On April 14, a hellish explosion at the West Texas Fertilizer Company devastated the small town of West, Texas, killing at least 30 (the final toll may never be known), including several first responders, and injuring some 200 others. The force of the explosion flattened a 50-unit apartment complex, demolished about 50 houses and battered a nursing home and several schools. Dozens of other homes were reported to have been damaged.
In the wake of the disaster, questions are being raised about the failure of government agencies to provide protection to the workers at the plant and the people of the town. Early analyses point to a collapse of government regulatory oversight—OSHA had not inspected the plant for 29 years—and bad corporate practices—the company had 1,300 times more explosive anhydrous ammonia on site that it was authorized to store.
West is a small bucolic town located in central Texas, settled by Czech and German immigrant farmers and incorporated at the end of the 19th century as a railroad town. However, during the era of chemical-intensive agriculture, West transitioned to become home to West Fertilizer, which produces fertilizers from chemicals, including anhydrous ammonia.
A large-scale company harboring explosive chemicals should not be located near residential areas. But in this case, West Fertilizer not only produced products important to the farming economy of West but also provided employment to West residents. As the town grew up next to the plant, no one seemed to notice the Faustian bargain that this relationship represented, particularly as the residents apparently assumed they were protected by government oversight of the plant. For those who died on April 14, that proved to be a fatal assumption.
Lax or nonexistent regulation
Inevitably as more details emerge, the story of West, Texas, will follow earlier stories of how lax or nonexistent regulation led to mining disasters; oil well blowouts; airline accidents; outbreaks of food poisoning; the production and sale of dangerous toys and infant formula; truck, bus and train accidents; and corporate fraud. In fact, this list could include incidents from any and all sectors of U.S. society, raising the question: If these disasters are so widespread, why do they reoccur with such regularity?
The short answer is that in spite of significant technological advances in accident prevention and a laundry list of legislative acts proposed as reforms, capitalist governments lack the will or power to prevent accidents and fraud. The real power is held by capitalists who manage the for-profit system, and no reform offered by capitalist politicians is likely to be adopted if it negatively affects the profitability or competitiveness of large capitalist enterprises. The liberal theory that capitalism can be regulated has gone into decline along with the liberal regulatory system that was gutted when neo-liberal policies were adopted beginning in the late 1970s.
The destruction of liberal regulation teaches several lessons about how capitalism manipulates the political system to serve its own purposes. The 1970s were a time of turmoil in world and U.S. politics—a mass anti-war movement had arisen, along with urban unrest and uprisings; the Vietnam War was lost; a president was impeached and forced to resign. In addition, the U.S. suffered a major economic crisis that produced a recession, followed by inflation and shortages, followed by a still greater recession, which was followed by an even greater period of inflation, leading in 1980-1983 to the highest official rate of unemployment in the U.S. in the post World War II era.
With capitalism in a deep and prolonged crisis, the door was opened for neo-liberals to offer regulatory “reforms” that included now familiar “public-private partnerships” and the “alternative dispute resolution” process, which substituted corporate management for public management of risk.
Once in place, these reforms provided a rationale for limiting public regulation as “too expensive” and starving public regulatory agencies of material and legal resources. At first, resistance was offered by liberal groups that had the public ear, as well as organized labor. But as time went on, the voices of the liberal opposition faded as corporate-sponsored substitutes elbowed them out with greater funds and more direct media access, and the off-shoring of industrial jobs weakened the labor movement. Today, the opposition is divided, unorganized and weak.
Now that liberal regulation has substantially collapsed, there is no realistic prospect for regaining control over corporate behavior without an upwelling of popular dissent and a revived labor movement. Here, too, there are lessons to be learned from how neoliberalism has acted to divide and fracture popular movements by tapping into and promoting individualism, using racism to divide workers, and divesting government agencies of the power to regulate in the public interest.
Lessons must be learned
These are significant barriers to organization, and the lessons of the past must be learned to avoid the mistakes of the past. It is also important to recognize the false promise of capitalism that risk can be safely negotiated as a tradeoff between jobs and security. However, this is false because actual power is held only by corporations that control the regulatory process, to the extent that a regulatory process exists.
Workers must be empowered to report workplace hazards without fearing loss of their jobs. And that requires union organization at companies like West Fertilizer.
Tragically, some will benefit from the disaster in West, Texas: The media will exploit the pain and fear to sell advertising, opportunistic politicians will offer platitudes designed for their next election, and capitalist enterprises will move in to profit from the cleanup and rebuilding. Once the story fades, however, the disaster and the people of West will also fade from public view, as have many of the survivors of Katrina who remain homeless, jobless and broke.
Communities and workers at risk are in need of a new politics that puts people before profits and acts to prevent disasters, not exploit them. Those politics are not the politics of parties beholden to corporations or of charitable and nonprofit organizations that appear only after the damage has been done. Rather, they are the politics of a workers’ party and a collective movement that targets the root cause, capitalism, and lights a path out of the swamp of profit at any cost. As Joe Hill so famously said, “Don’t mourn, organize.”
