As the Holiday Season unfolds, and as Americans count their blessings, the recent California
wildfires coincide with the arrival at the state’s border with Mexico of the Central American Refugee Caravan. How the government intends to deal with both wildfire refugees and the Caravan are strikingly similar. America now has one more selfie to document the developing national Race-To-The-Bottom.
The Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise, north of Sacramento, made 52,000 more
people homeless, transforming them overnight into climate refugees. Meanwhile, Trump spends $200 million to place the US Army at the border to “defend our way of life” and keep out other refugees. As we have seen, here the State separates families and puts both children and parents in private for-profit prisons. This amount dwarves the pitiful government support that
FEMA offers the victims of the fires.
The military is joined by California’s National Guard, which, in past eras, was mobilized to fight
wildfires and provide public support to those dispossessed by catastrophic events. Meanwhile,
the army of “first responders” who were sent to fight the fires was at least 40% comprised of prisoners, who contributed slave labor for their usual salary of $2 a day! Apparently there is no reason to deploy the National Guard when you are using slaves.
The Woolsey Fire that swept through Malibu in Southern California at the same time
dispossessed far more people than millionaire celebrities like Kim Kardashian. Her home,
however, was not burned, since Kardashian can afford a private fire fighting service that was detailed to save her house alone. The super-rich can, of course, easily buy whatever they need while they “camp out” in luxury hotels, while their lawyers insure that they get everything that is coming to them.
Personal property – that which people use every day – is tangible and easily goes up in smoke, but private property – private capital assets that concentrate riches – are social privileges and have serous clout.
Butte County, devastated by the fire, has a 21% poverty rate, 32% of the children qualify for free
lunch at school, 92% of the population is white. Ten days after the fire, huge numbers were living in tents, scattered to motels, and face rebuilding their lives with strikingly little support from the state government.
Insurance companies are already scheming how to deliver as little help as possible. Walmart kindly delivered a message to the hundreds of people who were in tents in their parking lot 10 days after the fire: get the Hell out by Sunday!
Every one of these climate refugees is now on their own. California has no viable infrastructure that can handle more than short-term emergency intervention. Long-term public health support for these people is virtually absent.
While the army and the California National Guard have been active at the border to keep out immigrants, there is no effort to use the military to assist the state’s new economic refugees.
Meanwhile, Jerry Brown rammed a special bailout for PG&E through the legislature days before the fire started. PG&E cutback on maintenance and fire prevention for years in order to enhance
their profitability and attract financial investment.
Now California will reward them for these criminal acts by allowing them to sell bonds to raise more revenue. The new law allows the company to pass on these costs to customers. California clearly has plenty of infrastructure to protect predatory corporations.
Dispossession 101
What lessons can be drawn from this amazing confluence of events?
Only a fraction of these climate refugees had secured the Industrial Era “American Dream” – a 40 hour a week job with health care and a pension, a house and a university education for their
children. The vast majority of the people who have been dispossessed – anyone who was not already independently wealth – will have tremendous difficulty procuring another home. Or even
finding a decent job.
The fires have driven these people into the new proletarian class of people who are now on the
skids with paltry temp jobs or no jobs at all, and little support from governments, state or local,
to get the necessities of life. They join the majority of the victim’s from last summer’s Hurricane
Michael, many of whom are still living in tents. In California, homeless tent encampments are
springing up everywhere. The caravan from Central America that now camps on the Mexican side of the border ironically occupies one of the world’s most concentrated centers of global hi-tech economic production.
Most of these people are refugees from the relentless transformation of society by laborless production that is sweeping across the economy. Capitalism, as an economic system driven by
private profit, can only use the marvelous potential of digital technology to replace labor and
thereby reduce production costs. This new proletarian class must survive outside of the capitalist relations of production that define the “job” and the process of economic production.
Americans are beginning to learn from their own personal experience that the system will never support those who do not make private profit for it. This social wildfire is about to get worse.
The World Economic Forum – think tank for global billionaires – predicts that, by 2025, 52% of
economic production will be done by machines, AI, etc. Machine production today is 29% of
economic production. This is a 79% increase in only 6 years! (World Economic Forum, The
Future of Jobs, 2018.)
Even if this is only half true, an increase to 40% machine production will be the greatest, most rapid and most profound transformation in human history. And as we are already seeing, it will likely be the most violent.
Another prediction is that by 2025 over 50% of all workers in the US will be “self-employed”, in other words, contingent workers who scramble from gig to gig.
The majority of the world’s population is already outside of the production process. This massive population is the most degraded and desperate section of humanity, the more than 3 billion people who live on less than $2.50 a day. Laborless and contingent production, climate crisis and war combine globally to convert this new proletarian class into refugees.
“These billions displaced by today’s global economy are the source of the surge in world
migration. According to the International Organization for Migrants, in 2010 there were some
214 million international migrants, or approximately 3% of the entire global population. There were also an additional 740 million internal migrants in the various countries of the world.Today there are 70 countries in the world where immigrants make up more than 10% of the population.” (Rally Comrades, “Mass Migration in the Age of Electronics”, March/April 2015, Vol 25)
Internal migrants are nothing new in America. As the 2008 financial collapse devastated once again the Rust Belt, more internal refugees left for Florida, Texas, Arizona and California than the mass migration of Okies from the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Today, once dispossessed, internal migrants join the gentrification-to-prison pipeline.
The response of both the Democrat and the Republican Parties is to massively criminalize both the homeless and the immigrants.
Marx describes this social force in ways that are strikingly accurate today:
“In the development of productive forces there comes a stage when productive forces and means of intercourse are brought into being, which, under the existing relationships, only cause mischief, and are no longer productive but destructive forces (machinery and money); and connected with this a class is called forth, which has to bear all the burdens of society without enjoying its advantages, which, ousted from society, is forced into the most decided antagonism to all other classes; a class which forms the majority of all members of society, and from which emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness, which may, of course, arise among the other classes too through the contemplation of the situation of this class.” (Marx. The German Ideology: The Necessity of the Communist Revolution, section 19 – emphasis added)
And:
“In all revolutions up till now the mode of activity always remained unscathed and it was only a question of a different distribution of this activity, a new distribution of labour to other persons, whilst the communist revolution is directed against the preceding mode of activity, does away with labour, and abolishes the rule of all classes with the classes themselves, because it is carried through by the class which no longer counts as a class in society, is not recognized as a class, and is in itself the expression of the dissolution of all classes, nationalities, etc. within present society….” (Marx. The German Ideology: The Necessity of the Communist Revolution, section 10 – emphasis added)
In the early 1800s, like today, the horrors of the capitalist system were apparent to anyone who
bothered to look. The question for revolutionaries, then as now, was how to eliminate an economic system that conferred massive riches on a tiny class, while wreaking social destruction on the vast majority of society.
Marx and Engels broke with good-hearted utopians by proving that the industrial proletariat was the only revolutionary class, the social force that would necessarily drive the social revolution. Against all decorum, they asserted that only this massive class of degraded, unwashed and ignorant human beings could objectively develop the social power to break with and destroy private property.
In the Roman Empire, the “proletariat” technically meant those people who had nothing to sell but their children. This class was driven out of economic production by the rise of slavery – as private property – in agriculture.
By 1950, as a result of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, the industrial proletariat controlled 1/3 of the world’s surface.
Today a modern new proletarian class – degraded, unwashed and ignorant – is driven out of economic production by laborless production as private property. The system itself today “does
away with labor”. This revolutionary class is the only social force today that can finish off private property. No longer able to attack the bourgeoisie “at the point of production”, this social force shifts their demands to attack society itself.
As economic refugees are forced into camps on both sides of the border, they can survive only by demanding what capitalism cannot do – circulate the abundance of society based on need, not on the ability to pay.
Steven Miller
Nanodog2@hotmail
December 13, 201
