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
In a little more than a week, wildfires in the Los Angeles metropolitan area destroyed at least 12,000 homes and other buildings. More than 200,000 people were evacuated from their homes.
Among the fire victims are many working-class people, for example in Altadena, large parts of which have burned down. How many of them will be able to rebuild their homes and restart their lives? If California wildfires from recent years are a measure, their prospects are bleak.
After a fire, both rents and home insurance rates go up, leaving fire victims unable to find a place to rent that they can afford, or buy a new house—especially working-class people with few or no resources. They end up in trailers, on friends’ couches or on the street. Many renters whose buildings do not get damaged also lose their homes, because their landlords raise the rent.
In Paradise, California, where the 2018 Camp Fire destroyed 15,000 homes, fewer than 3,500 have been rebuilt. Many of the fire victims qualified for money from insurance, federal aid and a settlement with Pacific Gas and Electric, which was found responsible for the fire. But still, many of them couldn’t begin to rebuild because it takes years to collect the money.
After the 2017 Tubbs fire in Napa and Sonoma counties, money from the federal government and charities poured in. But that money soon dried up, and thousands of people found themselves on the street. A year after the fire, more than a third of homeless people surveyed in Sonoma County said their previous housing had been affected by the fire. An additional 11,000 people, including more than 2,300 who had been renters, said they were living doubled-up because they had lost their housing as a result of the fire.
In Los Angeles, tens of thousands of people lived in the streets already before the fires. We can only expect thousands of working-class people to join the ranks of the homeless as a result of the fires. The capitalist economy, which is set up to facilitate profit and nothing else, has no mechanism to take care of the most basic needs of working people—not even those struck by disaster.