Month: October 2019

Callifornia on fire

California, is on fire. I know, because I can smell it from where I am.

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When I participated in a Mutual Aid Disaster Relief workshop last year in NYC, one of the things that stuck with me was the discussion about the term ”natural disaster”.

It sounds very innocent, but on closer inspection it tends to hide the social aspect of almost all such so called disasters. Storms, fires, earthquakes etc, all occur naturally, this much is true. In some cases they can actually play an important role in rejuvenating ecosystems.

The problem, however, begins when we move into the realm of disasters where humans were either the direct or indirect cause, or, equally important, where the social relations in our societies have caused catastrophic outcomes as a result.

A storm that hits a city is one thing. The resulting deaths, homelessness and suffering caused, on the other hand, are all directly proportional to the social, economic and political status of those affected. It is no secret that poor communities are hit the hardest, and that cutting corners in construction and safety is the norm and not the exception when it comes to “accommodating” poor people, both on a local and global scale.

So marginalized communities live in sub-par housing, often in areas more prone to be hit by disasters, and to top it off, they are often ignored when it comes to emergency response. Even worse, when disasters happen the state is usually more interested in (re-)establishing “order”, thus sending armed forces, imposing curfews, and engaging in other activities which directly and indirectly prohibit people from getting to safety and from helping each other. Then, when the social tragedy is a fact, the disaster is often used as an opportunity to gentrify areas and permanently displace people. This is the sick logic of state and capital.

Far from being a natural disaster, this process should be labeled an unnatural disaster, created opportunistically by the social system we live under. Or in the words of Japanese anarchist Kōtoku Shūsui, who witnessed the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 first hand:

hunger followed, and cold. Unemployment followed. One hundred thousand poor tasted bitter suffering to its fullest extent. And yet, this was not the fault of the fire, this was the fault of today’s social order alone.

Shūsui also experienced the mutual aid developing directly between people in this emergency, where the sluggish and disinterested state abandoned them. An experience that was important in his own political development towards an anarchist conception of socialism.

Today we also know that what we do to the environment on a large scale, the fossil fuel based and exponentially growing economy, causes emission of greenhouse gases, leading to climate change, which in turn leads to more extreme weather.

So is this what is happening in California right now? Just some fires caused indirectly by human greenhouse gas emissions? Mostly no. The reason why people are trying to escape the fires while losing their homes has a much more direct connection to the powers that be in our current social system.

The major electric company in California, PG&E, has prioritized profits and bonuses for decades, severely neglecting their infrastructure. Even after having been found guilty of causing 8 deaths due to a gas explosion in San Bruno in 2010, not only did the neglect and safety violations continue, the company even falsified gas pipeline records to avoid attention.

Their aging infrastructure has been the direct cause of many fires, most notoriously the Camp fire of 2017 that killed 86 people. In the aftermath of that fire, the company was forced to file for bankruptcy due to the immense amount of money it suddenly had to pay in fines and settlements. A well deserved financial fallout that nevertheless feels near meaningless compared to what the company has actively caused by its profit-driven disregard for safety.

The company has been forced to admit that its infrastructure probably caused the ongoing Kincade fire in Sonoma County in North California, and it has been confirmed that they are responsible for two other, smaller fires, that started during the weekend. All this despite the ongoing precautionary blackouts that the company has resorted to in order to avoid further fires.

So we have severe blackouts, human-made disasters, extreme corruption – if this would be in any place western or US media don’t approve of politically, it would be portrayed as a failed political and economic system. But what does that say about the most powerful state on earth, the flagship of the capitalist world?

Whether this could have been avoided had PG&E been a public company might be an interesting question, and it’s hard to imagine it would make things worse. But on the whole I think it partially misses the point. Most public companies are run like private businesses anyways, and have to deal with most of the same external pressures to cut costs in the name of “efficiency”.

Nor is corruption or exploitation limited to the private sector – it is inherent to power, which runs unchecked not only on Wall Street but also in politics. I think reclaiming the utility and making it into a public one is a fair demand, but not one that would be entirely sufficient. Let’s remember that the state of California that would be presumed to run the utility company in the best interests of the people, is the same that for instance uses prison inmates to fight fires. Inmates that, until a recent drop in interest (gosh I do wonder why) forced the state’s hand to raise remuneration a bit, earned as little as $1-2 a day.

Personally I think we will have to deal with this kind of problems until the day a few simple, yet in my view almost intuitive, things change. First, the ones who know best what to do are the workers, and they should be running the facilities themselves in a democratic fashion, without capitalists or politicians. Secondly, they should be beholden to the communities they serve – which in many instances are the very communities they live in. Together with the communities, they should decide what needs to be done, how to do it, and how to prioritize resources.

In this way, when issues are decided by those they directly concern, and power is dissipated, we might escape the incentives that not only set the agenda of utility companies today, but also of our entire society, and thus our entire lives. There’s a reason why the state and capitalist businesses cause harm and exploit people, while volunteer run grassroots initiatives create mutual aid information sheets, engage in resource sharing, and distribute breathing masks. We can’t eliminate disasters entirely or avoid disagreements, but how about we stop incentivizing downright destructive behavior?

On class reductionism

Times like these we live in leave their mark on everyone. Throughout the world, we’ve seen the rise of fascism and racist right wing populism. All sort of problems are blamed on the most vulnerable in our societies – a lot of the time people fleeing from conflicts created, fueled and supplied by western interests.

It’s hard to avoid being affected, even for people who consider themselves as socialists. Horseshoe theory is of course an absurd centrist myth, but there is no denying that certain more cynical and opportunistic elements of “the left” have always historically had a tendency to slip into red-brown alliances.

To a lesser degree, we have also seen socialists call for immigration control and strong border protection, and putting unreasonable blame on migrant workers instead of on capitalist enterprises and governments that try to stage a race to the bottom in terms of working conditions and wages across the world.

But going even further, I’ve noticed a worrying tendency among socialists which I think partially might explain the drift of some anti-capitalists towards more or less racist approaches to politics and analysis. It is a tendency that’s always existed in socialist theory, and which I think easily lends itself to sliding down this type of slope. It is the tendency to fall into class reductionism.

First, I am not talking about the vulgar type of class reductionism here, that disregards racism, patriarchy or state exploitation altogether. I am talking about people that are anti-racist, feminist and anti-state, but whose analysis, in the last instance, boils down to the primacy of class.

But isn’t this proper materialism? The material “base”, the mode of production, determines the ideological and political “superstructure”. As the productive forces develop, the mode of production becomes a fetter, it changes, and the superstructure follows. This is the standard story of orthodox materialism.

From it, it is easy to draw the conclusion that class society is the exploitative “base”, and other “forms of oppression” are helpful auxiliaries used by capital to perpetuate it’s domination. In it’s most mechanistic version, what this theory simply proposes is that technological development drives social change.

The problem with this “materialist” line is that, at its core, it is based on historical and anthropological data from the 19th century, used in a highly modernist context. This data is used to develop an over-simplified and stagist model of how societies develop, a model which at best only partially explains what is going on.

What we know today, is that the process of state or class formation is much more complex and nuanced. Military, religious, ethnic, state, patriarchal or economic power played different roles in different places, and almost any combination could at times be considered be the “base” of class formation.

Thus class was neither temporally “first”, nor always the primary determining factor for the rest of the social relations. To take an example from the industrial revolution, handloom weavers were often concentrated in factories before centralizing technologies were developed, as David Dickinson points out in his 1975 book The Politics of Alternative Technology.

The entire concept of so called historical materialism could be put in question, as for instance Alan Carter does in his book Marx, a Radical Critique. However, there are of course more recent and less mechanistic interpretations of so-called historical materialism, so let us briefly turn to one of them for a moment.

Autonomist marxism protests such mechanistic accounts by positioning the working class as an active subject in history, through the means of class struggle. Yes, forces of production tend to develop, but *how* they develop and are applied is influenced by class struggle. The subjective actions of the working class are shaping history, productive forces, and the mode of production – and not only the other way around.

What I am proposing is to extend this notion of “historical subjectivity” to other power dynamics and their subjects as well; racism, patriarchy, the state, the domination of humans over nature. None of these power dynamics is reducible to any other. They all co-constitute each other, and they all also contain within them their own dynamics, their own incentives for reproduction, their own struggling subjects, and their own seeds for a potential class society.

Thus we should neither expect racism to disappear automatically if class is abolished, nor expect the state to simply “wither away” on its own. We have to struggle against all such power dynamics here and now. The process of liberation is a struggle against all of these power dynamics simultaneously. But there are even more important insights at stake.

First, by erasing the driving forces and subjects of these power dynamics and reducing them to class, we will be unable to explain how society develops and the causality of social forces. It’s like looking for a key you lost under a street light, instead of where you lost it.

Secondly, this form of class reductionism very easily lends itself to instrumentalizing struggles. Thus even well-meaning people can come into struggles against racism, the state, or patriarchy with a mindset of this at best being a tool to further class struggle.

This obviously will alienate people for whom these struggles might be of existential proportions, and also simply leads to bad tactics. It’s not enough to fight racism on a class basis, you also have to fight class on an anti-racist basis, and so on.

Ironically, class reductionism can also lead to instrumentalizing the class struggle itself. Without a broad concern for all co-constituting power dynamics, even genuine class struggle can end up being used as a tool to gain power over people.

And lastly, maybe the most important point of all. I think all our political projects are doomed if we don’t ground them in a sort of ethics of empathy, solidarity and mutual aid. The primary reason we should fight racism, sexism, the state and capitalism is because all these power dynamics cause people great harm.

Whether all this is called materialist, intersectionalist, or something else is beside the point, but it is worth noting that intersectional analysis is often attacked on the basis of that it “demotes” class analysis to a shallow liberal framework of “classism”, and views all forms of oppression as simply reflections of certain identities.

This does not have to be the case though, and instead the proposition is to promote other power dynamics to the level of class analysis, and consider them all part of a connected web of social hierarchies producing different outcomes at different times, places and intersections. Identities are always a part of politics, the problem only arises when the former is mistaken for the latter.