the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Jan 20, 2025
Altadena and Pacific Palisades, where the two biggest wildfires in the Los Angeles region hit on January 7, look like bombed-out war zones. Two dozen people were killed in the first week of fires, with the official toll rising as more bodies are discovered. Thousands of homes, businesses and landmarks were also destroyed, leaving tens of thousands suddenly without shelter in one of the most expensive cities in the world, where there are few if any vacancies.
In reality, the wildfire crisis has collided with the real estate crisis.
Certainly, fires are a part of the environment in southern California, where it only rains a few months a year. The rest of the year, dead vegetation bakes under the sun, becoming kindling that catches fire easily. But those fires, which burn off dead vegetation and clear the land for new, healthy growth, play an important housekeeping role, and plants and animals have adapted to and benefit greatly from fire.
Some parts of Los Angeles, such as the rustic canyons of Malibu, where wealthy people live and play in great luxury and splendor isolated from the rest of the city, burn at least once every decade. The owners manage to rebuild, usually on a bigger and grander scale, because the main cost burden is shouldered by ordinary taxpayers and rate payers of the insurance companies.
Real estate developers have also built entire communities in more far-off, fire-prone areas, where land is cheaper, while ignoring or minimizing just how dangerous an area may be, despite the likelihood that one day all those homes and businesses will face fire.
Pacific Palisades, which was hit by the biggest wildfire on January 7th, is the home mainly to wealthy people, including many celebrities, who live on pleasant hills surrounded by beautiful Topanga State Park, with views of the Pacific Ocean. For decades, Pacific Palisades had been spared from destructive fires because whenever a fire did break out, the fire department rushed to put it out.
But on the morning of January 7, when a small brush fire broke out on a hill above Pacific Palisades, the fire department was stretched thin. Unusually dry and extremely windy conditions had caused several fires in other parts of the city to break out at the same time. The Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD), whose budget, like the rest of the public sector (except for the police), had been slashed over and over again, wasn’t able to get any fire trucks to Pacific Palisades for close to an hour. By that time, 60 mile an hour winds had turned a small brush fire into a raging firestorm that soon enveloped the entire town.
Back in May 2024, Freddy Escobar, an LAFD Captain II, had warned city officials: “We don’t have enough firefighters and medics, we don’t have enough fire engines, we don’t have enough trucks and ambulances in the field. And we don’t have the equipment and staffing to respond to half a million emergency calls for service every year.” In fact, the L.A. fire department’s budget had been slashed so often over the past decades, it is now operating with only half the number of fire stations than in the 1960s—when the city was much, much smaller than it is now. So, when the wildfires did hit, 20% of the LAFD fleet of emergency vehicles was out of service because the positions of 61 mechanics and sheet metal workers had been eliminated over the past year—a perfect example of how the capitalist class guts public services that are often a question of life and death, in order to fund their own enormous tax breaks and subsides.
More big problems emerged. As the LAFD and other fire departments gathered their forces at Pacific Palisades to fight the fires, water lines started to sputter. Before long, the hydrants ran dry. This is because the system in Los Angeles to deliver water to fire fighters hasn’t been modernized to deal with the big urban wildfires that are becoming more common. Instead, it was designed to fight local fires of a few structures or homes at the same time. Of course, it is hardly a surprise that local government is not modernizing the water system for fire fighters, since it isn’t even replacing most of its crumbling, hundred-year-old pipes and water mains that are so decrepit. They leak like a sieve and sometime erupt like geysers—despite the fact that water rates have gone through the roof. The reason for this is simple: the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is a major cash cow for the capitalist class—pocketing the enormous surpluses every year for itself.
As Pacific Palisades was burning to the ground, another huge wildfire erupted in Altadena, more than 30 miles east. Altadena is a working- and middle-class suburban community below the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains. All indications are that the fire started when a Southern California Edison high voltage power line that traverses a canyon above Altadena was hit by high winds and began to throw off sparks, setting off the fire that swept down the mountain and destroyed the town.
This too is not an accident. The big electric utility companies are by far the biggest cause of wildfires in California, having caused more than 3,600 wildfires since 1992, according to data from the U.S. Forest Service. And the problem is getting worse. Over the past few decades, the share of fires known to be caused by power infrastructure has grown across the state. This includes some of the biggest fires in state history, such as the Thomas fire in 2017, that affected Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties, and one of multiple wildfires that ignited in southern California in December 2017. That fire was started when high winds forced Southern California Edison’s (SCE) power lines to collide, a situation known as “line slap,” raining burning parts of the power lines to the ground, that then set off the fire.
Southern California Edison charges some of the highest electric rates in the country. But it simply won’t spend the money to maintain or upgrade or make its equipment safe. It pinches every penny so it can funnel more to its big stockholders and executives. SCE and the other big power companies in California stand out as the grossest, most disgusting symbol of how capitalist greed grinds down lives and destroys the environment.
Of course, the survivors of the fires will have to deal with all the consequences in a never-ending disaster and struggle to survive, squeezed by the banks, and deserted by the insurance companies, which had long ago recognized the dangers represented by the wildfires. They had begun pulling out of the state, leaving homeowners high and dry.
History proves that after all past disasters, capitalists take advantage of people’s vulnerability and desperation to buy up assets on the cheap and swallow up most of the disaster relief to rebuild, making their homes and developments bigger and more opulent, leaving the workers in the dust.
No, the class war of the capitalists against the workers is not suspended during disasters. The capitalists don’t suddenly feel a sense of compassion and love for all those who do the work and make everything run for them. On the contrary, the capitalist drive to accumulate ever more wealth at the expense of the working class goes into high gear. It’s why the motto of big capitalists is: “Never let a crisis go to waste.”
It’s one more reason why the working class has no other choice but to organize itself independently in order to get rid of this rotten system.