushima’s local industries, exempting the younger population from the same fate
[11] . Older people are less susceptible to radiation than younger people and children, so they should consume the contaminants – this idea itself must be questioned in another context, but the problem lies in his assumption of the unit of community, that is identified as
the social totality called Japan. In this manner, the anti-nuke position can tacitly reinforce the social congealment called Japan, in synchronicity with a return of nationalism.
Outside the protest movements, there have been grassroots efforts to sustain the safety of food and the everyday environment. In the wake of the accident, the government, TEPCO, the main media and pro-nuke scientists have been intentionally veiling information on the magnitude of radiation expansion and its possible health hazards. People, especially reproductive workers, have begun to take charge of investigating the state of contamination and researching its effects. Many civic centers have appeared to monitor radiation and exchange information. Many lay people have become scientists in their own right.
[12] This movement is synchronizing with the support projects for those who choose to evacuate from the irradiated zones in the north and live somewhere safer, since government programs for relocation are sorely lacking. The stance of these projects is motivated by their conviction that avoiding radiation is the priority for all.
Meanwhile, there are people who choose to go to Fukushima to help restore the living conditions of the people in the disaster stricken areas. Furthermore, though small, there have been attempts to organize the nuclear workers exposed to radiation in the crippled reactors
[13] . These people choose to be irradiated with their own will to support the immediate victims and organize the most oppressed stratum of nuclear industries.
The former is figuratively called “those who go West.” And the latter is called “those who go North.” The difference is clear in their choice of a philosophical principle: saving life or helping others. This too is deemed a fissure opened in the face of the hyper-object, and they have not been able to find a way to coordinate their actions so far.
We have been asked many times by our foreign comrades: “Why don’t the Japanese people rise up after Fukushima?” One of the clues to the answer exists in the divisions in our minds and the movements, facing the hyper-object. If the post-nuclear disaster power of rule fears anything, it is the simultaneous and coordinated actions of radiation-exposed workers, the people living in irradiated zones, reproductive workers, joined by a wide range of workers whose jobs are destabilized as well as the youth whose future is stolen. This would undermine most of the government policies and industrial operations that are forming the post-nuclear disaster socialization, and create a new horizon to confront the hyper-object itself by our own initiatives.
Generally speaking, what is preventing this situation from developing is the sense of civil society, identified as the social totality called Japan, which on the one hand gives a shared horizon for the movements, but on the other hand, incapacitates a full-hearted opposition to state projects -- especially the massive evacuation from the contaminated zones. Then, there are three interconnected aporas forcing a detour that we have to acknowledge in order to confront nuclear power and the power operations based on it: first, the radiation expansion is irreversible on the planet and we will live with it -- with crippled reactors in Fukushima ceaselessly releasing radioactive nuclides, with accumulating nuclear waste that seems to find no settlement, with nuclear weapons that will continue to haunt us virtually (global power contestations) and actually (depleted uranium weapons); second, the problematic of hyper-objects continues to invite bio-political solutions from the authoritarian, top-down standpoint in political, technological and scientific contexts; and third, however, the post-Fukushima problematic cannot be solved -- or nullified more precisely -- within the frame of the existing socio-political systems, capitalist apparatuses and this world, because it is they that have brought this situation in the first place and their operational mechanism cannot function without nuclear production.
3. The Catastrophic Socialization
As so many examples across the world show, after a catastrophic disaster, militarization and reconstruction unequivocally follow wherein priorities are security rather than rescue, development rather than restitution.
In Japanese history we cannot forget the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, that hit a large area including the Tokyo metropolis and caused a hundred thousand deaths and innumerable missing persons. Then, during theseismic calamity, came a social atrocity: vigilantes captured and massacred many resident ethnic Koreans, some Chinese, as well as socialists, labor activists and anarchists. The police and military played a leading role in this conduct. It is this affair that initiated the subsequent reconstruction of Tokyo. Furthermore, what materialized today’s Tokyo metropolis was yet another destruction, that is, by the massive US bombardment during the Pacific War that flattened almost the entire urban space. The metropolis has always fed itself with catastrophes for its enlargement and renewal. Now under the effects of radiation it is not only seeking to sustain its functions by tying the people of Fukushima to the irradiated land and conditioning its residents to continue their ‘normal lives’ as if nothing had happened, but also to reconstruct itself for the coming Tokyo Olympics 2020. This is a new kind of atrocity, which is more tacit, enduring and at the same time shamelessly spectacular
[14] .
Thus the post-Fukushima reconstruction has been accompanied by persistent policies to abandon people: blurring information on the magnitude of the disaster and radioactive pollution, the manipulation of the idea of a ‘permissible’ radiation dose, insufficient support for the evacuees and medical checkups, enabling of food distribution without full indication of its origin, the central government’s insistence that prefectures accept radioactive debris for incineration, public schools’ insistence on running outdoor programs and using local food products for school lunches, pressure to restart the nuclear plants in test repose, introduction of general contractors for mostly futile cleanup operation, restructuring of agriculture and fisheries into big businesses, and many more.
In this climate, we observe a return of nationalism in the widely spreading campaign for supporting local industry: i.e., “Eat and support Fukushima.
[15] ” For those who ride on this call, the revelation is directed toward an awakening of national unity that the Japanese have forgotten. Meanwhile, those who refuse this call by insisting on their individual health began to express their concerns, fears and anger across their social milieus: friends, families, schools, workplaces, blogs and demos. These voices have been accused by the authorities and diagnosed as ‘anxiety’ by the scientific and medical specialists
[16] . The people are divided between choosing nationhood or individuation. The divide forms two overlapping and conflicting dynamics in the post-Fukushima socialization: congealment
and dispersion.
On a more technical and medical level, a complicated debate has been taking place about the effects of radiation on the body. In the context of Japan, this goes back to Hiroshima/Nagasaki. After the bomb, primary attention was paid to ‘external radiation,’ which people get by solar and cosmic radiation in the atmosphere, x-ray, and finally, atomic bomb, while ‘internal radiation’ is experienced by intake of radioactive particles by way of drinking water and eating food. The latter, which is considered nastier for its slow, long and invisible destruction of cells, was revealed by the sufferings of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki victims who had not necessarily been exposed to the explosions, but lived in the areas after the events
[17] . Many of them have gone through tremendous hardship to get compensation from the government, due to the difficulty in proving the effects of internal radiation, that vary according to dose, the kind of radioactive nuclide, age, body condition, etc.
One of the points underlined in the debate concerns two models that would determine the judgment. The International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) claims that health hazards will appear from radiation exposure -- no matter how small the dose. This position is based upon the so-called LNT model (linear non-threshold model). On the other hand, following ABCC (the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission), the US government organization that intervened after Hiroshima/Nagasaki for examination (not cure) of the bombs’ effects on the human body
[18] , the Japanese government holds that there are threshold doses for the development of health hazards. It is this latter position that functions as a buffer for the authorities in manipulating the permissible dose. Furthermore this debate itself is, at this very moment, providing the process through which we all are made to get used to living with low-dose radiation contamination. In this regard, the point of divergence of all the struggles and movements exists whether they accept the idea of permissible dose or persist in zero-becquerel
in principle.
Radiation expansion is not so regular as to form a concentric fall-out, as often represented in maps of nuclear explosion. Affected not only by atmospheric phenomena (wind, rain and oceanic currents) but also by all human activities (traffic and transportation), it forms a constantly changing
complexity like a mosaic pattern. Therefore it is possible that hotspots have appeared irregularly in places far from Fukushima. On top of that, radioactivity takes place in the nano-level, which will not be diluted by being disseminated in a larger space of air or water, neither will it disappear by incineration; it will just continue to move around for as long as its fission continues
[19] . Imagine that we can no longer enjoy what we used to love: nature verdant with greens, smell of oceanic breezes, organic foods, etc! Now invisible radioactive particles can be anywhere, with hidden fangs that bite every gene of our cells
[20] .
Another question that is frequently asked by our foreign friends is: “Why did Japan dare to introduce nuclear power after Hiroshima/Nagasaki?” One approach to answer this question is to understand the nature of the postwar democracy. This ‘peaceful’ and ‘prosperous’ regime was hiding innumerable monsters, which have gushed out with the Fukushima explosion. The ringleader was the US/Japan partnership
[21] .
Throughout post-WWII history, during and after the cold war, Japan has always been under the tacit
protection and
rule of the US military. For the US government, Japan has always been one of the most crucial strategic bases in the world, and manipulating the nation to its preferred direction has been a consistent state policy.The realization of introducing nuclear power into the civilian life of a country, which had already experienced nuclear atrocities, was largely due to the intention of the ruling powers of the US and Japan. In order to push the “Atoms for Peace” policy advocated by President Eisenhower in 1953, bombastic media campaigns (involving Walt Disney) and shrewd information manipulation -- taking advantage of the social atmosphere during the time of economic growth and the initiation of mass media (TV) -- were instigated by the initiative of CIA agents operating within the Liberal Democratic Party and the major media such as Yomiuri Shimbun and Nippon Television Network Corporation
[22] . This was carefully planned to confront a massive surge of anti-nuclear weapon
and anti-US movements that arose after the Lucky Dragon Five Incident, wherein a Japanese
tuna fishing boat was exposed to and contaminated by
nuclear fallout from the United States'
Castle Bravo thermonuclear device test on
Bikini Atoll in March 1954.
The psycho-informatic warfare was miraculously able to shift the public dread of nuclear bombs and anger toward the US to their expectations for an almighty energy source for the future, namely, from dystopian to utopian sublime, while the movements were divided into anti-nuclear weaponry and anti-nuclear power
[23] . The reintroduction of nuclear power was thus realized and there are fifty-four nuclear power plants in fourteen locations as well as nuclear warheads (on the US military bases) across the archipelago. The so-called “Nuclear Village” -- the network of nuke-driving powers in Japan, that stretches across the government (both central and local), electric companies, large enterprises, financial circles, media and academia in close tie with the US/Japan partnership – is still surviving after Fukushima and holding their seats of rule
[24] .
However, one should not forget that, since the 70s, the residents of at least
twenty-seven regions have successfully ousted the nuclear project by their unyielding opposition
[25] . The achievement of the struggles has not been much known or acknowledged. Thus we should also stress that nuclear plants have been built
only in fourteen locations, despite intense invitation efforts by the pro-nuke ruling power.
One year and seven months after Fukushima, the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank took place in Tokyo October 2012. One of their schemes in choosing contaminated Tokyo as their meeting site was to fog up the severity of the present devastation with staged praise for the non-existent success of recovery from the disaster
[26] . The first annual meetings took place in Tokyo in 1964, the year of the first Tokyo Olympics. The slogan was “to promote Japan to the world and one of the driving forces behind Japan’s post-war new start.” This time around, the point was to show the world Japan’s strong recovery following the devastating earthquake. Both times, the rhetoric emphasized successful recovery and its underlying economic and technological power of the nation. Omitted completely were the real sufferings and struggles of the people. Recovery in a proper sense is questionable in both cases: not to mention the worsening nuclear devastation from which no recovery is in sight, or ever possible, the wounds from WWII have never been healed because there has never been an acknowledgement of the war crimes nor a full compensation for all the victims by the Japanese government.
The IMF urged Japan to conduct structural reforms in the state of exception: to handle the radioactive debris from Fukushima; to raise taxes for reconstruction, i.e., consumption tax; to lower corporate tax; to freeze the central government contribution to the public pension system
[27] . Meanwhile a joint team for reconstruction planning centered around Miyagi Prefecture which neighbors Fukushima has been under way in collaboration between the ruling powers of the US and Japan. The collaborative bodies for reconstruction, though involving conflicts in business interests, share the basic orientation: Japan’s participation in the free trade agreement Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP); instead of having a central and powerful headquarters to command, giving more initiatives to the private sector; emphasis on (voluntary based) soft power instead of (coercive) hard power, even when the military is involved, including rescue missions, medical support, research projects, etc. Its intention is a construction of network power by mishmash of the governments, NGOs, enterprises, academia, local communities and the military. Finally they agree on continuation of nuclear operations in Japan. This is, on the one hand, for maintaining the business as usual of Japan’s corporate society, with interventions of general contractors and continuous businesses (full profit-making) of the electric companies. On the other hand, for the US it is also the matter of security and global military strategy
[28] .
Now Tokyo will host the Olympics in 2020. We have always known that Prime minister Abe would tell an outright lie: “contaminated water will be completely locked.” But what is shocking to us all is that the ‘international community’ (IOC) has accepted the irradiated conditions for this celebratory event. From the meetings of IMF and WB, we have learned the priorities of global capitalism, but now what is reconfirmed is the fact that the international ruling forces have decided that the exposure to radiation be a common condition for the planetary populace. Now another humongous reconstruction of Tokyo will be under way and the preparation has begun: some homeless people living in a major public park (Meiji Koen) have been ordered to move out by December (2013). A coalition to oppose the project has been established
[29] .
So it is that the post-Fukushima socialization follows the process of seeking to absorb the never-ending catastrophes into yet another new reconstruction, which will affect the commoners of various social strata in all of their existential territories. This is an epitome of the “state mode of production” (Henri Lefebvre) that involves homogenization, hierarchization as well as fragmentation of the social space
[30] .
At the same time, as some people sense, there is a possibility that with this crisis-ridden over-expansion, the nation-state called Japan will collapse at some point, which, however, is strictly dependent upon the political and economic climate of the global power relations – whether or not they benefit from it --following the example of the Soviet Union
[31] . Or the state policy might be following the path of a total defeat as it had already happened. The Governor of the Bank of Japan, Haruhiko Kuroda’s endless additional printing of bank notes reminds us of the policy of the prewar minister of economy, Korekiyo Takahashi. The latter policy prepared the acceleration of armaments, while Abenomics is simplemindedly aimed at transferring the wealth into the capital of the post-nuclear disaster ruling power. It could be said that what the present rulers are scheming is a preparation for a process toward a coming defeat. There is no victory for the war against radioactivity, but meanwhile the ruling forces continue to control the society until the definite rupture manifests itself, by its propaganda toward a victory for a stronger Japan
[32] .
4. Complexity of the Radioactive Class Struggles
By now it must be evident that the experience of the hyper-object does not merely belong to the category of environmental problematic, but involves the ways in which our politics, economy, society and mind interact with it. And in this apocalyptic process, if the concept ‘ecology’ is still functional for an active intervention, it should provide
a strategy to rearrange all of our existential territories: environment, economy, society, technology and mind
[33] . One of the principles of ecology is: “[I]f an organism or aggregate of organisms sets to work with a focus on its own survival and thinks that that is the way to select its adaptive moves, its ‘progress’ ends up with a destroyed environment.
[34] ” In this sense, destruction of the environment has long been going on in the planetary layer called the atmosphere. Global warming and varied types of pollution have been spoken of as irreversible. So we talk about
the solution -- as thought out from the standpoint of an overseeing authority. But is the solution what we really want? Our position here is clear: what we need is already existing struggles and their recomposition. It is necessary to resist the haunts of Leviathan, and follow the on-going struggles, since it is they who embody what exists at the heart of the problematic.
It is not our problem if we all die by the intervention of hyper-objects such as global warming or radiation spread, for they are irreversible and we cannot do anything about it. We are not omnipotent! Our problem is the power mechanism that is using the apocalyptic process to rule and oppress us in order for its automatic reproduction and expansion – and as its side-effect, it is worsening the influences of hyper-objects.
In this sense the ecological problematic is no longer limited to the environment of the natural world, but involves the way the world, the society and our minds have been composed in entanglement. What is at stake here is ‘the commons’ -- but less as an abstract and moral directive than -- as a horizon upon which all our existential territories are arranged in power relations in confrontation with hyper-objects. Now ecology has to tackle the politics of the commons in crisis in a tactical, logistical and strategic manner in anarchic interactions of materiality.
In the original sense the commons means all of our mutually shared resources for survival and at the same time the potential basis for building communes: i.e., from natural resources to collaborative social relations to our bodies and minds. It means both the material ground for our existence whose ultimate embodiment is the earth and the mutualist and horizontalist way to interact with it. In principle, for common resources to be shared as good commons for building communes, there used to be a conditio sine qua non: land and people sustain an organic rapport, so that the people can have self-sufficiency for their reproduction, including that the excesses and wastes produced within a community should be recycled within.
Meanwhile capitalist economy has been based upon expropriation, exploitation, privatization and commodification of the commons, and in turn it has socialized all excesses and wastes and imposed them over the populace and especially the territories of the poor. The more the capitalist societies enjoy their flourishment, the more they lose their capacity for recycling within, and push the negative to the realm of invisibility -- air, ocean, underground and economically inferior territories. If we call ‘negative commons’ the excesses and wastes that cannot be recycled, the post-Fukushima radiation contamination is the worst example ever experienced in human history. And this is irreversible. In the context of Japan, this means the end of primary industries and local self-sufficiency, inviting more and more intervention of secondary and tertiary sectors, and acceleration of foreign dependency. Thus the commons no longer just means ‘good commons,’ but includes its opposite, the negative commons, that absorbs our existence. New approaches are required which are in the process of experimentation and formation in the struggles in Japan.
Here we are to look at the struggles that are confronting radiation as negative commons, from their own existential territories, which are embodying a class complexity in the dynamic of social congealment and dispersion. What we observe through them is an overlap of existing class relations with a new class category based upon radiation exposure. Who tends to be more exposed to and affected by radiation than others? Aside from the people living in the vicinity of the reactors, radiation-exposed workers at the plants, farmers in radiation-contaminated zones, sanitation workers in various parts of Japan, all other outdoor workers, homeless people (who are often day-workers without a job), and finally the youth and infants who are genetically more susceptible to radioactivity.
In this situation, life, reproduction and labor –the existential basis for all commoners-- can no longer be assumed without the influence of radiation. Now receiving radiation contamination and having to maintain one’s body has become
a social labor. In this light we need to redefine the category of labor (as irradiated body) in different existential territories, beginning from the workers in reactors to all those who are entitled to the compensations of nuclear industries and the state: the near-by residents, those who lost their land and homes to, finally, all vital bodies who are merely living
[35] . Labor is based upon its owner’s will to do or refuse it, as it has always been, but at the same time, at the extreme pole in the spectrum of being labor power, it is equal to living itself as a work to be valorized by the society and capital.
We know how painstakingly people in Japan have to act in every movement of their living—breathing, drinking, eating, outing, working, in their living places and conditions—in spite of and against all the policies, demands and expectations of the authorities. In general caretakers (reproductive workers) are making extra-efforts to take care of their families in terms of daily diet and hygiene, and thus more enraged by and militantly opposing the pro-nuclear policies; they would choose to radically change their lives (i.e., move away from the contaminated areas and choose diet carefully to avoid internal radiation), while breadwinners (productive workers) tend to persist in the same residence, working and eating conditions. This is one of the fissures driving the social dispersion.
After Fukushima, the role of the unpaid reproductive workers that had long been veiled under the post-war prosperity has come to the fore in double layers: firstly, their socially and culturally imposed role that has been made to look like their ‘nature’; and secondly, the rise of a conscious effort to politicize the role of protecting food and living environment from radiation. This latter has been led by women, and considered as feminist
[36] . This involves a class struggle again in two layers: one of the reproductive workers vis-à-vis the productive workers in families and society at large; and one of the reproductive workers against the ruling power that tacitly imposes the safety measures to their unpaid and unrewarded efforts, without acknowledging them
[37] . Their anger against the double-layered class oppression was expressed also in public protests led by women, addressing varied pressing issues: demanding a lowering of the annual permissible dose (20 milli-sievert) of radiation exposure for children set by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology
[38] .
The effort to build
reproductive commons is also embodied in radiation monitoring movements: many local residents go out on the street and measure radiation contamination of their neighborhoods, including places such as public parks and school yards, especially where children play
[39] . Also there have appeared many resident-run monitoring stations that are equipped with higher standard devices for measuring radiation doses in food and water, and share the information via the Internet
[40] . And after the accident it has been laypeople and independent journalists who have been researching the situations and sharing the information via private blogs. In ensemble these struggles oppose the post-nuclear disaster rule, mainly in three territories: against the
information manipulation of the government and main media, against the nationalization of radiation contamination of
the body and environment, and against the domination of
knowledge by the proxy scientists.
Another apex of the class complexity is formed based upon the historically uneven development between metropolis and countryside: i.e., Tokyo and the northeastern region of Honshu, where Fukushima is located. The countryside has been made to service Tokyo not only with its agricultural and marine products for food, but also by offering electricity as its lifeline, and finally disposable labor power (industrial reserve army) for construction as well as the nuclear industry.
As a common practice in all nuclear states, the location of power plants is chosen in consideration of three conditions: (1) non-residential area, (2) its surroundings must be under-populated, and (3) it must be far from densely populated zones. Namely, it must be remote from metropoli and industries, in case of accidents. So here is the accident, and the reason why it is so difficult for the people living in highly radioactive zones to evacuate and live in safer places is layered in three blocks of interests: local social relations, sustenance of Tokyo and the global economy. Therefore, the efforts to support the voluntary evacuees are confronting three-fold class relations. A movement has been born around the voluntary evacuees. Since the government’s support is far from sufficient or rather obstructing, this requires coordinated efforts of both evacuees and those who welcome and support them for rebuilding their lives.
[41] Along with this, though small in number and scale, some community centers have appeared mostly in the western and southern parts of the archipelago. This might be considered as the beginning of a new current of dispersion from the conformity of the nation-state called Japan.
Since the accident, TEPCO’s orientation has consistently been self-contradictory: on the one hand, it hesitates to decommission the crippled reactors for fear of its astronomical loss of its constant capital, while on the other hand, it lacks knowledge, technology and manpower to fix it. During the initial critical moments, TEPCO once decided to evacuate all of its workers from the site, but Prime Minister Kan issued a government order that they remain and confront the situation to avoid a worst case scenario
[42] . This is telling of the essential impossibility of management and work in nuclear power plants. The nuclear industry is a profitmaking endeavor, which however involves the possibility of mass extinction that is beyond its realm of trade. Meanwhile, the life-risking conditions to execute the work are closer to those of soldiers in combat, except that there is no foreign enemy, or to slave labor, but without direct coercion. Understandably, an increasing number of TEPCO’s employees are quitting their jobs after the accident. But more than anything, we have learned about the structure and conditions of ‘irradiated labor.’
Innumerable documents, reports and memoirs tell us the following facts
[43] : nuclear power plants are run based upon a strict hierarchical order, going down from the electric company to several layers (as many as eight) of sub-contracting companies and labor brokers (including
yakuza organizations)
[44] , and a strict rule of secrecy. According to the hierarchy, there are clear divisions in terms of information sharing, profit rate and the nature of work. While formal employees of the electric company monopolize crucial information, do mostly managerial work and rarely intervene in problematic sites, the workers hired by lower contractors take care of physical work such as cleaning and fixing in highly radioactive environments, without sufficient information, industrial injury insurance and safety measures. In this order the voice of the electric company is absolute. What the electric company demands are mainly low cost and good reputation, which is to say firstly that the value of the life-risking work is disfigured significantly stage by stage – with cuts taken by contractors and brokers – until they are embodied by the miniscule wages of the irradiated workers (average/aprox. of 10000 yen after 80% is taken away); secondly that the electric company does not want the public to know the reality of nuclear labor, which is susceptible to constant accidents and pre-destined illnesses such as leukemia and heart disease. The subcontractors complying with the demands try to settle workers’ injuries and illnesses informally by private settlements without relying on formal insurance. Furthermore, this hierarchical structure has a fatal flaw, that is, TEPCO managers who rarely visit the radioactive sites know very little about the real problems and situations that the
uninformed workers are facing at the site, thus the accidents continue to take place and the crises endure. And the never-ending crises of the Fukushima Daiichi Plant will irradiate more and more underclass workers in years to come.
Who are the radiation-exposed workers? They are akin to the group called ‘day-workers,’ the most precarious, underclass and nomadic group of workers, who move around the inner cities--called yoseba [day-workers ghetto]--of major industrial cities and are engaged in construction, dock-work and irradiated work on the basis of day-to-day contracts. Being excluded from civil society, they are people who have built the infrastructure of the postwar democracy. They consist of those migrant workers who seasonally come to metropoli from the remote areas like the places chosen for nuclear plants. For instance, the land around the particular townships (such as Futaba-cho and Okuma-cho) near Fukushima Daiichi is not suitable for agriculture, and men of age living there had had to go to cities, especially Tokyo, as migrant workers, before the plants began their operations: they live in yoseba and work at construction sites on day-to-day contract, or are sometimes recruited by subcontractors to be sent to nuclear power plants in different parts of Japan. But the plants made it possible for them to remain with their families by working there, if and only if they choose to do irradiated work. That is to say, the condition of being located in a remote area that is yet unsuitable for agricultural production -- or the production being weak in the market even if the land is productive -- is commonly shared among the sites for nuclear power plants, and also the area the majority of day-workers come from.
Ethnically, they also include some resident ethnic Koreans, Okinawans and the generic social outcasts called
burakumin[45] .
Yosebas in the postwar period were made into mono-sexual zones and mostly situated next to red light districts, where prostitutes, namely, underclass women work, including migrants from Thailand, Myanmar, Korea, China, and other eastern and middle Asian countries, especially since the bubble economy of 80s. Therefore, the inner cities of (
yoseba and red-light district) are considered as the place of the trans-Asiatic underclass.
The struggles of the day-workers have formed the most militant labor movements in postwar Japan
[46] . Before and after the 60s’ uprisings, periodic riots have taken place -- especially, in Sanya Tokyo and Kamagasaki Osaka, the two biggest
yosebas -- whose last manifestation was in July 2008 during the G8 Summit. They are confronting not only poverty and unstable living conditions, but also the violence of the labor brokers (mostly yakuza/fascist organizations) as well as police brutality on a daily basis. Their struggles are made to be militant
[47] .
Yoseba struggles also involve various mutual support projects: informal information exchanges for jobs and survival at bars and flop houses, free cookouts, patrols for helping homeless workers, seasonal festivals for empowerment and existentially nurtured solidarity. Now that the construction boom has passed and
yosebas are in the process of depopulation, the underclass workers’ movements have shifted their focuses to homeless movements in recent years. But the same workers are present, except that they are more nomadic, living outdoors or sleeping in one Internet café or another. Losing the common geographical place, they are becoming less visible yet more spreading and omnipresent, as the population of precarious workers increases.
What is expropriated from them -- the land, local means of subsistence, family, health, dignity, permanent residence, etc., by the process of post-war primitive accumulation -- assumes a necessity and possibility of what we mean by ‘commune’
as a fulfillment of the commons, since it is they whose living and working conditions require all aspects of reproductive care, mutual support, self-organizing and militancy. After Fukushima, some labor organizers of Sanya and precarious workers in general are trying to work with the nuclear workers by making a link between the precarious conditions before and after Fukushima
[48] . But due to the secretive and hierarchical nature of electric companies and nuclear industries as well as the placeless nature of the workers themselves, the organizing efforts are confronting difficulties. The primary objective here is to protect the workers from hazardous working conditions, but finally there is a possibility that the workers take initiative for the liquidation of the disaster and the termination of nuclear power generation –based upon
their ultimate option of refusal as a weapon to confront the state power as well as the global regime based upon nuclear energy.
Meanwhile the young in the cities have been doubly hit by the new situation: on top of the informalization of jobs and education reform, which had been hard enough for them to take, their hope for a long future has been severed by their susceptibility to radiation and the social atmosphere coercing them toward self-responsibility and sacrifice to accept the irradiated life. Here exists the crux of the combined apocalypse in the post-Fukushima Japan: radiation and debt, the double deprivation of the future.
Our existence has long been determined by the linear time of capital’s reproduction in which we are conditioned to exchange our lives with measurable clock time, but now with radiation our body has come to be taken hostage by half-lives of radioactive substances, some of which (i.e., Plutonium and Strontium) will last an astronomical number of years. Practically we -- the labor power -- are haunted by the coming illness and death and can no longer even commodify ourselves sufficiently.
Financial debt too is the state in which one’s life is taken hostage by the future. Even having a humble life, we easily take on debt in serious sums just for survival, i.e., with student loans or credit cards. It is as if since our birth we owe, we are indebted to something, and this something can appear in many forms -- from national and social conformity, family ties, financial institutions, to our own bodies. It is as if we will be charged with the rent of our own lives. If we are renters of our own lives and bodies -- then, from whom?
In this situation, all of us as well as our children are charged with the negative byproducts of capitalists’ profit making: debt and pollution, which determine the future.
Here what is deprived from us is not exactly the future itself, but the future as unknown and undetermined temporality from which we can create our own temporality. This state of human subject subordinated to this combination is now the most universal condition under the apocalyptic capitalism and its catastrophic modus operandi. In this sense Fukushima is the name for the common condition of the planetary populace.
In February 2013, two students in junior high school in Odawara City in Kanagawa Prefecture flooded their classroom with water, and wrote in big white letters: “Death” on the blackboard; they also drew “Dead School” on the grounds of the school yard. Reverberating this action, another junior high was flooded with water, and ninety six windows were broken in another high school. This is the form of struggle that the youth are creating which must be taken as their call for reverberation to which we should respond
[49] .
5. Apocalyptic Capitalism
The capitalism encased in collapsing reactors is evidently facing an unprecedented crisis with its labor power (or variable capital) exposed to radiation waiting for illness and death, and nuclear plants (or constant capital) uncontrollably releasing increasing amounts of radioactive particles in their irreparable process of collapse. Evidently, the dead labor is overwhelming the living labor. Assuming that the situation must be a disastrous crisis for capitalism, we also know that in principle it is movement that constantly creates new occasions for larger investment and development by actively involving disaster, contamination, immiseration, war and everything that articulates the previous cycle of its reproduction. During this process, a number of desperate re-compositions will take place. When a bigger crisis hits and the deficit is larger, it will play an even bigger game – thus inviting endless crises, risks, hazards and calamities. Though this sounds too horrendous, this has long been the essential modus operandi of capitalism, and now it is revealed in the daylight. Capitalism is producing
combined and uneven apocalypse (Evan Calder Williams)across the planet
[50] .
So it is that post-nuclear disaster socialization is driven by the will to reconstruct and the consequent nationalization of radiation exposure. What kind of mechanism is behind all this? We would say ‘capitalism,’ but here it is necessary to speak of a specific capitalism, namely, the post-nuclear disaster capitalism that still relies on and even further develops nuclear operations, including the futile yet profitable experiments of aftercare (decommissioning of plants and waste management), on a global scale. Then, this question leads to another concerning our struggles: “Why is it so hard to abolish nuclear power, especially even after Fukushima?” Even if individual reactors can be taken off-line and the construction of reactors can be stopped – thanks to the struggles of the locals -- it seems extremely difficult or even impossible to abolish nuclear power entirely. And, even if it is possible that individual nation-states may determine to do away with it –thanks to the pressures of the nationals -- why doesn’t it disappear entirely from the planet?
With these questions in mind, now I shall summarize a couple of main attributes of apocalyptic capitalism, or the global capitalism/state conglomeration whose last stronghold seems very likely to be nuclear power itself.
Nuclear power is always and essentially Janus-headed: both military and civilian. It offers capitalism a utopian dream for sublime energy and the state a utopian dream of sublime weaponry, assuming the strongest bond between capitalism and state sovereignty. Since the industrial revolution, this bond has existed particularly over energy industries: coal, oil and nuclear power. This conglomeration created the world being totalized around energy generation and distribution. Or it is this capitalism with the state as its chief executive that has been tirelessly extracting its driving power – energy -- from humans and the environment at the same time as commodifying them, in a combined and uneven development and apocalyptic process.
Energy has always been the central concern for capitalism, for it is the core of its operations. Original energies are always human labor reproduced by communal relations and the commons and natural environment produced by solar energy. In the history of capital’s reproduction and expansion, “microstruggles” (George Caffentzis) of workers to refuse work in various forms have been driving capital’s necessity to discover new sources of energy and invent machines, in order to create new modes and relations of production. This history has been developing in tandem with scientific revolutions from Newtonian theory of the solar system to Carnot’s laws of thermodynamics to Mayer’s law of conservation of energy to Taylorits labor management to Teller’s proposal for new production system
[51] .
The age of coal was the initiation of the labor movement with remarkable achievement of general strikes in many industrial sectors, which was largely thanks to the geographical concentration of mining, production and transportation netted around coal. This is considered as the age of modern democracy in the West based upon its geographical expansion (imperialism) continuing from colonialism, while the age of oil embodies the limit of that production and circulation as well as democracy
[52] . It announces dystopian transformations within the modern paradigm: the end of the welfare state; dispersion/expansion of production points and network of circulation; invention of spatio-temporality and a culture based upon the automobile; the economy centered around information, service, energy; the spatial limit of colonization/expansion of capitalist commodification, reoriented toward macro to micro dimensions (i.e., from spatial and mega-scale developments to genetic information copywriting).
Nuclear energy came into existence strictly within the paradigm of oil, as an offshoot of the accelerating energy-dominant tendency of capital’s reproduction/expansion. Initiated as a military technology, concretized in the Manhattan Project
[53] , it was readapted as energy production as an effort to connect two separate sectors (weaponry and energy) into one production/circulation via the process of plutonium generation. Thus it invented a Janus-headed (military/energy) culture or militarization of the space, which controls and permeates our everyday lives in invisible yet substantial manners. In the realm of international politics, we have been observing in the pattern of recent US interventions into the oil rich countries to establish its business monopolization, that it unequivocally uses the excuse of the threat of developing nuclear technology to produce weapons of mass destruction. In this manner, the connection of oil and nuclear exists at the core of what I call “apocalyptic capitalism”. Thinking of the historical origin as well as the present situations, it is unimaginable to be anti-nuke without being anti-oil or anti-energy centered capital/state conglomeration.
Despite the claims of pro-nuclear discourses, nuclear power is not in the least economical, clean or safe. As a number of analyses show, it is one of the most absurd projects that humans are engaged in: what it does is just boiling water and making steam, but for this it involves tremendous amounts and kinds of labor, machine, trade, power conflict and hazard. And at the same time, it isthe most concentrated and dreadful form of
capture. It is a new form of “mega-machine” (Lewis Mumford) that creates, regulates and controls the entire social body and space by over-coding the land and populace, by imposing
an insanely megalomaniac project[54] . It is, as it were, an invisible pyramid of the new age on a global scale.
Let us look at what nuclear power generation is actually doing.
First it is a false notion that nuclear power is low cost. In fact its cost is much higher than hydraulic power and thermal power, if we take account of the actual costs for electricity generation, reprocessing costs and government expenditure for infra-structure (land acquisition and facility construction). Furthermore, there required is a mechanism called ‘pumped-storage hydroelectricity.’Nuclear energy generation, due to its mechanical inflexibility, cannot be stopped for an operation period, and in consequence it produces excessive energy. In order to consume it, two water pools are prepared–for pumping up the water from one pool to another during the night, and pouring water from one to another during the daytime to generate energy for use. Each of these operations loses thirty percent of the extra energy. This cost adds to our electricity bills.
Secondly it is another untruth that nuclear energy does not produce carbon dioxide. It should be rephrased: ‘nuclear fission itself does not produce carbon dioxide.’ Before the generation, nuclear production involves uranium mining, refinement, enrichment and processing, as well as transportation. All these processes require fossil fuels that are already producing large amounts of carbon dioxide.
Thirdly it is a lie that nuclear power is not causing global warming. It is said that in an average nuclear plant, three million kw of heat is produced inside the reactor, only one third of which is transformed into electricity, while two thirds is being released, in most case, into the ocean. This is the reason why the seawater near the plants is always warmer, aprox.7 centigrade. This effect is significant for oceanic ecology as well as global warming.
[55]
Then, how can such absurdity be allowed in this world? The secret lies in the way the state takes special care of this industry. To run it requires various financial tricks of state subsidies and insurance limitations.
[56] “Generally speaking, even when nuclear energy generation is privately funded, […] the state protect[s] investors in nuclear power plants with a crazy law that put[s] a limit on the insurance costs of these plants in case of accidents and disasters. Nuclear reactors [are] government funded in the final instance, since this private liability limit [is] a small fraction of the eventual damage claims a serious accident at a nuclear plant would generate.”
[57] On top of that, laws have been coined for the benefit of nuclear production. For instance, the Atomic Energy Damage Compensation Law (1961) in Japan says: in case of an accident caused by an unexpected large natural disaster or social upheaval, the electric company is exempted from responsibility
[58] . That is to say, it is
virtually tax money and electricity bills that have to pay off a large part of the post disaster liquidation and compensation (if it reaches above 120 billion yen) -- on top of the hardware costs such as land acquisition, facility construction, waste reprocessing and storing and decommissioning, while electric companies basically play the managerial role for running the facilities and distribution of electricity and absorbing most of the profit. Again in the case of Japan now, it is the commoners who will have to pay off the ever-increasing costs of the disaster by way of electric bills and taxes.
Due to the legalized financial settings, the more nuclear plants the electric company constructs, the more it gains profit. In Japan electric companies are monopoly capital. The residents of the Tokyo area have no other choice but to buy electricity from TEPCO, while those of Osaka area buy from KEPCO. No matter how high the price, the people have to buy it. Protected by monopoly status and secured by the Electric Utility Industry Law, the electric companies can draw profits from their electric bills determined in the way by which the so-called comprehensive costs --including depreciation cost, business expenses, tax and business returns – turn to be profit. In other words, the profit rate of the electric company is determined by ‘rate base’ (fixed assets) plus business returns rate. This means that the electric company can add a certain percentage of its fixed assets onto its profit rate. Therefore, there is nothing better than constructing more nuclear power plants in order to increase its rate base.
While liberalization of electric power became a worldly current around the turn of the 21st century, Japan’s electric supply industries too were confronting a situation where they had to go along with market principle in deciding their electric fees. Many companies could no longer pay for the most expensive electric bills in the world, and sought to equip their own power stations. So liberalization of retail electricity sales began targeting large-lot electricity users. But a backlash came, due to the powerful interests of such trans-national enterprises as Mitsubishi, Hitachi and Toshiba being tightly intertwined with the interests of electric supply industries. Now the mammoth nuclear industries have swollen into a three trillion industry, whose apparatuses stretch across the nation and the world, becoming unstoppable.
Japan’s technology of nuclear reactors was originally purchased from the US: Westinghouse (Pressurized Water Reactor, PWR) and General Electric (Boiling Water Reactor, BWR). KEPCO’s reactors use PWP type with Mitsubishi’s technical intervention, while TEPCO’s reactors are BWR via Toshiba and Hitachi.
The cartel of Japan’s nuclear industries constructed forty plants up until about twenty years ago, but only fourteen have been built since then. Their expectation of expansion was miserably defeated. Therefore Mitsubishi, Toshiba and Hitachi sought to sell their technologies to China, India, and South East Asian Countries. But the problem was that now PWR became the international trend. Toshiba, with BWR, was in trouble, and determined to buy out Westinghouse, who owns PWR, for more than 6 thousand billion yen. Then Mitsubishi was in trouble, so it established a business tie-up with Areva in France.
As the Fukushima disaster shows well enough, the copied technology was far from sufficient for operation. As someone pointed out to me, it is just like we buy a computer and use it everyday but cannot fix the hardware once it has a trouble.
As we have seen, there is a global power –that I shall call the “global nuclear regime” -- behind the post-nuclear disaster economy and socialization in Japan. For that matter, forces that both promote and rely on nuclear power have always been global in nature. Nuclear technology was initiated as military technology for the atomic bombs. Undoubtedly its biggest leading player has always been the US. But the international politics that is centered on the UN, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA
[59] ) et al. is a place for negotiations among pro-nuclear power/weaponry states. These powers’ way of rule is based upon “nuclear exceptionalism” (Gabriel Hecht) over which they contest amongst themselves
[60] . In other words, they employ all their economic, scientific, political and military might to achieve and monopolize the
sublime power of destruction and energy production. The global nuclear regime is an assemblage of the powers—nuclear states and nuclear capitals forming the military/industrial complex—based upon their grip of nuclear exceptionalism.
The history of nuclear production follows the history of colonialism, imperialism, postcolonial power contestation, Cold War power relations and empire. Here we see layers of power dynamics in which nothing has disappeared from the past. Within the global power relation over nuclear exceptionalism, there exist combined and uneven arrangements, whereby the historical layers distribute different roles to different places in nuclear production, involving uranium mining, global trade, concentration of capital, state intervention, international politics, scientific research, energy production, weaponry production and distribution, military intervention, decommissioning plants, waste reprocessing and waste storing or shipping. The countries that achieved independence relatively recently –i.e., such as Canada, Australia, Niger, Namibia, Kazakhstan, et al—took over uranium mines from their former colonial rulers and/but continued to play the role of servitude, that is, by transferring the surplus value of their massive, cheap and irradiated labor power to the catastrophic machineries of the electric companies in the cutting edge nuclear states of the US, France, Israel, Japan, et al.
Therefore, apocalyptic capitalism operating behind the global nuclear regime is producing combined and uneven hells that the peoples are experiencing differently according to their historical and geo-political positions, emphatically embodied by health hazards and atrocities -- in innumerable mining sites in Africa, Canada, Australia and elsewhere, nuclear bomb testing sites, war zones bombed by depleted uranium warheads, and radioactive pollution from power plants, factories and dumpsites across the globe. Thus the irradiated planet is the given, and is now irreversible.
It is not that apocalyptic capitalism is run by a conference of executives or representatives of the global nuclear regime, presenting and discussing their ideas about how to immiserate the labor power of the world and contaminate the environment on the planet. It is less run than driven by – and furthermore it is less by than as the power contestations within the global nuclear regime, which is equal to the real and virtual condition for the on-going global war. If it is considered as a power, it is an acephalic one. It does not think, feel, speak or respond. It is nobody: it does not have a body! Apparati at war with each other! Leviathan! Here exists the final instance for the fact that it continues to operate as an automaton, despite all the crises and without listening and responding to our desperate contestations.
6. Zero-Becquerelism or the Gift of the Apocalypse
Finally intervenes our lingering question: “Why is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism?
[61] ” In this context, the answer is clear – because of the nuclear exceptionalism under the grip of the global nuclear regime. That is to say, nuclear exceptionalism is the ultimate stronghold for the survival of global capitalism. Therefore, anti-capitalism today is equal to anti-nuke (energy/weaponry), anti-oil, anti-energy-centered drive of
this world.
In order to start our offense against this force, we have to begin with a dark, realist view or one could say nihilism: “Another world is impossible!” As some of our Japanese comrades rightfully suggest, since the global ruling power is operating on their version of another world --
there is no radiation threat -- in order to absorb catastrophes into a series of their reconstruction, it is necessary for us to insist that we have only this irradiated, groundless and miserable world
[62] . That is the only possible beginning for any imagination to be developed and any action to be taken by our own initiative. This world we must leave!
[63]
In line with the nihilism it is worth reminding ourselves, once more, of an aporia about the treatment of hyper-objects: i.e., global warming and radiation spread. The point of recent arguments is that instead of ignoring, hiding or sending them to the domain of invisibility, it is necessary to make them visible and place them in the public centers of the countries responsible for them, for the efforts to take good care of them, both politically and aesthetically
[64] . Although this makes sense and even if there is a possibility to realize it, we must also be aware that such an ambitious challenge will invite another capitalist/statist redevelopment project. The struggles must be ready to confront such development. For, again, what we want is not a solution, but the decomposition and recomposition of the problematic situations through class struggle.
Our life with hyper-objects is the end result of the totalizing impetus of the world, or the world history, driven by global capitalism and states, that we have been living in and struggling against since the colonial age. With the advent of global warming and radiation spread, the geographical divisions between civilization and nature, developed and underdeveloped zones –that which the totalization has been living off of -- have been increasingly blurred, forming a complexity. Now the totalization has been reaching its limits, with fissures open all over the planet, but it cannot stop. Globally the increasing presence of hyper-objects is depriving us of the sense of measurement, border and hierarchy, while revealing multidimensional interconnectivities. Meanwhile we are no longer the humans that we used to be, due to the exposed interconnectivity of forces that is imposed upon us and now we should make ourselves actively engaged in. On the one hand, we are existentially part of machinic, informational and technological apparatuses, and on the other hand, released from the fixed social, political and economic territorialities: we are less and less homo nationalis. This announces the end of the age of the world. But the impetus of the world won't end by itself. It is only the struggles across the planet, from those in indigenous lands to the war zones to the production/circulation points to the metropoli, that can discover positive openings in the apocalyptic process. This is the gift of the apocalypse.
The struggles that exist all over the planet could disrupt the production/circulation of energy –coal, oil and nuclear -- and information flows in order to take them over in their own hands omnipresently. That the struggles meanwhile develop their own energo-signaletic flows would be the only possible way to realize an ecology covering all of our existential territories. This is the impetus to decompose the totalizing world and shift our beings into the becoming of the planetary omnipresence. This is the beginning of the ultimate ontological mutation from the world to the earth.
In Japan, under radiation spread, it is going to be more and more difficult to live without prosthetic devices such as Geiger counters, shielding cloths and architecture, medicines, etc. The age of the cyborg is here. Again, this would invite another wave of capitalist developments and commodifications. Yet, there is a possibility that the commoners develop their own science, technology and information tools as weapons. The loss of given connection with the land could lead to fluctuations and manipulation of real estate prices, while the people could develop new manners of interacting with their existential territories, by actively developing mobility and flexibility. Finally in confrontation with coming illness and death and by a realization of life being ephemeral, they are creating a new notion of vital activity, beyond that of personalized life confined in the capitalist commodity economy, that is directly connected to a life chain and environmental, social and individual ecologies.
Among Japan’s struggles, there is a current called “Zero Becquerelists” (Shiro Yabu)
[65] . So far they have been focusing on radiation monitoring and information exchange, as well as advocating a mass exodus from the eastern part of Japan (that includes Tokyo Metropolis) with a small cohabitation space near Nagoya. In this instance, zero Becquerelism is not the goal, since radiation spread is irreversible and we will live with it, but instead it is a guideline and political manifesto. It is supposed to be the point at which all the struggles must coordinate their actions and projects, in confrontation with the global nuclear regime. The manifestation is crucial primarily in order to refuse any involvement in the government’s discussion about a threshold dose. Their slogan: “We don’t need a society that tells us to eat radiation” is a refusal to be involved in the post-Fukushima socialization. It is a refusal, furthermore, of the abstraction of our lives or categorization of our bodies under
apocalyptic capitalism that seeks to naturalize radiation and other contaminations across the planet, and by so doing creates a global clinic/mausoleum society dominated by the energy/military/pharmaceutical industrial complex. On the logistical front, they are envisioning the creation of a subsistence economy, centered around existing reproductive workers’ efforts, while confronting the ruling power. This confrontation would be based upon the irradiated workers’ refusal of liquidation of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi reactors (1~4). As it has been always believed, strikes by workers in nuclear reactors is impossible; while this is true when the reactors are at work, due to the possible mass extinction, the case is different in the four crippled reactors that are already uncontrollable
[66] . By presenting
their will to sabotage at once, the irradiated workers can create a situation where they begin to take initiative by having their voice heard globally. This would cause an unprecedented threat to the post-Fukushima sovereignty as well as the global nuclear regime. This could also assemble the
dispersing powers (Raul Zibechi) into a form of exodus from Eastern Japan
[67] . They call this possible situation: “Eastern Japan general strike.”
We are not saviors of the planet. We are just trying to survive in a way that is comfortable for us, and to die in a way suitable for us. We want to achieve a future that is undermined, a future that we can create, as well as a mobility with which we can live where we want to live. We have been observing enough of the situation where every crisis is appropriated by capital’s new project. In this time of global calamity, we want to see the existing class struggles re-appropriate authority’s solution by their own needs and aspirations. Amidst the schizophrenic mix of affects – desperation, anger and joy – that many of us share, it is only the struggles that can discover new weapons to dismantle the global nuclear regime, in order to live the ephemeral yet intense life in and as the omnipresence called the earth.
[1] Evan Calder Williams,
Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, Winchester, UK and Washington, USA: Zero Books, 2011, p. 149.
[2] George Caffentzis,
In Letters of Blood and Fire, PM, Common Notions, Autonomedia, 2013, P.12
[4] However, even the ‘natural’ disaster was likely part of the effects of global warming that cannot be deemed irrespective of human activities. Rather it was an event whose causality and responsibility are unidentifiable within the complexity of planetary interconnectivity.
[5] The Riot of Occupy Oi [Occupy Oi no Ran] –
Document 2912, 6/30~7/2, August 2012, Anti-nuke, Anti-Restarting Watch Tent.
[7] Thereafter this conflict has repeated in the anti-racist actions against the xenophobic ultra-nationalist group: Zaitoku-kai:
< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaitokukai>.
[8] ECD, “Good by Osugi Sakae,” included in
Osugi Sakae, Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2012, and Apocalypse+/Anarchy, “Apocalypse and Anarchy After Fukushima,” included in
Hapax VOl. 1, Tokyo: Yako-sha, 2013. P. 35.
[9] Timothy Morton,
Hyperobjects – Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
[10] Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan, Edited by Richard Tuck, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
[11] Hiroaki Koide,
Lies of Nuclear Power [Genpatsu no Uso], Tokyo: Fuso Sha, 2011, p.92
[12] Yoshihiko Ikegami, 2011, “A new movement of the people”, < http://www.jfissures.org/2011/06/07/a-new-movement-of-the-people/>
[13] Nasubi, “Challenging the Issues around the Radiation-Exposed Labor that Connects Sanya and Fukushima,” < http://www.jfissures.org/2012/08/31/sanya-and-fukushima/>.
[14] Zaha Hadid Architects, “Japan National Stadium” : < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7II0J_aT7A>.
[15] From the Website of The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries
<http://www.maff.go.jp/j/shokusan/eat/>.
[16] Message to the Japanese people (August 9, 2013)
<http://www.kantei.go.jp/foreign/incident/thomas.html>
[17] Robert Jungk,
Children of the Ashes, translated by Constantine Fitzgibbon, Harcourt, Brace and World, INC., 1961.
[19] Shiro Yabu, “Radiation Exposure is Unequal,” < http://www.jfissures.org/2013/04/24/radiation-exposure-is-unequal/>.
[20] Sabu Kohso, “Fangs Hiding in the Green: Between Revolution and Disaster, The World and the Earth,” included in
Fukushima Mon Amour, New York: Autonomedia, 2011.
[21] This is politically organized around Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan.
[22] It can be asserted that a certain number of Japanese congressmen, bureaucrats, CEOs, and commentators in the media are agents of the CIA. The CIA has an annual budget prepared to have them operate -- this has long been an ordinary practice.
This information has been widely circulated since the publication of Tetsuo Arima’s book: Nuclear Power, Shoriki, the CIA (Tokyo: Shincho-Shinsho, 2008).
[23] Ichiyo Muto, “Buildup of Nuclear Armament Capability and the Post-war Statehood of Japan, < http://www.peoples-plan.org/jp/modules/article/index.php?content_id=129>.
[24] Jeff Kingston, “Japan’s Nuclear Village,” < http://www.japanfocus.org/-Jeff-Kingston/3822>.
[25] According to Dr. Hiroaki Koide’s
Nuclear--Its Future (Hon-no-izumi-sha, 2011), constructions of nuclear plants were disrupted in the following regions: Hamamasu (Hokkaido), Taisei (Hokkaido), Taro (Iwate), Namie (Fukushima), Odaka (Fukushima), Maki (Niigata), Suzu (Ishikawa), Ashihama (Mie), Miyama (Mie), Kumano (Mie), Nachikatsuura/Taiji (Wakayama), Koza (Wakayama), Hikigawa (Wakayama), Hidaka (Wakayama), Kohama (Fukui), Kumihama (Kyoto), Kasumi (Hyogo), Hamasaka (Hyogo), Aotani (Tottori), Tamagawa (Yamaguchi), Hagi (Yamaguchi), Hohoku (Yamaguchi), Anan (Tokushima), Kubokawa (Kochi), Saga (Kochi), Tsushima (Ehime), Kamae (Ohita), and Kushima (Miyazaki). Meanwhile the struggle goes on in Kaminoseki (Yamaguchi) and Ooma (Aomori).
[26] <http://www.imf-wb.2012tokyo.mof.go.jp/english/>.
[28] Ken Hirano, “The Reconstruction Project and the US,” <http://www.jfissures.org/author/ken-hirano/>.
[29] <http://hangorin.tumblr.com/>.
[30] Henri Lefebvre,
State, Space, World – Selected Essays, edited by Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden, translated by Gerald Moore, Neil Brenner, and Stuart Elden, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
[31] Hapax Editorial Collective, “Fragments for Ikata Insurrection,” included in
Hapax Vol. 1, Tokyo: Yako Sha, 2013.
[32] Hapax Editorial Collective, ibid.
[33] Felex Guattari,
The Three Ecologies, translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, London, New York: Continuum, 2009.
[34] Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000, p.457.
[35] Midnight Notes Collective, ’”No Future Notes,” <http://www.midnightnotes.org/PDFnofuture.pdf>
[36] Mari Matsumoto, “Nuclear Energy and Reproductive Labor – The Task of Feminism,” < http://www.jfissures.org/2011/11/28/nuclear-energy-and-reproductive-labor-–-the-task-of-feminism/>.
[38] Tanaka Ryusaku Journal, <http://tanakaryusaku.jp/2011/05/0002365>.
[39] For instance, Tokyo Sunaba Project: <http://sunabanakano.blogspot.com/>.
[41] A Conversation with Takako Shishido (1), 2013, “Voluntary Evacuation: A New Form of Struggle, <http://www.jfissures.org/2013/01/14/voluntary-evacuation-a-new-form-of-struggle-a-conversation-with-takako-shishido-1/>.
[42] <http://astand.asahi.com/magazine/wrscience/2012032000009.html>.
[43] For instance, Kunio Horie,
Nuclear Gypsy [Genpatsu Gypsy], Tokyo: Gendai Shokan, 2011. British TV Documentary: “Nuclear Ginza,” (1995) < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJTuWVDjarg>.
[44] Tomohiko Suzuki,
Yakuza and Nuclear [Yakuza to Genpatsu], Tokyo: Bungei Shunjyu, 2011.
[45] < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin>.
[46] Takeshi Haraguchi, “Notes on the 4.5 Great Kamagasaki Oppression and Nuclear Industry,” <http://www.jfissures.org/2011/04/14/notes-on-the-4-5-great-kamagasaki-oppression-and-nuclear-power-industry/>
[47] The film: “Yama – Attack to Attack,” < http://www.bordersphere.com/events/yama1.htm>.
[49] Hapax Editorial Collective, ibid.
[50] Evan Calder Williams, ibid.
[51] George Caffentzis, ibid.
[52] Timothy Michel, Carbon Democracy – Political Power in the Age of Oil, Verso, 2011.
[53] Robert Jungk,
Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, translated by James Cleugh, San Diego, New York, London: A Harvest Book, 1958.
[54] Lewis Mumford,
The Myth of the Machine, vol. 1, Techniques and Human Development, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967.
[56] Jim Falk,
Global Fission, Oxford University Press, 1982.
[57] Ferruccio Gambino, “An Elementary Algebra of Common Goods and Evils,” translated by George Caffentzis, 2011, <http://www.jfissures.org/2011/08/21/an-elementary-algebra-of-common-goods-and-evils/>.
[59] IAEA was originally an international mediator for trading enriched uranium, but became an inspector for the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Finally after the first Gulf War in 1991, it came to be more subordinated to the judgment of United Nations Security Council, as an inspector of the weapon of mass destruction.
[60] Gabrielle Hecht,
Being nuclear—Africans and the global uranium trade, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2012.
——2006, ‘Nuclear ontologies’, Constellations, vol. 13, no. 3, September, http://www-personal.umich.edu/~hechtg/articles/HechtConstellations06.pdf
[61] Debates around this question have been going on between such intellectuals as Slavoj Zizek, Fredrick Jameson, and Mark Fisher.
[62] Hapax Editorial Collective, ibid.
[63] Jacques Camatte,
This World We Must Leave, and Other Essays, edited by Alex Trotter, New York: Autonomedia, 1995.
[64] See Timothy Morton and Hiroaki Koide, ibid.
[65] Shiro Yabu and Yoshihiko Ikegami,
We Don't Need a Society that Tells Us to Eat Radiation – Zero-Becquerelist Manifesto, Tokyo: Shin Hyoron, 2012.
[66] Robert Jungk,
The Nuclear State, translated by Eric Mosbacher, London: John Calder, 1979.
[67] Raul Zibechi,
Dispersing Power – Social Movements as Anti-State Forces, translated by Ramor Ryan, AK Press, 2010.
