Life & Times: An everyday story? (2024)

The Life and Times column from the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

I’m not a soap opera fan. But I do make one exception: the Archers. I’ve tuned into it more or less daily for years and – though I’ve sometimes found the story lines ridiculous, trivial or far-fetched, and have vowed to stop listening, I still find myself drawn back to the goings-on in the fictitious village of Ambridge, to its improbable cast of characters, and to what the BBC used to call ‘an everyday story of country folk’.

Though rarely referencing current news events, the programme has in more recent times taken to including among its story lines ongoing issues of broad social interest. Examples have been drug dealing, coercive control, modern slavery, alcoholism, and, most recently, the crime of perverting the course of justice as committed by one of its teenage characters, George Grundy. George had always been a problematic young man, causing trouble for himself and those around him, but then he took it to a whole new level. He found himself driving a drunken Alice home in her car and when it crashed, endangering the lives of people in an oncoming car. He moved his torpid, inebriated passenger into the driver’s seat to evade responsibility and incriminate her. It worked for quite some time, but then the truth came out and, despite his genuine remorse about what he had done and how it had affected other people’s lives, he was sent down for three years by a stern, unforgiving judge – a sentence perfectly permissible in law.

Before the fictional court proceedings, online discussion abounded among Archers fans about the likely sentence with most seeming to favour a suspended sentence and/or community service, especially given his guilty plea, his repentance and the fact that it was a first offence and no one was seriously hurt in the incident. In fact George had actually put himself at risk by rescuing from the river the people in the car he’d crashed into. But the judge was implacable, and a fearful, desperate George was sent to a prison for older criminals since all young offenders’ institutions were full. This gave rise to much further discussion and protest among listeners. But there was nothing to be done. The law had spoken.

Obviously, the Archers is a fiction. Yet stories like this do shed light on aspects of the way the society we all live in is organised. Most crimes committed in this society are to do with property or money in one form or another – theft, robbery, fraud, etc. Some of these manifestly cause pain, misery or loss to others. Some do not in the sense that when large institutions (banks, building societies, etc) are affected, there are no manifest individual victims. But in all cases, if the perpetrators are found, the system inflicts punishment on them because a society based on property and money cannot allow ‘illegal’ methods of procuring those things to take place without the threat of such punishment. Otherwise the whole basis of that system would risk being undermined. But does a society, even one based on property and money, need to punish those who violate its norms not by stealing or such like but by what can broadly be called antisocial behaviour, in George’s case, for example, trying to blame someone else for your own misdeed?

Well, certain countries, for instance Denmark and New Zealand, practise what is called restorative justice, whereby individuals who commit antisocial acts are asked to face their victims, discuss with them what they have done, and ideally to understand, empathise with them and work with them to repair the harm – and then hopefully to learn lessons for the future. And even in the UK, some courts and judges take the view that, if there is genuine remorse and understanding on the part of an offender who has behaved in an antisocial fashion, a suspended sentence or work in the community is a better solution than locking that person away. Of course, any such solution is always an individual one, since the social and economic inequalities inherent in the system of society we live under – capitalism – and its dog-eat-dog mentality will always provide a fertile breeding ground for what is known as ‘crime’, even if, despite that, most people most of the time exhibit a natural inclination to help rather than to harm others.

This leads on naturally to thoughts of what the situation will be in the moneyless society of voluntary work and free access to all goods and services that socialists advocate and work to bring about. Clearly in that society theft and other ‘property crime’ will be obsolete. There will be no point in ‘stealing’ what is readily available to all. Also, since it will be a society without the coercion of wage and salary work with each member simply working according to their ability and taking according to their needs, we would expect there to be essentially positive connections between its members. However, it would probably be naïve to imagine that it will be a society entirely without personal conflicts or even violent confrontations between individuals. But if such there were and resolution needed to be found, surely this would be in terms of the kind of restorative practice we have already seen happening at least on a small scale even under the current system, so that genuinely repentant or remorseful individuals are given a ‘second chance’ and punishment such as removal of liberty is only considered if that proves unsuccessful.

George in the Archers was not given that ‘second chance’. So when he gets out of prison, will the troublemaker return to Ambridge a reformed character, or will he just continue as before and keep carrying out ‘antisocial’ acts of one kind or another? If what is known to usually happen in the real world is realistically reflected in the Archers, then the second of these options is the more likely. But time will tell.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: Climate of crisis (2024)

The Pathfinders Column from the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

You might think, given much of the news last month, that the howler monkeys had taken over the zoo. Some of Donald Trump’s executive appointments were widely viewed as stark raving bonkers. Matt Gaetz, ‘the most investigated man in the United States Congress’, suspected of underage sex and sex-trafficking, and friend of far-right conspiracy nuts and Holocaust deniers, was made attorney general. Tulsi Gabbard, avowedly anti-Nato and allegedly pro-Moscow, was made director of national intelligence, prompting critics to suggest that in future there won’t be any. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who sacked the janitors at Twitter so workers had to bring their own toilet rolls, has been given a job to cut state spending. And the president-elect put Robert F Kennedy, the vaccine sceptic and 5G conspiracy nut, in charge of the Food and Drug Administration, Medicare, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ‘That sound that you just heard was my jaw dropping, hitting the floor and rolling out of the door,’ as one professor put it.

In the words of the Economist, Trump is an aroma many people don’t want to sniff. His attitude to the ‘climate hoax’ is also well known. He is fully expected to pull the country out of the Paris Agreement once again, just as the latest UN report announced that, far from restricting warming below 1.5 or even 2.0°, the world is on track to warm by 2.6 to 3.2°. The likelihood of the world’s biggest fossil-fuel producer bolting for the door and leaving everyone else holding the bag may well have overshadowed the two COP meetings that took place last month, as participating states must have calculated that if the USA bailed, then probably China would follow, leading a stampede of ‘every state for itself’. COP16 met in Cali, Colombia to discuss ways to preserve biodiversity in the face of what is being called the sixth mass extinction on Earth, but broke up in chaos. Then COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan started badly with its own chief executive being caught on film making oil deals, the country’s president calling their gas resources ‘a gift from God’, and fossil-linked lobbyists outnumbering the delegates, making the event look like a mafia-led War on Drugs initiative. No wonder a former UN secretary general and a former UN climate chief have written to the UN saying that the COP climate talks are ‘no longer fit for purpose’. And all this just after the publication of the 2024 State of the Climate Report, which begins: ‘We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperilled’.

Something else Trump has no time for is the World Health Organization, which has since the last pandemic been attempting to negotiate a collective global accord in time for the next pandemic, but which last month also failed to reach agreement. The reason for the failure is the same reason the climate talks never get very far, and it’s not Trump, it’s the capitalist competitive market system. The 194 WHO member states certainly understand that the next pandemic is a matter of when, not if. They know perfectly well that they don’t want to be caught with their pants down and unable to react, like last time. So they have every reason on Earth to cooperate. But they just can’t. For one thing, poorer countries can’t afford to scale up their health facilities, meaning richer countries would have to foot the bill, a big ask given their many other financial commitments. An even more pressing issue is the transfer of technology for vaccine development and production, part of the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing System (PABS). Poorer countries want PABS to be mandatory (of course), but the WHO is an entirely voluntary scheme, and big countries are reluctant to bear all the R&D costs only to give away their valuable intellectual property for nothing. They are insisting on merely giving away a certain percentage free, and a further percentage at cost price, a proposal that infuriates poor countries who are invariably on the sharp end of diseases like Ebola, bird flu and Mpox. Negotiations are further stalled on the establishment of the Global Supply Chain and Logistics Network, which is intended ‘to facilitate equitable, timely and affordable access to pandemic-related health products.’ All parties are agreed that this is highly desirable and in everyone’s collective interest, but squabbling continues over just one word, ‘unhindered’, to go in front of the word ‘access’. Once again, poorer countries obviously want this, while rich countries are afraid to cut their own pharma industries off at the knees.

When you consider the world’s urgent and existential need to mitigate climate change, halt a mass extinction, and prevent the next pandemic, and that instead of acting, countries always end up paralysed by the competing requirements of the market, you realise that capitalism as a planetary management system is about as helpful as Superman building his own kryptonite factory.

But since it would be unseasonal to end on a sour note, a recent study found that the news might not be entirely as bad as you think it is, and that there has been an ‘increase in media coverage of crises, but not in the number of crises’. Researchers looked at news articles from The Times, going back to 1785, along with parallel studies of the Guardian, Economist and others, and concluded that there has been a notable increase in ‘crisis rhetoric’ rather than in actual crises, and not for the usual reason that ‘if it bleeds, it leads’. They pin the blame on ‘intensified crisis PR’ from pressure groups, better public education creating a more acute perception of crises, and a proliferation of politicised media outlets. But crisis or not, we’re definitely going round in circles, even if not quite circling the drain.

Paddy Shannon

Marx was right about workers and wages (2024)

From the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

In an article for Mises Wire on 14 September a certain Allen Gindler sets out his view as to ‘Why Marx Was Wrong about Workers and Wages’.

We are told that ‘the Marxist approach to labor, which treats it as a commodity to be controlled by the state, is fundamentally flawed and dangerous to human liberty’. But Marx never advocated that, in a socialist society, ‘labour’ should be a commodity controlled by the state. In fact, he thought that in socialism ‘labour power’ should cease to be a commodity — something bought and sold on a market — and endorsed the slogan ‘Abolition of the Wages System’. The very fact that the wages system features in ‘ostensibly Marxist societies’ such as ‘the Soviet Union, China under Mao, and Cuba’ shows that they were not the sort of society that Marx envisaged replacing capitalism. They would more accurately be described as forms of ‘state-run capitalism’, but certainly not socialism.

‘By labour power or capacity for labour,’ wrote Marx, ‘is to be understood the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any description’ (Capital, chapter 6).

This is a human capacity which exists in all forms of human society — humans work, and must work, to produce the useful things they need to survive. It is part of the human condition.

Labour power is not the same as ‘labour’ which is the product resulting from the exercise of human labour power:

‘When we speak of capacity for labour, we do not speak of labour, any more than when we speak of capacity for digestion, we speak of digestion’ (chapter 6).

‘What economists therefore call value of labour, is in fact the value of labour-power, as it exists in the personality of the labourer, which is as different from its function, labour, as a machine is from the work it performs’ (chapter 19).

Under capitalism labour power is bought and sold and so is treated as a commodity, even if a peculiar one. Gindler cites Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation as arguing that labour power is a ‘fictitious commodity’ in the sense that ‘it is not produced for sale but is an inherent aspect of human life’. He misses Polanyi’s point which is not that it is a mistake to call labour power a commodity but that he was criticiszing such ‘an inherent aspect of human life’ being treated as a commodity, as something bought and sold on a market. Marx himself made the same point.

Similarly, Marx would not have disagreed with Mises himself that ‘labor cannot be treated as a commodity in the same way as goods and services because it is intrinsically linked to human choice and action.’ Textually, Marx wrote that ‘in contradistinction therefore to the case of other commodities, there enters into the determination of the value of labour-power a historical and moral element’. In fact, the whole Marxian concept of the economic class struggle is based on the purveyors of labour power being humans who choose and act and struggle to get the highest price for what they are selling and to be treated with some degree of dignity.

This distinction between ‘labour power’ and ‘labour’ is fundamental to Marx’s theory of wages and surplus value, but Gindler seems to be completely unaware of this, using the two words interchangeably as if they meant the same. He writes:

‘If labor power is a commodity, it is a very strange one indeed. According to Marx, this commodity is always sold below its value. In other words, workers are constantly selling their ability to work for less than it is worth, generating surplus value for the capitalist. But this raises a fundamental question: if labor is a commodity, why is it the only commodity that is consistently sold below its cost?’

In his writings on the economics of capitalism in the 1840s before Capital was published in 1867, Marx did accept the general view then prevailing amongst opponents of capitalism that workers were exploited through being forced to sell their ‘labour’ below its proper price. But further research and thought in the 1850s led him to make a distinction between labour power and its product (labour), and this is the view he puts in Capital. What workers sell is their labour power and, normally, at its value reflecting what it cost to create (what workers have to buy to keep themselves in working order and raise future workers to replace them in due course).

Marx’s theory of worker exploitation is based precisely on workers selling their labour power at its value. Surplus value arises as the difference between the value of labour power and the value of what workers produce. Actually, Gindler got it right in his opening paragraph when he wrote that ‘Marx argues that, under capitalism, workers are forced to sell their labor power to capitalists, who exploit them by paying wages that are less than the full value their labor produces’.

Gindler is not alone in mistakenly thinking that what workers sell for wages is their labour. It was made by all economists before (and in fact after) Marx. He tries to prove his point by introducing a self-employed plumber:

‘A plumber who owns their own tools and operates independently does not sell their labor power to a capitalist; instead they provide a service directly to customers and charge a fee for their work.’

According to him, in Marxist theory ‘this self-employed plumber would somehow be selling their labor power below its value’. But he had just said that the plumber does not sell his labour power! In fact, what self-employed plumbers sell is a commodity (their plumbing work) in which their labour is embodied and at a price which covers its cost of production plus the extra value their labour added. They get the full value of what they are selling.

Gindler apparently thinks that employed workers are in the same sort of position as a self-employed worker; that employed workers are each selling the product of their labour to their employer and getting the full price for it. Leaving aside the question of where, then, would the employer’s profits come from, Gindler needs to ask himself why self-employed plumbers sell their product at a higher price than the price that employed plumbers get from their employer for supposedly selling the same product. The embarrassing answer for him is that self-employed plumbers are selling the product of their labour while employed plumbers are selling their labour power with the product of their labour appropriated by their employer.

Adam Buick

Material World: Poverty and taxing the rich (2024)

The Material World column from the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Oxfam regularly publishes reports about global poverty. Its most recent one points to how ‘the richest 1% have more wealth than the bottom 95% of the world’s population put together’. It accuses the ‘ultra wealthy and powerful corporations of tax dodging and exercising monopoly control of important products such as Covid vaccines to increase profitability’. As a result, it goes on, the pandemic has resulted in the emergence of at least 40 new vaccine billionaires. The charity complains that its efforts to reduce world poverty are being undermined by large corporations and the ultra-rich who, with their control over the global economy, are responsible for exacerbating problems like extreme inequality and climate change. In an interview with the Voice of America (VOA) radio network, Nabil Ahmed, director of economic and racial justice at Oxfam America, states: ‘The wealth of the world’s five richest men has doubled since the start of this decade. And nearly five billion people have got poorer’.

So what does this report, as well as others produced by Oxfam, advocate to tackle the problems it carefully documents and makes public? As often before, Oxfam puts emphasis on what it calls ‘fair taxes’. To be precise, it calls for ‘fairer taxation of large corporations and the ultra-wealthy’. In his VOA interview, Nabil Ahmed is quoted as saying: ‘We live in a world in which mega-corporations are paying next to or little to no tax’. They are, he says, ‘shaping the rules in their favour … at the expense of ordinary people’ and ‘fuelling inequality within and between countries’. He argues that governments should ‘claw back’ revenues from the rich ‘to be able to invest in their people, to be able to meet their rights’.

Superficially such an approach may seem sensible and desirable, and the Oxfam report praises a campaign proposed by Brazil’s government in favour of a 2 percent minimum tax on the world’s richest billionaires. This, it claims would raise up to $250 billion from around 3,000 individuals and would pay for food, healthcare, education and tackling climate change. However, this fails to consider several crucial factors. First of all, any ‘extra’ taxation money raised by governments from their capitalist class is just as likely to be used to pay off state debt as to help workers or to ease climate change. Then, more importantly, it will always be impossible for governments collectively to agree to universal tax levies, largely because they will all be looking to carry out their duty of encouraging ‘growth’ in their own country at the expense of other states and of supporting their own capitalist class at the expense of others. Nor is the capitalist system as a whole controlled by individual governments or by governments collectively, and disagreements easily break out between them as they seek to defend their own ‘patch’ in the world of competition and profit – something we see happening in many places right now.

It is no surprise, therefore, that, while the Brazil proposal apparently has the support of some countries, for example South Africa, France and Spain, it is opposed by others, including the United States, whose treasury secretary Janet Yellen stated at a G20 meeting last July: ‘Tax policy is very difficult to coordinate globally and we don’t see a need or really think it’s desirable to try to negotiate a global agreement on that’. So a solution along the lines suggested by Oxfam to tax the mega-rich and cancel debt burdens seems in fact little more than a well-meaning pipe dream.

And we can also see that, since the 1980s, when Oxfam changed its approach from being a mere money-collector to putting a lot more effort and resources into trying to offer explanations (if not always well founded) as to the causes of world hunger and deprivation, not a great deal has changed. Oxfam continues to devote considerable time and effort into proposing what it sees as explanations for the ills afflicting society, but, unfortunately, it still can’t come up with viable remedies. This is not for want of trying but because it fails to pinpoint the fundamental cause of those ills, which is that, in the system we live under, profit will in the end always trump need. And governments, no matter what their intentions, can never remedy that, since they are the system’s servants not its masters.

What is needed is a switch in perception, a new consciousness, not by the super-rich or governments but by the majority of those who have to sell our energies for a wage or salary – ie, most of us. This is a switch that will enable humanity as a whole to see the necessity of organising things differently, of using the resources of the whole planet sanely and rationally and in the interests of all its inhabitants – on the basis, that is, of a classless, worldwide society without frontiers which produces goods and services cooperatively and solely for human need not profit.

Howard Moss

Slicing the pork barrel thin (2024)

From the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Labour Party’s new autumn budget, presented by Chancellor Rachel Reeves, has made notable changes to universal credit and other benefits. However, these updates have raised concerns for vulnerable communities.

We’ve been speaking with people currently on benefits, universal credit, and Personal Independence Payments (PIP) about their experiences in the UK today.

Claire, 35, who transitioned from ESA to universal credit and works part-time in administration in Sheffield, is disabled due to genetic and autoimmune conditions. She also receives PIP. Claire says ‘The job centre is horrible; it’s not set up to support disabled people properly. They lack time, resources, and training.’

Toni, 44, is self-employed in events management in London, but her part-time universal credit isn’t enough. ‘I was fine when I worked in Europe; my business thrived for nearly a decade. But since Brexit, the cost of living crisis, and COVID, my business has tanked. Event venues are closing, and there are no opportunities for those without access to Europe. I have no options unless I retrain at my age!’

Starting in April 2025, benefits including universal credit will rise by just 1.7 percent. This means only a few extra pounds per month for claimants who have been struggling to make ends meet from one capitalist crisis to the next.

Claire believes the support is inadequate for disabled individuals wanting to work, saying it falls short of previous options like disabled tax credits, which provided more effective assistance.

Reeves announced a cap on universal credit deductions for debt repayments, lowering it from 25 percent to 15 percent of the standard allowance. This aims to ease financial pressure for over a million households, potentially saving them around £420 a year.

‘It’s disheartening,’ Claire reflects, on her feeling of alienation from society. When asked about the impact on her mental health, she added, ‘Yes, the challenges of universal credit deepen my sense of isolation.’

Toni feels society has abandoned her: ‘I worked hard for years and paid into the system, but when COVID hit, my business got no help. I was dumped on the dole and left to fend for myself, which only makes me feel more alienated’.

Claire adds ‘They’re just continuing the previous government’s policies. I didn’t agree with them then, and I still don’t. The system doesn’t support disabled people or consider different levels of disability.’

They’re also concerned about the new measure allowing the DWP direct access to bank accounts. This approach to combating fraud feels like a surveillance tactic that will erode trust among unemployed workers. What they feel they need are real job opportunities, not increased government intrusion into their lives.

Labour will uphold the Conservatives’ reforms to the work capability assessment, making it harder for disabled workers to qualify for the highest level of incapacity benefits. This could affect over 420,000 people, resulting in a loss of about £5,000 in annual support for many.

A new £240 million ‘Get Britain Working’ initiative aims to provide work, skills, and health support for people with disabilities and long-term health conditions. This includes the already controversial idea of sending job coaches into mental health wards to push the severely ill back into work.

The earnings threshold for carer’s allowance will rise to £10,000 a year, allowing more unpaid carers to qualify for support. However, we note that the broader social care system remains underfunded and profit-driven.

Labour has also decided to keep the two-child limit on benefits, which denies extra support for families with more than two children and pushes many deeper into poverty.

Claire expressed her concerns about no longer receiving cost of living payments and the reduced eligibility for the Warm Home Discount, making it harder for her to heat her home amid rising costs.

The budget fails to adequately address the financial strain on the UK’s most vulnerable. Small increases, targeting the working poor with threats of prosecution and debt recovery measures, don’t meet the real needs of those struggling, especially when many families rely on food banks or multiple jobs just to get by.

Claire remarked, ‘We will struggle even more than before.’ She envisions a truly socialist society prioritising adequate material support and holistic health care for everyone.

Neither the Labour Party nor the Tories can solve these issues. The current government may offer minor increases, but they remain trapped in a system that prioritises market whims over people’s needs. ‘The market giveth, and the market taketh away.’

Names have been changed to avoid potential targeting or sanctions.

A.T.

Brewing up a storm? (2024)

From the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

After 29 October of this year many more people, (particularly in Spain) will, one suspects, have become a lot more familiar with the acronym DANA. It stands for Depresión Aislada en Niveles Altos (Isolated Depression at High Altitudes).

A DANA is a rather unique meteorological phenomenon, often experienced at this time of the year on the Iberian peninsula. It begins with a large slow-moving mass of circulating cold air, breaking off from the jet stream and settling over the peninsula at an altitude of about 9,000 metres. What then happens is that warm air sucking in moisture from the Mediterranean is forced upwards by mountain ranges and collides with the cold air above, precipitating a torrential downpour mainly along the Mediterranean coastline.

Temperatures are a critical factor. According to the World Meteorological Organization website:

‘For each 1°C of warming, saturated air contains 7 percent more water vapour on average. Every additional fraction of warming therefore increases the atmospheric moisture content which in turn increases the risk of extreme precipitation events’ (31 October).

Friederike Otto of the World Weather Attribution organisation argues that climate change has made extreme rainfall 12 percent more intense and twice as likely (Guardian, 4 November). This is something we had better get more used to, she suggests. We need to build more resilience to deal with events like 29 Oct – better infrastructure, more effective early warning systems and so on.

But, of course, in capitalism this boils down to spending money on something that doesn’t yield a financial return; predictably, it will meet some resistance. What seems like just plain commonsense has to constantly do battle against financial priorities and short-term thinking just to reach some sort of compromise.

Aggravating factors

In any event, it would seem that people in those parts of Spain affected by the storm of 29 October had not really been prepared for what happened. Of course, it was expected that there would be heavy rainfall since this is what normally happens around this time of the year in this part of the world. What was not expected was the sheer intensity. AEMET, the national weather forecasting service had, as early as 25 October, issued a warning but this had been largely ignored and apparently, even ridiculed by climate change denialists as ‘alarmism’ (‘October 2024 Spain floods’, Wikipedia).

It’s not just atmospheric temperature that matters, so too does sea temperature since this affects the take-up of moisture into the atmosphere. Since the 1980s, the Mediterranean has warmed up by about 1.5 degrees. Water, of course, retains heat longer than land so this has implications not only for the intensity of precipitation but, also, the timing of DANA events (in the past, they were more common in September or early October).

As one commentator explained, it takes just a tiny increase in the sea´s temperature to make a big difference: ‘The DANA encountered water temperatures around 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 degrees Celsius) off the coast of Valencia, while the usual temperature for this time of year is around 70 F (21 C). That difference may seem small, but it is enough to supply the storm system with extra energy’.

The storm that followed caused a truly unprecedented amount of damage – most particularly to communities in the autonomous region of Valencia but also in areas as far afield as Andalucia and Castilla-La Mancha. Some communities received a year’s worth of rain in the course of a few hours. The impact of this enormous volume of water in such a short space of time was made worse because of the recent drought, making the soil hard and unable to absorb the water rapidly enough.

Other aggravating factors included vegetation loss, inappropriate farming techniques and rampant urbanisation along the Mediterranean coastline, covering the land with impermeable surfaces. Speculative building projects have resulted in housing units being constructed ridiculously close to old water courses prone to periodic flooding.

As of early November, we still do not know the full extent of the damage, but the tragedy has already been dubbed Europe’s worst flood-related disaster since 1967. The death toll is currently 217 and rising. There are still many more people unaccounted for and reported missing

Rescue teams have been searching for bodies in underground car parks such as the Bonaire shopping mall near Valencia airport, as well as river mouths where currents may have deposited bodies. Additionally, at the time of writing, there are still many flooded underpasses and basements that have yet to be inspected, not to mention remote rural locations.

It is not just the lives lost and damaged that define this tragedy. The physical destruction has been catastrophic: houses washed away or structurally weakened, countless roads blocked or partially destroyed, bridges broken up and swept away like mere matchstick structures.

Video clips have revealed the fearsome sight of enormous volumes of fast-flowing water gouging out the sides of once bone-dry barrancos or carrying countless cars down narrow streets, along with the flotsam, to some final resting place where scores of them can be found piled up like metal corpses in what are perhaps some of the most hauntingly emblematic images of this whole dreadful event.

Beyond the urban areas, thousands of hectares of crops have been seriously affected. In Almeria’s greenhouse belt that supplies a significant fraction of the UK´s fresh vegetables, initial estimates suggested at least 4,500 hectares of greenhousing have been seriously damaged by hailstones–the plastic shredded beyond hope of repair.

Pent-up anger

Very understandably, all this is has aroused a great deal of anger among local people. In quite extraordinary scenes, the Spanish monarchs, along with the prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, were pelted with insults and lumps of the ubiquitous mud that cakes the streets of the towns they visited. Accused of being ‘assassins’ they prudently decided to cut short their scheduled tour of the area.

Predictably, political opportunists have waded into the fray with far-right elements, like supporters of Vox, protesting against the Sanchez government for its inexplicable tardiness in sending in the army to help. For their part, leftwing groups like Podemos, have called for the resignation of the Valencian president, Carlos Mazón of the conservative People’s Party, not least because of his decision last year to scrap the Valencia Emergency Unit (UVE) as a ‘superfluous expense’. The UVE was set up to respond to emergencies precisely like the current one, but such is the stupidity of short-term thinking that it is only with hindsight that we can now appreciate its potential value.

Much criticism levelled at the authorities has focused on the question of why people were not alerted sooner to give them more time to reach high ground and safety. According to an Al Jazeera report (3 November): ‘When authorities sent alerts to mobile phones warning of the seriousness of the flooding and asking people to stay at home, many were already on the road, working or covered in water in low-lying areas or underground garages, which became death traps’.

AEMET, as mentioned, knew of the approaching storm and issued a yellow warning a few days before it broke. On 29 October, it converted this into a red warning:

‘AEMET issued a red alert level warning very early on Tuesday, the day of the Dana, but life pretty much went on as normal until hours later when the torrential rains began to fall, and the rivers began to overflow in inland Valencia’ (4 November, Sur in English).

As that day dragged on and conditions deteriorated Mazón held a press conference at about 13.00 claiming that ‘the storm would dissipate by 18:00’ (Wikipedia). Of course it did no such thing and matters steadily worsened. Only by 20:11 did the Generalitat Valenciana issue a general SMS alert to the public to stay indoors while around midnight on 30 October, ‘Mazón’s social media team deleted a tweet claiming the storm would dissipate’. Astonishingly, Mazón also apparently rejected offers of help from firefighters in Catalonia, Navarre and Bilbao.

It was not just the regional government that was at fault. Many businesses in the area adamantly insisted that their employees turn up for work that day and in the evening, despite the obviously deteriorating circumstances, thereby putting the latter´s lives at risk. That speaks volumes.

Political bickering

Of course, it is all too easy to get embroiled in the blame game when it comes to ‘natural tragedies’ when we should really be focusing on the wider picture. Strangely, though, weather forecasters are often the first to cop the blame. One recalls the famous gaffe by the BBC weather forecaster, Michael Fish, in 1987 on the eve of the Great Storm reassuring his viewers that there was no hurricane on the horizon, (though as an afterthought he suggested it might become ‘quite windy’). One truly feels for poor Mr Fish and the backlash he endured but predicting the weather has never been an exact science.

Blaming the weather forecaster is precisely what seems to have happened on this occasion as well – except that AEMET actually got its forecast spot on. That did not stop Alberto Feijoo, leader of the Popular Party, springing to the defence of his comrade Carlos Mazón and, in desperate need of a scapegoat, claiming that AEMET had not forewarned the public sufficiently promptly (31 October, elDiario.es ).

Undoubtedly, the descent into political bickering and backbiting has hampered efforts to deal with the situation. It has also provoked a huge amount of public anger at the ‘political class’ – not just over the delay in warning people but also because of the delay in responding with practical help.

A complicating factor is that Spain has a relatively decentralised system of regional government. There are protocols to be followed as to when central government can become directly involved in the affairs of regional governments and Mazón seemingly dragged his feet when it came to formally raising the official crisis level which would have automatically triggered central government involvement. Of course, when the latter did get involved it was already too late, in the view of many.

In any event this all set the scene for what has been the one truly positive and outstanding development to emerge from this whole sorry saga – the awe-inspiring and magnificent efforts of ordinary working people to handle the situation themselves. Unwilling to wait any longer for the authorities to take action they themselves set about the monumental task of rescuing others, locating bodies and cleaning up. Even those who had lost everything.

Wave of solidarity

The mobilised power of mutual aid is indeed a wonderful and inspirational sight to behold. There are videos circulating on the internet of truly enormous columns of volunteers – thousands upon thousands of people – buckets and mops in hand, trudging on foot from one part of Valencia to another (travel by car being impossible and, at the time of writing, forbidden by the authorities).

This spontaneous voluntary effort originated in social media – for example among groups of young Telegram users – as a bottom-up initiative. Predictably, this has not stopped the authorities from muscling in on the act:

‘From now on, all the organisation is in the hands of the Generalitat. A “wave of solidarity” that needs “coordination”, said Mazón in an institutional message. “We are doing this to better organise, transport and segment the aid of those who are lending their solidarity”’ (2 November, Sur in English).

That smacks of the typical politician trying to save his bacon while claiming the kudos for what others have done. Nevertheless it won´t detract from what the latter have shown themselves amply capable of achieving as working people – not ordinary but extraordinary.

Robin Cox