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doomsday sentiment further (no, not the fascism) and accept that not only is God dead and we have killed him, but he’s been replaced by the factory foreman.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. 

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. 

We can smell the smoke from a world on fire. 

We are being told to stay indoors to avoid the toxic air.

People are scared. Rightfully so.

These severe and “unprecedented” Canadian wildfires are just the latest expression of the runaway train that is climate change. 

With every new season, the immediacy of the changing climate becomes more and more real for people. Every crop failure and natural disaster makes the reality of our situation harder to ignore. Climate change isn’t just a looming specter, it is a monster that lives in our backyard. 

So, what is the capitalist ruling class doing about it? 

The reactionary right does nothing. It buries its head in the sand, “rejects the politicization of weather” (Desantis, 2023), and “encourages innovation in the private sector” while denying the necessity of government intervention. Then they try to change the conversation to be about whatever hateful and chauvinistic fire they are trying to stoke this week.

The Democrats use this fear to beg for votes, promising that they are the only ones that can save us from the climate denying Republicans. Biden made climate change a central tenet in his first round with Trump, and he will 100% be playing this same sad song as the bell rings for round two. The Biden White House is trying to push the narrative that they have made some sort of meaningful progress in the fight on climate change; this is all political posturing and downright dishonesty. His signature Inflation Reduction Act, hailed as “historic climate action,” requires the federal government to lease 62 million acres to fossil fuel companies every year before it is allowed to allocate a single acre for solar or wind. Third party groups such as Earthjustice give Biden abysmal scores on the few minimal programs he has nominally begun work on. 

In the meantime, the owning class tries to push an agenda of personal responsibility in the face of climate change. The owning class is giving us a way to perform agency in the face of a terror they have unleashed upon us. Instead of passing the minimum intensive regulatory measures necessary to even slow climate change, the capitalist class tells us that the way to save the environment is to “vote with your dollar.” Buy local. Buy a Tesla. Buy from “eco-conscious” brands. They have taken our fear and commodified it. Selling us mousetraps to set in the path of a charging T-Rex.

One of their most cynical ploys is the motto of “corporate responsibility,” particularly through carbon offsets. Through this scheme, companies can continue to pollute and degrade our environment, continue to tear down forests and pump out as much carbon as they wish, as long as they also use some of their ill-gotten profits on paying for other forests to not be destroyed. Some of these carbon offsets are located in the very same forests that are smoldering as we speak — where is the accountability for those companies that claimed these trees as their greenwashed indulgences?

There is no amount of personal or corporate responsibility that can put an end to climate change. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t recycle and visit our local farmer’s market. This doesn’t mean that every individual is impotent in the face of climate change. But, we need to understand that neither these individual acts of consumption nor the voting booth are where this fight needs to take place.

Every person can make a difference: as a part of an organized mass movement. We must come together, organize and make our voices heard. We must reject the tepid promises of a “Democratic” party that has continuously failed to do anything meaningful in the face of the literal end of the world. We can’t be hoodwinked into casting a vote for the “lesser evil.” 

Instead of making cynical comments to our family, friends and coworkers about how fucked we are, we need to start having real conversations about why the people in power are not doing what clearly needs to be done. We need to reckon with the unbreakable link between capitalism and environmental destruction.

Even while we watch the world burn around us, the ruling class begs us to maintain civility in the face of the devastation they bring down on us every day. They shed crocodile tears and assure us that reasoned debate, civil procedure, and compromise will eventually start working. Well, we can clearly see how far that has gotten us. The smoke in our eyes cannot blind us from their sleight-of-hand. They cannot absolve themselves with words and false promises. The only path forward for this planet is to divest the capitalists of their power and get to work undoing the damage they have done.

The announcement of her forthcoming release follows the orca’s belated “retirement” last year. Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut is the second-oldest known living orca in the world.

The Miami Seaquarium, its parent firm, the Dolphin Company, and that firm’s owner and CEO, Mexican multimillionaire Eduardo Albor, are hailing the announcement as a big win for animal rights activism. Albor has associated himself and his company with billionaire-funded nonprofit corporation Friends of Toki. He presents himself to the public as a concerned philanthropist, environmentalist, and animal lover.

The truth of the matter is that Albor is, first and foremost, a capitalist — a profiteer — and that his decision to release Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut was made, first and foremost, because holding her in captivity is no longer profitable. She is too old to continue performing; the stress has undoubtedly shortened her lifespan, and would kill her if she were forced to continue. Her death by overwork would doubtless bring a wave of negative publicity crashing down on the Miami Seaquarium and its owner, damaging the company’s public image and, ultimately, hurting its bottom line. Now, after decades of profiting from her misery, the firm that owns Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut has agreed to release her. This is not charity. This is not justice. This is a public relations stunt.Meanwhile, since 2018, far in the “background” of the corporate media buzz surrounding the “philanthropic” pursuits of “concerned” capitalists, an Indigenous-led campaign for Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s freedom has carried on, gaining international support. The campaign is directed by the Lummi Nation through their nonprofit organization Sacred Sea. The Lummi, also known as the Lhaq’temish, are a federally recognized tribe native to a part of the Salish Coast, with a reservation in present-day Whatcom County, Washington. The goal of Sacred Sea’s campaign is to “right the wrong of Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s capture, and safely and responsibly bring her home to the Salish Sea.” To this end, the nonprofit has prepared a “comprehensive” operational plan, summarized as follows:

Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut lives in a concrete tank that is barely bigger than she is. She cannot dive and swim freely; she cannot escape the relentless Florida sun or hurricane dangers. The chlorinated water in which she swims is devoid of all life. Killer whales see with sound, as well as with vision. Her acoustic isolation is an extreme cruelty, akin to solitary confinement in a prison cell far from home.

By contrast, the Xwlemi Tokw [Lummi Home] that has been designed and would be custom-built for her is a large netted structure within a secure and protected area in her natal Salish Sea waters. She will have ample space to swim and dive; the waters will be full of natural life. She will breathe the air of the Salish Sea, she will hear the birds, keep company with the fish, swim over kelp beds, feel the pull of the tides and currents. We believe that water is alive, and has memory. Her home waters will embrace her. 

The Xwlemi Tokw will give access to spiritual practitioners, scientists, and veterinarians who will continue to assess and fulfill her changing needs. The Operational Plan details every aspect of the Xwlemi Tokw, including maintenance systems, long-term environmental assessment protocols, and on-site risk management.

Since the Lummi Nation’s 2018 resolution to fight for Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s freedom and return, Lummi activists and their allies have employed protest and public awareness tactics. Moreover, according to Sacred Sea,

In 2019, two individual Lummi women invoked the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and announced their intent to sue Miami Seaquarium if the Seaquarium would not agree to collaboratively work out a plan to safely bring Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut back home to her family in the Salish Sea.

Whether such legal action would meet with any success within the white supremacist U.S. court system, dominated by capitalist and settler interests, is doubtful. But such “lawfare” tactics could prove ruinous to the Miami Seaquarium’s public image, and hit the firm where it really hurts: its revenue stream.

Fortunately for the Lummi Nation’s campaign, theirs isn’t the only potential legal threat the Dolphin Company faces.

In 2021, the U.S. Department of Agriculture investigated the Miami Seaquarium, and reportedly found that Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut was suffering in abhorrent living conditions. The water in her tank, drenched with chlorine, was “turbid” with filth, plastic, and chipped paint. She had endured years of malnutrition caused by the Seaquarium’s policy of chronically underfeeding her; her diet consisted of mostly rotten food, despite the objections of a veterinarian. She had sustained major injuries, including a jaw fracture, after being forced to perform dangerous jumps and somersaults, despite her advanced age. She was provided with no shelter from the oppressive Miami sun, which, in addition to painful overheating, can damage orcas’ eyes.

The protesting veterinarian would be fired by Miami Seaquarium shortly after the USDA’s report on Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s living conditions was published.

Now, in 2023, the Dolphin Company has at last agreed to cooperate in implementing the Lummi Nation’s “operational plan” for Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s rehabilitation and rematriation to the Salish Coast. In all likelihood, mounting pressure from multiple sides was the true impetus for the Miami Seaquarium’s sudden “ethical” awakening. Capitalists know no other morality than the profit-motive.

The announcement of Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s forthcoming release and reintroduction to her northern Pacific birthplace has again brought into the light that the horrific abuses of capitalism extend not only to humans and livestock animals, but also to any animal, no matter how rare or remote, that the capitalists can harness and exploit for profit.

All available evidence from scientific research indicates that orcas are sentient. They have magnificently complex social structures, rivaled in the organic world only by simian primates and elephants. They feel, by all appearances, a range of complicated and nuanced emotions and have intricate interpersonal bonds. They communicate with each other in something resembling language, and separate pods (small social units) even have varieties of this “language” resembling unique dialects. They are capable of abstract thought and planning, and of applying elementary logic and mathematics in novel ways in order to solve problems. They cooperate in teams when hunting, quite literally “herding” and corralling schools of prey fish, in a method known as “carousel feeding,” similar to how human hunters might pursue herds of deer or bison. They evidently have long memories, as pods can navigate thousands of miles of ocean together to complete regular migrations. Mothers affectionately sing to their calves, passing down “pod songs,” unique to each social unit, that the newborns remember and recite for the rest of their lives. The orca’s enormous, highly developed brain contains spindle neurons, a rare class of neurons associated with intelligence, found only in hominid apes (including humans), some monkeys, raccoons, and elephants. Most males live for 30 to 60 years; most females, 50 to 80 years, with some recorded living into their early 100’s.

While we believe that we should avoid anthropomorphizing (that is, reading human traits into nonhuman animals), it is difficult to deny that we can see many aspects of ourselves — our human minds, emotions, relationships, and societies — reflected in these animals. We can only speculate about the subjectivity, the mind, the internal life of an orca (in other words, what it is really like to be an orca, from her own perspective), but it seems undeniable that orcas, as with some other nonhuman animals, are endowed, in their own ways, with sentience.In a 2021 article, Lummi Nation leaders Raynell Morris and Ellie Kinley discuss the “people below the waves” in strikingly empathetic terms — terms of relatedness:

Our teachings hold that we have kinship bonds — as well as cultural and spiritual ties — to a particular clan of killer whales who live in the Salish Sea. They are our relatives, and so we call the J, K, and L pods of the Southern Resident orcas by their Lummi family name, Sk’aliCh’elh (Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut means “daughter of Sk’aliCh’elh”). 

We are taught that our Lummi and Sk’aliCh’elh families mirror each other. Our connection to the Salish Sea defines our people, as it does with the orcas. Salmon is essential to our identity and survival, as it is with the orcas. Our Lummi notion of “self” is inseparable from kinship and community; so, too, it is with the orcas. Family is sacred to us all…

In the 1960s and ’70s, about one-third of the Southern Resident orca population was captured and sold to aquariums and theme parks. For several decades, many of our own Lummi children were taken and sent away to boarding schools and foster care. Bringing those children back into our families and community has been healing. Sk’aliCh’elh children were sold to marine parks, where most of them died.

The authors also relate a heart-wrenching account:

This past spring, Lummi tribal members traveled to Miami and joined with members of the Seminole tribe, on whose homeland the Seaquarium is built, along with a nontribal filmmaker. After paying for their tickets to see “Lolita,” they took their seats in Whale Stadium, the arena surrounding Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s tank. The tribal members began to sing, drum, rattle, and pray. Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut began her routine. The filmmaker, who had attended and recorded previous shows, noticed that Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut was not responding to the trainer’s cues as usual. She would not perform. Many people have spoken for her, but we believe that this time, in the presence of ceremony, she was speaking for herself.  

Despite their sentience and our relatedness, when orcas are captured and forced into the inhumane and dehumanizing process of capitalist production, they, like all organisms, including human beings, are reduced to mere objects — commodities, profit-generating machines, privately owned means of production. A whole entertainment industry has been built upon kidnapping orcas from their natural habitats, stealing orca calves from their mothers, caging them in distressingly small and solitary enclosures, isolating them from fellow orcas and depriving them of social lives, perversely compelling them to breed and to bear offspring, subjecting them to cruel experiments, torturing them in order to “train” them as show animals, and forcing them to perform for crowds of human onlookers.

For her part, Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut was forced to perform for over 50 years before she “retired.” Only at the relatively advanced age of 57 will she be allowed to return to the waters where she was born. Unfortunately, her release cannot be immediate: She first must be taught by veterinarian specialists how to hunt in a specially designed enclosure — for she was deprived of the chance to learn from her pod — and she needs to grow a substantial amount of muscle — for the conditions of her captivity, inhabiting the cramped tank to which she has been confined since adolescence, have caused her muscles to atrophy. Only after a few years of rehabilitation will she have a chance to find her way back to her pod.

According to Morris and Kinley, “Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut still sings the [pod song] her mother taught her when she was a baby. Family is everything to these killer whales. Bringing Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut home will heal a very specific wound: It will make her family whole again.”

We hope that they’re right; we hope that their prediction is realized.

We look back with horror, and rightly so, at the depravities of mass entertainment in past epochs — for instance, the bloodsport competitions forced upon Rome’s slaves in the Colosseum. Future generations will look back with similar horror upon the depravities of our own, capitalist epoch, and their horror will be no less justified. Our grandchildren, or their grandchildren, or their grandchildren, and on, will wonder with disgust at how we could abide the caging and torturing of sentient animals for the purposes of live mass entertainment and, above all, capitalist profit; they will judge us and our times unkindly; they will feel immense gratitude at the circumstance that they were born into a more civilized, repaired world, a world in which such barbarities have receded into history.

Why are we writing about this issue in a Communist newspaper?

Communism means the universal and total liberation of humanity from all forms, modes, and structures of oppression — including the abolition of all colonial regimes and the decolonization of all stolen and subjugated lands. Communism means not only the abolition of social classes and of private property, and therefore the elimination of poverty and exploitation, but also the abolition of all other manifestations of social and interpersonal violence inherent to class societies — an end to all wars, genocides, deportations, occupations, plundering, and other violence between populations. This has been well established since Marx. We hold that the first step in the long historical march of Communism on this continent, North America, must be, and can only be, its complete decolonization — the abolition of the illegitimate settler-colonial empires occupying it, the U.S. and Canada, the rematriation of all Indigenous lands, the liberation of all colonized peoples, and the eradication of all racism. Moreover, we believe that Communism would be incomplete, if we failed to also champion the liberation of nonhuman animals, to work for the ecological restoration of our planet — our only home — and to safeguard the continuation of life as we know it in this and future eons.

Morris and Kinley write as follows: “Our late beloved hereditary chief of Lummi Nation, Tsilixw, told us that if we heal our orca family, if we heal the salmon, if we heal the Salish Sea, we will heal ourselves. We believe he meant our Lummi selves and also, broadly, our human selves, our species.”

We believe it is the duty of every Communist to wholeheartedly support Indigenous liberation struggles, and to unite these struggles with the struggle against the capitalists — the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes and the poor of all countries, without distinction of ethnicity, race, or religion — the struggle for socialism.

Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States, is drying up. Its destruction threatens the lives of over 20 million people across the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico, and is a direct consequence of capitalist extractive processes. The lake itself is an artificial reservoir east of Las Vegas, formed by the construction of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River in 1935. It was intended to supply water and hydroelectricity to the rapidly growing urban areas of the Mojave desert which were developed, in part, to help secure the West against the possibility of reclamation by the region’s Indigenous peoples. For nearly a century it has, but climate change and recklessly irresponsible use of the Colorado’s water now imperils the lake’s, and, therefore, millions of the most vulnerable and oppressed people across the whole region’s, continued existence.

The climate naturally goes through periods of drought. Historically, these droughts have been damaging to those who experience them, but the relatively lower density of population and agriculture in the area meant that the threat was more local and of a smaller scale than the danger posed today. The Las Vegas metropolitan area has grown from a population of 708,000 in 1990 to over 2,800,000 in 2022 according to US Census Bureau data.

The drought currently afflicting the U.S. west began in the year 2000, twenty-two years ago. According to a UCLA research paper analyzing soil moisture, this 22-year period has been the driest of any, going back twelve hundred years. Let’s put that in perspective: this has been the driest period in the southwestern US at least as far back as the year 800 C.E., and possibly even farther. 2021 alone, they say, was probably drier than any other year in the last three centuries, and likely ranks 10th or 11th driest since the year 800. While drought is inevitable in such arid regions as the American southwest, their research demonstrates that fully 42% of the soil moisture anomaly of 2000-2021 was caused by anthropogenic — man-made — climate change.

Local and federal agencies have monitored water levels at Lake Mead very closely since the area was first flooded in 1935. The water has fallen over 170 feet between 1998 and July of this year, threatening to pitch the lake over into “dead pool” status, at which point the levels will be too low to extract power from via the Hoover Dam’s hydroelectric turbines. In fact, had several of those turbines not been retrofitted between 2011 and 2016, the lake would already be a dead pool today. As it stands, a further reduction of 90 feet from levels recorded in August of this year would make it impossible for the dam to function at all.

Lake Mead supplies drinking water to millions across the southwest, but it also serves another function. According to the Bureau of Reclamation, about 75% of the reservoir’s water outflow flows directly from the lake into Nevada’s and Arizona’s farmlands, fueling an agribusiness sector which focuses on the industrial production of highly water-intensive monocrops. None of these are native: lettuce, kale, almonds, and pistachios rely on the water from Lake Mead, as does extensive dairy farming. Yuma County, in fact, is the country’s largest supplier of iceberg lettuce and Arizona as a whole produces almost 30% of the country’s supply of the winter vegetable despite the incongruous-sounding fact that it’s a desert.

Should water levels at Lake Mead fall, the turbines that provide over 300 megawatts of energy to customers primarily in California and Arizona would shut down. People in those states, as well as those in Las Vegas which recently started drawing energy from the dam, would see a significant hike in energy prices, compounding with already historically high costs associated with natural gas fired energy. The power grid won’t fail, but coal and gas will have to be fired to cut the shortfall.

If the water line falls below that minimum level necessary to keep water flowing through the turbines, all of the Colorado River south of the Hoover Dam will be cut off from its headwaters. That would be catastrophic for communities that draw from the river below the dam, especially in California and Arizona which use the river extensively for both residential and agricultural use. Up to a third of Southern California’s water is drawn from the Colorado south of the dam. If the bourgeois authorities permit the Colorado to stop flowing, the entire environment will be destabilized.

The danger to Lake Mead is disproportionately a threat to the Indigenous people who rely on it. The western U.S. states allocate water rights by seniority; those who had the first allocations take priority. This had the, presumably, unintentional side-effect of working in the favor of Indigenous claimants to water resources, as those claims date back to the 19th century. Collectively, members of the Colorado River Basin Ten Tribes Partnership enjoy the rights to 2.8 million acre-feet of water from the river and its tributaries. Yet, these communities lack the funds and infrastructure to make use of the water Non-Indigenous water users often take the “remaining” water that the Indigenous nations cannot use once the year is out. In a period of tightening water supply and increasingly fierce competition for rights to the existing allocations, this provides a dangerous incentive to attack the remaining rights of the Indigenous peoples in the southwest. The quiet expropriation of the waters of the Colorado and its diversion away from Indigenous peoples to sustain unsustainably large settler monocrop farms is a hidden dimension of this struggle; it’s yet another expression of settler-colonial relations within the U.S. Empire.

Agriculture is by far the largest use of Colorado water by Indigenous peoples. While most non-Indigenous farmland in the basin is devoted to the industrial production of high-profit monocrops like almonds, the majority of Indigenous agricultural land consists of subsistence farms and other small agricultural plots. According to the USDA’s 2017 agricultural census, in Arizona nearly 70% of farmland is owned by Indigenous producers, who collectively account for about 2% of the state’s total agricultural revenue and in that year, 73% of Indigenous operated farms grossed under $1,000 in revenue. USDA figures also reflect that between 2007 and 2017, Indigenous owned land was reduced by over 600,000 acres, though that document cannot offer an explanation for this loss. White farm operators, however, held a small minority of the state’s farmland, only 24%, and collected a truly staggering 96% of the state’s agricultural revenue. 

This data paints a picture of an indigenous agricultural sector in Arizona that’s operated primarily by subsistence farmers and people who cultivate the soil to supplement the food they’re able to buy with regular wages. The destruction of the primary agricultural water source would have a distinctly different effect on them than it would for the white petit-bourgeois and bourgeois agricultural operators in other parts of the state. For the Indigenous peoples, already some of the most acutely impoverished in the country, the loss of the waters of the Colorado River represents not just the promise of an unprofitable year or the bankruptcy of individual producers, but an existential threat to their whole communities.

Monopoly capitalists, the engine of the U.S. Empire’s economy, perhaps sensing blood in the water, have descended upon the southwest hoping to collect on the peoples’ increasingly desperate situation. According to the New York Times, such giants of finance as MassMutual, a conglomerate based in Springfield, Massachusetts, are buying up water rights in rural agricultural towns in the region and selling them at a staggering profit to fast-growing urban centers like Phoenix and its suburbs. Panic is setting in among circles in the major cities, and a savvy capitalist can leverage that fear and uncertainty to promote bidding wars between cities for the rights to water allocations appropriated from the poorer, economically and politically weaker, rural communities. In their wake, they leave isolated towns and counties full of workers and petit-bourgeois landholders struggling to pay water bills that have skyrocketed over the span of just a few short years. This is not an unexpected, accidental byproduct of the commodification of water — it’s an intentional decision made by the vultures who nest on Wall Street half a continent away.

Volatility in this newly emerging water market (which the New York Times compares to the energy bubbles of the 1990s, made infamous by the spectacular collapse of Enron in 2001), the steady and uninterrupted escalation of prices, and the vice-like squeeze on the people of the southwest make this a prime target for capitalists looking for profitable opportunities for investment in the face of looming recession and economic crisis. 

As the lake starts to run dry, as the flow of water slows and the power provided by the Hoover Dam falls off, the negotiators for the states that draw from the Colorado River Basin seek to protect agribusiness that produces revenue measured in the tens of billions of dollars annually at the expense of the most vulnerable in the region. In June, the federal Bureau of Reclamation gave seven states – Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Utah – a deadline to determine how they would draw 15% less water from the river in 2023, or else have a plan drafted and imposed on them. That deadline is fast approaching, and, at the time of writing, negotiators representing the concerned states are locked in increasingly bitter disagreement over who among them should shoulder the brunt of the cuts. States in the upper basin argue that those in the lower basin should suffer the most drastic cuts, owing to the fact that they draw the majority of the water. Lower basin states retort that the upper basin should instead have its ration cut, considering that those states usually don’t make use of all the water they have negotiated for in the past, and because their contention that they need to keep the extra to accommodate future growth is a secondary priority in such a time of crisis.

We need to be absolutely clear on this point: this conflict is among and between the ruling classes of those states, not the workers. The figures they manipulate and throw at each other like hand grenades and the stakes at play during these negotiations are measured not in lives or the peoples’ health, but in future profit estimates for the richest residents and business owners. At the end of the current negotiation cycle, even if the federal government has to step in and impose a rationing plan upon them like a referee separating violent players on the field, whatever plan is agreed upon will still see over 70% of the Colorado’s waters diverted for an unsustainable agricultural industry. It will still see rising costs for the workers and the continued expropriation of Indigenous property (along with the revocation of the few rights the bourgeois state still pretends to recognize), and will still invite the barons of capital to descend with ever-increasing ferocity upon this suffering region.

James Eklund, formerly the head of Colorado’s water management, stands as a shining example of the priorities of the capitalists. Speaking on the developing water crisis, he says “I have seen time and again the wisdom of using incentives that attract private sector investment and innovation. Dealing with the threat of climate change to our water requires all sectors, public and private, working together.” Eklund isn’t unaware of the predatory nature of capital’s creation of, and intervention into, the water market. In declaring that the only solution to this crisis is to open the floodgates to capital and the commodification of water itself, Eklund says, without shame, that he stands on the side of the vultures and robber barons who would sharpen a humanitarian catastrophe for the promise of healthy profits in the futures markets. Here, he speaks not as an individual but as the representative of the entire bourgeois class and the government they’ve erected to defend their class dictatorship. These are the jackals who are negotiating for 40 million people’s access to water. They have every intention of leaving the people of the Colorado River Basin and every community that draws upon it to a slow, choking death; just as the bourgeois government has turned its back on the suffering caused by COVID.

This period, when public awareness of the water crisis is at its peak, when the nature of the ruling class’ nihilistic and reckless disregard for our health and the health of our environment is the most plain for all to see, offers the working class an opportunity to take advantage of the cracks in ruling class unity and to push for a more sustainable, humane solution to the water crisis. We can only make that happen if we act together. Educate yourselves and your neighbors about the destruction being intentionally visited upon us by the extractive policies of the rich. Build bridges with the communities most affected by the new plan for ecocide being negotiated by the State governments, especially the Indigenous peoples of the region and the many, many exploited migrant workers who are forced to toil in inhumane conditions in the southwest’s agricultural fields. March against the unjust and unsustainable deals made between those who’s only conceivable risk in all of this is the loss of profits, and announce to them that the working class rejects as a matter of principle the notion that the richest exploiters have the right to bargain away the peoples’ future in exchange for profits.

It is crucial that the workers take for themselves an independent seat at the negotiating table. Direct organization of the working class, and its exercise of political power, is necessary to protect not only the white working class communities of the southwest, but to help secure the very existence of the Indigenous peoples under attack.

If a deal is agreed upon by the states without the direct input of the working class, or imposed upon them by the federal government, the workers must demand its repeal and replacement by one written entirely by our class, without the input of the exploiters. The working class and the oppressed are the only groups in whose interests it is to build a sustainable, just future. The capitalists are willing to sacrifice every tomorrow for today.

We must seize the opportunity, today, to begin crafting it or else resign ourselves to a future of ever worsening environmental disaster and poverty.