By Humble_Humboldt. From https://racmag.substack.com/.
Preface: The text which follows consists of an introduction to an article I’d planned on uploading during the summer of last year yet never got around to completing. Given its (necessarily) provisional nature, of course, it leaves much to be desired in terms of content and style. Nonetheless, I believe it contains at least a few observations about this loathsome world we call ‘home’ which merit inclusion on this page. In addition, for the fellow writers among my readership, I include two scrapped paragraphs that conveyed the same essential ideas as the foregoing but in different ways. As for the future, I frankly don’t see myself contributing another piece to this substack ever again. I’d initially set out to use it as a platform for “raising consciousness” about Palestine when I assumed (however quixotically) that such a venture still meant anything; I am no longer so convinced. Although there are still many things you and I can and should do to ease the lot of the world’s exploited majority—protest, boycott, donate—obscure academic exercises such as this offer nothing to them. The blunt reality is that their suffering is escalating almost everywhere on the planet thinkable, and the historical subject needed to vanquish it (whether communist, secular nationalist, Islamist, etc) was already killed or coopted decades ago. I don’t mean to foreclose any possibilities prematurely; I cannot say the same for the capitalist world-system, however.
[…]
IN HIS CLASSIC 1998 ESSAY “THE CASE FOR LETTING MALIBU BURN,” the late Mike Davis drew a searing indictment of Los Angeles County’s Dickensian approach to urban fire control—which was to say, its near total absence in neighborhoods populated disproportionately by the poor. For the better part of a century, owing to a lethal union of faulty building codes and regulatory inertia, the City of Angels’ most underserved dwellings thus periodically transformed into concrete tinderboxes. Davis recounts the corresponding postmortems in grim detail: 120 dead in a hotel once billed as “fireproof”; eight bodies recovered from a quasi-nuclear Westlake blaze (including one pregnant woman who’d leapt from a third story window to her death); an entire family left to perish in a room starved for oxygen. In these cases and uncountable more, a person’s zip code determined far more than just their mailing address—it was an effective death warrant.
With that said, there was at least one class of Angelenos whose security from rogue combustion was awarded due notice. Only unlike the packed tenements of South Central, residents of coastal Malibu had walked (indeed, kept walking) themselves into a trap that was wholly unpreventable. As Davis showed conclusively—and as anyone familiar with the pyrodynamics of North American chaparral would agree—deadly wildfires are an unavoidable feature of colonization in the Santa Monica Mountains. This is because any domicile established in their path will inevitably have to reckon with the presence of both, (a): abundant and highly flammable brush and (b): a natural vector for transmitting what flames do emerge in the form of the Santa Ana winds. The upshot: a chain of blazes at least as destructive as those which have plagued LA’s urban interior, with the crucial—and paradoxical—caveat that orders of magnitude more resources have been deployed toward “fire prevention” in the former than the latter (in addition, of course, to the costs incurred in rebuilding Malibu’s lost palaces). What’s more, the ventures financed thereby rarely took aim at the actual culprit behind Malibu’s fire problem (i.e. excess chaparral), opting instead to wage class warfare against a nameless—and non-existent—cabal of inner-city arsonists.1 The (second) upshot: “‘[S]afety’ for the Malibu and Laguna coasts…is becoming one of the state’s major social expenditures, although—unlike welfare or immigration—it is almost never debated in terms of trade-offs or alternatives.”
Davis’ account of the above two wildly divergent fire regimes supplies a valuable object lesson in how capitalism deals with two forces which regularly threaten to upend its existence: risk and nature. We already have a good sense for how the first can exact significant—indeed, sometimes ruinous—damage. As rivalrous claims to the social product accumulate faster than this product itself, there must eventually come a point beyond which the web of promises holding them together gives way—hence, crisis.2 The second one, by contrast, is a bit harder to unravel. Though examples abound of natural disasters temporarily decommissioning certain capitals (only for them to usually end up replanting elsewhere), it isn’t nearly as common for us to read about them actually shutting down the system in one fell swoop. Part of this is to be expected, given the near-automatic response time between nodes in financial systems as compared to natural systems. Yet it also implies that our search would yield more fruitful results if we stopped regarding the Earth as (for lack of a better term) an autonomous force of nature and instead paid more attention to how its physical might is itself mediated by the language of risk. Davis’ essay is a case in point. Here we have a well-endowed coalition of homeowners and construction magnates whose implacable lust for development in the California chaparral carried with it a tremendous amount of personal risk. To defuse this risk (and thereby preempt a potential tax strike), county officials embarked on a snipe hunt to defy Malibu’s millennia-old fire ecology while gladly footing the bill every time disaster did strike. At the same time, these same officials’ chronic disregard for urban fire safety manufactured a new risk where none had previously existed, thus in effect “transferring” the hazards of beachfront settlement to the very people who could least afford to partake in it.
Of course, none of this is news to the people actually responsible for adjudicating the distribution of risk in capitalist economies. The field of actuarial science brims with examples exactly like Davis’ study, if on a much smaller scale, e.g. deprioritizing employees who are likely to die sooner than others. Where this impersonal triage becomes potentially more interesting is in the myriad ways in which it can become coded along lines of class, race, and gender. For instance, it was standard practice in American banking until recently for loan officers to automatically downgrade a woman’s creditworthiness on account of her presumed child-bearing capacity (even if she had no plans whatsoever to actually make use of this capacity in the near future). Part of this could be chalked up to sexism, though the more likely explanation lay in the dividends that stood to be reaped from simply assuming female clients would end up becoming pregnant at a moment when their reproductive autonomy was largely dictated by males—civil rights be damned. By a similar token, poor nations hoping to secure access to foreign investment must first prove their worth in the court of bondholder opinion before any creditor will even begin to consider underwriting a loan in their name. Anyone familiar with the history of IMF-imposed “structural adjustment” will already know what this proof usually consists of: slashing expenditures on education and healthcare to disastrous effect; lifting barriers to trade and thereby imperiling domestic industry; cracking down on residual labor militancy with brutal (sometimes deadly) force. As in the case of American banking, the goal of such unvarnished economic terror is to “de-risk” capital in places where its promise to deliver a minimum rate of return is legitimately under threat.3 Nor is the enforcement of this promise a matter of concern only for the people who have something to lose; in a significant way, it helps fortify the relations of trust that make capitalist production viable in the first place.
It should come as no surprise that de-risking tends to assume the utmost importance during periods of intense ecological rupture. After all, a basic sine qua non of capital is control over the spatial and temporal conditions of production, neither of which is attainable when “natural” (though usually also >0% man-made) forces throw a wrench into one or multiple stages of the valorization process, e.g. acquisition of raw materials, distribution, consumption, etc.4 Yet this doesn’t mean capital is afraid of engaging these forces in open combat. Far from it, in fact. As the example of Malibu shows us, there exists no blind logic—economic or geophysical—which can nullify the preferences of those who possess the dough to back them up, however suicidal these might be in practice. At the same time, the physical artifacts which capital deposits in the process have to be insured against any and all possible contingencies. The reasons for this extend far beyond the typical observations regarding “sunk costs” (important though these are). Beyond the simple financial calculus of recouping an investment after having poured substantial time and/or resources into it, the safeguarding of these artifacts itself protects the social order of which they form an aliquot part. The no less important corollary to this principle is that not all artifacts are insured equally. On the contrary, the choice of which ones merit advance protection and which ones don’t can tell us a great deal about the social distribution of risk at any given moment. This distribution can in turn refine our image of capital’s “battleplan,” including the physical faits accomplis which it regards as (and likely are) necessary for its operation.5
[…]
Two scrapped paragraphs:
In choosing to barter urban fire safety for the lives and property of LA’s nouveaux riches, county officials had effectively signed off the extermination of the poor as a fiscal cushion for development in the Santa Monicas. Yet unusually cruel though this arrangement may seem, it’s actually nothing foreign to the people responsible for adjudicating the distribution of risk in capitalist economies. As any actuary could tell you, the very concept of insurance hinges on channeling resources from low-risk individuals to high-risk ones, the latter of whom tend (logically) to be far less common than the former. But what was it about the reclamation of the Malibu coast that made it intrinsically more risky than so many combustible shantytowns? In actuality, nothing; what truly mattered for county officials’ calculus wasn’t who was more likely to suffer harm but rather whose harm was more likely to upend the social order of LA. And when compared to the orchestrators of southern California’s great symphony of exploitation, the million or so nameless victims of this drama must have seemed like bit players indeed.
Of course, the normalization of mass killing as a background condition of modernity isn’t the exclusive province of LA County. Indeed, as several analysts have already noted, one of the ongoing climate crisis’ most epic feats has been to replicate pre-existing inter/intranational disparities in mortality on the scale of global weather systems. Yet what sometimes gets overlooked amid this dizzying carnage is the latter’s precise opposite: the unknowable opulence which certain sectors of humanity have been able to cash in as a result of so many others’ agony. Indeed, part of what keeps the machinery of global immiseration spinning is the need to defend precisely this opulence.
1 - This is certainly not to suggest that municipal authorities would have been any more successful if they had targeted chaparral.
2 - This is the basic formula for every major (endogenous) crisis that has struck global capitalism since its inception, from 1830 to 2008. Exogenous crises like COVID are the exceptions that prove the rule, though bourgeois states have frequently retooled the methods they usually reserve for endogenous crises to handle these as well. See Berry, “The asset economy under Covid: from the K-shaped recovery to the Latin village,” autonomy.work, 28 March, 2022.
3 - As of recent, the term “de-risking” has most often been used to refer to the practice of governments compensating investors whenever the projects they help finance fail to deliver a satisfactory rate of return through private consumption alone. Though such efforts have done little to advance development in the (overwhelmingly poor) countries that utilize them, they have exacted a considerable toll on the economic well-being of their citizens. See Gambor and Sylla, “Planting budgetary time-bombs in West Africa: the Macron Doctrine En Marche,” CADTM.org, 14 January, 2021.
4 - Or as explained by Marx in his Appendix to Capital vol. 1: “On the other hand, however, it is only on the basis of capitalist production that the commodity becomes the general form of the product, that every product must take on the commodity form, that sale and purchase seize control not only of the surplus of production but of its very substance, and that the various conditions of production themselves emerge in their totality as commodities which go into the production process from circulation” [emphasis mine].
5 - [2025 Humboldt speaking]: to help craft such a battleplan yourself, check out the following texts:
- “The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth,”
- “Militarized Global Apartheid,”
- Where Shrimp Eat Better than People: Globalized Fisheries, Nutritional Unequal Exchange, and Asian Hunger, Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work,
- “Nexus dynamics: the impact of environmental vulnerabilities and climate change on refugee camps,”
- “‘Bombable geographies’ and the international Monroe: a global south history of the unwilling or unable standard,”
- “Emergence, Development, and Impact of Population Displacement in Damascus During Syria’s Civil War.”
🔻 2025 Humble_Humboldt. All rights waived for the third world. No rights granted to the imperial core or its collaborators.