“Commodities begin to be exchanged because of an act of will: their owners agree to dispose of them reciprocally. In the meantime, people gradually come to rely on use-objects produced by others. Constant repetition makes exchange into a normal social process.”

“Our commodity owners learn, then, that the same division of labor that makes them into independent private producers also makes the social production process — and their relations within it — independent of them, the producers themselves: they learn that their independence from one another emerges in and is complemented by a system of all-around dependence on things produced by other people.”

Karl Marx, Capital, pg. 82 (2024)

Introduction

Recently, Cde. Potato published a work in Red Clarion entitled “No One is Coming to Feed Us.” While the piece brings to the forefront important issues regarding food supply chains in the United States, its surface level analysis coupled with individualistic calls to action reflect a deeply disruptive tendency within the contemporary communist movement. This paper serves as a substantive critique to the faulty theoretical lines of thought contained within Cde. Potato’s piece, while also providing a new framework for systematically addressing political issues that will aid us in our struggle to obtain political power and bring about a socialist state.

The Dialectic of Revolutionary Struggle

As communists, using scientific analysis of contemporary and historical social relations to determine the correct path of revolutionary struggle is the key aspect of our work. What differentiates Marxism from other pseudo-intellectual attempts at social analysis is that humans are not prescribed natures as independent actors or socially dependent subjects, but are understood in their contradictory truth as both. As an individual you can act in ways that benefit both yourself and those around you. You can go vegan, reduce food waste and compost the rest, and even plant native flowers to help local pollinators. The issue with individual action lies not in its moral nature as a good thing that you should do, but in its quantitative relation to broader society. One person going vegan in a country of over three hundred million is going to have a negligible effect on average consumption habits and their subsequent environmental impacts. However, local concentrations of thousands of vegans and a national population of over a million can begin to introduce qualitative changes in broader society. This is the dialectical nature of social development.

Historical progressions in social-economic relations keenly reflect this process. The bourgeoisie did not always exist, nor did they simply emerge from the mist to bring about a new age of gunpowder and roaring steel. Instead they emerged slowly out of the contradictions of feudal society. These small groups of proto-bourgeois eventually found one another and began to organize towards the interests of their class. Bit by bit the bourgeoisie concentrated and began to disrupt the feudalist biospheres. By the time feudalist society caught onto this process it was already too late to prevent the capitalist age. Feudalist classes had two options: they could either consign themselves to a slow death or face the guillotine. The bourgeois eventually won their class war through bitter struggle and brought about the contemporary age, in which capitalism has subsumed and guaranteed the death of all former social divisions of labor.

Anyone who calls themselves a communist must understand this process, as it is by the same means which we will bring about communism. There are no shortcuts or tricks that allow us to avoid direct confrontation and simply declare the world anew. We are as much subjects to history as we are its progenitors. Winning our war with the bourgeoisie will necessitate a strict dedication to proven revolutionary strategies and the scientific development of new tactics informed by historic failures and contemporary material conditions. The population of cadres politically developed enough to engage in such a struggle may still be small in number, but just as the bourgeoisie and feudal lords before them, we will achieve our social revolution through quantitative action.

Now is a time of unprecedented opportunity for our movement. In the face of the end of unimpeded imperialist expansion, the liberal mask of the American empire has fallen. The bourgeoisie have turned their gaze to the core in the hopes that by ripping out the copper wire and using the floorboards as fuel they can hold out against a global turn towards anti-imperialism. We have seen this self-destructive tendency emerge in several ways. On the international scale, the American bourgeoisie have begun to forcibly open up the empire’s vassal states for rapid and brutal economic exploitation. This has primarily emerged through the use of economic crises induced via tariffs, the threat of annexing territories, and the move to end NATO to demonstrate the European bourgeoisie’s reliance on the United States as an occupational force. While these moves have shocked liberals within the imperial core, they are simply a continuation of the empire’s shift towards open imperialist brutality. The longstanding strategy of obscuring the violence necessary to maintain the settler and aristocratic laboring classes has been replaced with an ideological drive toward fervent celebration of complicity in the brutal murder of the globally hyper-exploited. With socialist and anti-imperialist resistance drastically reducing the ratio of surplus-value that can be extracted from the third world, the first world has been turned to as a fresh store of labor and resources prime for rapid primitive accumulation. 

On the national scale, we have seen the violent enforcement of the patriarchal social division of labor through the targeting of transgender people as a third sexed class. Making state backed and extralegal violence against transgender people an acceptable social reality makes all deviations from gendered norms, particularly those done by women (trans or otherwise), a viable marker for increased levels of exploitation. Regarding the nationally oppressed, the state has abandoned the policy of courting select segments of these populations to increase their tokenistic representation in the exploitative classes of the bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, and aristocratic labor to justify the continued brutal immiseration of the vast majority of their populations; replacing it with the open and fetishized brutality of their hyper-exploitation. This too is not unprecedented. Over the last two decades the state has forced migrant laborers into increasingly precarious conditions of survival through the slow erosion of legal protections, the expansion of surveillance, encouragement of settlers enacting extralegal violence, and the expansion of administrative violence through Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security. Conditions of precarity that have forced this population into becoming a slave-like class of hyper-exploited laborers.

With capitalism’s barbarism now laid bare, millions have been galvanized to take action against these systems of exploitation. While the revolutionary energy of this moment is undoubtable, the ability of any of these movements to effectively harness them to bring about lasting social change is doubtable at best. Once again liberals squander this energy through haphazard and disorganized fits of reaction, such as the recent “economic blackout” that excluded small businesses from their supposed boycott of the American economy, or the national “hands off” protest which included an ideologically muddled list of complaints and no real demands. Those who have yet developed socialist consciousness mistake these protest movements as the means to develop and consolidate power. However, their lack of organization and long term planning leads to apathetic nihilism among the masses when the movements inevitably fail to achieve any of their idealistic goals. As long as there is no a communist party to lead the masses and uplift them from base trade union consciousness, these spontaneous actions will continue to act as a roadblock in the path of socialist struggle. To seriously address these crises requires us to direct our efforts away from spontaneous action, and towards the extensive construction of the communist movement’s organizational capacity. 

You can engage in this work by joining or organizing a local Marxist Leninist book club. After building up a solid base of educated and militantly consistent cadres can you then direct your organizations capacity around a central project, whether that be communal gardening, mutual aid, becoming an anti-ice rapid response network, etc. This tiered process of development will provide you the means to effectively harness local revolutionary energy to not only enact social change, but to slowly institutionalize your organization as a node of political power. This essential work on the micro level will aid in the eventual consolidation of these nodes into a communist party that can harness our collective power towards dismantling the empire once and for all. While the struggle may seem daunting, revolutions have never been won in a single decisive blow. Rather they have succeeded against all odds by dismantling the enemy piece by piece.

The Conquest of Crumbs

As communists in the heart of the imperialist core, there is a vast array of issues we must address to build the foundations for socialism. A key issue that is rapidly exacerbating social contradictions is capitalism’s tendency towards ecological destruction through the metabolic rift. Current production processes and consumptive demands outstrip our environment’s ability to reproduce the raw resources these commodities rely upon. A process from which we have witnessed the total destruction of biomes through pollution, over extraction, and the mass eradication of hundreds of species. Faced with the existential threat that climate change poses, the global bourgeoisie was faced with a choice: either perpetuate the capitalist system by having the state intervene in the process of accumulation so as to restabilize the environment’s process of self-reproduction, or remove all fetters and pursue accumulation at any cost in the hopes some miracle cure for climate change will come along. Being nothing more than soulless husks that physically embody the spirit of capital, the bourgeoisie enthusiastically chose the latter. The ramifications of which have only just begun to hit the insulated imperial core. As Cde. Potato notes in their work No One is Coming to Feed Us, the rapid spread of pollution, disease, coupled with climate change are overlapping factors that will cause serious disruptions in food supply chains. Conditions that require us to face a serious question, who will feed the people?

Cde. Potato’s answer to this question is rather slapdash. Instead of outlining tactics and strategies by which local orgs could begin building the logistical means to feed the masses, we are given six individualist actions one can take to help bring about ecosocialism.

The short term steps towards ecosocialism are:

1. Grow your own food as much as possible to get a functional understanding of what your local ecosystem can produce
2. Support the food sovereignty of Indigenous communities by learning about what they are already doing
3. Support migrant farm workers by learning about what they are already doing
4. Organize to end child labor and prison labor through boycotts, advocacy, and direct action
5. Support local farms with an emphasis on perennials and orchards. Trees take YEARS to replace, these are the farms we can’t afford to lose
6. Recognize that “farmer” is not a specific term that automatically means petit bourgeois. Focus on the ownership class of agribusiness or Big Ag.

The author’s call for everyone to learn how to not just grow their own food, but to can and preserve this food on their own demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of how systematic this issue truly is. This call for individual and small group preparation for a food crisis calls to mind the settler-colonial prepper mindset more than an effective socialist strategy. There will never be the spontaneous emergence of enough gardeners and small scale farmers to feed the people. These pressing conditions require a deeper centralization of agricultural production, not its decentralization.

Let’s say that you, as an individual, want to become more independent from national and international bourgeois agricultural production. So you decide to grow some potatoes in your backyard. Let’s assume you’ve got a natural green thumb and through hard work you’re able to produce 80 potatoes each containing about 100 calories. Assuming you consume 2,000 calories a day, that would result in only a 1.09% decrease in your caloric dependency. If you were to compare the value of each potato given the labor time it took to till the soil, add fertilizer, consistently water them, cover them with leaves so they don’t freeze, harvest them, etc., the amount of labor stored within each potato would far outweigh the price of any you could buy at the store. Attempting to produce your own food at home, while a lovely hobby, is a complete waste of socially productive labor, as the socially necessary labor time to produce these products at scale will always be far outside your capacity as an individual laborer.

If you wanted to reduce your dependency by 10% you’d have to produce at least 73,000 calories, and spread that caloric intake across several nutritional sources such as onions, potatoes, rice, and beans. Of course this work would be made easier in a collective, but doing so comes with exponentially increasing costs. If each person is working towards the same goal you have to produce 73,000 calories for every member within the collective, divided across X number of crops, times an array of values for each crop’s individual requirements for land, water, and labor time necessary to produce a decent yield. Not to mention the financial costs of tools, seeds, etc. Taking on such a monumental task requires one to effectively answer several questions. For example, how are you acquiring enough land to grow that many crops? The majority of people do not own several acres to just start a farm. Even in suburban areas you’d require several front-and-back yards worth of land to feed more than a handful of people. Furthermore, which members of the working class have enough free time to dedicate themselves to farming on top of their jobs and domestic labor? Existing subsistence farmers still rely on the daily work of the whole family to produce enough food to eat or trade to maintain themselves. Finally, where will you obtain the money to maintain this project? Your comrades may be able to chip in through dues, and perhaps well-off members of your community may donate to such a noble cause. Yet, as soon as a financial crisis hits your pool of funds will dry up. There is simply no way to succeed on this path without the substantial support of an emergent socialist state.

When it comes to Indigenous food sovereignty Cde. Potato tells readers to research what their local Indigenous groups are, offer up support for their food sovereignty projects, and to “…shift your mindset to default the authority on agriculture and land management away from profit-driven science and towards Indigenous knowledge.” While it is good for comrades to know the conditions of their local tribes, the lack of direction given shifts the responsibility of politically activating readers from the author and onto the backs of these tribes. Indigenous organizations already have to deal with the incessant ignorance of well meaning liberal “allies” that come to the table with no means or tools to aid tribes in their liberatory struggle, yet demand to be educated and cultivated as activists so they can achieve moral salvation. As communists we must avoid adding to this feckless pool of good samaritans, and instead work to achieve the organizational capacity to work with these tribes in coalition. To have cadres who can be put to work using spades to put spuds in the ground or be an active presence to help in the protection of Indigenous farmers from settler violence. 

Beyond this lack of political activation, Cde. Potato refuses to explain what the struggle for food sovereignty looks like in the United States. In the place of such an explanation readers are given a collage of random news articles about Indigenous organizations, federal programs, and small businesses, with no context given for what each meaningfully does in the long term struggle for tribes sovereign management of their own food production, consumption, and distribution. No thought is given to the ways in which ecological colonization, the capitalist enclosure of land, and the genocidal destruction of Indigenous languages, knowledge, and traditions has made many tribes’ traditional food systems nearly impossible to reproduce. Nor is there consideration given to the fact that not all tribes have a strong traditional relationship to agricultural production. Take the Northern Arapaho tribe. Situated in the plains, the tribe’s primary form of caloric intake came from hunting local wildlife and gathering wild grown food. This in turn led to periods of extreme precarity before the introduction of the horse and gunpowder rifle guaranteed a more consistent means to sustain the tribe on wild game (Arthur and Porter, 2019, pg. 74-75). The same level of nutritional variety and food security did not rematerialize until the 1940’s with the emergence of family gardens and increased levels of small game hunting. Gains that were again swept away within a few decades due to capitalist and colonial encroachment (Arthur and Porter, 2019, pg. 78-80). While contemporary efforts such as the Growing Resilience project on the Wind River Reservation was able to achieve some gains in food sovereignty through the development of home food gardens, further efforts are still drastically constrained by extremely limited access to resources and capital.

To understand what role we as communists can play in the work to achieve Indigenous food sovereignty it’s important to first contextualize the project within contemporary material conditions. Food sovereignty represents several political goals in one project: tribes securing access to plentiful and healthy food, the ecologically sustainable production of this food, and the means to develop agricultural production in relation to their own needs and ambitions. While each is key to achieving the political project as a whole, most Indigenous people in the United States struggle with either hunger or being able to regularly obtain nutritious and healthy food, so of central importance to the current struggle is securing access to food. When food sovereignty is brought up by non-Indigenous people the focus is rarely on ending the systematic colonial violence that is the infliction of hunger on Indigenous populations, rather the ecological benefits of Indigenous food systems are made to be the main focus. This is because liberal interests lie not in aiding Indigenous people in their struggle, but using their knowledge to save the Bourgeois and the settler-colonial classes that served as their foot soldiers from the environmental catastrophe they themselves brought about. 

Despite these ideals placed on the back of Indigenous tribes they currently do not have the means to fix over two centuries of genocidal environmental destruction. The level of development required for tribes to achieve food sovereignty may at first look nothing like the ideals of ecological stability or growing crops native to a geographic area. It may very well require industrial levels of agricultural development owned, operated, and managed by the tribes themselves. Instead of family and community gardens that feed a handful of people, it may look like the efficient use of socially productive labor through the implementation of heavy machinery, greenhouses, and a variety of other large scale forms of agricultural production. The burden of fixing climate change alongside feeding not just their people, but everyone who will remain on Turtle Island, is a burden that should not be placed solely on the back of these nationally oppressed peoples who are pushed to the absolute extremes of precarity. To expect them to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and fix the ongoing environmental catastrophe forced upon them with nothing but a small amount of individual financial, moral, or volunteer support, is not merely an absurdity, but outright cruelty.

If communists are genuinely interested in helping to achieve Indigenous food sovereignty, then we have to develop the means to materially support them. The collective efforts of a communist club can do far more to aid these tribes than any individual deciding on a whim to look into what’s going on. A club could work with food sovereignty projects by helping to organize a donation drive, volunteering club members labor to help build and maintain gardens or farms, or find other ways to provide material and logistical support like offering car rides or free mechanical maintenance. Instead of this ceaseless chatter about what Indigenous sovereignty could do for us, we should be figuring out what we can do at scale to aid in their struggles and fight to restore their land.

When addressing the conditions of migrant farm workers, Cde. Potato again refrains from fully addressing what these conditions are and how readers can engage in migrant workers struggles. The only direction readers are given is to follow United Farm Workers (UFW) “for updates and attend a ‘Know Your Rights’ training if you can.” Information that is only useful if you live in California, as the UFW has little to no organizational presence outside of the state. Further, this call to action yet again shifts the responsibility of politically activating readers from the author and onto the backs of self-organized migrant workers. Workers who are expected to trust absolute strangers with not just their personal safety, but the safety of their family. An astounding amount of trust has to be given for these workers to tell a stranger they’re a migrant, particularly when ICE agents are rounding folks up while in plain clothes and many white people are more than happy to report migrants so they can take part in the spectacle of state enacted colonial violence.

Migrant workers can be found in every state of the country, doing not only local agricultural work, but much of the hard physical labor of proletarian jobs that the broad swath of Americans are totally uninterested in doing. Just as these workers can be found in every state so too can you find organizations fighting to improve their material conditions. Some states may have orgs dedicated to this specific struggle or chapters of national organizations such as the ACLU may have rapid response networks of trained legal observers who can show up to ICE raids to inform people of their rights and do everything within their legal ability to prevent an abduction. As an individual it is far more useful for you to get in contact with one of these orgs so they can train you and put you to use in the local struggle rather than simply keeping up on the news. What migrant workers need is not self-educated sympathy, what they need is organized groups of people who will fight to protect them from the violence of their employers and the settler-colonial police force that is ICE. Politically centralized orgs, even in some of the most rural and conservative states, have been able to use long term strategic planning to prevent both deportations and the construction of ICE detention centers. The only way migrants can regain any sense of stability is through the support of highly organized groups that provide safety through rapid-response networks, legal support, volunteer translators, or even the provision of daily necessities such as food and water.

Child and prison labor are similarly under-discussed by Cde. Potato. Child labor is nothing new to capitalist development. Whether it be in the cotton mills, coal mines, or modern day meat processing plants, the blood of child laborers has long served as a fountain of youth for the dead labor known as capital. Liberalism’s main function in the United States has been to obscure the violent exploitation contained within nearly every commodity so that aristocratic laborers can consume them without guilt, so they can eat their $10 cheeseburger without once thinking about the child who lost their hand carving up the flesh they now so greedily consume. The reappearance of such overt exploitation in the imperial core is merely a sign that the imperialist super-profits that once protected America’s aristocratic laboring class from such conditions have drastically eroded. All this change means is that to maintain current rates of surplus-labor extraction within the imperial core now requires adult laborers’ direct competition with child labor. This will continually get worse until we bring about socialism. Cde. Potato also engages in the longstanding myth that prison labor is a profitable enterprise, and thus believes a boycott could do anything to affect it. Prisons in America do not exist to produce a profit, but primarily serve to suppress and concentrate the nationally oppressed and precariat so as to sequester their classes revolutionary potential. The carceral state is a central foundation for maintaining the imperial settler-colonial state. These conditions cannot be ended without engaging in long term socialist struggle.

If feeding people is a genuine concern and if, as Cde. Potato argues, supporting local farmers is imperative to achieving this goal, then we must undertake a serious analysis of their needs and character as a class.  Despite Cde. Potato’s claims to the contrary, farmers are a petit-bourgeois class. Renting land, tools, and having to buy fertilizer do not disqualify farmers from membership in this class. If renting one’s constant capital is all it takes to not be a member of the petit-bourgeois class, then the local cafe or bakery owner is also a member of the working class because they have to rent the building in which their business operates. Whether they own or lease the land, becoming a farmer still requires having access to the capital and labor necessary to not just start their farm, but maintain ownership of it through the exploitation of surplus labor. This labor may come from their unpaid family members, migrant workers, or seasonal agricultural workers. Whatever the case may be, they actively engage in exploitation and thus cannot be labeled as peasants, proletarians, or even aristocratic laborers. Further, Their reliance on government subsidies and the willingness of locals to buy their produce at higher prices places them in a reactionary position against both the bourgeoisie and those that seek to overturn the state. Without state intervention their class would be fully subsumed by what Cde. Potato describes as “Big Ag.” Not only are they petit-bourgeois, but they serve as an active force of colonization.

It is a simple fact that anyone who owns land in the United States is an active participant in settler colonialism. On the east coast this participation is rarely seen and felt as there the tribes’ physical, social, and historical relationship to the land have been the most thoroughly eradicated. It is in the West, wherein lies the largest concentration of reservations, that we witness continuous acts of heinous violence inflicted on Indigenous populations. Police, white workers, ranchers, and farmers regularly engage in the trafficking, sexual assault, and murder of Indigenous peoples. White settlements built on reservation land expand themselves to further exploit native people and resources, while the means of social reproduction is restrained to conditions of utter desperation within the tribes. These conditions of precarity provide an opportunity for settlers to engage in further exploitation by getting Indigenous people addicted to drugs and alcohol. The war against Indigenous people never ended in the United States, the same tactics and tendencies have been in continuous use by colonizers for well over 500 years. Liberal society simply chooses to wash away the blood on its hands by silencing Indigenous voices and sequestering their violent subjugation to the least populated areas of the country. 

Local farmers are just, if not more, guilty of perpetuating this systematic violence. They have no legitimate claim to the land they till and grow food on beyond that which is enforced by the settler-colonial state. The right of eminent domain makes this relationship clear, as any land can be claimed by the state for the expansion of infrastructure to benefit the military and the national means of production. This makes their class one of highly concentrated, yet split reaction against all those who may attempt to expropriate their land and capital, i.e., the industrial bourgeois, the state, and Indigenous tribes.  This is why as communists we cannot allow ourselves to fall into the anarchist tendency to reduce every class and struggle to that of David and Goliath. Just because a class of people views the bourgeoisie as a threat does not mean that they are our ally in the socialist struggle. The petit-bourgeoisie’s reliance on the capitalist system of exchange to maintain their means of production and access to a wide pool of exploitable labor puts them in a natural opposition to the socialist cause. Even if that were not the case, Lenin’s critique of the cooperative movement remains a salient reminder of why we must struggle against these anarchist tendencies contained within Cde. Potato’s work:

“Do you really think that the capitalist world will pave the way for the cooperative movement? Capitalism will try to take power over the cooperatives by any means necessary. This ‘anti-authoritarian’ cooperative group of English workers will be crushed in the most ruthless way possible and will be made into servants of capital. They will depend on capital via a thousand threads so that the newly created trend, which you sympathize so much with, will be caught as in a spider’s web. Pardon me, but all of that is unimportant! Those are all details! What is needed is direct action of the masses, and as long as that is not happening, nothing can be said about federalism, communism or social revolutions. Those are all children’s toys, prattling without any firm ground under our feet, without power, without means, and it does not bring us any step closer to our social aims.”

Vladimir Lenin, A meeting between V.I. Lenin and P.A. Kropotkin

Capitalism will not allow you to leave its social relations! You can free yourself as much from their overwhelming pressure using collective farming, housing, cooking, etc. as a submarine can free itself from the pressure in the Mariana Trench by opening up its hatch. The capitalist class will smash you into mush just as it has done with every attempt at individualist revolution for well over two centuries. The choice is simple. Engage in vanguardist organization, or die being remembered for nothing but hindering the revolutionary movement. In order to win, these petit-bourgeois anarchist fantasies must be smothered in their bed, before we lose another decade to their cult worship of spontaneous and individual action.

If you want power you have to think as if you already have it. You have to think about how resources will be transported, you have to think about how people will be supported, think about where funds will come from, think about how to maintain people’s morale, and you have to take your enemies seriously. If we take for granted the fact that local farmers’ agricultural production will be of key logistical importance in the revolutionary struggle, then to prevent local farmers’ total capture by reactionary forces our short term strategy must be to direct the energy of their class struggle against our mutual enemies. Such work has already been done in getting farmers to join the ecological struggle against the construction of pipelines by arguing against the use of eminent domain and demonstrating to them how their farm could be destroyed if a leakage were to occur. Further work can be done to organize the struggle against factory farms due to their mass production of and spread of livestock diseases. Gaining the full trust of these farmers in the socialist cause will necessitate the construction of a sophisticated party that has the logistical means to ensure their goods are transported and traded at a fair price, can secure the maintenance of their means of production, and possibly reduce the economic pressures they face by providing free technical, mechanical, or physical labor through party cadres. To manage this contradiction of aiding this settler class and fighting for Indigenous sovereignty, the emergent socialist state’s mass agricultural production must be placed under the management of Indigenous experts. Through this process the land and capital of industrial agriculture can be expropriated into the hands of Indigenous tribes, providing the foundation for the eventual expropriation of all settler-controlled land for the benefit of Indigenous and nationally oppressed peoples.

This paper is not a condemnation or a call to shy away from the necessary work to provide food security for the masses. It is however a call for comrades to recognize the path to do so is not an easy one with simple solutions. Taking on the task to feed the people is a vital struggle for our movement to take on, and doing so will significantly aid the development of our logistical capacity and political power. If your club or organization is interested in taking on this work then you should follow these steps: first, ensure you have developed the institutional means to take on and cultivate new cadres. If local needs outstrip your organization’s capacity and it collapses, that will harm the movement far more than developing the essential skill of patience within your cadres. Second, secure a regular supply of food through donations, organizational funds, or whatever means are at your disposal. Third, find and build connections with those in your area who lack the means to secure food on a regular basis. Learn their stories, struggles, and work to find out what they want and need. Fourth, connect with other organizations doing this work. Ask how they’ve come to their current strategy, what has worked and what’s failed, see if there’s any way you can support one another.

The struggle for a socialist world is not a game and there is no salve by which we can fix all the harm capitalism has brought upon humanity. The only path for liberation is to engage in massive struggle propelled through the people. As communists our responsibility is to become a collective leadership the masses can trust, to not just courageously overturn the present, but to safely guide them through this tempest with vision unclouded by idealism. When the people ask the question of who will come to feed them, our goal must be that it comes with the quick reply, “The party is here to feed you.”

Citations

Arthur, Melvin, and Christine Porter. 2019. “Restorying Northern Arapaho Food Sovereignty.” Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 9 (2): 69–84. https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2019.09b.012.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilich. (1902) 1961. What Is to Be Done? Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow. Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm

Marx, Karl. (1872) 2024. Capital. Edited by Paul North. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press.

When “Israelis” left Europe to settle Palestine in 1948, they brought European plants with them to remind them of “home” — the home they said did not accept them. Introducing non-native plant species was also a means to drive Palestinians out of their own homeland and towns and deny them access to water and land.

One tree the settlers favored was the eucalyptus tree, known in “Israel” as the “Jewish Tree” (despite being native to Australia) as it was so instrumental to the colonization of Palestine.

But first, what is settler-colonialism? Colonialism is the forceful arrival of settlers into a land that is already occupied to enable exploitation benefiting these settlers’ state back home. The settler part, however, presupposes that a native population, which becomes Indigenous when it exists in relation to settlers, is being displaced permanently so that settlers can occupy their homeland for themselves. Settler-colonialism creates new countries where none existed, and usually ends up carving out a state of their own instead of staying beholden to the state that sent them in the colonies — an example being pre-independence British Colonies and post-independence United States of America.

The importation of these foreign plant species into Palestine firstly played a part in concealing the Nakba. After 1948, zionist organizations planted more than 250 million trees in Palestine, most of which were invasive pines and eucalyptus. These trees were planted around the ruins of Palestinian villages that were ethnically cleansed and emptied during the Nakba. Under the guise of “turning the desert green”, land around ancestral Palestinian communities was seeded with these foreign plant species and then expropriated to be turned into a ‘natural reserve’ that is neither natural nor a reserve of anything. Legally, it means the land cannot be built on. It cannot be excavated. The Nakba is concealed.

When objections are raised about this practice, settlers —  who think of everything in terms of their potential for exploitation — is “well, at least we’re doing something with the land!” but Palestinians were doing something with the land too. Just because the settlers didn’t understand this relationship doesn’t mean that the land was not being used in some way.

It’s difficult in the West to understand ties to the land. We are removed from the processes of production, and see commodities only as the object in front of us on the grocery store shelf. We don’t see the labor that went into bringing us vegetables on a stall or candy in the aisles. Someone has to till the land, someone has to plant the seeds, someone has to water the sprouts, and someone has to harvest, package, and drive the grown crops to the store so we can eat them.

Thus, we think of land in the abstract. We think that the shelves will always bear food, because from our perspective it just appears there, conjured out of thin air. But for most of human history (and for a vast portion of the world still today) this has not been the case. It was instantly clear to any farmer of the past, including in Europe, that land had to be taken care of lest it stopped providing for good.

Before the Nakba, Palestinians distributed land communally under the Masha’a system. Plots were distributed among families for a certain period, and land outside villages was held in common for grazing and collecting firewood.

Many ways in which Palestinians made use of the desert and marshes and why they chose to leave them as they did may have very well been lost in the Nakba. Most of the information about the Masha’a practice in Western studies comes from British sources and is thus seen through their worldview. After which, the absence of evidence about how people used to survive on their native land is used by the settler to justify more of their destructive practices.

A system that works for its population cannot be said to be a failed system. That settlers “made the desert green” is a childish myth for a childish people who mythologize their history where none has been. Throughout history, Palestine had long been a provider of commodities around the Mediterranean. Even today, the only use “Israelis” have for the Naqab desert is to abandon asylum seekers there to die. No settler wants to live in the desert — they prefer the lush, neatly-colonized landscapes west of the Jordan, or the seaside accommodations that Gaza keeps away from them. What one finds in the Naqab today are 36 unrecognized Palestinian villages that do not appear on any map (including Google Maps), and several kibbutz suspiciously close to the border with Jordan; this makes sense within “Israeli” settler-colonial policy, as the kibbutz were established to serve as the first line of human shields against incursions (and that is indeed the purpose they served on October 7, 2023).

The introduction of destructive species in Palestine has disrupted local ecosystems and the availability of water. Eucalyptus trees drink up as much water as is made available to them, which can be used to justify not providing water to Palestinian communities – and eventually forces Palestinians to abandon their homes. Eucalyptus trees have also been the cause of many wildfires in Palestine — the oil in the bark is highly flammable and makes the trees explode under heat, spreading the fire. Wildfires in Palestine are now more common than they used to be, and this can be directly attributed to the presence of foreign plants that have been imported to Palestine.

Since 1967, settlers in Palestine have uprooted over 800,000 olive trees — trees which are suited to the local climate and provide food and livelihood to millions of Palestinians. Settlers are not interested in cultivating olives for themselves; they prefer to destroy these generational trees and import olive oil from Turkey or Spain; Because of this, the “Israeli” settler state has become the 35th largest importer of olive oil in the world. The settler state turns itself into a caricature because no concessions can be given — not one step back can be made.

The ramifications of this form of colonialism are plenty. Under humanitarian concerns, the settler reinforces their power and ensures the native population will never be a problem for them. They kill the Indigenous; they force them into reservations; they sever their ties to the land that feeds us all, and then wonder why climate catastrophes happen. And when these catastrophes happen, the settler retort is to say “well, there’s just nothing we could have done to prevent this!” To say otherwise would mean recognizing that the land is occupied and that people did know what to do for hundreds of years, but they were uprooted and severed from the land — only then will the settler know peace, however briefly. To recognize and integrate Indigenous practices would mean to recognize their claim to ownership of the land – at least partly – and this is antithetical to the survival of any settler state.

Despite being removed from its process of production, land is land: it feeds us. We extract its resources for our devices. This is true whether one is Palestinian, European, American, or anyone else.

In 1626, when Puritans arrived in what is now Salem, located off the Bay of Massachusetts, they came across empty buildings and, thinking they were abandoned, appropriated them. By winter, when the Naumkeag band of the Massachusett came back to their winter fishing grounds for the season, they found white people occupying their homes, redecorating them to suit their European tastes. Instead of driving them out, the Naumkeag welcomed these newcomers as people needing help in a new land they did not know. They taught the English how to cultivate the land, how to plant in the hills productively, and how to survive there.

In Salem the settlers drained swamps and built upon them houses and industry, despite the fact that the Naumkeag had been living perfectly well with these swamps next to their fishing grounds for thousands of years. They understood the importance of these biomes because they had lived with them for millennia. In Salem too the rocky hills in Salem were also a problem to the settlers — just another obstacle to be flattened, destroyed and paved over.

When Europeans came to Turtle Island, they thought they were seeing wilderness; huge forests and marshes greeted them. But what they were actually seeing were carefully-tended autonomous systems that served as breadbaskets for the Indigenous population. Controlled burns were used seasonally to renew the soil, promote the growth of fire-adapted plants and prevent wild forest fires. Over generations, these burns could be massive and span over hundreds of miles — but they were not random. They were the result of careful planning over decades.

As fires destroy entire towns in California right now, we may want to remember that Native American burns across Arizona and New Mexico showed that it is possible to break the typical climate-fire pattern across large areas. This pattern consists of a few years of rainfall promoting plant growth followed by a year of drought that starts wildfires. It becomes even more mind-boggling to witness these fires and wonder how much must have gone wrong that things have come to this when Indigenous people would be able to enact these practices today in California, but are kept away from doing so at the administrative level.

Native tribes actively managed and enriched forests by introducing beneficial species and useful plants for human life that could thrive in a given system. Plants were sustainably harvested and encouraged to become resilient by sometimes purposely — but always strategically — disturbing the ecosystem.

This was not wilderness and neither was it unique to the Americas. This was not undeveloped land. It looked undeveloped to the European eye because they did not see cobble roads or brick houses, but it sustained life for millions of people for millennia. The European considered the Natives’ tie to the land magical, as if they had some secret sixth sense and knew just where to find berries and game, because they could not see the approach taken to building a multi-generational system with reason and labor.

Dams along the Klamath river were removed just three months ago to restore salmon populations, and now enlightened descendants of Europeans are blaming the Indigenous populations that led this initiative for dispersing water that could have been used against the fires. But salmon indirectly help forests become resilient against wildfires, and this is what the settler mind refuses to see.

The Naumkeag band used the Salem grounds as their seasonal fishing spot. How did all the fish happen to congregate there specifically?

And European settlers could have enjoyed this way of life too — the Naumkeag and many other tribes did not pick up weapons against them, even as the settlers killed them off with diseases they brought over from Europe, but instead welcomed them into their homes and communities, teaching them what they knew of the land. Instead, settlers chose to create reservations outside of the nations’ ancestral homelands through 535 treaties that the U. S. government broke with the Indigenous at every turn.

In California, forest fires are a natural risk. The climate is naturally prone to wildfires, and certainly climate change is worsening the situation. But the European response to these constant risks is always to consume more. Build more dams to dump more water on more fires. Then build more walls to retain more water when the dams flood. Build more dykes to help the walls we built…

Indigenous practices are not magical or mystical. They are the result of understanding the local conditions (something we all do as humans) through practice over millennia. What seems more magical is expecting that we would be able to transpose foreign practices to entirely different conditions with no friction.

I can tell you one thing: if the land in California had been under Native stewardship, the fires would not be destroying thousands of acres, countless homes, and causing the suffering we are all witnessing at this moment.

Greenwashing occurs in cycles. In 2002, British Petroleum tried marketing their acronym as “Beyond Petroleum.” The campaign fell apart after the company caused one of the largest oil spills in Alaska’s history in 2006. Four years later, they caused the biggest marine oil spill in history. Fourteen years after Deepwater Horizon, scientists are unsure how B.P.’s catastrophe has affected diversity in the Gulf of Mexico. 

“Net zero by 2050” is the latest greenwashing fraud. On one hand, these plans would be too little, too late in averting a scenario in which millions of people are killed by climate-induced famine, natural disasters, and war. On the other hand, there is every reason to believe “Net Zero by 2050” is nothing more than a pipedream; a slogan to buy time and maximize profits. 2030 was supposed to be an interim deadline on the path to Net Zero by 2050. They haven’t enacted a single step, yet they expect us to believe a stairway to heaven is arriving any day now…  

B.P. announced in 2020 that it would cut oil and gas production by 35-40% in just 10 years. Shareholders, feeling this would impede short term betting on the gears of capital, moved shares into B.P. competitors like Chevron and ExxonMobil. Their stock prices increased by 46% and 57%, while B.P.’s fell 10% by December 2022. B.P. knelt in shame and begged investors for forgiveness by watering down the target from 40% to 20-30%. That was in 2023. One and a half years later, they are abandoning the project entirely. As reports of their capitulation emerge, the plan which connects the 2030 deadline to “Net-Zero by 2050” sits in embarrassment on B.P’s website. Investors prefer the straight talking social murderers at Shell, who pledged to increase gas output and keep oil production consistent. Investors will continue to prefer this direct commitment to fossil fuels as long as they make for higher profits than renewable energy, which will be the case as long as all our machines and weapons depend on hydrocarbon production. Clearly, the free market solution to climate change is a sham. Producing oil is simply more profitable than saving the planet. 

The free market can offer nothing except climate fascism; maximized corporate profits in the face of an existential societal crisis. Deteriorating public entities replaced by a continuous investment into the empire-encompassing Cop City. The federal government’s responses — if they can be called that — to hurricanes Helene and Milton give us a hint of a taste into what lies ahead. There is a light at the end of this tunnel, but it requires us to crawl just a little further. For there is a specter haunting American energy; the specter of communism. 

America has lost the “war” for renewable energy to China. As America renews its commitment to fossil fuels, the Communist Party of China has asserted itself as the world leader in renewable energy. It is silly to phrase what should be a collaborative, global effort in terms of conflict, but this is the only language America understands. The empire is incapable of cooperating on climate change because the capitalists running the show will never permit a foreign country to compete with American interests. To be clear, “American interests” do not include the shared desire to live on a habitable planet. As we observed, only short term speculation has a seat at this table. When the transition to renewable energy is conceived in fighting words, the losing population resolves to suffocate on car exhaust.

China has made historic advancements in renewable energy implementation. While B.P. was abandoning its 2030 environmental commitments, China surpassed its 2030 target for wind and solar installations by six years. Today, fossil fuels make up less than half of China’s installed power capacity. One decade ago, that fraction was two thirds. Whereas America is restricted from this transition by the undead hand of the stock market, China controls its state-owned oil companies in the interests of the Chinese people. American propaganda against China used to focus on air quality in Chinese urban centers, depicting masked workers traipsing through a yellow haze. Since Xi Jinping took office in 2012, air quality has improved considerably in Chinese cities. American attempts to blame China for the climate crisis have never sounded more hollow, especially as the regime does everything it can to prevent Chinese technology from entering the market. For example, nothing scares the American auto industry more than the thought of affordable, electric, Chinese vehicles on American roads. They make Elon Musk look like the coddled charlatan that he is. This soiling of pants extends to all vehicle manufacturers, and even the oil barons. An affordable, electric vehicle would resemble a death knell for our fossilized transportation system. They want your car to produce toxic chemicals because it makes them money. This is why the regime just announced a 100% tariff rate on Chinese electric vehicles. They use typical “national security” concerns to cover for industry. Ever eager to please its master, the European Union followed suit. They are all terrified of the communist economic system. They should be. 

China is not going to liberate the imperial core from climate fascism. Their plate is full, so to speak, with liberating the oppressed regions of the world from Western economic bondage. Even when China releases planet-saving technology to the Western world, America and its lackeys use tariffs to block the masses from sharing in this collective human achievement. Organizing in the imperial core has always been difficult due to a relatively high standard of living enjoyed by the American masses. Climate change throws a wrench into previous calculations where comfort was always chosen over morals. Traditional bribes are less compelling when they come with a miserable existence under climate fascism. Even for those in the Core who would sacrifice the international masses for their own comfort, climate fascists will not save them. Let it be known: Communism or Extinction is the only reasonable policy. No fantasies, no stairways to Heaven. Climate fascism has arrived, and only a hammer of organization will bring it to its knees. Organize like your life depends on it, because it actually does. 

Along with death by exposure to cold, which some studies report taking the lives of around 1,330 people a year, the climate has become a weapon wielded by the capitalists against the working class. The heat dome over the eastern United States continues to intensify, marking record high temperatures from Ohio to Maine, including in Boston, Cleveland, Buffalo and Caribou Maine. Temperatures continued to climb well into the 90s and approach 100 degrees Fahrenheit in many areas. Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine are in the center of the most intense portion of the heat-wave, posting temperatures higher than South Florida.

Worse, the humidity is punishing. This contributes to what is known as the wet bulb temperature, measuring the effects of heat and humidity combined. The more saturated the air is with water, the less the human body can sweat to cool off. At 95 degrees Fahrenheit, even people without sensitivity to heat will begin to overheat and potentially die within six hours of continuous exposure. Even with fans and shade, at a 95-degree wet bulb rating, only air conditioning (and electricity) can protect you. In the morning on Thursday, June 20, the wet bulb temperature in New York City was 81 degrees Fahrenheit.

Climate change, the natural result of the West’s industrial revolution and the discharge of around 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, threatens organized human society. You can trust the capitalists, however, to turn any evil to their advantage. They have leveraged climate change into a weapon in the class war.

Notice: there are no work suspensions, no statewide efforts to reduce heat-related deaths, nothing to stop those most vulnerable to heat exhaustion from being forced to work outside or spend the day on the street. Just like the beginning of the COVID pandemic when efforts were taken to protect the petit-bourgeois, labor aristocrats, and white-collar workers who work in office buildings but no efforts were taken to help the “essential workers,” this heat wave is being used as a killing tool against the lowest and most precarious ranks of the working classes.

Not only did the capitalists do this to the world with their excesses, but now they’re making the working people pay the bill. We must remember to whom the debt is owed — and not forget that our time is coming to collect.

Some Canadians might remember the 2016 fire season. The 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire displaced close to 90,000 people from their homes and caused the most damage to business, property, and oil sands operations of any natural disaster in Canadian history (so far). Nevermind that, in terms of area burned, 2016 was less than even 2022. Although Indigenous nations were affected by the Fort McMurray fires, and Indigenous nations are disproportionately affected by wildfires generally, cynical observation suggests the fire became memorable only once it scorched the predominantly white suburbs of Waterways, Beacon Hill, and Abasand.

When the news consistently reports that something is in some way unprecedented, once in a blue moon, once in a generation, once in a lifetime, etc. the effect is that people fail to notice the gradual deterioration in the normal condition of that thing. Suddenly, the wildfire season starts in March when just five years ago it started in April, and five years prior to that, in May. Events that affect settler populations are magnified, while the same events are minimized when they affect Indigenous populations. This effect is called Shifting Baseline Syndrome, but one might be more familiar with the term “boiling the frog,” which is the propaganda technique that induces it. The technique isn’t restricted to news about wildfires, or even weather and climate — most subjects, from health to economics, are reported upon in this way. Eventually, everyone feels like the dog in the iconic 2013 meme and K.C. Greene comic, “This Is Fine.”

Things aren’t fine. In its insatiable hunger for profit, the Canadian forestry industry clearcuts swathes of ancient, biodiverse forests. When they replant trees, as part of so-called green capitalist initiatives, they plant only a few species. The result is that the new tree plantations are essentially kindling. They can’t rightfully be called “forests” because a forest is not just “many trees,” but a dynamic ecosystem of soil microbes, mosses, fungi, insects, and animals — the destruction of which is actually what renders environments susceptible to flames. Likewise, it was the clearing of the Canadian prairies’ complex meadowscapes to graze cattle, and monocrop canola and other cash crops, that increased the environment’s flammability. In Canada’s Northwest Territories, global warming has altered weather patterns and melted polar ice, resulting in widespread ecological change and, again, environs that are increasingly vulnerable to fire. These effects are cumulative and cyclical. Wildfires emit greenhouse gasses that warm the Earth, which causes larger fires to emit more gasses, drastically altering global weather systems and the seasons. Although these changes manifest first as fire and drought, they’re also to blame for the vicious tropical storms and monsoons that devastated Pakistan in 2022, and Libya in 2023, resulting in thousands of deaths. Eventually, this will all culminate in an oven planet that bakes all its living organisms to death. No, things aren’t fine, but it’s an existential imperative of the owning class, the bourgeoisie, to ensure the masses continue believing they are — to continue believing that these events are disparate and unconnected from the capitalists’ activities, and from capitalism altogether, when the opposite is true.

The ruling class likes things the way they are. As they exploit the environment (and us), they’re acutely aware of a great danger: that we won’t take it any more. They study their history books — well, to be honest, they don’t; they’re dissolute wastrels who don’t do much other than lounge on their billion-dollar-yachts. They pay people to study history for them. And what history teaches them is that they have to beware of violent revolutions, especially those with decolonial or communist character. 

One of the ways they work to stay in power is to delay the recognition of these impossible conditions for as long as possible, and one of their tactics is propagandizing people into believing that circumstances are relatively okay here, they must be worse elsewhere, and there’s no connection between here and there. In several works (i.e., “The Collapse of the Second International” and “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder), Lenin observed that a revolutionary situation can only occur when three conditions are met:  

1. when the oppressed classes no longer want to live in the current way
2. when the ruling classes are no longer able to rule and govern in the current way
3. when a crisis affects both the oppressed and ruling classes, spurring the former to action, and destabilizing the latter.

In May Day Action by the Revolutionary Proletariat, Lenin adds that “the bourgeoisie [does] everything in its power to back counter-revolution and ensure ‘peaceful development’ on this counter-revolutionary basis.” 

But a byproduct of technological progress under capitalism is that it has sufficiently improved the lives of westerners such that these conditions occur with increasing rarity. For instance, since the 1970s, the Canadian province of Alberta has been afflicted by drought with increasing frequency, yet this hasn’t manifested into widespread starvation due to improved technology that rescues food crops in otherwise blighted years. Furthermore, capitalist overproduction ensures that millions of kilograms of imported produce from the imperial periphery go to waste each year. Our so-called peaceful development and counter-revolutionary stability depends upon this waste and exploitation. We are a far cry from the mass poverty that galvanized the Russian Revolution or the Chinese Revolution. The real danger and the real misery remain hidden from us (so far).

From the George Floyd uprisings of 2020, the riots in France over the murder of Nahel Merzouk in 2023, the murder of Tortuguita at Cop City, and to the refusal of the Canadian government to search Winnipeg landfills for the bodies of murdered indigenous women, events that could have been the straw that breaks the camel’s back come and go. This is just as the ruling class wants it — just as they have designed it to be. We can’t manage to grasp the moment and fight against them before the moment slips away.

But what does this have to do with wildfires? In a sane world, climate events such as this year’s wildfires and floods would represent a political crisis too unconscionable to ignore. The system that utilizes its police to terroristically execute thousands of people, and the corporate system whose practices condemn thousands to death each year are one and the same. But instead of a political crisis, we have political theater.  

Past wildfire seasons involved an expected amount of backbiting between bourgeois politicians, phonily accusing each other of not caring. For instance, Justin Trudeau was accused of apathy about 2016’s Fort McMurray fires. This year’s wildfires are especially noteworthy for the conspiracy theories about them. Conspiracies, such as the idea that “green terrorists” or “antifa” started the fires with the goal of justifying “climate lockdowns,” abound. It’s no longer that Trudeau is apathetic; now his agents are maliciously setting the fires to convince you that climate change is real so the World Economic Forum can control you (and he can justify his carbon tax). 

Belief and propagation of these conspiracies convolutes any serious conversation and delays any mitigation of climate change. Whether cooked up by the ruling class or simply amplified by them, conspiracy theories like this prevent us from seizing the critical moment; they prevent us, the working class, from even realizing the nature of our enemy, let alone drawing the sword.  Ultimately, it’s not the case that Trudeau is either apathetic or enacting a secret scheme — his purpose is to maintain the normal extraction of profit. Both obfuscations are part of the same strategy that gave us the term “climate change” to begin with. Recall that it was the notorious Republican political strategist, Frank Luntz, who advocated replacing “global warming” with “climate change” in the vernacular, since it’s a much less frightening phrase, and more malleable to the political agenda of the ruling class. This agenda is actually quite simple. In fact, it’s so simple it barely qualifies as an agenda at all; it’s to maintain the exploitation of people and nature for profit, aka the status quo, for as long as possible. This is the class interest of the bourgeoisie.  

They would have us believe it’s not the case that capitalism is omnicidal, that human exploitation of the planet and each other is gradually heating the planet past the point it can sustain life. The planet’s not warming, it’s changing. Are these changes natural, or caused by humans? Who can say?

They would have us believe that, even if the changes are caused by human activity, the activity is part of a plot. It’s certainly not an indictment of their mode of production, or system of governance. The world isn’t burning because of something they have participated in, or let happen — it’s obviously some other (((them))).

Historically, accusations involving a them are antisemitic. From the 1389 Holy Saturday Pogrom in Prague, to the Khmelnytsky Uprising (1648 – 1657) in present day Ukraine, in which tens of thousands of Jewish people were massacred, Jews have been the frequent scapegoats for the ruling class, to use as a bulwark against the frustrations of peasants and oppressed classes. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, incitements against Jews were given anti-communist flair by the Okhrana, the Tsar’s Secret Police, so that violence could be directed against would-be revolutionaries. Germany’s Nazis developed this strategy to its apotheosis, and the result was the Holocaust.

Just as it happened in Germany 90 years ago, people who believe these narratives are rapidly coalescing into an alt-right fascist movement in Canada. Although the victim group may change nominally, the tactics used to turn the working and oppressed classes against each other remain unchanged.

Scapegoating, deferral, and denial are more comfortable than admitting one’s entire way of life is murdering all life on the planet — but this is exactly what’s taking place. My comrades at USU have already written about the profitability of ecocide as it related to Maui’s fires and about how the bourgeoisie’s narratives about climate change are ruses. Their analyses are also true of Canada’s fires. 

Still, among many Canadians, none of this information causes the general alarm it should. The powder keg of mass resentment has not ignited, even while the country burns. Sure, every summer is a bit smokier than the last, but in the average Canadian metropole, everything seems normal. This is the ultimate boon of colonial exploitation — the privilege to live in normalcy while your internal colonies, and indeed the world, burns around you.   

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live — forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence — knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.

Friedrich Engels, The Conditions of the Working Class in England

Every year, around 1,330 people are killed by the purposeful neglect of the capitalist state in the richest and most powerful of the Western capitalist countries, where we are told resources are the most plentiful. These 1,330 people — some years more, some years less — are left to freeze to death. Over the 2022 holiday weekend in December, a killing winter storm swept across North America. The death toll currently stands at or above 60 individuals, more than half of them in upstate New York. Power across the worst-affected regions exacerbated the effects of the storm. At its height, the storm left 1.2 million homes and businesses without power. Two-thirds of the U.S. population were under winter warnings or advisories. Overnight temperatures were as low as 9 degrees below zero, and that’s before accounting for wind chill. As always, it is those with the fewest resources and least able to deal with a dire event like this that were most affected.

The U.S. imperialist news turned the storm into a spectacle of horror, but not once was a serious attempt made by the federal government to reduce the impact of the storm on the unhoused or those who could not afford their power bills. No, indeed, in places like Connecticut, electricity and heating prices are set to spike on 1 January. But we must not lie to ourselves: the deaths that came after this storm are no different than the deaths that follow every major weather event in the U.S. Empire. This isn’t an outlier; this is the status quo. It is accepted and expected that thousands of unhoused persons and lower-income members of the working class will die whenever a seasonal weather disturbance hits the country. Meanwhile, COVID is still killing hundreds and sometimes thousands of people every day, and the capitalist government has completely given up the pretense of trying to combat it.

Every last one of these deaths is directly attributable to the iron laws of capitalism: the private ownership and control of economic production and the exploitation of billions of workers by and for the profit of a small class of capitalists. The capitalist state takes great pains to preserve the private property and hoarded wealth of the opulent capitalists, while it lets those who have the least — the workers, the unemployed, the elderly and disabled poor, the unhoused — suffer and die with little more than a shrug and a few misery-porn stories in the capitalist media. When, for instance, the stock market begins to crash, like it did in 2020, or when the “too big to fail” capitalist institutions of the country crumble under their own weight, like they did in 2008, the state is always ready to lend a helping hand. Oh, I’m sorry, did your value-per-share drop? Here comes the state to make up the difference. Oh my, did your rampant speculation destroy your company and other big banks like it? Well, here is a prop and a taxpayer-funded loan to help keep it afloat. “Too big to fail” was the phrase they used, and too big to fail is what they mean: the wealthy are the state. For the capitalist, society exists only to service and protect those of means. There is a corollary to “too big to fail” — “too small to care.” The lives of the working people are meaningless to the capitalist state. Let ten, let one hundred, let two thousand die each day — of what concern is it to Washington or Wall Street?

But COVID and this latest winter storm are hardly the beginning or the end of the weather catastrophes that struck the beleaguered working class of the U.S. Empire this year. 83 tornadoes struck the U.S. South. Hurricane Ian blasted Florida and killed more than 125 people. Nearly 7.5 million acres burned in wildfires. The drought in the U.S. West continues unabated, even as new data centers and chip-building facilities that threaten to use the last remnants of the Colorado River reserves are being constructed or opened.

These are not isolated events. This is the result of a regime that thrives on, relies on, and profits from social murder. The capitalists that run the U.S. Empire don’t care what happens to the environment. The only thing they care about — the only thing they’re capable of caring about — is lining their own pockets. If that means the planet’s ecosphere dies, they’re willing to kill it. If it means thousands and hundreds of thousands of working class people die, they’re ready to commit social mass-murder. Oh, how they’ll cry for us on television, but don’t think for a moment that they aren’t laughing as soon as the cameras are off… and all the way to the bank.

Since the advent of capitalism itself, the ruling class have used natural disasters, cold, and hunger as weapons against the working people. Today, they want you to know that unless you take their minimum wage job, you will freeze to death in the snow — freeze to death in incredible storms created by their own greed. That is the legacy of the U.S. Empire and its capitalist masters: a world ruined by rapacious, never-ending greed, and lives thrown away into the frigid winter they themselves have brought.