The recent floods in Central Texas, which claimed the lives of more than a hundred workers, children, and elderly, are not a “natural disaster” but another episode in the long chain of social crimes committed by the capitalist mode of production. When the Guadalupe River rose twenty-six feet in under an hour, engulfing homes, camps, and entire communities, it was not only water that swept away lives, it was decades of neglect, the calculated dismantling of public protection, and the cold logic of profit before human need.

The county’s so-called emergency “management” lay in ruins before the first drop of rain. Officials were missing or asleep; warning systems were nonexistent; funds that could have financed sirens and evacuation plans remained idle or were siphoned into the usual coffers of capitalist development. Neighboring towns that had invested modest sums in public warning systems saved lives; Kerr County did not, because, in the accounting books of the bourgeoisie, even minimal safety for the working class is too costly.

This is the same pattern we saw in Lahaina, Hawaii, where in 2023 the bourgeois authorities allowed the deadliest U.S. wildfire in a century to spread without activating the world’s largest outdoor siren network. Over one hundred people perished, thousands lost their homes, and immediately capital descended on the ruins, buying up land and forcing survivors into exile. While billionaire vultures descended on the area to buy the cheap properties for themselves.

FThe intensification of rainfall in Texas, the record heat that fuels droughts and fires in the West, the rising seas that gnaw at every coastline, these are the planetary consequences of fossil-fueled industry, agribusiness, militarism, and overproduction.

The bourgeois State, whatever its political flag, exists to defend the conditions of exploitation. Its disaster agencies are underfunded, its infrastructure crumbling, because public resources are devoted to subsidies for capital, tax cuts for the rich, and military adventures abroad. When disaster strikes, aid is slow, inadequate, and filtered through bureaucratic and corporate channels; when reconstruction begins, it is carried out under the sign of profit, not human need. In fact the destruction plays a vital role in rejuvenating the static capital.

We live in the midst of capitalism’s general crisis, where its economic contradictions, overproduction, falling profit rates, speculative instability, intertwine with environmental collapse. The ruling class cannot and will not reorganize production to avert disaster; on the contrary, it seeks to turn each catastrophe into a new field for speculation and dispossession. In Texas, as in Hawaii, in the wake of hurricanes, floods, or fires, the survivors are left to fend for themselves while developers, insurers, and banks prepare their harvest from the ruins.

Under capitalism, the forces capable of preventing or mitigating disasters, science, technology, coordinated labor are subordinated to the pursuit of profit. The working class pays twice: first in exploitation at the point of production, then in abandonment and ruin when disaster strikes.

Our party affirms that only the destruction of the bourgeois State and the expropriation of the capitalist class can put an end to this cycle.

In a communist society, preparedness would not be a budget line to be cut, but a basic function of the associated producers. Warning systems, resilient infrastructure, and rapid, universal relief would be as natural as the coordinated labor that builds them. Disasters would still occur, but they would no longer be massacres.

Until that victory, every flood, every fire, every “natural” disaster will expose the same truth, that capitalism is the greatest catastrophe, and only the proletarian revolution can bring an end to it.