Political theorist, anti-capitalist activist, and translator Sabu Kohso joins me to discuss his book Radiation and Revolution, a text that "uses the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster to illuminate the relationship between nuclear power, capitalism, and the nation-state." This interview was recorded in the Gray Coast Guildhall in Quilcene, WA, for the Communal Life & Planetary Relations at the End of This World event, held on March 12, 2022.

In Radiation and Revolution, Sabu Kohso argues that “nuclear power is not a mere source of energy—it has become the organizing principle of the global order and the most effective way to simultaneously accumulate profit and govern the populace.” The 2011 Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear disaster and its effects live with us today. “The year 2011 was,” as he writes in his article Radiation, Pandemic, Insurrection published in The New Inquiry, “the beginning of the present: an age of endless disasters and struggles against ruling powers under the catastrophic conditions thereby imposed. The epoch has witnessed the intensification of two global impetuses – disaster and uprising – whose interaction, since then, has increasingly involved us.”

// Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/sabu-kohso

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