The catastrophic impact and death toll of last Tuesday's floods in the Valencia region are an indictment of the social and political order. This region is well known for being one of the most flood-prone in Europe, and scientists have been warning Spanish and European authorities for years of the urgent need to protect its population. Yet masses of people received no warning Tuesday, before walls of water from flash floods slammed into their homes and workplaces.
Spanish authorities have tried to conceal the scale of the disaster and refused to make public the death toll, which was unknown until Friday evening, when notes of a meeting of regional authorities in Valencia were leaked to the press. These revealed that 1,900 people were missing and that nearly 200 people had been confirmed dead. Since then, the number of confirmed deaths has risen to 217 across Spain, including 213 in the Valencia region.
According to photographic data from the Copernicus emergency management service, the European Union (EU) space program, the floods affected at least 77,000 buildings, housing 199,000 people. The mud has swallowed up many bodies and the floodwaters have carried others towards the sea. The streets are littered with cars tossed around like matchboxes by the waters. Thousands of people still have no access to running water, electricity, heating or medicine, and the region's shops and supermarkets are in ruins.
While Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who heads the PSOE and Sumar government, ordered 10,000 soldiers and gendarmes to be sent to the region, rescue operations are still largely carried out by volunteers. Spain's health ministry warned that hospitals were “on the brink of collapse” and as of Friday its emergency line had received 75,000 calls. The roads of the Mediterranean corridor, on which 40% of Spanish goods pass, are closed. The A3 Madrid-Valencia motorway is cut, trains from Valencia are stopped and dozens of roads and bridges have been demolished.
In addition, the storm continues to hit eastern Spain: the provinces of Murcia, Almeria, Alicante, Castellón, Tarragona and now the south of the Valencia region are once again on flood alert.
The community of Valencia is the scene of a social crime. Scientists have long warned that human-induced climate change would increase the vulnerability of the Mediterranean region, and eastern Spain in particular, to catastrophic flooding.
After the Valencia region floods in 2019, the Red Cross published a report warning of weak infrastructure, the construction of buildings in flood zones and the lack of disaster planning in the region. She called for measures to protect its population from future floods. None of these warnings were heeded by official circles.
The PSOE and Compromís, the Valencian allies of the petty-bourgeois pseudo-left parties Podemos and Sumar, had set up an unfunded Valencian Emergency Union (UVE) shortly before leaving power. Their successor, Valencian Prime Minister Carlos Mazón of the right-wing Popular Party (PP), abolished the UVE after being elected in 2023. At the same time, Mazón reduced landowners' inheritance taxes and granted 90 million euros in subsidies to companies, including Volkswagen.
As the storm approached, Mazón refused to act, although the Spanish National Meteorological Agency gave warnings five days in advance, correctly predicting that floodwaters would peak on Tuesday. He gave baseless assurances to the public that the rains would lessen during the day. It was only shortly after 8 p.m. Tuesday that his government issued a text message alert advising residents to stay indoors. But by then, the area was already flooded and hundreds of people had died.
In The situation of the working class in EnglandKarl Marx's great co-thinker, Friedrich Engels, gave a famous definition of social murder. “When society puts hundreds of proletarians in a situation such that they are necessarily exposed to a premature and abnormal death,” he wrote, “and yet allows it to persist, then it is indeed a murder, just like that. to that committed by an individual.”
Anger erupts against the social murderers who run Spanish and European society. Yesterday, Sánchez, King Felipe VI of Spain and Queen Letizia visited Paiporta, one of the worst-hit towns in the Valencian community, blocking relief supplies as police set up a security perimeter around them. Outraged residents surrounded Sánchez and the royal couple, pelting them with mud and chanting: “Out!”, “Pedro Sánchez, where are you” and “Murderers!”
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Billionaire capitalist aristocrats have sentenced workers to death, demanding they come to work amid floods. Spain's richest man Amancio Ortega (net worth €127 billion) forbids Inditex employees from having phones at work and they even missed desperately late official emergency text messages. Workers confronted Mercadona supermarkets owner Juan Ruig (€9 billion) for ordering Mercadona trucks to leave during the storm, to which Ruig responded by shouting obscenities.
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Global warming confronts workers and young people with a global crisis, which cannot be resolved within the rotten framework of the capitalist nation-state system. It is well known that global warming will cause increasingly violent storms across the planet. But no coordinated action is being taken to stop them, or to invest the necessary resources and put in place infrastructure and disaster response plans capable of withstanding such crises.
Instead, in country after country, state officials and the ruling class treat workers with malignant neglect, leaving them to fend for themselves in the midst of catastrophic storms. In the United States, Hurricane Helene recently caused severe flooding, killing more than 230 people. Continuing rains across central Europe led to flooding and left 20 people dead, just weeks before the Valencia disaster. Floods in Nigeria, Chad and Ghana have killed more than 1,500 people.
Industrial, technological and scientific resources exist to stop global warming and protect humanity from its effects, but they cannot be mobilized for this purpose as long as they remain under the influence of a ruling class unfit to govern.
The question must be asked, where have the resources gone that could have been used to build flood-resistant infrastructure and save lives in the Valencia region? Since the Wall Street crash of 2008, the European Central Bank has massively increased its balance sheet, printing nearly five trillion euros of public money which has been distributed to bail out the financial and corporate aristocracy. During the same period, EU powers have collectively spent hundreds of billions of euros to increase their military budgets.
Under the PSOE-Podemos and PSOE-Sumar governments, Spain's military budget reached a record 26 billion euros. At the same time, Ministers Podemos and Sumar oversaw the distribution of EU bailout funds to major Spanish companies, while Madrid continued to sell arms to Israel amid the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Their hostility towards the working class is embodied by Labor Minister Yolanda Díaz, from Sumar (ex-Podemos). This notoriously ordered workers to return to work at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to more than 140,000 deaths in Spain and millions of people suffering from long-term Covid. Last week, she cynically called on company management to be “responsible” during the floods, so that “no one works while taking risks”.
Bitter experience, however, shows that it is useless to make moral appeals to the conscience of capitalist parasites like Sanchez or Ruig. They and their pseudo-left defenders like Díaz and Podemos are as impervious to the legitimate demands of the masses as the right-wingers of the PP.
There is no simple solution to the climate crisis or its effects. To prevent new disasters like the floods in the Valencia region, it is necessary to build a socialist movement in the working class on an international scale, to put an end to imperialist war and genocide, to take control of the social wealth created by workers from the hands of capitalists and use it to meet the urgent social needs of humanity.
(Article published in English on November 4, 2024)
