It is not the people’s fault that they are dying from climate change

We at Partido Sosyalista extend our solidarity to the victims of the latest typhoons to have hit the Philippines. We enjoin everyone to contribute to relief efforts. We add our voice to all those demanding that the government spares no effort to ensure that all those who need rescue, relief, or comfort get them immediately. At the same time, we wish to take this moment to speak out against a proposition that is once again spreading in the public sphere:

That is, that it is the people themselves—those whose houses have been destroyed by the typhoons, those whose family members have been swept away in the flood—who are ultimately responsible for their own suffering by voting for “bad” leaders who engage in corruption, or by helping perpetuate “bad governance.” 

We strongly disagree with this way of thinking.

To begin with, the people who voted for incumbent officials never also gave these officials the permit to plunder public funds when they voted for them. In a society where the public has been largely deprived the power to oversee and hold elected officials accountable, where the power of money in politics constrains voters’ choices, and where the people are denied the time and the means to meaningfully participate in politics at all, the responsibility for corruption and its consequences lies with the corrupt and the corrupt alone—never with the electorate.

But in addition, the problems we face go beyond corruption or flood control projects.

We are facing more severe floods and landslides during typhoons because our mountains have been flattened and our forests have been denuded to make way for mining operations, subdivisions, hotels, dams, logging concessions and coal power plants. And we are experiencing more frequent and more devastating typhoons because of climate change, now better described as climate breakdown or climate collapse. This in turn is the result of runaway fossil fuel emissions, itself ultimately the consequence of the perpetuation of an inherently irrational global economic system oriented towards endless accumulation and growth.

Seeing the problem from this wider perspective, it becomes clear that the ones responsible for people’s suffering today are the mining corporations, real estate companies, logging concessionaires and other big business owners who have been getting richer and richer by clearing our forests and ravaging our mountains.

The ones to blame for people dying are all those government officials—including the so-called “good leaders”—who have been conniving with these corporations and allowing their large-scale environmentally destructive projects to operate and proliferate.

From an even larger perspective, the ones that ought to be condemned are the governments of the United States, the European Union, and other advanced industrialized societies who have historically dumped the most fossil fuels into the atmosphere yet refuse to do more to reduce their emissions—but also the governments of China, India, and the rest of the world’s biggest polluters, including our own government, for hiding behind these larger, more industrialized countries to justify their own refusal to reduce their own emissions and their own responsibility in the world’s failure to arrive at a just international solution to climate change.

Ultimately, the ones that deserve to be denounced are not the ordinary people dying from climate change, few of whom contributed to causing climate change and profiting from. The ones that deserve blame are all those in power who seek to defend and reproduce the global economic system that—by driving everyone to accumulate, accumulate, and accumulate—is ultimately the cause of the climate breakdown and of our inability to stop it.

We at Partido Sosyalista refuse to blame the victims for their own suffering: they are not responsible for what befell them, the prevailing social order is. 

What they need now—what all working people need now—is not condemnation but concrete forms of relief: rice, sanitary napkins, roofs, nails, and so on. But ultimately, what they need—what all working people need now in the face of climate collapse—is not denunciation but concrete forms of solidarity as we come together, mobilize against all those truly responsible for our hardships, and establish a new world in which we can forge a new, more caring relationship with nature and with each other.#