New pamphlet (2023)

Pamphlet Review from the September 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Revolution Not Reform. By Jordan Levi. World Socialist Party of the United States. 70 pages (with notes). ISBN 9781097623600.

This pamphlet, in booklet form, is a simple exposition of the case against capitalism and reformism and for socialism by a member of our companion party in the United States.

Two of the reformists discussed — it was written in 2019 — are Bernie Saunders (of whom the author was originally a supporter) and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Both claim to be socialists but their programme shows that they favour the wages system ‘but just want wages to be higher’; that they favour private ownership ‘but just want small and big business to have a level playing field’, that they still think housing, food, etc should be produced for sale ‘but just want them to be cheaper’. As the author comments, ‘sounds pretty capitalist to me’.

The idea that Russia, China, Cuba and Venezuela were or are socialist is debunked and they are shown as state capitalist to various degrees. Leninism is distinguished from the views of Marx and Engels as a distortion of them. The final chapters speculate on what the early days of socialism, as a classless, wageless, moneyless society based on common ownership, democratic control and production for use not profit, might be like.

Written in a chatty style it is easy to read, with the footnote references confined to the last 20 pages. It can be read in one go and so can be a useful short introduction to socialist ideas.

Copies can be obtained from our Head Office at 52 Clapham High St, London SW4 7UN. Price £5 (postage included). Cheques payable to “The Socialist Party of Great Britain”. Paypal payments to spgb@worldsocialism.org

Paris Commune 1871 (2021)

From the May 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

May 28 marks the 150th anniversary since the French Army captured the Communards’ final positions, officially marking the end of the Paris Commune, the first living example of workers in control of political power. Preceded by the Franco-Prussian War, which ended after Prussian forces besieged Paris for over four months, the Commune began on March 18, 1871, following a failed attempt by the French Army to seize 400 cannons that the Government of National Defence deemed ‘state property’, even though Parisians themselves paid for the cannons via a subscription. The French Army retreated to Versailles and Paris’s National Guard then took control of the city for over two months before the French Army could gather enough reinforcements to return and slaughter the Communards during Bloody Week. Along with the Prussian Army, who’d just defeated the French, they injured as many as 10,000 Communards and massacred as many as another 10,000, with 147 alone being shot at what’s now called Communards’ Wall in Père Lachaise cemetery the day before the French and Prussian armies fully suppressed the uprising. The French Army captured over 43,000 prisoners during and immediately after Bloody Week, 13,500 of whom were either sentenced to imprisonment, deportation, forced labour, or death.

Barricade at Paris 1871

The Paris Commune arguably stands out as the first peek at what the last phase of capitalism might have looked like, as well as what challenges the working class might face in attempting to surpass it. Though the Commune was ultimately foiled, events like this are always worth analysing for any lessons that can be learned, whether good or bad, and applied to the future.

The Good

One of the best aspects of the Commune was that it was leaderless. Leaders necessarily imply followers placing all their faith in them, even though no one’s infallible. Having a leader also allows an easy target to be picked off, incapacitating their followers at the drop of a hat. Rather than leaders, the Commune had mandated delegates, elected by the Communards themselves, who were recallable any moment the people felt a delegate wasn’t carrying out their will — a direct democracy. They also had plans to implement the same structure of self-government across the rural areas of France, having district assemblies in the central towns and having those send delegates to the National Delegation in Paris — decentralised self-government. Magistrates and judges were elected and immediately revocable, as well.

The Commune also passed a decree which implemented a separation of church and state, as well as another allowing everyone to attend school free of charge, with some arrondissements giving out free school supplies, clothes, and food for children — mutual aid. The police were also made revocable, and they abolished conscription, along with the standing army, declaring the National Guard — which included all citizens able to bear arms — as the Commune’s only armed force. Much to the surprise of the bourgeois government, there was no violence between Communards during the entire two months. Pensions were also granted to the unmarried companions and children of national guardsmen killed in active service. The death penalty was abolished and the guillotine was even brought out by the National Guard and publicly burned as the crowd celebrated.

It’s said that the highest salary given to an employee of the Commune was 6,000 francs, though that claim has been contested. Regardless, they abolished child labour, as well as night work for bakers, since it’s very difficult to get sleep while you’re cooking bread. Employees were given the right to take over and run any businesses that were abandoned by their owners and any fines imposed by employers on their employees were prohibited. All workmen’s tools and household items that were given to pawn shops during the siege, valued up to 20 francs, were returned for free and, later, the Commune ordered the closure of all pawn shops themselves, since they were deemed a private exploitation of labour. There was a moratorium on all rents during the siege, meaning they were supposed to be paid back afterward, but the Commune forgave all rent for homes from October 1870 through April 1871, with any amounts already paid counting instead towards future rent, along with a postponement of commercial debt obligations, and the abolition of interest on any debts.

The Bad

It’s much easier to play Monday morning quarterback with uprisings rather than actually participate in them, but it’s always important to take a critical look at these kinds of situations to parse out any decisions made due to bad circumstances from those made due to bad foresight. One of the first that stands out is the fact that, despite many women playing important roles in the Commune, they weren’t allowed to vote in the Commune elections. Only three countries had ever granted women suffrage before this, but — considering the fact that the Communards were seeking economic equality — it wouldn’t have been much of an ideological leap to extend that equality to women, too. Another drawback was the fact that they opted to keep the Commune Council’s meetings secret, citing war with the bourgeois government as their reason. They obviously should’ve tried their best to prevent any sensitive information from getting back to the French Army, though perhaps a reasonable middle ground could’ve been reached.

Aside from those decisions, there were a couple made that were pretty useless. One was the adoption of the French Republican Calendar. Considering the Commune was still at war, finagling with the date should have been the last thing on anyone’s mind, if only because it could complicate communications with allies outside the city. Communards also took to burning various buildings and monuments, two of the most prominent being the Vendôme Column and the home of Adolphe Thiers, the chief executive of the French government during the Commune. While individuals may decide to do that themselves, the only things the Commune administration should have been focused on at that time were keeping Parisians alive and surviving as a political institution— and burning buildings assists with neither of those.

As far as the financial decisions go, the Communards decided to take a loan from the Rothschild Bank to cover their expenses, rather than seize the 254 million francs in gold coins and banknotes left inside the vaults of the Bank of France — essentially leaving their greatest bargaining chip on the table. Had the Commune threatened to collapse the French currency, they might have got Thiers to do anything they wanted. Not only did they neglect to exploit that opportunity, but if employees took over a business, they also recognised the previous owner’s right to compensation. Employers rob employees for their surplus value and, by virtue of that alone, would have no reasonable right to compensation in this circumstance. That money could instead be used for more mutual aid.

Another big issue was censorship and repression. The Commune banned multiple pro-Versailles newspapers and created a Committee of Public Safety to hunt down and imprison enemies of the Commune, in the same vein as the Committee of the same name which committed the infamous Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. Considering how many times efforts like this had taken a turn for the worse before, the Commune should have avoided them at all costs. They also issued a decree which accused the Catholic Church of ‘complicity in the crimes of the monarchy’, arresting roughly 200 church officials afterward, along with another decree later called the Decree on Hostages, which stated that for every prisoner of war or Commune official that was executed by the French Army, the Commune would execute three hostages. However, it’s worth noting that, despite this decree and the fact that the French Army executed multiple Communards beforehand, the Commune executed none of their hostages until after the start of Bloody Week — and even then it was only 63, which pales in comparison to the roughly 10,000 Communards murdered in cold blood during that same week by the French and Prussian armies.

Arguably, there were also more than a few mistakes made on the military front. A major setback happened when the National Guard tried to march on the French Army in Versailles. The National Guard took power after the French soldiers refused to fire on them once instructed to during the soldiers’ attempted seizure of the cannons. The Communards naively assumed the same thing would happen again and advanced without cavalry, artillery, food, ammunition, or ambulances. Not only that, but they didn’t even scout the area ahead, subsequently passing a line of forts on the way that they thought were occupied by more national guardsmen but which had actually just been re-occupied by the French Army, causing the National Guard to suffer heavy artillery fire as a result.

As the French Army was returning to recapture Paris, divisions arose within the Commune about whether to give absolute priority to military defence, or to political and social freedoms and reforms. This decision honestly should’ve been a no-brainer, considering that any reforms would be undone if the Commune were to be drowned in blood. A key fort, Fort d’Issy, was captured by the French Army and the National Guard left the fortifications undefended by one part of the city wall at Point-du-Jour, allowing 60,000 soldiers to enter the city within a few hours. Without an overall planned defence or many barricades having been prepared in advance, it quickly turned into a bloodbath. To add insult to injury, when the Commune Council found out the walls of Paris had been breached, they were holding a trial for a former General — something that clearly could’ve waited until the war was over — and the last military commander they’d chosen, Louis Charles Delescluze, was a journalist who had absolutely zero military experience.

Most importantly, though, even if the Communards had done everything correctly, they were still acting prematurely. Not only was the majority of the working class still not socialist, but the majority of the Communards weren’t socialists in the proper sense, either. Aside from that, capitalism was still in its relative infancy, far from the complete global hegemony we’ve reached now and any developments that are bound to happen in the future. As frustrating as it may be, we have to remember that, no matter how badly a minority of the working class may want to establish socialism, they’ll fail until the material conditions have developed for them to succeed — two key conditions being productive forces capable of sustaining a socialist society, as well as a vast majority of the global working class understanding what socialism is and what responsibilities it would entail, while actively wanting to establish it. Nonetheless, the Commune was a noble effort that will surely go down in history as one of, if not the greatest, attempt at liberating the proletariat.

Jordan Levi

(WSPUS)

Marx’s considered opinion on the Paris Commune:

“[A]part from the fact that this was merely the rising of a town under exceptional conditions, the majority of the Commune was in no sense socialist, nor could it be. With a small amount of sound common sense, however, they could have reached a compromise with Versailles useful to the whole mass of the people — the only thing that could be reached at the time. The appropriation of the Bank of France alone would have been enough to dissolve all the pretensions of the Versailles people in terror, etc., etc.” (Letter to F.D. Nieuwenhuis, 22 February 1881) (see Marxist Archive)

‘When the looting starts, the shooting starts’ (2020)

From the July 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Miami, Florida – December 26, 1967: just a few months removed from the ‘long, hot summer of 1967’, in which rampant unemployment, poverty, and police brutality in black America reached a boiling point, sparking almost 160 race riots across the country. Ironically, that same summer was referred to as the ‘Summer of Love’ by hippies due to their rapid concentration in San Francisco. Miami’s Police Chief, Walter Headley, held a press conference regarding a spike in violent crime in the city’s ‘Negro district’ that past holiday weekend. Miami narrowly avoided race riots that summer, with Headley saying ‘We haven’t had any serious problems with civil uprising and looting because I’ve let the word filter down that when the looting starts, the shooting starts’ (snopes.com/fsact-check/trump-wallace-looting-quote). We’ll leave aside the fact that this statement contrasted with a recent comment from Sheriff Purdy, saying that his department’s community relations programs and specialized training projects successfully prevented the civil disorders. This statement encouraging police to murder irreplaceable citizens for looting replaceable commodities – valuing commodities over human life – was predictably criticized by several civil rights leaders.

As Karl Marx once said, history repeats itself ‘…the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce’. More than 50 years later, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, made the same statement regarding looting in various cities across the country due to George Floyd’s recent murder. After liberals had yet another field day of moral grandstanding, he tweeted to clarify his statement the next morning, but this was just an attempt to save face.

George Floyd was a former athlete, rapper, Christian, and proud father. Originally from Houston, Texas, he moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota around 2014 for a fresh start after serving four years in prison. Floyd was looking for another job after recently being laid off due to the pandemic, just like millions of other Americans. Shortly before his death, he’d purchased items at a local corner store with what the clerk believed was a counterfeit bill, which made them call the police. The police arrived, and the situation escalated to another unarmed black man being strangled in broad daylight as they repeatedly said, ‘I can’t breathe!’

This incident resembles far too many to name. Fatal police shootings have been rising every year, and the victims are disproportionately black. An estimated that 76.5 percent of Americans were white, and 13.4 percent were black in 2019, but victims of fatal police shootings were 36.85 percent white and 23.4 percent black that same year (the rest being unknown or Hispanic – Link). What’s worse, roughly 1,000 people are killed by the police every year, but only 98 officers were arrested and only 35 convicted for it from 2005 – 2019.

Outrage over these incidents happening so often without officers being held accountable understandably led to widespread protests. There are countless videos of protests happening peacefully until police officers with more gear than Robocop assaulted citizens first, agitating them and leading to riots. It’s hard not to question the government’s priorities when they’re more prepared to attack its citizens for condemning murder than to protect them against a pandemic – whether the equipment was a free military surplus or not. You’re forced to wonder why using tear gas against foreign armies is an international war crime, but somehow not illegal to use against American citizens – or why rubber bullets are being shot directly at them when they were initially intended to be bounced off the ground.

Trump unsurprisingly condemned the riots, but not the police brutality that sparked them, nor did he call for any of the officers who’ve committed recent murders to be convicted. He says it’s due to the looting, but he couldn’t care less about corporations looting the ‘Not-So-Democratic’ Republic of the Congo. He hasn’t called for any of their CEOs or members of their Boards of Directors to be shot, just domestic workers looting products made by other workers abroad. What’s more concerning is that he’s decided to blame most of the looting on ‘Antifa’ and called for them to be designated as a terrorist group.

We’ll set aside all the terrorist groups backed by the United States and pretend that matters to Trump. What’s important, for one, is that we currently only have laws that allow us to designate international extremist groups as terrorist organizations, so an entirely new law would need to pass to classify domestic extremist groups as terrorist organizations. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_state-sponsored_terroris). )The question would then be why that kind of legislation hasn’t been passed yet to designate at least the KKK as a terrorist group after all the murders they’ve committed – but it’s pretty clear once you realize that Trump’s dad was arrested at a KKK rally, although neither his exact charges nor the exact circumstances could be confirmed (Link). For two, and we’d argue most importantly, Antifa isn’t even a cohesive organization. Unfortunately, that could work in his favor. He probably knows this, but it could be incompetence at best or an excuse to charge dissenters as terrorists at worst.

Often people throw around the term ‘fascist’ too loosely and this waters down fascism’s actual meaning. Some might concede that Trump could be considered something of a ‘fascist-lite’. However, blaming a loose organization for the looters and calling for police to shoot them admittedly seems like he’s creeping into that sort of territory – especially once you consider the implications of the ‘EARN IT Bill’ (Link) and jokes he’s made about staying President for life.

The real question here is what we should do about this? In some ways protesting, signing petitions, posting on social media, etc. are all great activities to bring awareness to the issue. But we’ve done that countless times and know it’ll take much more than that to bring about any fundamental change. Attempts to hold law enforcement accountable have failed many times before, with two recent examples being a bill watered down in California and another blocked altogether in Utah. As Martin Luther King once said ‘…a riot is the language of the unheard’. Until justice is served, riots are guaranteed to continue happening. But the question is, can systemic racism and police brutality be prevented within our current system?

A fundamental change would require this system to work in the interest of the majority in the first place, which it doesn’t. It works in the interest of the capitalists. And we don’t mean your bootlicker, wage-slave Facebook friend that only comments on your statuses to defend Jeff Bezos. We mean the actual capitalists, the ones with mansions the size of Vatican City that still lobby to keep their taxes lower than anybody else’s. We’ve seen time and time again that, when it comes down to it, the state and the police won’t protect and serve the people; they’ll protect and serve the rich and their property. Police will hesitate to arrest their colleagues for murdering unarmed civilians, but if anyone peacefully protests in response? They’ll tear gas pregnant women in a heartbeat – knowing it’s been linked to miscarriages – arrest legal observers just for being there, then shoot people who riot or loot because of it. Police and the state only value your life if you’re part of the ruling class.

Private property, being different than personal property, inherently leads to competing classes. In the words of Adam Smith, ‘Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many’. Capitalism perpetuates systemic racism so well because it’s much easier to justify this inequality when those poor tend to be a particular race. It makes them easy to dehumanize, whether consciously or unconsciously. This perpetuation couples with the fact that private property requires a means to legitimize and protect it. In the quote mentioned above, Adam Smith also says, ‘The acquisition of valuable and extensive property, therefore, necessarily requires the establishment of civil government. Where there is no property, or at least none that exceeds the value of two or three days’ labour, civil government is not so necessary’.

That doesn’t mean it necessarily has to be democratic. Dictatorships have still been capitalist; all it needs is a monopoly of force. Even in an anarcho-capitalist dystopia where a traditional state wouldn’t exist, there’d still need to be private security forces. But once we understand that capitalism necessitates inequality and a defensive body and how that perpetuates racism, then we see why systemic racism would be a rampant problem and why trying to end it without ending capitalism is futile.

As long as we have private property, we’ll have trigger-happy, racist police hired to protect it at the expense of human life. I’m not saying never to speak out and protest against systemic racism, but to do that without keeping abolition of capitalism as the primary goal would be like hacking at a tree’s branches, rather than its trunk. To end police brutality and systemic racism for good, we need to establish socialism: an economic system based on common ownership of the means of production and production for use. Classes, class antagonisms, and systemic racism would thus be done away with once and for all.

Jordan Levi 

(World Socialist Party of the US)

Markets are trash (2020)

From the WSPUS website

I’ve never wanted to restart a year so bad in my life. We lost Kobe Bryant, Trump almost started World War Three with Iran, and now we’re living in a real-life version of Contagion that’s got us on a trajectory rivaling The Great Depression – and we’ve barely entered the second quarter. 2020 so far has been absolute garbage. On the bright side, at least this pandemic is waking people up to the fact that markets are garbage too.  

I know that many people reading this may already understand what a market is. However, watching a YouTube video of Sam Seder debating a Libertarian before writing this made me realize that I need to clarify the meaning of markets before I demonstrate precisely why they are trash. 

The almighty Google sources their meanings from the Oxford Dictionary’s website Lexico.com, which defines a market as an area or arena in which commercial dealings are conducted. 

For example, someone voluntarily calling into a radio show for free doesn’t constitute a commercial dealing since no money or commodities have been or will be exchanged. However, the host monetizing the call later does constitute a commercial dealing with the entity that distributes it, assuming that entity is different. In other words, a market only exists when a commodity is directly exchanged for another commodity, whatever happens later. The commodity most commonly exchanged is money. Markets suck for a lot of reasons, but right now I’ll focus on the contradictions between effective and notional demand and supply, as well as on profit.  

Lexico.com defines effective demand as 

 the level of demand that represents a real intention to purchase a good by people with the means to pay.

In contrast, notional demand is the demand of people who want a commodity but are unable to buy it for some reason, like not having enough money or a ban. Effective supply is the amount of a commodity furnished on the market, as opposed to notional supply, which is the amount of a commodity that would be furnished on a market if there were no market constraints, such as below-average profit margins for the commodity or a ban. 

Another critical concept is derived demand, which Lexico.com defines as 

 a demand for a commodity or service which is a consequence of the demand for something else.

A good example is Nevada governor Stephen Sisolak ordering temporary closure of all non-essential businesses in the state to curb the spread of Covid-19. The order led to lower derived demand for public transportation since fewer people are traveling to work, drink at the bar, get a haircut, and so on.  

The Covid-19 outbreak itself is an excellent example of how effective demand and supply can lead to negative results. It’s widely believed that the Covid-19 pandemic started in November of 2019 as a result of consumption of bats or pangolins sold at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market – a live animal and seafood market in Wuhan, China that also sold the flesh and organs of various exotic wild animals, referred to as yewei or bushmeat. The other two major coronavirus outbreaks of the past decade, MERS and SARS – of which Covid-19 is a variant – are believed to have originated in bats as well. Although no one has found evidence of anyone selling bats or pangolins at the market, Covid-19’s genetic similarity to another coronavirus found in bats (see here) suggests that it did originate with them and was most likely transmitted to humans through an intermediate animal – widely believed to be a pangolin (see here). Considering that two thirds of the first 41 people hospitalized for Covid-19 had direct exposure to the market (see here), pangolins could have been sold there — under the table, since they are a protected species. Assuming that was the case, the effective demand for yewei, which is known to have already caused two significant outbreaks this decade, met with the effective supply of yewei. Markets can incentivize the supply of dangerous goods – for instance, bombs, the only use of which is murder, or infected meat, leading to a global pandemic like the one we’re dealing with right now.  

Another excellent example of the negative results of effective demand is the impact of Covid-19 on my hometown, Las Vegas. The town’s economy revolves around the Strip, which caters mainly to tourists’ and locals’ leisure activities. The effective demand for goods and services was drastically lowered on the Strip after stay-at-home orders were issued to curb the spread of the virus, causing a domino effect. The lower effective demand for goods and services on the Strip led to lower effective demand for labor on the Strip, causing many workers employed on the Strip to be laid-off. With their derived demand for healthcare coverage and housing coming from their employment, these workers being laid-off led, in economic terms, to them losing effective demand for healthcare coverage and shelter during the pandemic. 

I give kudos to Wynn Resorts for committing to pay all their employees through mid-May, even though it may only be because it would be too expensive and time-consuming to bring all their employees back if they lay them off. Still, I haven’t heard of any other companies committing to that. 

Thank god, also, that Governor Sisolak issued a moratorium on all evictions during the pandemic. Still, he did make it clear that any unpaid rents or mortgages would have to be paid after the pandemic, essentially postponing the homelessness of many Las Vegans to a later date.  

The absurdity doesn’t end there. A resident at St. Vincent’s – the town’s homeless shelter for men, where I happened to live for about a month – was diagnosed with Covid-19. As a result, they shut the shelter down until further notice as a “safety precaution” — meaning that they wanted to avoid legal liability if other residents got sick. Now they have as many as 500 residents sleeping outside in the parking lot of Cashman Center, sectioned off into “social distancing” boxes. And this is on the same street as hotels with thousands of empty rooms, which are now only a notional supply due to the ban on non-essential business. Even if that were not the case, these homeless men would have only notional demand for these rooms that could help curb the spread of the disease among them, because they can’t afford them anyway. They are basically leaving these residents out to die, since a vaccine may not be available until at least early 2021 – a vaccine for which they may anyway have only notional demand.  

Vaccines usually take 2—5 years to be ready for market, but the urgency of the pandemic has experts hoping optimistically that it can be done in 12—18 months. The long timespan is due partly to the complexity of the vaccine development process, but in large part also to the need for funding. Over 60% of vaccine research and development funding comes from for-profit companies (see here), which was a major stumbling block in the development of vaccines for SARS and MERS. For-profit companies tend to be hesitant to invest in vaccine development since it’s much more lucrative to invest in other medications. Even if they do invest, a pandemic may pass before they can get a vaccine to market – an outcome that they see as a waste of money. Publicly funded research would be subject to the same sort of prioritization, so the only way to guarantee that we develop vaccines promptly is to remove market forces entirely.  

In a socialist society there would be no markets, because there would be no money. Since production would be for use rather than for profit, vaccine research and development would not be dependent on securing investment. It would depend only on having the necessary resources at hand. We would not stop developing a vaccine just because a pandemic has passed; we would continue to develop it, so that we would have a head start in case a future pathogen arises with a similar genetic makeup, as with SARS and Covid-19. Since there would be universal free access to all products, we would have an incentive to stockpile a buffer of supplies so we can isolate ourselves for long periods if that is necessary in order to fight a pandemic. Since healthcare would be free, anyone could get tested, use a vaccine, or get a ventilator without impediment or significant delay. Our decisions would no longer be subject to the anarchy of the market, because we would finally have achieved coordinated cooperative control over production and distribution. 

Jordan Levi

Fire On 9th St (2019)

From the World Socialist Party of the United States website

Whenever out-of-towners imagine Las Vegas, they’ll usually think of the extravagance of downtown and the strip. Glistening lights, risqué showgirls, exquisite food – It’s like a never-ending party that grossed over $19.5 Billion in the fiscal year 2018 alone.[1] Settled in 1905, Vegas became the most populated American city founded within the 20th century. Like all cities, it was built outward, so most of the city’s oldest buildings and poorest neighborhoods are just blocks away from that same extravagance.

Another thing Vegas has in common with other American cities is, unfortunately, the rapidly rising rent prices. A two-bedroom apartment that cost me $695/month in late 2014 is now going for $1,175/month, 5 years later – and most locals would consider that neighborhood sketchy. Just go on Twitter and search “Charleston and Nellis.” If you’re making minimum wage, have a criminal record, or past evictions, then you’ll usually be forced to live in an even less desirable neighborhood. It should go without saying that many of the cheap, “second chance” apartments and extended-stay hotels that will accept people in those circumstances tend to be in those poorer neighborhoods downtown and just off the strip. It should also go without saying that those same residences tend to cut corners to save money.

That brings us to December 21, 2019. It’s 4:13 AM on a Saturday, just a couple hours before sunrise, around the time the Fremont Street Experience starts dying down as tourists and locals head home from their night of drunken debauchery. Just 5 blocks from this scene – about a 10-minute walk away – a fire starts at the Alpine Motel Apartments. Thick, black smoke rose into the air and some residents were jumping from their windows to escape the blaze just as firefighters arrived.[2] Six people were found dead, along with 13 injured (including a pregnant woman), making this the deadliest fire in the city’s history, since the 1980 MGM fire was in unincorporated Paradise, outside city limits. Around 50 people were displaced, days before Christmas. So, how did this fire start? From a stove.

Vegas is well known for its scorching heat, with highs regularly surpassing 115°F in mid-summer. What I think is much less well known is that it also regularly gets well below freezing temperatures in winter. While it doesn’t get as cold as Reno – let alone Salt Lake City – 30°F is nothing to scoff at, especially if you don’t have a heater in your home. And that’s where the stove comes into play. Residents said that the heat in the hotel hadn’t been working, so many of them had to use their stove to heat their apartments.

But it gets worse. The Las Vegas Review-Journal interviewed one of the residents, who said that when he noticed the fire and attempted to pull all the fire alarms, none of them worked, and neither did any of the smoke detectors. [3] He said that the maintenance man attempted to kick the back door open, but it was bolted shut – preventing residents from escaping the fire – so that homeless people couldn’t get into the building and sleep.

Some people may blame the residents for “choosing” to live in an apartment that doesn’t have heat, without taking any time to consider the extent to which it could be considered a choice. Even if we set all the circumstances I mentioned earlier aside, we still have to consider the fact that 69% of Americans have savings of $1,000 or less [4] – half of whom have no savings at all – 78% of US workers live paycheck-to-paycheck, [5] and 80% of Americans are in debt. [6] Remember the old apartment I mentioned earlier? They told me that if I wanted to end my lease early, it’d cost me 1 month of rent for every 3 months left on it. Halfway through, that would’ve cost $1,390, aside from first month’s rent and the deposit at a new apartment, as well as a U-Haul and maybe some helping hands. If you think packing up and moving was a feasible option at all for most of these residents, versus just turning on their stove at night instead, your privilege is showing. Yes, they could’ve informed the Southern Nevada Health District or a tenant rights advocacy group that their apartment had no heat, but for them to help you, you have to send your landlord a written letter informing them of the issue first, [7] and there’d be nothing stopping the landlord from evicting a tenant for a made-up reason if they were to do that. That’s why poor people tend to be much more scared to contact the authorities: fear of retribution. And rightfully so. Contacting the authorities would be assuming that no one’s already informed them, or that anything would come out of it.

It doesn’t take a genius to recognize the fact that landlords have significantly more bargaining power than tenants. The more desperate the tenant, the more they’ll usually be willing to go without. That’s why it’s the landlord’s responsibility to make sure they abide by any rules and regulations put in place for the tenants’ safety. If a landlord willingly chooses to disregard tenants’ safety so they can keep a few extra dollars in their pocket, the blame should entirely be put on the landlord, not a tenant that’s in a vulnerable position.

And that’s exactly what happened here. The landlord already violated 3 different NRS statutes by not having functioning heating facilities, [8] fire alarms, [9] and smoke detectors, [10] and possibly another by bolting their rear exit shut. If those regulations didn’t prevent this, then what will? More regulations? I don’t think so. Regulations only act as a band-aid, but don’t inherently fix the cause of this issue, which is the power imbalance that exists within the landlord-tenant relationship.

Capitalism necessitates profit over everything, even human safety. If a capitalist is left with the decision to spend more money to ensure the safety of their customers, or disregard customer safety and save money, capitalism incentives them to choose the latter. Profit is the end all be all in capitalism; the alpha and the omega. Profit incentives regulations to be broken. We’ve seen that time and time again; this is just another example. If we want to prevent things like this from happening for good, then we need to switch to the only economic system that puts people and the environment first by eradicating the profit motive: socialism.

In a socialist society, there’d be no profit motive, because there’d be no money. There’d be no ghettos people could be coerced to live in because there’d be no wages or classes. Every residence would have functioning heating facilities, fire alarms, and smoke detectors because there’d be no commodities – nothing would be bought or sold; everything would be produced of the highest available quality directly for use, according to a decentralized plan, with resources being calculated in kind. There’d be no private property – no capital – because everything would either be personal property, or it’d be owned in common. There’d be no state, leaders, or countries because we’d finally have direct democracy with an administration of delegates directly subject to the will of the majority, united under a worldwide commonwealth. We could finally use our productive forces rationally, rather than allowing market forces to control them for us.

So, what sounds better to you? Do you want a system that puts profit over human safety or a system that puts human and environmental safety over everything? Contrary to what the mainstream media may have you believe: the latter is possible. But a small minority of us can’t build it alone, only a vast majority of us can build it together.

Jordan Levi

[1] https://gaming.nv.gov/index.aspx?page=144

[2] https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/NVLASVEGAS/bulletins/272bf75 

[3] https://www.reviewjournal.com/videos/alpine-fire-survivor/ 

[4] https://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/03/how-much-americans-at-every-age-have-in-their-savings-accounts.html 

[5] http://press.careerbuilder.com/2017-08-24-Living-Paycheck-to-Paycheck-is-a-Way-of-Life-for-Majority-of-U-S-Workers-According-to-New-CareerBuilder-Survey 

[6] http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/assets/2015/07/reach-of-debt-report_artfinal.pdf?la=en 

[7] https://www.southernnevadahealthdistrict.org/permits-and-regulations/landlord-tenant-disputes/ 

[8] https://www.leg.state.nv.us/NRS/NRS-118A.html#NRS118ASec290 

[9] https://www.leg.state.nv.us/NRS/NRS-477.html#NRS477Sec130 

[10] https://www.leg.state.nv.us/NRS/NRS-477.html#NRS477Sec140