New Orleans: Ignorance – Impotence – Rapacity

Even before colonisation the tracks of man and beast ran along the banks of the Great River, or Missi-sipi as it was known in the language of the Algonquin Indians.

And it is into the Mississippi-Missouri river, with its great tributaries the Arkansas and Red Rivers feeding in from the right and the Ohio-Tennessee from the left, that most of the continental precipitations within the coastal mountain chains flow. The hydrographic basin of the Great Lakes doesn’t flow into it but an artificial canal connects it to Chicago. Along the river’s principal arm water takes three months to complete its course from source to delta.

At Baton Rouge, upstream from the delta and 100 kilometres from New Orleans, the average flow of the river is 12,800 cubic metres per second with a maximum of two and half times that. But the final course of the river, which follows a millenary cycle and is also linked to variations in sea level, hasn’t always been as it is today. Erosion of its banks has caused the river to widen, resulting in meanders, which later became cut off and left to find their shortest route to the sea.

The amount of solid matter carried along by the ‘Brown River’ is calculated at 0.2 kilograms per cubic meter, adding up to 2.5 tons per second. Alluvial floodings of extremely fertile land make up a quarter of modern Louisiana. These sediments have shaped the delta and coastline into an intricate and continually changing landscape of shallows, bayous, swamps, lagoons and meadows. The principal branch of the river, the one which crosses New Orleans, then flows along a peninsula, composed of old silts, and finds an outlet on a spur 160 kilometres out in the Gulf of Mexico.

As in all fluvial deltas, the weight of new deposits exerts pressure through compaction and subsidence – that is, through lateral slippage – on the older layers of clay and mud, and causes a slow, but steady, lowering of the ground level. The erosion caused by hurricanes, tides, the rise in sea level and human activity are other significant factors though of lesser impact. At the present geological moment, taking deposition of material and subtracting lowering of the ground level and erosion, we arrive at a negative figure; between 1974 and 1980 the land above sea-level retreated at an average rate of 430 hectares per annum, corresponding to 1.7% of the delta.

This picture, already very unstable and dynamic, has latterly been complicated by human colonisation.

In 1927 there was a flood which submerged 70,000 square kilometres of the middle course of the Mississippi under up to 10 meters of water. Following the 1929 crisis a New Deal project for a series of hydraulic works got underway whose main object wasn’t regulating the flood waters but rather improving the rivers’ navigability. The problem is the level of the river at low water: to increase the draft, canals were constructed to avoid the rapids, and 27 dams built in the higher course upstream from the confluence with the Ohio.

These works, which continued down to the middle of the last century, caused an increase in the velocity of the water and resulted in a temporary increase in erosion and in the transport of solid matter (by seven times according to some estimates) and in various States resulted in the draining of the vast floodplain and low lying areas for agricultural and building purposes. Rather than diminishing the risk of the river bursting its banks, these works have increased it. In 1973 there was a serious flood, but the worst in recent American history was the ‘Great Midwest Flood’ of 1993, during which the river overflowed its banks along a 10,000 kilometers stretch and caused 19 billion dollars worth of damage.

And of course New Orleans has to suffer the consequences of any bad management of the river happening further upstream.

Although the climate and setting are clearly hostile, the city was founded by the French, in that strategic situation, in 1718. It was at a time when building still took place according to what we might call a town plan, that is, an organic relationship between man and territory, and one which would later be recognised as beautiful and good. The choice then was to build on the highest ground, directly onto the outer bank of one of the bends of the great river. Up to the early 1900s, the inhabited area grew in a large semicircle, and building was carefully avoided any lower down; towards the lagoon, Lake Pontchartrain, and the port, which lay 7 kilometers away. Today it is the ‘French Quarter’ which has been saved from the water.

Despite the insalubrious climate (in 1853 a yellow fever epidemic killed 10,000 people) the city population increased through an influx of immigrants – freemen and slaves, of all languages and races. In 1830 the city numbered 100,000 inhabitants.

But its urban conformation at that time wasn’t sufficient for the burgeoning forces of rising capitalism. In the last century New Orleans became one of the biggest ports in the world. Today it is 4th in terms of traffic and one of the most concentrated industrial centres in North America. Soon the extraction and refining of oil would get underway as well.

Only the laws of profit and revenue can explain why the great factories and the workers quarters had to be situated in the middle of swamps. The population today (or rather was) 480,000.

In the second decade of the 1900s, with a view to building in the swamps, there began a concerted project to drain the shallow swampland in the low lying depression between the banks of the lagoon and river. A whole network of artificial levees would be built along the lake and, running laterally from the lake to the banks of the river, a network of drainage channels would be excavated. An innovatory pumping system would be set in place which would operate around the clock and keep the basin, as far as possible, dry. A large number of other types of embankments, of great height and extension, also had to be erected along the various canals, which, linking the river to the lagoon, would be used by river traffic and be of service to industry and convenient for warehousing.

That mechanical drainage has only been partially effective is illustrated by the fact that cemetery burials take place not in the ground, which consists of only a very thin stratum overlying the water, but in specially raised aedicules.

The more the water is removed, the more it filters under the riverbanks and under the levees; and the more the resulting subsidence occurs, the more water there is to pump away. At present, the entire city, excepting that built on the banks of the Mississippi, is lower than the annual average level of the river by about 6 meters. Moreover, for the most part, it is also lower than the average level of the sea and the lagoon, with a maximum depression of 2.5 metres, whilst at high tide the whole of the city is at a maximum of 6, and average of 3, meters below sea level.

In Streetcar Named Desire, as she leaves a house in the workers’ quarter of New Orleans supported on the arm of the doctor taking her off to mental hospital, poor Blanche confesses, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers”. A presentiment of the catastrophe forever looming over the American bourgeoisie, and over its less bad literature.

But the coasts of Louisiana are threatened not only by river and sea but are threatened from above by tropical hurricanes.

Hurricanes of the force of Katrina, the one which hit New Orleans on August 29, are not uncommon. The statistical information on hurricanes shows they seem to be distributed over a thirty year cycle, and there is no evidence to suggest they are on the increase, either in frequency or force. Currently the opposite is held to be true, and their cause is sought in a supposed climatic change, and talk of this celestial phenomenon is on the lips of ignorant people everywhere. About evolutions of this sort, of such delicacy, slowness, complexity and duration, we – we who live under capitalism – are totally ignorant, with its specialists the most ignorant of all. Not that we Marxists rule out that capitalism will eventually poison the earth and troposphere so badly that the climate will be affected. In fact, we are certain of it. We are however just as certain that it will not be able to measure nor, much less, be able to voluntarily intervene to modify the planetary consequences of its means of production.

Reproaching the ‘Bush Government’ with not having signed up to the Kyoto Agreement on the reduction of Carbon Dioxide emissions is therefore just a ‘green’ version of the same old anti-Americanism which is so often wheeled out on such occasions, and which is totally rejected by Marxism. As capitalism ages it gets worse, and worst of all in every sense is the capitalism we find in Europe.

The problem, as ever, is on earth and not in the sky. What is clearly on the increase, with respect to hurricanes, is social vulnerability. “What you search for lies within you”, responded the oracle to an Oedipus who didn’t want to see, true reversal and assertion of modern man’s consciousness.

If we restrict ourselves to the United States – although this can be generalised to every type of what are aptly described as “unnatural” catastrophes – we observe that over the past 25 years the population in the coastal areas, which are affected by three or four hurricanes a year on average, has expanded by 25 million. The type of building construction, especially in the areas inhabited by the poor classes, is the least adapted to withstanding cyclones, and consists of small flimsy houses with wooden frameworks and outer coverings and panels which easily detach in strong winds.

In the delta, the canalisation of the Mississippi has reduced the lateral dispersion of the floods, which feed precious nutrients and silt into the wetlands, and over the last 75 years vast swathes of marshland vegetation and coastal mangrove swamps have disappeared. Irregular coastlines, along with their protective cloak of vegetation, absorb energy and soften the impact of hurricanes, thereby constituting a natural buffer which is a lot more effective that reinforced concrete. Even for the latter it is calculated – now that the coastline has moved back 8 kilometres – that the sea wall would have to be double the height to attain equivalent resistance.

Moreover, the total lack of planning and the neglect typical of capitalism has resulted in trees being cut down, in particular the lines of cypresses which used to function as windbreaks.

From the time of the Civil War, the difficult, onerous and strategic maintenance of the banks of the Mississippi has been the responsibility of the army corps of engineers; later the job of looking after the levees along Lake Pontchartrain, and the canals and pumping stations, was then transferred partly to the city government and partly to the State of Louisiana.

But the entire system of barriers is only designed to resist an ‘average’ storm of ‘category 3’, a rise in sea level of 3.5 meters and waves of around a meter in size. The pumps are designed to drain off 25 millimetres of rainwater an hour, and are therefore already not up to dealing with really heavy rains.

Everything that has happened – a real “unnatural disaster” in the strict sense of the word – had therefore already been predicted, and described in minute detail, decades ago in hosts of texts and denunciations. The last of these warnings was issued in a bulletin by the national meteorological service in the days immediately preceding the hurricane. It predicted the consequences for the city of New Orleans in a scenario which exactly corresponded, even in terms of scale, to what then actually happened.

First there was the hurricane. If the little houses in the poor areas could do little to resist it, modern works fared even worse: practically all the bridges and monumental viaducts on the motorways sustained irreparable damage. This shows that they either weren’t designed to withstand ‘predicted wind strength’, or they were badly constructed. Present-day mythology and illegal reliance on automatic calculation of structures, using computers, in order ‘to save time’, even for straightforward pieces of work like bridge abutments, piles and beams, shows its practical impotence and “reveals the charlatan”. Capitalism even fails at what it is supposed to be best at, adding things up, and even statistics and mathematics revolt against it. We have seen images of modern hotels being torn apart by the wind, their windows ripped out and hurled into the maelstrom, followed by the furniture. Even the roof of the stadium was partially blown off.

Then the hurricane turned inland and the levees collapsed. Because the eye of the storm passed to the left of the city, the latter would then be hit by strong southerly winds, which raised the level of the lake by 120 cms. Not enough, therefore, to overflow the levees. Nevertheless three of them gave way, over a length of two or three blocks. Not those facing the lake, potentially susceptible to wave motion, but the ones along the internal canals, communicating with the lake. Not the old levees made of earth but the barriers of reinforced concrete built in the 60s. According to those responsible for maintaining them, the collapse of the entire system of levees was only narrowly avoided.

Soon the sea invaded 80% of the built up areas, covering them in up to six meters of water. All just as had been predicted.

As for the hydraulic technicians, first they had to plug the gaps, then pump out the water, both of which operations were difficult and laborious. Having discarded the idea of blocking the breeches in the damaged levees because they were simply too wide, it was decided to block sea access to the two canals. But due to the fact that mobile or floating bulkheads weren’t initially available, although an obvious precautionary measure, they had to make do with materials delivered by means of helicopter drops and pontoons. And if all that wasn’t enough, a barge had sunk at the entrance of the canal as well, which also hampered operations. The work would take several days.

By September 6, only three of the city’s 148 pumps were working. Since they were old, and no provision had been made for spare parts, it appeared they would have to be rebuilt from scratch.

To see how ‘rational’ capital is, we need only refer to the project for reinforcing the levees put forward by the army’s corps of engineers. As the estimated cost for this project was 14 billion dollars, Congress decided it could ‘make a saving’ by giving it the thumbs down. However, in the past few days it has already had to allocate 10.5 billions for emergency aid alone, and it is estimated that hundreds of billions more will be needed for reconstruction work.

Where is the logic in all this? It is to be found in the fact that ‘reconstruction’ entails not only profits, but revenue from rent. It is worth letting destruction takes its course so that then rebuilding can take place. And this explains the ‘inefficient’ management of the aid with regard to the poorest section of the population, composed of proletarians and the vast industrial reserve army. The poor people are sent away and there is a rise in the price of the devastated areas where they used to live.

For several decades now the city of New Orleans, along with every other industrial area in the West, has been hit by an industrial crisis and many factories have closed down; still going strong is the pestilential oil industry and the so-called ‘service sector’, in particular the docks and that form of mass alienation known as ‘mass tourism’.

The industrial crisis has made the perennial insecurity of the working class a lot worse. Of the population, two thirds of whom are Afro-Americans, a quarter are categorised as poor. But amongst those 18 year and below, poverty rises to 40%. The rate of illiteracy is around 40% as well.

Even after the inevitable catastrophe threatening the city had been known about for several days, nothing was prepared and it was left to the local police force to tell the townspeople that it would be best to get out. But at least 57,000 families were without a car, that is a quarter of the inhabitants. All these have been left to fend for themselves because it was simply impossible for them to escape. There are no buses, no trains, nobody knows where to go. Only 10,000 of these people who left behind have taken refuge in the stadium. And they are told ‘to bring their own provisions from home’.

Although the covered stadium is in a less low-lying area of the city and not far from the banks of the Mississippi, which have remained dry, the refugees have been held here for several days and nights in infernal conditions without food, without water, without toilets, without lighting, and weighed down by the torrid summer heat.

The State has intervened, yes, by sending in the national Guard, “with loaded weapons and orders to shoot on sight”. For capitalism this makes sense, since every emergency is a social emergency, and there isn’t a suspension of hostilities in the war between classes just because there is a disaster. We see armed soldiers patrolling this scene of desperation and destruction, in the middle of this emergency, whose main concern seems to be hunting down ‘looters’. The Baghdadization of New Orleans.

After three days it was announced that, “the National Guard has taken control of the city”. The bourgeoisie heaves a huge sigh of relief. The relief operation has still not got underway. It starts with the transferral of hotel guests, the rest are held back by the threat of being shot.

A week goes by, and the authorities decide on forced deportation of the unfortunate occupiers of the Huston stadium to somewhere 500 kilometres away. Those who have survived that is. Meanwhile, armed soldiers go on house to house searches to monitor the dead and evict the living.

We don’t have special sources, but it seems pretty apparent that behind all this there is some nice ‘reconstruction’ plan for the city. The poor refugees won’t be going back, and in the areas around the lake they will construct a nice wall of skyscrapers, like in all the Naples’ and Honolulus of this world. And then it will be left to geology to avenge the poor, sucking these lousy buildings, floor by floor, down into the mire.

Is this, therefore, some kind of ‘long-term plan’ coming to fruition? We repeat: the dominant classes neither can, nor do they wish to, predict and deal with emergencies. But one thing is for sure, they certainly aren’t concerned about helping proletarians deal with the consequences. This senile impotence which capitalism is exhibiting, vile and indecent, has done nothing to diminish its insatiable rapaciousness. Not ‘the Bush government’, not the ‘American bourgeoisie’ but the international class of slaveholders.

Even if we don’t deny capitalism’s particularly odious legacy in the many ‘deep Souths’ of this world, capitalism, as mode of production based on class oppression, won’t be able to free itself from slavism, anywhere.

Everywhere, objectively, poverty is increasing. For the bourgeoisie it is getting ever more difficult to keep its wage slaves alive, who, after all, are its one and only source of sustenance.

But it won’t be either a natural, nor a social, disaster which will threaten the domination of the bourgeois class. For that it will need to undergo a political disaster, the conscious revolutionary intervention of the working class.