On 7 January 2025, the most destructive wildfire in the history of Los Angeles broke out in the Palisades neighborhood of the city.
The blaze has leveled thousands of homes and structures, forcing hundreds of thousands of residents to flee. LA, a city with a metropolitan population of nearly 13 million, is now blanketed by the smoke from the fires, reducing air quality to dangerous levels.
As of 10 January, the fires have killed at least 10 people and destroyed over 10,000 structures. The devastation is immense, and the scenes of desolation are hellish. These fires are the latest in a series of wildfires in Southern California that have become more intense and frequent in recent years due to climate change.
Let us not be mistaken: this catastrophe is no accident, no random occurrence. There are guilty parties, and they must pay.
Climate change is no natural phenomenon. It is a consequence of the rampant and anarchic expansion of capitalism worldwide. Capital, fueled ultimately by profit, seeks the cheapest materials to reproduce itself, making fossil fuels and other nonrenewables the go-to energy source for the global economy. These energy sources release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, introducing further chaos and volatility to the planet’s climate. In California, climate change has led to protracted droughts and water shortages, leaving the vegetation surrounding Los Angeles drier and more vulnerable to wildfires. The connection between capitalist production and climate disasters is a straight line. The suffering of the working class—who, due to their exploitation, cannot afford to lose anything, let alone their entire homes—is a direct result of capitalism.
To be clear, the state plays its role in maintaining our capitalist relations. In 2024, Democrat and LA mayor Karen Bass (who was overseas when the fire broke out) proposed and passed a budget for the city that included a $17 million reduction in funding to the fire department. The needs of workers be damned—the safety of citizens from the ravages that capitalism itself has produced is not a consideration for the ruling class. They will let our homes continue to burn.
To apply a band-aid on a gaping wound, of the 7,500 firefighters involved in the efforts to contain the fire, more than 900 are prison inmates, who are paid less than the national minimum wage and are at far greater risk of injury. The use of prison labor allows the ruling class to squeeze every last penny out of our labor that they can, even in the face of massive climate destruction. Further, to escape any form of responsibility, insurance companies such as State Farm and Allstate have canceled fire insurance policies on homes in the Palisades area and elsewhere in Southern California, abandoning the workers who, in some cases, had paid their policy premiums for decades.
Images of the wreckage continue to spread as the fire rages on. Climate change-induced disasters such as this will continue and intensify as the ruling class continues its profit-driven production. Only the working class in power can address the full scale of climate change and mitigate the further loss of homes and lives to disasters.
The Mutual Aid Los Angeles Network (MALAN) has provided a list of resources available to anyone affected by the fires. We encourage those in need of or able to provide aid to make use of it.
Jean Paul Mella / newworker.us
