Sunday, November 04, 2012

Capitalism is a Disaster

That capitalism puts profit before safety is perhaps no great revelation. Today even many believers have stopped believing that disasters like floods and droughts are simply acts of nature, let alone God. In the aftermath of the Orissa cyclone that killed 10,000 people in eastern Indian in 1999, and the drought in the horn of Africa (2000), the charity Christian Aid argues “that is wrong to call these catastrophes natural now that we are aware of the creeping menace of global warming which is caused by the burning of fossil fuels”. The earthquake and tsunami that struck the Japanese coast in March 2011 were an extraordinary demonstration of the power of the earth’s natural forces. The tsunami swept away entire towns and killed tens of thousands of people. And yet a Japanese parliamentary investigation has concluded that last year’s nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima Daichi nuclear facility, which occurred in the tsunami’s wake, were a “man-made disaster”

Disasters come in different forms. There are slow-motion disasters, an accumulation of deaths in ones and twos that add up to mass carnage. Then there are sudden accidents resulting in mass casualties caused by technical failures of machines or buildings, such as train and plane crashes. Finally there are so called natural disasters featuring environmental factors such as floods and droughts, but often with social causes. Unlike poverty, homelessness and hunger, weather-wrought devastation evokes public sympathy because it is a “natural” disaster. But socialists recognize natural disasters as the natural outcomes of  capitalism.  Disasters aren’t “natural”. What makes something a disaster, as opposed to just a hazard, is the way it interacts with society. Earthquakes are inevitable, but death in an earthquake is not.

Capitalism is incapable of preventing disasters - and indeed actually produces them - it is equally unable to clear up the mess afterwards. True, disasters are often the occasion for military mobilisation, but the first priority of such efforts is always to “safeguard public order” and guard private property (seen in the summary execution of looters). The attempt by the ruling class to find a scapegoat for disasters - seismic geologists who failed to heed warnings, a train driver who fell asleep or the ship’s drunken captain - is mirrored by the radical leftist search for a scapegoat from amongst the ranks of the bourgeoisie, typically the fat cat capitalist. Disasters are shown to arise from the innermost logic of capitalist society, not just from the negligence or malice of individuals.

The reason that so many poor people live precarious lives, the reason so many suffer on the edge of survival, is because of how wealth and power are organized under capitalism. The poor people of Third World countries are not valued as human beings by capitalism. Besides their value as producing cogs in the capitalist economic machine, poor peoples are mostly considered expendable by the capitalist system. Capitalism is a system organized around profit. Capitalism is not organized to serve the people or the Earth. Capitalism is irrational from the standpoint of balancing ecological and human needs. Instead, communities are not planned in harmony with the natural world nor are poor communities protected from such disasters. This irrationality is part of what Karl Marx called the anarchy of the capitalist mode of production. The reason that poor people lose their lives in such disasters is because capitalism does not value them enough to create the proper infrastructure to prevent such problems. The reality is that such disasters are the result of hundreds of years of neglect inflicted by the wealthy. Disasters are not blind. We have this rhetoric of disasters affecting rich and poor equally and that’s just not true. Hurricane Sandy reeked devastation on tens of thousands of New Yorkers, and inconvenience millions more but the people who were most hurt were the workers who have exploitative bosses forcing them to come in to work. The poor suffer the most in a calamity, and then they experience the brutalizing effects of what the activist journalist Naomi Klein has termed “disaster capitalism.” After the Asian tsunami Oxfam found that because the flow of aid has tended to go to business people and landowners, many of the poor have been made even poorer by the disaster. Business sought to profit from the reconstruction while the residents of the fishing villages that formerly occupied the area are being forced to relocate.
The reality is that natural disasters are as much man-made as natural. Such disasters are yet another crime by the rich against the poor. The reformist institutions of the state refuse to place the blame on capitalism itself. Instead they repeat the same old lies. They say that the system can be fixed. The reality is that they will never fix their system because they are the system. The nature of capitalism is to serve the wealthy, not the poor. From their point of view, from the standpoint of the wealthy, capitalism is working fine even if poor peoples are slaughtered. Capitalism both exacerbates, and creates, supposedly 'natural' disasters. Capitalism produces disasters almost as quickly as it produces commodities. Capitalism cannot save us from disasters because its short term economic interests are what drives it, not the long term conditions of life on the planet: No capital will be invested for the good of our great-grandchildren. Capitalism is going to do is build in places and ways that make short-term profits. You fill in wetlands. You build private sea walls that redirect waves and make it worse somewhere else.  In Asia, industrial fish farms, tourist resorts, and refineries have  over the last generation destroyed huge stretches of coastal mangrove forest. Bangladesh experienced many fewer deaths in the disaster because of the conservation of its coastal mangroves than did Indonesia, where two-thirds of the forest has been destroyed. The forest that helps stabilize the land, and offers a form of natural protection has been decimated. In New Orleans, dredging of channels to accommodate petrochemical companies has compromised huge amounts of marshland. Such changes, combined with the erosion of the area’s barrier islands weakened the natural frontline defense against a hurricane storm surge and left the city more vulnerable to death and destruction.
The best disaster relief is offered through solidarity, through organizations that people are already members of. People are increasingly isolated in modern societies. And the elderly poor and the disabled poor are particularly vulnerable in the face of a calamity. The people who die are the people who die alone.
The best disaster preparedness we can have is to build the kinds of communities we want to live in anyway. What kept many alive after floods, hurricanes or earthquakes, and is keeping them alive today, is a culture solidarity and mutual aid. Solidarity is a strategy through which on-the-margins communities and their individual members can survive, and through which relationships, loyalty, and tradition thrive. Volunteers from the community come forward as first and second responders. They saved people from roofs and waters in New Orleans, and from buildings and rubble in Haiti. Neighbor and stranger alike compiled what food they had or scrounged it from abandoned stores - what outsiders often referred to as 'looting' - to distribute to the hungry. They shared water, shelter, money, and emotional support with loved ones and those they'd never seen before. People who had lodging took in abandoned children, elders, injured and ill, whole families, and animals.

Beyond spontaneous gestures, grassroots and other non-profit groups led solidarity-based relief efforts. In New Orleans, they set up clinics in living rooms, organized systems to track down neighbors relocated around the nation, created free restaurants in yards and internet centers in gutted buildings, collected tools that were free for the borrowing, converted churches to shelters, drew in volunteers from around the country to help with clean-up, etc. In Haiti, community groups provided refuge, medical care, leisure activities, security, and support for much-needed agricultural production. They offered community mental health support, trauma recovery, and education or recreation for children, since no schools were functioning. People not connected to either wealth or the power elite demanded that they be part of the reconstruction planning, and that they benefit from it. They demanded that their voices be included in political decisions. In the aftermath of Sandy we saw Occupy Wall Street doing a lot of disaster relief.





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