The SoCal Fires, The Environmental Crisis & Who Showed Up to Help

Since January 7, fires and intense winds have ravaged the city of LA. Since January 7, ILPS members, other people’s organizations, and community members have been working nonstop to address the pressing needs of their communities across Southern California as the people have been left severely neglected during this crisis. The weak crisis response and the climate-driven fires themselves are symptomatic of a system that prioritizes profits for developers and energy corporations at the direct expense of lives and livelihood of the people. Unfortunately, this neglect did not start with the fires but is part of a long trend on the part of the LA city government & the US government as a whole.

Through the efforts of community members over the past 2 weeks, hundreds have mobilized daily, consolidating basic needs ranging from masks, portable chargers, and flashlights to hygiene, clothes, baby supplies and more and preparing thousands of care packages. More importantly they have been going out into their communities to bring these care packages to impacted workplaces where workers are being forced to work without PPE amidst toxic air quality, to impacted neighborhoods where people have been without power or water for days, to people who have been displaced from their homes due to the fires, and to those left without work.

Through serving the urgent needs of the community, ILPS members and allies heard the demands from the people and raised them to a political fight directly confronting LA City Government to bring forward these demands. In the immediate, the people need relief from the direct impacts of the fire, including hazard pay to essential workers. The people demand accountability and decry the failure of the government to properly address this crisis while spreading disorienting information that there are “those affected” and those “not affected” by the fires, when in fact everyone in the area and their loved ones are affected. The people also demand an end to the misallocation of resources, prioritizing the institutions like the police to repress the people while the city lacks necessary infrastructure. The destruction may be caused by the fire itself, but in the aftermath, people will be left without homes, without jobs, without access to quality healthcare, and the government must be pressured to deliver on these needs and end their longstanding neglect of LA residents. Unsurprisingly, LA City government continued to ignore the demands of people focusing instead on false narratives of “looters who need to be handled” and allowing the deployment of ICE to capitalize on the crisis to further attack working class and migrant communities.

The government has continuously neglected to mobilize its resources and infrastructure to support the people, and has failed to heed signs of the growing wildfire risk that community members and climate scientists have been warning about for years. Instead, Biden gave lip service to fighting climate change while offering more fossil fuel leases to energy corporations than any President before him, and then Trump dropped all falsities and pulled the US out of the UN Paris Climate Agreement on his first day in office. The climate crisis has only mattered to the ruling class when they can profit from disaster relief and green energy initiatives, and the LA wildfires are a dark reminder that the ruling class will sacrifice any number of the people  to cash in on their investments.

The lesson above all, however, is that it is through the people’s own efforts to address their situation that real legitimate change is possible. The wildfire itself may be natural, but it is the system that forces people to struggle every day to afford their basic necessities, that leaves the people suffering without housing and healthcare, that leaves people neglected through disaster. In fact, the fires themselves are part of the wave of climate disasters across the world caused by the non-stop plunder of peoples’ lands and natural resources for the profit of the ruling class. To truly address the long term impacts of the fire and build climate resilient communities, we must address the system at the root of all these issues: imperialism which can only be overthrown by building up a genuine mass movement to meet the needs of the people, empower our communities to make the change they desire, and ultimately win a socialist future!