“It’s like being in a disaster movie”, was the way that one person put it when asked how he felt about the recent wave of floods that have decimated large areas of Spain’s eastern coastline near Valencia. This event has been described by Pedro Sanchez, Spain’s president, as “the worst natural disaster in our country’s recent history” and the second deadliest European flood of the century. It has led to the biggest peacetime mobilisation of the Spanish military.
The scale of the destruction is immense. It is estimated, so far, that 90,000 vehicles have been destroyed, 4,500 businesses premises destroyed and 90 schools damaged or destroyed. The current death toll stands at 214 and hundreds remain unaccountable. The Economist magazine estimates the cost of the disaster to be around $31bn, more than three times the annual budget of the Valencian regional government.
This disaster will have a profound and enduring effect on Spanish politics in exposing the failure of its politicians to keep its people safe as well, as their inability to prevent such a disaster from occurring in the first place. It is not simply the role of individual politicians that is being called into question but the capitalist system itself. As with all major disasters it will pose the question; what changes are required to ensure that such a catastrophe does not repeat itself and why were the authorities not better prepared? Socialists must ensure that the class issues are at the heart of that debate as well as the need to transform society along socialist lines.
Flooding on an unimagined scale
Following the recent floods in Spain, the scenes in many Valencian villages were more reminiscent of a Hollywood disaster movie than tranquil Spanish villages. “I can’t tell you what happened here,” said one local resident, Carmen Aleixandre, featured in a Guardian (London) report from 31st October. “I just don’t have the words to describe it.” Further reports describe how, “People were very happy at first because they’d been praying for rain as their lands needed water,” said Remedios, who owns a bar in Utiel, Valencia. “But by 12 o’clock, this storm had really hit, and we were all pretty terrified.”
Trapped in the bar, she and a handful of her customers watched as Spain’s worst flooding in almost 30 years caused the Magro River to break its banks, trapping some residents in their homes and sending cars and rubbish bins surging through the streets on muddy flood waters. Floodwaters surged into people’s houses, washing away whole buildings.
“The rising waters brought mud and stones with them, and they were so strong that they broke the surface of the road,” said Remedios.
“The tunnel that leads into the town was half-full of mud, trees were down and there were cars and rubbish containers rolling down the streets. My outside terrace has been destroyed – the chairs and shades were all swept away. It’s just a disaster.”
Two days afterwards the mud was still calf-deep in places and the streets littered with wrecked cars and other detritus. Whole areas of the region of Valencia became cut off. They were left without electricity, without access to drinking water or food, without access to healthcare and public transport. Roads that were no longer rivers of water were made impassable due to the debris that the storm had left in its wake and whole bridges had been swept away adding further to the difficulties. It was as if the state had ceased to exist within a few short hours. As one resident put it, “it was like waking up in Afghanistan.”
To take in the scale of the disaster, in a mere few hours, more rain was dumped on areas of Valencia than normally fall in one year. “Events of this type, which used to occur many decades apart, are now becoming more frequent and their destructive capacity is greater,” said Dr Ernesto Rodríguez Camino, a senior state meteorologist and member of the Spanish Meteorological Association.
What happened in Valencia may have been the result of a freak weather phenomena known as gota fria but this was anything but a simple natural disaster. This human tragedy was caused by a corrupt, profit hungry system and its effects made worse by the criminal politicians who act in the interests of the capitalist system rather than the people they claim to serve.
Climate change is global
Scientists from the World Weather Attribution group have previously confirmed that as temperatures rise further, western and central Europe will be exposed to increasing extreme rainfall and flooding. The group previously found that the recent “heat dome” in North America would have been almost impossible without climate change and that the heatwave in Siberia in 2020 and the 2019-20 Australian bushfires were also made more likely by global heating. These events bring with them deadly consequences, but they also pose the need for political action.
World Weather Attribution has also shown how much more intense and likely storms, droughts, floods and fires have become because of climate disruption. These events include the late summer flooding in the Sudan, Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon that killed more than 2,000 people and displaced millions; the torrents that left at least 244 dead in Nepal from 26-28 September; the floods in the south of Brazil that took more than 169 lives earlier in the year; and the devastating hurricanes – particularly Helene and Milton – in the US that killed 360 people and caused more than $100bn of damage. Then there are also the apoplectic images of the recent typhoons which wreaked havoc across large parts of South Asia.
Extreme weather patterns are no longer freak occurrences but are increasingly becoming the norm. The negative effects of climate disruption are born mainly by the working class and rural poor, which result in homelessness, destitution and death. The Spanish floods are another tragic event to add to this global list of disasters.
Non-profit forecaster Climate Central has made similar findings. They recently commented that disasters such as the weather front DANA, which devastated parts of Valencia, is between 50 and 300 times more likely to occur due to warming sea temperatures which, when combined with cooler air moving over its surface, cause a significant increase in cloud moisture retention which is then released when it passes over land.
This shows how urgent it is to ensure that we fight for change but only a complete transformation of society along socialist lines will enable us to bring about genuine change. A democratic plan of production would allow us to decide what we produce and how we produce it, taking into consideration its effects on the environment, and it would also need to prioritise questions of safety in that process.
System failure, anger against politicians and royalty
In the wake of the disaster Spain’s pro capitalist politicians have started to engage in a blame game. Spain’s PSOE (‘Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party’ – a social democratic party) government has blamed the PP (People’s Party – a right wing conservative party) controlled Valencian Regional government for not raising the alarm earlier to facilitate safe evacuation. Spain’s weather authority, AEMET, had issued clear warnings concerning the severity of the storm, its timing and its potential for damage and risk to life. It did so at 8am on the day of the storm yet no warnings were sent out telling people to remain at home until 8pm in the evening!
The Spanish government has defended its decision not to immediately declare a state of emergency by claiming that it did not want to go over the head of the regional Valencian government. For these well protected capitalist politicians the constitutional niceties were apparently more important than the risk to the lives of ordinary Valencians. In turn, the Valencian government blames the national government for not acting more decisively, claiming that they had more resources at their disposal than the regional authority. The reality is that the inaction exposes the uselessness of both national and regional governments alike which resulted in deadly consequences.
The PSOE president, Pedro Sanchez, belatedly called on people to stay at home by which time many Valencians no longer had a home to go to! There were no attempts by Sanchez or Mazón (the Valencian regional president) to ensure that hotels were requisitioned, even temporarily, to accommodate those who had been made homeless. Neither has there been any attempts to requisition food from the multinational companies to feed those who are currently unable to provide food for themselves and their families. There is no reason why the task of transporting food, as well as other urgently required provisions, could be undertaken by the large transport companies and supermarket chains in conjunction with local authorities and neighbourhood committees. Yet neither Sanchez nor his Valencian PP counterpart, Mazón, have taken any of these initiatives. Sanchez’s empty phrases confirming his love for the people of Valencia and telling them that the state is with them does little to reassure the beleaguered Valencian people or provide them with the sustenance they require.
The main priorities of the PP government in Valencia were exposed by the fact that on the day of the storm, they preferred to spend time in the Valencian Cortes by approving a reduction in the minimum distance that hotels could be built from the beach rather than assessing what they could do to ensure the safety of residents threatened by the rising floodwater. Their main interests were clearly commercial, in seeking to maximise the profit for the building companies and major Hotel chains rather than focus on the immediate risk to life which many workers were facing.
The PP government in Valencia were further exposed by their failure to act in the interests of workers whose safety was put in jeopardy. No orders were given for workers to return home safely while they could, and plans were not put in place for them to be evacuated to a safe place. This meant that many workers returned home from work at the worst moment of the storm. The clear priority for people like the Valencian president Carlos Mazón was for workers to continue to work. This has caused real anger not just directed towards the politicians but also bosses of large businesses, such as the supermarket chain Mercadona owned by Spanish billionaire, Juan Roig. During the storm, Mercadona lorries continued to attempt deliveries. Many of these lorries were subsequently stranded unnecessarily risking the lives of those drivers. Some of these lorries were captured in video clips showing them desperately trying to avoid being swept away by the rising flood waters. Following on from this, Roig was shouted at and accosted by angry shoppers when he was spotted in one of his supermarkets in the aftermath of the floods.
Cuts both national and local have also taken a terrible toll and the pro capitalist politicians who implemented them must be held accountable for this. These cuts have prevented the state from responding in a way that would have significantly reduced the worst effects of the floods.
Mazón, with the support of the far right Vox party, scrapped his predecessor’s plan to set up a regional agency, UME, for handling emergencies. Mazón characterised this project as a useless invention to satisfy the trade unions and claimed that it was another unnecessary expansion of the public sector.
Sanchez has blamed extreme right wing groups for expressing hostility to political leaders and has accused them of whipping up the mood. This is nothing more than an attempt to distract attention from real problems, and particularly his own responsibility in this affair. Some elements of the extreme right wing were present, but the anger expressed towards the politicians was genuine. Any attempt by PSOE to point the finger of blame at the extreme right is only likely to exacerbate tensions and further alienate any lingering support that they might have.
Attempts by politicians and Spanish royalty to show support for victims by visiting the flood damaged areas spectacularly backfired. News reports showed unprecedented scenes of anger as the King, Queen, President and Valencian leaders were pelted with mud and told to leave. Some in the crowd shouted, “You are four days too late!” and “you are to blame!”. One young 16 year old was shown shouting at the King, “You have abandoned us!” With tears streaming down his face, he told the king how the task of rescuing people had fallen on the shoulders of ordinary people without any help from the state. He described how these exhausted volunteers had to undertake the heart breaking task of pulling out the dead from trapped cars and collapsed buildings. Now they were cleaning up the area, distributing food and water, and transporting the sick to hospitals and health centres. He also explained that they could not possibly go back to work or school until they had completed their work – working people were taking decisions into their own hands, not relying on the state nor waiting for their instructions.
The sense of abandonment goes hand in hand with a mood of huge anger. Yet alongside the despair there is obvious solidarity. Many of the tasks of daily life are being discharged by local groups of people. This marvellous display of self-organisation together with anger towards the pro-capitalist politicians terrifies the establishment far more than the devastating effects of the floods. The callous inaction of the state and the brutal determination of the capitalists to continue with production, despite the severity of the storm and obvious risk to life, provide a very telling contrast to the thousands of volunteers who have come forward to help fix the problem, acting under the direction of local neighbourhood committees.
Amid a disaster this gives us a glimpse of how the working class can organise itself. If the working class can so successfully undertake the tasks of organising society under such difficult circumstances, why could they not continue to do so once the immediate crisis of the floods has subsided? In this way self-organisation represents an enormous threat to the role of the capitalist state. It is also the reason why the capitalist class have attempted to discredit it.
Role of the capitalist media
This genuinely popular response to the disaster in Valencia has sent shock waves across the bourgeoisie, as they have gone into overdrive by enrolling the capitalist media in attacking this “Dad’s army” of volunteers. They clearly fear that the mood might catch on. Hypocritically Spain’s main daily, El Pais, made appeals for people not to “abandon the institutions” when it was the other way round!
Another newspaper, the so-called liberal El Diario, even went as far as to attack the beleaguered flood victims by suggesting that that they only had themselves to blame for electing such a right wing incompetent government. No mention was made of the previous years when PSOE administration was in power or the legacy of cuts and pro-capitalist policies, which contributed to the rise of the conservative PP and the extreme right wing party Vox, who currently govern the Valencian region.
The Spanish El Mundo went one further by taking photos of people taking food and water from a supermarket in an attempt to criminalise local people. These people were not looters; they were trying to stay alive in a period of exceptional crisis. Many of these individuals were redistributing food and water. These media outlets were effectively criminalizing victims of a disaster whilst providing a distraction from failure of the real criminals, capitalist class and their system.
Roles of the trade unions
The risk to the safety of workers both at work and on their journey home not only shines a light on the class loyalties of the pro-capitalist politicians, but it also raises questions about the role of the trade union Leaders. What role did they play in fighting for workers safety during this tragedy?
There is no indication that the trade union leaders made any concerted attempt to organise workers or give them confidence not to undertake dangerous journeys or tasks which would put their safety at risk. Many workers by themselves, especially in smaller workplaces, would lack the confidence to take decisive action in these circumstances. It is precisely for this reason that it is so important to fight to elect fighting socialist trade union leaders who are not intimidated by the bosses, as well as building strong workplace unions.
Had there been a firm lead given by the leaders of the main unions, such as the UGT and CCOO, the outcome of this tragedy could have been very different. Instructions could have been issued for workers not to attend work and to move to a place of safety at an early stage. Efforts could have been coordinated in conjunction with local authorities. Safe evacuation plans at work could have been executed and safe spaces reserved for workers who could not travel safely. Had the trade unions shown a serious attitude to protection of life as opposed to the role played by the bosses whose priority was to protect business this could have transformed the situation. By taking the lead in this way the trade unions could have enormously enhanced their role as well, as strengthening the confidence of the working class to take on the bosses not simply on the issues of safety but also on issues such as pay, working hours and conditions of work. It would also have posed more starkly the need for a genuine party of workers, as opposed to the current crop of pro-capitalist politicians were shown to be completely untrustworthy and in league with the bosses. The anger that has erupted in the aftermath of the floods as well as the self-organisation of the thousands of volunteers, clearly shows the potential to forge a political movement to challenge the existing capitalist politicians.
Mazon must resign, no confidence in capitalist politicians, Elections now!
Massive protests and demonstrations have been planned which call for the resignation of the incompetent and hated Valencian president Mazon. However, these need to be accompanied by strikes and threats of further strikes, should the demands of the movement not be met.
The Left must help to provide a political alternative, uniting neighbourhood committees bringing them together not just to organise, clear up but also to develop a programme to take over the wealth that exists in society to plan resources in the interests of the millions rather than the billionaires like Roig. An independent worker’s inquiry needs to take place to expose the criminal role played by the employers and politicians.
An enormous programme of rebuilding will need to be undertaken to repair the damage done by the floods. Just as the capitalist politicians could not be trusted to save people’s lives, they cannot be trusted with the task of rebuilding or the urgent planning to prevent further disasters causing such misery and loss of life. However, to execute these tasks some form of democratic worker’s organisation will be necessary. None of the existing parties or organisations have shown they are capable of this task yet the self-organisation of local people in Valencia in response to the floods show what is necessary and possible.
Freak weather events bring increased risk to life and property, and this is exacerbated by the pro-capitalist politicians who tinker at the edges but refuse to dismantle a system which they are wedded to. The only effective way to successfully combat the deadly effects of climate change is to abolish the capitalist system which is the root cause. To abolish this system, the working class has a key role to play in building new workers’ parties and militant trade unions, armed with a socialist programme both in Spain and internationally. Fighting climate change must be a central part of that programme.
