Fires and the economics of disaster. Coincidence? Tragedy? No, capitalist profit and democratic control

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In recent days, fires have destroyed thousands and thousands of hectares in different parts of the country. Tarifa in Andalusia, Jarilla in Extremadura, Cofrentes in Valencia… but above all León, Zamora and Galicia are the areas most affected so far. As always happens in these situations, television news and the press are full of reports of chaos, mismanagement, and recriminations between different administrative bodies – all against the backdrop of a situation that has already claimed four lives, devastated vast areas of farmland, and killed hundreds of livestock.

In the Mediterranean climate that prevails over much of the Iberian Peninsula – with pronounced periods of heat and drought and forest cover that does not seem to be in any way diminishing from year to year – fires should be fairly common and under control. But every year the situation gets worse. There is increasing destruction and more deaths every summer. Moreover, it is not just a terrible situation caused by fires, but also a political and social game that is being played with the aim of frightening the population – and using it as an excuse to maintain a permanent state of fear and tension in which the bourgeoisie rules so well.

“Prevention must be strengthened,” “fires are extinguished in winter,” or “we must not allow this situation to repeat itself, we must focus on the causes”… These are the phrases we have heard in recent days from politicians, senior officials of the central and regional administrations, and even buffoons who usually lend their image to reinforce the effect of this nonsense. Because it is nonsense: neither prevention nor daily work, nor, of course, the causes of fires are any cause for concern for the bourgeoisie or its representatives. Catastrophe – whether in the form of fires, floods, or even war – is an integral part of the capitalist world, and the bourgeoisie profits well from it. In the case of fires, this is obvious: for decades, spending on any kind of preventive policy has been reduced, while budgetary resources allocated to the measures necessary to cope with summer fires have been kept to the bare minimum (which, as we can see, is not enough). Neither the central government nor the autonomous regions, nor the municipalities, see the necessary interventions as anything other than unnecessary expenses that only burden their annual balance sheets. But it is not just that, in the face of a “catastrophe” (which, as we can see, is entirely avoidable), spending on prevention is being cut – the profit that can be made from it is so considerable that it eliminates any incentive to prevent it. The construction of new houses on devastated land, the wood processing industry, public investment in the affected areas – all this represents big business that neither the big nor the small bourgeoisie, nor construction companies nor small owners want to miss out on. The question of how many fires are deliberately set is already a hackneyed one. But beyond that: how many of them are maintained for the time necessary to fulfil their economic function? How many of them are “set” and by whom? How many of them provide economic results that no one wants to give up?

Capitalism always and in all circumstances produces the same results: natural and human resources are destroyed to obtain the greatest possible profit. The fires of recent days illustrate this well, because for many years those responsible for preventive policy – that is, the bourgeois state at all levels – have pursued a policy of reducing the workforce, human resources, in short, the proletariat, in the area of fire prevention and firefighting. The same policy that is applied in every enterprise where labour is replaced by capital, hands by machines, to continue the cycle of capital appreciation, is also applied in the public sector: jobs are becoming precarious, wages are falling, contracts are becoming shorter and shorter… even observation posts are being replaced by CCTV.

It can still be said that a fire is a tragedy… but for whom? Neither the bourgeois state, which allows it to break out, nor the bourgeoisie of the private or public sector, which gives it the green light, sees it that way. The capitalist logic of profit also operates in this area. Once the rural economy, in which there were direct incentives for preventive measures – because forests were used as a source of raw materials whose value lay in their annual renewal – gave way to a highly developed capitalist economy, where profit consists largely in the direct or indirect destruction of resources, it has become increasingly difficult to prevent fires and keep them under control. It should be borne in mind that in this rural economy (which was also capitalist, albeit less developed), fire was always one of the means and tools used to maintain forest vegetation at a suitable level to prevent the kind of violent fires we see today – when the forest is more profitable the larger the part of it that can be destroyed at once.

Other hackneyed phrases that are so common these days are the verbal insults exchanged between the two political camps – local governments controlled by the People's Party against the central government of the Socialist Party and vice versa – to pin the blame for the fires on each other. The democratic game also benefits greatly from this situation. Every situation, every natural disaster, every death serves to reinforce the idea that democratic alternatives really do represent different possibilities and that the proletariat can (must!) embrace one of them to solve the urgent problems that afflict it. In reality, however, there is only one objective: to gain adherence to the democratic system itself, to the belief that the solution to the problems created by the bourgeoisie lies in bourgeois institutions themselves, and to the practice, so widespread and so deeply rooted in the social existence of the proletariat, of delegating the struggle to defend its own existence to the institutional mechanisms that define the democratic government of the country.

In the most extreme version of this game – a version that is gaining strength because it is a reaction to tensions that affect all social classes and are gradually escalating – Spain is being talked about as a “failed state,” because it is completely incapable of responding to situations such as these fires or the floods ten months ago in Valencia. This is, as we say, a seemingly more radical, tougher, but essentially the same version of the defence of the democratic game that the bourgeoisie of all parties and all institutions is calling for. What bourgeois state is capable of responding to a catastrophe that logically stems from its own existence and that of the bourgeoisie? In what bourgeois order do catastrophes, which are increasingly exacerbated by the force of capitalist development itself, not occur? The nationalist solution to the social crisis, which is looming ever larger on the horizon as the international and national situation sharpens, also needs democratic confirmation to triumph.

Proletarian class struggle, and not trust in any democratic bait offered by the bourgeoisie, is what can end this situation, even if today it seems like a difficult, distant, and even unattainable path. Strange as it may seem, vague and unfeasible, and something that should be postponed in favour of any more immediate solution, it is the only realistic solution; what we are seeing these days is the failure of all other options. The proletarians are the only ones who have a clear interest in the destruction of the society of catastrophe, in the direction of the enormous social forces that capitalism devotes to maintaining and strengthening the class domination of the bourgeoisie towards the achievement of a society in which there is no private (bourgeois, in all its forms) appropriation of social wealth. To achieve this – at least to embark on the path of anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist struggle – the proletarian class must break with the democratic mystification, it must reject the poison that is the belief – a belief that it unfortunately still harbours – that the bourgeois class and its game of parliamentary alternation, or any authoritarian imitation of this game, can provide a way out of the catastrophes caused by the bourgeoisie itself and its system. It must rise with all its strength against the united front that the bourgeoisie is imposing on it. We saw this during the fires, as well as during the floods in Valencia. All the social power of the proletariat is democratically channelled into a policy of interclass collaboration that directly plays into the hands of the bourgeoisie. This collaboration turns the proletariat into “volunteers,” into a free labour force that is supposed to heal the damage when there is no other option – and which, moreover, dies in the process – while all its class strength should be directed toward striking a blow against the bourgeoisie, stopping production, and forcing the bourgeoisie to pay for its economy of catastrophe.

The only way out of the world of horror and death that the bourgeoisie is preparing for humanity is to destroy the capitalist system – and to accomplish that, the proletarian class must rise and shatter it to pieces.

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