America in flames and floods

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The year 2025 began in the USA with a series of the most extensive and destructive fires ever experienced by California, the so-called “Golden State”. The fires lasted for several weeks (1).

On the afternoon of January 7, a series of fires began that devastated the entire Los Angeles area. Like hurricanes, strong winds and fires are given names. The Palisades Fire, which broke out on the Pacific coast west of Los Angeles, destroyed more than 4,700 hectares of land in just two days. East of Los Angeles, the Eaton Fire spread to the city of Pasadena and destroyed approximately 4,000 hectares of land in one night between January 7 and 8. To the north, in the San Fernando Valley, the Hurst Fire consumed 344 hectares on the same night, and a fourth fire, the Sunset Fire, burned more than 24 hectares, destroying a number of luxury villas in the Hollywood Hills. Winds reached speeds of up to 130 km/h, contributing to the rapid spread of the flames.

The causes of the fires are, of course, as always, attributed to climate change, increased drought, arson, and power line failures, whose cables were torn down by strong winds and fell into vegetation (which is particularly dense in the Los Angeles area), where sparks ignited branches and dry brush, which the wind then spread for miles and ignited more fires. All of these causes are certainly very likely: they have been known for decades; one would expect that the most powerful and richest country in the world, which has highly accurate maps of the territory and all the equipment necessary for accurate and timely forecasting of weather changes, should be able to set an example for all other countries how to prevent and respond in such a way as to minimize the consequences of these events, i.e., damage to people, buildings, and vegetation. Various media reports speak of 28 confirmed deaths and another 24 people missing, but the toll is not final, as it is possible that more bodies will be found once the fires have been extinguished and the clean-up of the entire vast area from the remains of the fire has begun. The damage appears to amount to 12,000 destroyed or damaged homes, buildings, and vehicles, with entire neighborhoods razed to the ground; the number of evacuees is estimated at least 88,000, with 70,250 power outages still reported in Southern California as of January 14. What is the cost of the damage caused by these fires? Estimates by the private company AccuWeather put the figure at between $250 billion and $275 billion (2).

But even powerful and wealthy American capitalism cannot escape one of the “natural” laws of its mode of production, namely profit. Profit loves all measures that protect, promote, develop, and secure it, and this “naturally” goes hand in hand with reducing the costs of prevention – any preventive measures, whether in the workplace, in transportation, infrastructure, environmental protection, leisure and recreational facilities, or in any human activity. It is therefore not surprising that the firefighters did not have spare tanker trucks to replenish the water they had used, and that they were not sent sufficient numbers of firefighting aircraft to assist them. It is not surprising that they face a systematic shortage of personnel, which prevented them from responding simultaneously to four large fires that broke out in four different and distant locations. And it is not surprising that houses and buildings, poorly insulated and separated from forested areas, often built of wood, were devoured by fire with great ease.

On the other hand, it is clear that months of drought have dried out the vegetation, turning it into ideal fuel for fires. Climatologists have long been recording and predicting that extreme phenomena – such as months of heavy rainfall followed by long periods of drought—are no longer exceptional, but are increasingly becoming the norm.

and dominated television and radio news. In southern Texas, in Kerr County, about 100 kilometers from San Antonio, the Guadalupe River flooded: in 45 minutes, the water level rose 8 meters and destroyed everything in its path. Camp Mystic, a summer camp for scouts that had been hosting large groups of boys and girls every year on Independence Day, July 4, for a hundred years, was completely flooded and destroyed. By July 5, 32 people were reported dead and 20-25 young girls missing, but in the following hours, the death toll rose to 52, with 20 girls missing (3). It all happened on Friday, July 4, at 4:26 a.m. (local time), when most of the campers were sleeping in mobile homes, cabins, and bungalows at the resort.

Was this flood predictable? Certainly! But as is almost always the case, the forecast of severe weather with heavy rains was taken lightly by both the summer camp organizers and the mayor of Kerrville himself. The New York Times, quoted by the Corriere della Sera newspaper on July 5, reports that meteorological services in Austin and San Antonio issued the first warnings, general and lower level, on Thursday afternoon; but it was not until early Friday morning that they warned of a drastic deterioration in the weather in an area considered to be “the area with the highest risk of sudden and destructive flash floods in the United States”! Shortly after 4 a.m. local time, the weather service issued a warning of a “particularly dangerous situation”; at 5:34 a.m. local time, a warning came from Kerr County. But the disaster had already struck. Not only that, according to the Corriere della Sera newspaper (see note 3), according to a certain Kelly, who was a participant in the summer camp, “no one knew that such a flood was coming, and there is no warning system in the area”. These deaths and this destruction could have been completely prevented; moreover, since this is an area with the highest risk of sudden and devastating flash floods in the US, why were 750 Girl Scouts aged 7 to 17 brought to Camp Mystic for the 4th of July celebrations this year? Sooner or later, a flood could have come, just as it did in July 1987, when the Guadalupe River rose 9 meters in the same area and swept away a school bus and a van carrying teenagers to a nearby summer camp. Ten children died and 33 others were saved by clinging to tree branches until rescuers arrived.

The authorities' response? The usual, nothing new under the sun... or under the rain. Trump: “Terrible, shocking. Girls have died, I am in contact with the governor”. Texas Governor Greg Abbott declared a state of emergency and said, “I have never seen a place so horribly devastated by a natural disaster”. He went to the scene of the tragedy with a statement: “We will not stop until we find all the girls”… But we don't need a governor or a president to count the dead, we just need rescuers, who are the ones who really put all their strength into it and risk their lives, as is often the case.

Not a word was said about the need to put warning systems in place, to exclude the most dangerous flood-risk area of the United States as a location for summer camps, to learn from tragedies that have already happened so that they never happen again!!! Nothing, absolute silence! Business cannot tolerate disruptions, and if these disruptions are caused by “extreme events”… it is necessary to try to resolve the emergency as quickly as possible and close the case: this is what can be expected from a society in which the ruling bourgeoisie bows to the interests of capitalist profit at any cost!

This is more than enough reason for this social organization to be thrown away and replaced by a social organization that not only prioritizes the real needs of the human species and the natural environment, but which will fight against and for the elimination of all activities associated with capitalist profit, the prosperity of the capitalist economy and finance, and the interests of the minority bourgeoisie, which sucks the blood and sweat of the majority made up of wage laborers, the proletariat.

The proletariat, which is still under the pernicious influence of democratism and authoritarianism, which will never solve the real social problems affecting the vast majority of the population; a pernicious influence that has penetrated deep into the social structure of the proletariat and weakened its ability to respond to a system that every day, every hour, every minute, proves that it is not only inhuman, but brutal, thirsty for the blood and sweat of the proletariat, because only from this blood and sweat, with the help of all the coercion and repression at its disposal, can it generate capitalist profit. The history of the struggles between classes, even though dictated for many decades by the ruling bourgeoisie – as has been the case until now – is not the exclusive domain of the capitalist bourgeoisie. It will be its catastrophic contradictions that will once again bring to the stage of real human history, and not commodities and capital, the spontaneous, instinctive, and mass reaction of the proletariat, thanks to which it will rediscover not only the strength to finally fight for itself and its immediate interests, but also encounter its class party, its revolutionary leadership, and its historical goals. As the bearer of the productive forces on which the development of human society is based, the proletariat will turn all its revolutionary power against the capitalist system, which for more than a century has survived only by exploiting the masses of workers throughout the world in wage slavery and in wars aimed at prolonging its own existence.

In every country, the future is in the hands of the proletariat, created by the ruling bourgeois class for the purpose of exploiting it to death, but which possesses the only social force capable of ensuring the harmonious and humane development of the whole of society, if it succeeds in using it not to strengthen bourgeois rule, but to destroy it once and for all.

(1) Cfr. https://www.focus.it/ambiente/ecologia/los-angeles-brucia-i-quattro-fattori-che-stanno-alimentando-gli-incendi-in-california, 9 gennaio 2025; https://it.euronews.com/2025/01/23/stati-uniti-nuovo-incendio-a-nord-di-los-angeles-ulteriori-ordini-di-evacuazione

(2) Cfr. https://it.euronews.com/2025/01/15/los-angeles-oltre-6-milioni-di-persone-ancora-minacciate-dagli-incendi

(3) Cfr. https://www.avvenire.it/attualita/pagine/texas-24-morti-per-le-piogge; https://www.corriere.it/cronache/25_luglio_05/texas-alluvione-morti-dispersi-adolescenti-fiume-guadalupe-959bb05d-092a-4f08-b278-e6f33bf0bxlk.shtml

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