LA wildfires show the future of capitalism
Los Angeles is an icon of global capitalism. Home to 18 million people and some of the largest and most profitable corporations in the world, this sprawling city is a mecca of production and exchange. As the seat of the American entertainment industry, it is unsurpassed in its cultural influence.
Yet for more than a week now, large parts of the City of Dreams have been transformed by out-of-control wildfires into a nightmarish inferno. That predictable and preventable fires have overwhelmed the second largest city in the United States is an indictment of the system that Los Angeles has come to symbolise.
The worst of the many fires burning around the city is the Palisades fire, which has so far consumed nearly 24,000 acres [9,700 ha], including most of the coastal Pacific Palisades neighbourhood with a population of more than 23,000. The Eaton fire has consumed almost 15,000 acres, including much of the neighbourhood of Altadena. In total, fires have burned through approximately 40,000 acres in the Los Angeles area—an area larger than the entire city of San Francisco. One Pacific Palisades resident who was forced to evacuate and witness the fires consume her neighbourhood told the BBC, “It was like watching the end of the world”.
More than 170,000 people living near the Palisades and Eaton fires currently remain under evacuation orders or warnings. Many have been forced to make the heartbreaking decision to flee their homes as embers surrounded them, with some becoming trapped in their vehicles. Twenty-seven deaths have been confirmed, but many more victims are likely to be discovered among the smouldering ruins. What’s more, many millions have been exposed to the toxic smoke, which blankets the city, with health consequences that will be felt for years to come.
Images and videos shared widely on social media show whole neighbourhoods and city blocks burned to the ground. Tens of thousands of people are now returning to the burned-out ruins of what was once home to their entire lives. One Altadena resident told the New York Times, “The flames have consumed all our dreams of years here. Everything has turned to ashes”.
This unfolding catastrophe is not merely a “natural” disaster. It has been driven in large part by the irrationalism of an economic and political system that subordinates all social needs to the logic of profits and capital accumulation. The wildfires illustrate the inability of capitalism to plan properly for and deal with the realities of the environment on which it depends: from climate change to urban planning to basic fire and water management.
Climate change—driven largely by the burning of fossil fuels that are integral to the global capitalist system—intensified the inferno. LA already has a uniquely fire-prone geography, with powerful winds that fuel wildfires flowing out of the Great Basin in Nevada and Utah toward the southern California coast. These Santa Ana winds push dry desert air over the mountains and accelerate as they blow into canyons and valleys. Los Angeles County and much of southern California have been in climate change-induced drought conditions, having recorded no significant rainfall for eight months. Longer dry seasons in southern California have not only aggravated the fire danger but also reduced available water supplies and complicated efforts to develop countermeasures. One recent study found that human-caused climate change resulted in a 320 percent increase in burned areas in California from 1996 to 2021.
Capitalist urban development has transformed LA’s unique geography into the wildfire capital of the world. In his seminal essay “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn”, American Marxist Mike Davis argued that the wealthy, and the political establishment that serves them, are to blame for these increasingly disastrous fires.
In what can only be described as the opposite of rational urban planning, property developers and wealthy homeowners have fought for their “right” to expand into the scenic but fire-prone foothills of Los Angeles, along the coastlines of Malibu, with the expectation that the government will protect their investments. The southern Californian fire policy of “total fire suppression”, intended to protect these houses, in fact means that there is more fuel to burn when fires do start, which they inevitably do. “At least once a decade a blaze in the chaparral grows into a terrifying firestorm consuming hundreds of homes in an inexorable advance across the mountains to the sea”, writes Davis. “A monomaniacal obsession with managing ignition rather than chaparral accumulation simply makes doomsday-like firestorms and the great floods that follow them virtually inevitable.” The current wildfires are the latest episode in what Davis calls fire “holocausts” that regularly (and, with climate change, more frequently) wipe out whole sections of LA.
In the aftermath of each fire, government resources have been swiftly mobilised to rebuild the fire-damaged homes of the wealthy, while fires in Los Angeles’ downtown slum tenements received comparatively little support or attention. “Why more mansions in the fire-loving hills?”, asks Davis. “Because of a perverse fact: after every major California blaze, homeowners and their representatives take shelter in the belief that if wildfire can’t be prevented, nonetheless, its destructiveness can be tamed ... Yet, as a contemporary Galileo might say of defensible space, ‘still it burns.’”
Local firefighting resources have been completely overwhelmed by the current inferno, handicapped by insufficient numbers and a lack of water pressure caused by high demand in fire hydrants. Firefighters have been mobilised from neighbouring states like Nevada, Oregon and Washington, as well as Mexico, to support local resources that have been depleted. An estimated one-third of those deployed to fight the inferno are hyper-exploited prison inmates who are paid as little as 16 to 74 cents per hour. As one inmate told Al Jazeera: “Sending us to fight fires was abusive. We preferred it to staying in prison”.
Adding to the problem are recent budget cuts for firefighting services imposed by Democratic Mayor Karen Bass. Last summer, Bass cut funding for the fire department by US$17.6 million, leaked documents revealing that Bass recently proposed an additional US$49 million in budget cuts. In December, LA Fire Chief Kristin Crowley prophetically warned that “the [budget] reduction ... has severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires”. Whether $17.6 million extra would have made a tangible difference to the outcome of these fires is difficult to determine, but it indicates a governmental complacency about the threat that defies science and logic.
Class inequalities also affected how fire resources were and are used, with the wealthy using scarce resources to protect their assets without regard for the wider firefighting effort. Meanwhile, LA’s poorer communities have been left defenceless against the fires, with many of the dead older and disabled people who were not able to leave their homes.
None but the wealthiest will be able to recover fully from the damages and displacement caused by the fires. Many will be added to the growing number of homeless, who numbered more than 75,000 last year in Los Angeles County. The problem is compounded by insurance companies’ decisions to cancel hundreds of homeowners’ policies in Pacific Palisades last summer. State Farm, one of the biggest in California and the US, cited the area as high-risk and unprofitable due to the increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires brought on by climate change.
Toxic smoke from the fires now blankets the entire region, exposing the 18 million people who live in the LA metropolitan area to the effects of inhaling carcinogenic particles. And it will be the poorest and most vulnerable who will suffer the worst effects, such as the tens of thousands of homeless people with no protection from the hazardous air as well as the many workers who can’t afford to stay home to avoid the smoke. People with underlying health issues, as well as older people and children, are particularly vulnerable. Carlos Gould, an environmental health scientist at the University of California San Diego, told the New York Times that the levels of wildfire smoke in LA could be raising daily mortality by 5 to 15 percent.
Meanwhile, US media coverage of the fires has tended to avoid mentioning climate change as a factor in the disaster, at the same time as it repeats right-wing conspiracy theories peddled by President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters as they seek to capitalise on the crisis. These include the claim that diversity, equity and inclusiveness programs are behind the shortage of firefighters and that environmental protection programs are the root cause of the water shortages. In doing so, they deliberately divert attention from those responsible for this catastrophe: the fossil fuel companies driving climate change, property developers and wealthy homeowners that have transformed LA into a giant tinder box and the entire political establishment, which supports the rich whilst cutting the essential public services needed to manage and prevent such tragedies. Not surprising, given their policy of “drill, baby, drill” to increase domestic fossil fuel production.
The LA wildfires have global implications. Capitalist-fuelled climate change is driving more intense and frequent extreme weather across the world that will result in increasingly devastating disasters such as the one unfolding in LA. This is particularly true for countries like Australia, with a climate conducive to bushfires and urban centres vastly under-resourced to deal with the threat. As urban development expands into wild lands, the probability of fires and the property potentially exposed to fire increase, creating a feedback loop of escalating wildfire risk.
It is not enough to say that climate change needs to be reversed. Even with drastic action now, the majority of the planet will still be living with the consequences of a rapidly warming planet. In the absence of planning and rational decision making, crises like the LA wildfires are going to become increasingly worse and more normalised.
Only a democratic and rationally planned society is capable of dealing with the threat posed by climate change and the social catastrophes that it will produce. Decisions should be made by the many millions who produce the wealth of society but don’t control it and therefore can’t use it to protect themselves from the worst effects of climate crisis. They are the same people who could reorganise wealth production to make it sustainable and geared towards meeting need, not simply accumulating wealth for the sake of it.
The Los Angeles metropolitan area is home to 53 billionaires, whose combined wealth totals US$222 billion. The US$222 billion held by Los Angeles billionaires could cover the estimated US$150 billion in damage caused by the fires and provide immediate relief to those affected.
A democratically and rationally planned society run by the working class could immediately abolish the fossil-fuel industry and direct resources toward building renewable energy and reversing the effects of climate change. Urban development could be rationally planned rather than subject to the whims of the wealthy without regard for the realities of the natural world. And rather than cutting and chronically underfunding essential public resources like firefighters, a society run by the working class would allocate the resources needed to prevent and respond to the threat of wildfires and other climate change-induced catastrophes.
Unless we fight for socialism—a democratic and rationally planned society run by the working class based on genuine human needs—the Los Angeles wildfires provide a window into our terrifying future.
