To punctuate a hot September, the smog of a large chemical fire filled the air of Conyers, Georgia, before spreading out and reaching Atlanta. Sandwiched between one South-devastating hurricane and another, the interconnectedness of these disasters is clear in the fact that many of those from Florida, who sought to escape the devastation of that second hurricane, Milton, were then forced to flee from one environmental disaster through another. As predicted by scientists for decades, the climate crisis is death by a thousand cuts — countless different yet connected systems all failing like a criss-crossed chain reaction, perpetuating a feedback loop that spirals every ecosystem into cataclysm. As predicted by communists for a century, capitalism and its states are fully incapable and unwilling to do anything to stop it.
The week of the fire, Georgia’s health advisories had recommended nearby populations stay indoors from the evenings to early mornings, until Friday, as the plume has been shifting based on “weather conditions.” How considerate of the giant cloud of toxic gas to abide by our 9-5 work week. Maybe we should take the Nietzschean doomsday sentiment further (no, not the fascism) and accept that not only is God dead and we have killed him, but he’s been replaced by the factory foreman. Expect medical updates from the same sources to be as follows: “Best cure for long covid is unpaid overtime.”
At best, our public health is a joke — a carnival run by careerist clowns who toss their pies, honk their horns, and make the very notion that we should care about our communities seem silly. At worst, it’s a lure — reassure those who might have otherwise still taken public advisories seriously that it’s safe to lose the mask, cough in coworkers’ mouths, dig trenches through the chlorine miasma, for heaven’s sake, just get back to work! It’s a bit of both, tragedy and farce. For many of the people of Conyers this most recent negligence is hardly a surprise, since when it comes to community-endangering negligence, the company responsible, BioLab, is a repeat offender. This isn’t even their first chlorine gas leak. Most notably, in 2020, a Louisiana BioLab facility leaked waves of hazardous gas over Interstate 10, forcing an evacuation and road closure for 28 hours. The initial cause of that leak? A hurricane, which BioLab refused to prepare for in line with a national extreme weather preparation policy implemented in response to a 2017 leak caused by another hurricane. This most recent, specific plant in Georgia has been “held accountable” five times over the last ten years, five of which are citations on their record, four of which came with fines — amounting to a sum of $29,322 (most of it had been settled for much cheaper than initially charged). This isn’t punishment, or accountability; it’s a business expense, and a paltry one at that, the extent of “justice” under capitalism. This is the new normal in the age of climate catastrophe. All our infrastructure, cheapened and sold off and deregulated for years, caving in on itself, whether under a weak breeze, a derailed train car, or Biblical floods.
“I been fighting and been saying that that company was gone explode… no one listened. $850 million of our taxes went to this company to kill us.” These are the words of Kenny Johnson, a member of the Rockdale County’s Soil and Water Conservation board, described as an official actually committed to the preservation of life and health in his community. He actually did argue and politic and debate for our rights, in just the way we’re all told this system is supposed to work. A public servant, utilizing a public forum for its supposed intended purpose. He died minutes later, collapsed out in the hall from a respiratory attack.
Although his death is under investigation by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, we won’t imply that there’s someone putting hits out on county soil and water experts. Far more likely, and tragically relevant, is that Kenny Johnson succumbed to a compounding of public health failures, like, for example, repeated infections from COVID-19, a cardiovascular illness; like, for example, the air filled with poison; like, for example, massive health disparities destroying Black people on a cellular level, due to stress, environment — a million closed doors and barbed wire fences to health and opportunity. As stated above, this is how the world ends: not with a bang, a bullet through the window, but a series of cracks, all connecting and overlapping until what separates us from the abyss is fully disintegrated. This is how the capitalist ruling class wants it, they want us tired and sick, if we’re not immediately dead. To those who stuff their wallets with our work, our death is acceptable at any speed, just so long as we die off-site so they don’t have to waste time having our bodies swept.
As we just covered, in 2017 and 2020, this isn’t the first disaster BioLab has caused through negligence and greed. And this is just one of many recent toxic leaks that won’t result in accountability, change, or the recovery of the devastated community. What we saw in East Palestine, Ohio will be repeated in Georgia. This is because what these disasters represent is not a failure of capitalism for its ruling classes, but a success. How far can they push us, how many can they abandon to die? All of society is an experiment social classes perform on their opponents, the classes opposed to them. Just as within dictatorships of socialism, where communists conduct living, mass experiments to chart the path forward to liberation and development, within dictatorships of capitalism our enemies perform mass experiments on all of us to dam progress and restrain the future. They think they can get away with it again, because they have proven, empirically, to do so in the past.
We must break that pattern and prove them wrong.
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