Six Articles on Disasters and the Nature of Capitalism

INTRODUCTION

This edition contains the translations of a series of six articles that were written over the period 1951 to 1963 and concerning the question of disasters and the role the State and economy played in their resolution. This was the period leading from the post-war reconstruction in Italy to the years of the boom, a period of massive capitalist expansion. The disasters mentioned seem to be modest in relation to the ones of the present period – air crashes with hundreds of deaths, smaller, but more frequent losses on the roads, the new illnesses resulting from the proliferation of (leaky) nuclear power plants and chemical works, even when these do not actually blow up and pour their deadly contents into the atmosphere, as at Chernobyl (and we are regularly told by the newspapers, Windscale, Three Mile Island, Savannah River, etc), Seveso, Bhopal and Flixborough.

Then there has been the doubling or more of the world’s population over the 40 years since the last article was written, meaning that people are forced to move into those areas their ancestors considered too dangerous because of the natural risk from volcanic eruption (Columbia), floods (Bangla Desh) or tidal floods (the North Sea basin).

Excuses in the 1950s ran along the lines that capitalism was in a phase of rebuilding and that all the damage of the war still had to be made good. But capitalism has never been anything other than a system which builds and rebuilds. If 40% of the bridges that the Romans built in Italy are still in use, we know that little of the present motorway system will last out this century and will have to be replaced. The Romans could limit their turn over to the dinner table with the vomunt et edent, edunt et voment and every self-respecting villa had its vomitorium. Now the excess agricultural product does not even have to pass through the human body, but is immediately transformed or even thrown away. Thus too with the construction industry: we can recall many cases of the demolition of works carried out less than 30 years ago, undamaged by any war. Here too capitalism can call on disasters and their prevention to aid it in removing unwanted excess populations from town centres to the outskirts to allow for rebuilding. Whereas in the 18th century or even in the first part of the last one, such a removal was often linked to the building of works of public utility: the Paris boulevards, railways and roads in London and so forth, now the only pressure is to provide quick access to land that can be relet at a much higher rent.

A classic case of this transformation can be found in the city of Pozzuoli, near Naples, built on the site of previous cities dating back to 529-8 BC. This site, unlike the neighbouring cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii survived the eruptions of Vesuvius, but was equally subject to another volcanic form, apart from a sulphur spout that last erupted in 1198, called bradisism, the slow rising and falling of the surface as magma flows underground from one caldera to another. This cycle lasts about 25 years and has never led to the complete abandonment of the area.

The arrival of the modern period changed this. In 1970 a plan was prepared to evacuate the population in case of undersea eruptions and tidal waves. The world renowned volcanologist, Haroun Tazieff, doubted the seriousness of the plan when he discovered that „with the prediction of a submarine eruption in the Gulf of Pozzuoli, the area of Rione Terra was to be evacuated, that is the higher part of the city. How come that it was this zone and not the port, which was far more vulnerable to the threat of tidal waves, was evacuated?“ and answers his own question: „The occasion was seized on to get hold of the old part of the city at a very low price in order to begin speculation.“

Nature was not so obliging, however, but the earthquake in Irpinia in November 1981, followed by the start of a fresh cycle of bradisism in 1983, gave the local capitalist class (local mafia – Camorra, businessmen, elements from the local judiciary) a second chance. The old city was evacuated in October 1983 and the inhabitants outhoused in various areas up to 50 km from Pozzuoli. The City Council immediately voted for the construction of a new city, Monteruscello, which, with progressive numerical inflation, rose to a planned 44,000. Here again the volcanologist discovered the tricks used. His registration devices did not detect the movements that were registered daily by the State. In the end he found that the latter had been placed alongside the local railway and picked up the slight movements produced by passing trains. Then the new city was to be sited in the ex-caldera of one of the volcanoes of the Campi Flegrei, where a possible eruption would cause «total loss and zero survival».

Even the new town soon began to fall to bits, not because of a natural disaster, but because the job had been rushed with poor quality materials – after all it was an emergency! Not so the work along the coast. All and sundry were asked to intervene: FIAT, the State holdings ENI and Italstat, even the communist party League of Co-operatives, the party being worried about the loss of the area’s “political, democratic and civil traditions”, i.e. its vote share¹.

It would be tedious to consider many more cases of this refinement of disaster management. Let us look at the articles translated here instead.

The first two deal with the death and destruction caused by floods in the Po valley in late 1951. Here we need an overview of the long period of capitalist expansion in this zone, the criticisms of those who foresaw disaster and an updating of the question from 1951 to the present day.
 

1. Cf Panorama Mensile No.3, March 1985 and La Repubblica 17.10.85 and 22.1.87  ↩︎