Nuklearna katastrofa kapitalizmu. O polskich reakcjach na katastrofę elektrowni atomowej Fukushima Daiichi w Japonii

The Nuclear Catastrophe of Capitalism. Polish Responses to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Disaster in Japan

Aleksandra Brylska in the article The Nuclear Catastrophe of Capitalism. Polish Responses to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Disaster in Japan the Polish press discourse on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster analyzes the terms of the relationship between this event and capitalism. It raises the question to what extent a tragic event in the field of technology can undermine and weaken the capitalist framework of the world, and to what extent – in line with Naomi Klein's thought – it even contributes to the strengthening of this ideology. In the Polish press, the failure quickly ceased to be a technology event, and turned into a tragedy for international financial markets and the economy. The author argues that it is capitalism that shapes reality, including the experience of a catastrophe (both natural and technological) and the manner of talking about it. The power plant failure has polluted the global imagination, but it has also shown how polluted the world is by thinking in terms of profit and loss. The failure in Fukushima also showed that the crisis of capitalism is not something unequivocal, and that it mutates itself and is able to feed on the disaster that originally devastated it. An important aspect in the analyzed material is also the status and transformations within the perception of Japan as a technocratic country. The purpose of this article is to check how the myths of capitalism and technocratism are related to each other and how the catastrophe changes the status of these two areas.