The disaster of the floods in Central Europe, which capitalism paved the way for

At the beginning of the second weekend in September, floods hit Central Europe (mainly the Czech Republic, Poland, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania) as a result of two frontal systems over the region and persistent rainfall (for example, the Jeseníky mountains received over 500 mm per m², exceeding the rainfall of the 1997 floods). By 19 September, 24 people had died and tens of thousands of people had been evacuated.

In the Czech Republic, the floods hit mostly central, northern and north-eastern Moravia and Silesia, where, among other things, the economically poorest areas are located, and the water also flooded parts of the country's third largest city, Ostrava, as well as Jeseník, Hanušovice, Opava, Krnov and Litovel; rivers remained in their beds in the capital, Prague, and the second largest city, Brno. Overall, 55 places experienced a so-called centennial flood, five people died and eight are missing, nearly 200,000 households found themselves temporarily without electricity and a significant part without mobile signal.

The situation in Poland was much more catastrophic than in Austria, Slovakia or the Czech Republic. In the southern regions, as much water fell in three days as on average over the whole year. Many dykes and barriers could not hold, so the towns of Hlucholazy, Kladsko, Prudnik and Nisa and parts of Jelenia Góra and Wleń were flooded. The giant dry polder in Racibórz Dolny protected Wrocław with its 672,000 inhabitants for a long time, which withstood the onrush of the Odra River at a height of 644 cm. 11 people lost their lives.

We say that it was capitalism that "paved the way" for the floods, but many will say that not everything is capitalism's fault, and that many of those who criticised capitalism only yesterday are today acting as defenders of society as such, i.e. bourgeois society, just as they did in the time of Covid-19. But to the question: what is the system that determines the organisation of this society, the priorities, the general direction, the prevention, the protection of Man and Nature? The answer is: capitalism, a system based on the class division of society, which determines the existence of the majority of the population as a huge mass of people without reserves, i.e., wage or potential wage workers, and other poor strata that are exploited and oppressed worse than the beasts, suffering violence and oppression, solely for the interest of the valorization of capital, pursuing an unbridled race for profit to the detriment of the human species and the natural environment.

Although meteorologists were able to warn and model the movement of air masses in advance, and even predict their development and rainfall almost accurately, the environment has been so damaged by the capitalist regime that its ability to cope with torrential rains is very limited.

The straightening of Czech rivers and streams in the 20th century led to the loss of 160,000 kilometres of watercourse length, and straightened rivers accelerate the flow of water, while their natural spillways, which would form a free flood zone, are essential for coping with the surge of water due to torrential rains. The bourgeoisie doesn't want to touch these straightened rivers because their flood zones are usually home to housing and infrastructure. There are only small river improvement projects, at most a few kilometres long, often initiated by private individuals, which do not lead to systemic changes.

In the fields we have lost water infiltration by ploughing 49,000 kilometres of baulks (1), yet in large fields without dividing elements (e.g. soaking strips, baulks, etc.), water can run off rapidly in a bare field, gaining a destructive force that leads to direct erosion. Erosion monitoring recorded over 440 events at the beginning of September, the highest number in the entire monitoring period, and the loss of 21 million tonnes of topsoil worth CZK 4.2 billion (EUR 167 409 603) – topsoil that takes hundreds of years to form –; in total, 48% of arable farmland is degraded and 60% is at risk of erosion; between 2000 and 2020, an average of 17.9 hectares of arable land was lost every day (328 km² of arable land was turned into built-up land), i.e. In these 20 years, 10% of the country's arable land has been lost, but it still accounts for the majority of the total area (11% of the land is urbanised and about 5% is covered with concrete or asphalt, while only 0.3% is left to wildlife).

Under normal circumstances, soil in very good condition can absorb up to 30 mm of rainfall in one hour, an amount equivalent to heavy rainfall. According to experts, this figure is usually unrealistic, as most soils in the Czech Republic are in such a state that they absorb only a minimal amount of water in the event of extreme and widespread heavy rainfall; for example, a government document issued by the Ministry of the Environment in 2017 states that the soil's ability to retain water has decreased by 40% since 1950, meaning high run-off into streams and rivers, which is contributed to by built-up areas, car parks and other impermeable surfaces – so instead of retaining water, water is conducted away into sewers and watercourses, which also causes a drop in groundwater levels. In addition, 90% of subsoil is compacted, i.e. it acts as an impermeable surface, receives minimal rainfall and is therefore unable to absorb more abundant rainfall; and rainfall absorption always depends on its initial moisture and whether it is degraded, that is, whether the soil can absorb water and whether its pores will fill up; most soils today are essentially dry to a depth of one metre.

For context, the Czech Republic – even considering its strategic geographical location – is home to a fifth of all production halls and warehouses in Central and Eastern Europe (almost always on former agricultural land), and even the largest number of halls and warehouses per capita in the region: 11.7 million square metres!

Environmental organisations have long-drawn attention to the lack of protection of the soil and the environment in general. Recently, the Ministry of Agriculture of the Czech Republic has taken steps to weaken ecological requirements, e.g. cancellation of the allocation of areas for nature, that is, terrain elements, fallow land and protected zones, which are now disappearing from the countryside again or are not being realised, which, according to ecologists, contradicts the formal commitment of the government programme to allocate one tenth of agricultural land for biodiversity protection (for example, 40% of field birds have already disappeared since 1982), which means a reduction in agricultural subsidies for unproductive land. Of course, previous governments had also not rushed to adopt measures to protect the countryside or prevent flooding: as regards flood prevention, a 2020 report by the Supreme Audit Office claims that between 2016 and 2018 the state invested only a third of the planned funds.

The Minister of Agriculture Marek Výborný put the crown on everything in the context of the recent floods: after the meeting of the crisis staff he expressed himself in the sense that the floods were “the fault” of ecologists, i.e. “if ecological activists had not hindered the construction of the Nové Heřminovy dam, the damage caused by the floods in Krnov and Opava would have been incomparably smaller”! The fact is that – apart from the fact that a dry polder makes much more sense than a dam – the delay in construction is not due to environmentalists, but to property relations – land purchase – and the general disinterest of the state, which sees the solution only in millions of tons of concrete and steel, while environmental organisations have put forward more complex proposals involving “smaller reservoirs and other partial measures, where at least some of them could have been built long ago, in contrast to the complexity of a single large dam, and where the countryside lacks natural spillways for rivers and water meadow returned to their natural state, which prevent flooding more reliably than dams”.

This overall context of the floods demonstrates how prevention and harmony between Man and Nature is not a priority at all in capitalist society – and another example demonstrating the influence of bourgeois society is the fact that after the massive wave of relief, the week after the floods, volunteers are expected to decline by more than 70 percent on working days: the proletarians have to go to work, to valorise capital, to increase capitalist profits for the capitalists! Of course, even if capitalism were to revitalise the environment – certainly not in a few years, but in decades and decades – it would “only” lead to a given flood being spread over a longer period of time and not having such a strong peak because natural floods cannot be completely eliminated. Even healthy soil has its physical limits; the “natural” point of view is that the water does not run off all at once. But generally, and there is no doubt about the connection between rising floods and so-called climate change, this is a social and therefore political problem. However, the economic aspect, in which the capitalist system has a supreme interest, cannot be ignored either: every so-called natural disaster brings with it lucrative opportunities for investment and profit, both in emergency aid and in reconstruction. All previous “natural” disasters have systematically been opportunities for capitalist profit.

Genuine communists are not indifferent to the issues that fall on the shoulders of the working and dispossessed masses in bourgeois society, even if it is not directly the so-called question of wages and jobs. But the attention given to “ecological” questions is not a slip towards the green interclass movement; communists understand the basis of bourgeois society is capitalist social relations, with the majority of society – the modern proletariat, that is, the working class without reserves – is violently forced to submit to the dictatorship of wage labour, to be exploited, to have no control over the fruits of its social labour, nor over the countryside and the environment in general, and to suffer the consequences of the competitive struggle between the capitalists and between the states representing the general interest of capitalism and the inevitable outcome of this struggle in armed conflict.

Environmentalists and citizen activists correctly describe how the poor and poor countries suffer incomparably more than others, but the best they can come up with is capitalism with a human face, something that is fashionable to term a “resilient society” (in practice, a society in which capital does not cease to dominate); in the Oxfam study, for example, the academics write that “to be resilient, a society nonetheless requires the cooperation of its members” and must “challenge the social, economic and political institutions that provide security for some but vulnerability for many, and redistribute power and wealth (and with it, risks)”. Instead of a ruthless critique, which can only be communist and will culminate in the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois ruling class and the leap to a society of the human species without class, money and profit, i.e. to communism, the academics ruminate on how to make the dispossessed masses see that they are not alone in their plight, how to strengthen their confidence in the functioning of relief systems, since these masses are “marginalised and (...) the state has not provided [them] with affordable and decent housing or basic health care for years” and therefore “have no reason for such confidence”.

But what is the point of fighting for only partial and temporary remedies in the environmental sphere when imperialist capitalism generates the war destruction that is currently taking place in Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, whose tragic effects in terms of unemployment, disease, aerial and artillery bombs of today's and even the second imperialist wars will continue to manifest themselves for many decades after their end?

The task of the communists is to enter into all social ruptures – including the question of the capitalist destruction of the environment in which mankind lives – and by their weapon of criticism (before there can be criticism of weapons) to amplify the determination of the proletariat to struggle against everything that represents bourgeois society, for the conquest of political power and the destruction of the bourgeois state; and in this situation to direct the revolutionary struggle of the proletarian masses towards the installation of the dictatorship of the proletariat by giving it the greatest possible effectiveness. The central organ of the communist revolution is the class political party, the international communist party, “which achieves the conscious organisation of the proletarian vanguard aware of the necessity of unifying its action, in space – by transcending the interests of particular groups, trades or nationalities – and in time – by subordinating to the final outcome of the struggle the partial gains and conquests which do not modify the essence of the bourgeois structure”. When we speak of the dictatorship of the proletariat and of the party, we mean the conquest of political power and the reorganisation of society from the top down, i.e., the intervention in economic relations from the top down, not the lies about the institutions of representative democracy; not the illusion with which the ruling class – and at the end of the floods in the Czech Republic there were by-elections for the regions and the Senate, no matter the cost! – deludes the proletariat that not revolutionary struggle, but the impotent ballot box, will enable it to overturn the pyramid under whose weight it is crushed.

The real solution to even the “ecological” problem can only come from strengthening the class power of the proletariat, not only its defence against the attacks of capital on its working and living (and environmental) conditions, but also its offensive, even if such a prospect is remote today; and for this, it is necessary to strengthen the class party, the revolutionary communist party, firm in its doctrine and critique, by strengthening programmatically and organizationally the struggles of the proletariat, even in name of the other dispossessed masses, against bourgeois society, by confronting worldwide the capitalist united front and its coterie of lackeys and cops, against the influence of the class-collaborationist trade unions and fake workers' parties, and against the whole mass of intellectuals, academics, sociologists, ecologists who are used by the bourgeoisie to discourage and divert the proletariat from its class struggle.

The sacrifices to which the proletariat, and especially the revolutionary communists, will be called upon to make in the ongoing process of the revolutionary movement will be much heavier than under the present bourgeois dictatorship; they will be forced to overcome the consequences of economic devastation, repression and wartime massacres, increased hardship, perhaps even ruined environment (these facts may lead many of those who are sympathetic to communism in thought to defend bourgeois society and their futile attempts to humanize it).

But there is no other way: as long as the society of capital exists, there is no real remedy for the systematic destruction of the earth. The disruption of the countryside is part of the disruption in the field of the economy which the capitalist system constantly generates, and it is precisely the economic disruption, when it reaches a level intolerable for capitalist profit, which creates factors of conflict between states and between the imperialist poles to the point of driving the whole of society to world war.

 This is why we argue that the coming imperialist war must be confronted by the proletariat with class struggle.

(1) Baulk (BrE; balk in AmE) is a margin of an uncultivated strip of ground separating two fields. Usually created by farmers, especially in sloping terrain because they reduce the slope of the cultivated area, making farming easier. In addition to their agricultural function, borders are also an important element of nature conservation: they limit soil erosion by rainwater run-off.

September, 22th 2024

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