[ The struggle now is the one that punctuates all moments of
crisis: the forces of disaster capitalism versus the people attempting
to build a paradise out of hell.]
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EMPIRE AND CAPITAL SET MAUI ABLAZE  
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Andrea Bower
August 16, 2023
Common Dreams
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_ The struggle now is the one that punctuates all moments of crisis:
the forces of disaster capitalism versus the people attempting to
build a paradise out of hell. _

Luz Vargas, 45, lost her son Kenyero Fuentes in the fire in Lahaina,
Maui, on Aug. 8. He was found in the remnants of their burned home.
His 15th birthday would have been last Sunday., Deanne Fitzmaurice/NPR


 

Over 100 people (likely many more) were burned alive and an estimated
1,300 are still missing on Maui, in one of the most deadly and
destructive wildfires in history. The dire crisis continues as
hospitals are overwhelmed with burn patients, residents inhale
highly toxic air
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the community reals with trauma
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and basic necessities fail to get to those most in need
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Countless Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) and workers—including
many undocumented and unprotected immigrants
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everything and may never be able to reestablish their lives in the
Lāhainā area
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With only 25% of the devastated area searched by rescue
teams, developers and realtors
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already swooping in to try to buy land
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displaced locals—a callous incarnation of our current social order.

The human-caused roots of the Maui atrocity—and
the already-in-motion fight
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happens next—have everything to do with empire, capitalism, elite
power, and their ravaging of the planet and people. But what has
emerged from the bottom-up in response to the disaster—ordinary
people collectively and creatively organizing to generously and
selflessly care for one another
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us the alternative to the world that imperial capital has compelled.
It is also the world that the vast majority of us long for so deeply.

Multiple wildfires across typically wet, tropical islands are a
chilling reminder that climate catastrophe is upon us. The
“absolutely unprecedented
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is our new norm. Our planet is ablaze; the impacts of climate change
are hitting harder and faster than scientists predicted even less
than a decade ago
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and cascades are already
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at around 1.2°C of warming. On our current trajectory, we are facing
a cataclysmic 2.7-4.4°C
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by the end of this century.

In Hawai‘i, we are increasingly accustomed to floods, hurricanes,
tsunamis, even sea level rise. But wildfires of this nature came as an
absolute shock to most of us, despite scientists’ warnings
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government and large landowners for years. Heat and severe drought
turned parts of Hawai‘i into a “tinderbox
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before a high pressure system in the north and a hurricane passing to
the south lowered humidity and caused forceful winds to blow up
multiple fires. All of these effects of climate change are going to
get worse. Hawai‘i is already getting 90% less rainfall
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it did a century ago, with the severity of drought being particularly
acute in the past 15 years.

Parallel to climate change, “tinderbox” conditions were created by
appalling land and water management for benefit of the elite. Major
water diversions—first for plantation agriculture and then for
tourism and gentlemen estates—have radically altered ecosystems.
Landowners and water diverters like the old sugar barons Alexander &
Baldwin may bear some direct culpability for the death and destruction
on Maui. The company has a long history of ferociously and corruptly
fighting
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Maoli and environmentalists over restoring diverted water
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its natural watersheds.

Some of the very same players diverting water, like Alexander &
Baldwin, left broad swaths of land covered in highly flammable
invasive grasses, despite abundant warning
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they were creating a potentially catastrophic fire hazard. Fire-prone
vegetation like guinea grass, brought to Hawai‘i by sugar oligarchs
to feed livestock, has been left to cover over a quarter of
Hawai‘i’s land
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the transition from monocrop plantations to tourism development.

Climate change and water-deprived land covered in combustible
non-native vegetation have led to other serious fires in recent years,
a phenomenon Hawai‘i is highly unprepared for. Multiple studies and
articles have warned that Hawai‘i is “primed
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for wildfires. In 2018 and 2021, fires burned thousands of acres and
destroyed hundreds of homes. The growing threat was largely ignored
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it was inconvenient and expensive to the powerful.

When last week’s fires broke out, the occupying U.S. state—which
ideologically justifies its presence through appeals to
“protection”
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in its emergency response. Not a single alarm siren was activated
during the fires
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Power lines stayed on despite fire hazard warnings from the National
Weather Service. Firefighters and disaster response teams
were radically under-resourced
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save people, and remain “overwhelmed
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in the days after. A week later, despite the immense resources held by
the U.S. military and settler elites
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Maui—Bezos, Oprah, Jimmy Buffet, Jensen Huang, just to name a few
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people are still without food, fuel, and water. Mutual aid efforts led
by Kānaka Maoli have proven far more effective
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disaster relief
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The proximate causes of the horrific Maui tragedy—a rapidly warming
climate, land “primed to burn,”
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lack of preparedness—share the same underlying roots. Capital and
empire, or more specifically, a social system violently forced upon
most of the world, that is premised upon unending extraction and
exploitation of people and environment for accumulation of private
wealth. In Hawai‘i, imperial capitalism has dispossessed most of
the Native population
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power and resource control
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a remarkable degree, created a society of lavish wealth
alongside extreme poverty
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the ‘āina [[link removed]] (“that which
feeds,” or land), commodified Hawai‘i and Hawaiian culture
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and increasingly delivered huge chunks of “paradise” into
the vacation home portfolio of the elite
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These are the conditions that created water diversions, denuded land
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and neglect of potential disaster that always hits hardest at the
bottom of social hierarchies. As Kaniela Ing succinctly put it,
“colonial greed is burning down our home
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These histories, and the monstrous repercussions, are relatively
recent ones in the long span of human history in the islands. Knowing
the recent history of imperialism and capitalism in Hawai‘i—and
their ongoing contestation
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the current social order. It reminds us that much different kinds of
social orders have existed in our human past, survive in our present,
and are possible in our future.

For over a millennium, Hawai‘i’s peoples lived in steady balance
with the rest of the web of life, sustaining dense populations
through sophisticated agroecological production
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Structured by relationships of reciprocity, Indigenous Hawaiian
production was organized cooperatively around ‘ohana, or extended
family units. People freely accessed land, water, sea, and forests.
While evolving Indigenous Hawaiian society was not free from class
hierarchy, it was defined by beliefs and structures of collectivity,
human freedom, reciprocity, and redistribution. Systems of production
and distribution were designed to ensure that all had enough and
that careful stewardship and reverence
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maintained. It was a society in which the logics of capitalism—of
unabated exploitation of land and people for personal gain, extreme
individualism, absolute private ownership, accumulation of wealth for
wealth’s sake, and the deprivation of many alongside excess riches
for very few—would have been structurally impossible and culturally
unintelligible
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Kānaka Maoli power in and over the islands remained strong in the
first decades of increasing contact with Euro-American capitalists and
imperialists, even as they navigated widespread death from introduced
disease. The 19th century was one of competitive Euro-American
imperialism throughout the Pacific, and militarily imposed agreements
for repayment of accused debt-ensnared Hawai‘i
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the imperial-commercial economy even before it was recognized by
colonial powers as a sovereign nation. While the Hawaiian
Kingdom worked to maintain sovereign Indigenous governance
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the 19th century, capitalism and its violent backers steadily
engulfed the islands
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As the interests of sugar capitalists increasingly collided with the
Hawaiian Kingdom, white oligarchs secured the backing of the U.S.
military in overthrowing the Indigenous government. By the early
1900s five sugar corporations
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from four missionary families—controlled virtually the entirety of
the economy and the government that served it. Sugar production
thrived for decades because an antidemocratic, illegally occupying
state
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the industry’s elite minority interests, maintained extreme class
and ethnic inequalities, and delivered the land, water, and laborers
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it demanded.

Sugar production in the mid- and late-20th century moved to cheaper
locations of exploit, largely in response to militant interracial
worker organizing
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However, the legacies of the plantation persist. Today, Hawai‘i is
entirely dependent on a vertically integrated corporate tourism
economy. It provides cheap labor, natural resources, infrastructure,
and other government support in exchange for low-wage jobs and an
inflated cost of living—a change in form but not in function from
plantation days of past.

Lāhainā embodies these colonial and capitalist assaults, as well as
their resistance. Pre-colonial Lāhainā—with older names like
Malu‘ulu o Lele
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“land of the flying breadfruit”—was a place of wetlands and
extensive food tree forests. It has long been seen by Kānaka Maoli as
a highly sacred place. Ali‘i (problematically translated to
“chiefs” by colonists) would gather in Lāhainā for governance,
and it was the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom for 50 years.

Lāhainā became one of the first commercial centers of the islands
with the entrance of whaling, which gave rise to a growing population
of foreign traders looking to “grow rich rapidly
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in the islands. Thick groves of breadfruit and fishponds were
destroyed to make way for export-oriented sugar production. In the
1960s sugar capitalists started cashing in for land development, which
continued to require water diversions and further “denuding
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of the land. West Maui is now choked with hotels and tourism
infrastructure that services 2 million people who visit every year.

Amidst the ongoing systematic extraction of wealth and resources from
Lāhainā, it remains the home of many Kānaka Maoli, their sacred
sites, burials, and cultural centers like Na ‘Aikane o Maui
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Invaluable cultural artifacts, documents, and art were turned to ash
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the flames that burnt Lāhainā to the ground. It’s a chilling
symbol
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the rapaciousness of capital and empire.

Others at the bottom of Hawai‘i’s social hierarchies are also
hardest hit by the fires. Housing is excessively unaffordable and
difficult to find in Maui, and the thousands of working-class people
rendered homeless will not simply be able to find new places to live
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Those already living on the edges—which are the majority in
Hawai‘i
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be further pushed into lives of precarity under the existing social
order. A large portion of Lāhainā’s population was immigrants
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federal relief. As the ash settles, inequalities will be further
cemented.

The struggle now is the one that punctuates all moments of crisis: the
forces of disaster capitalism
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attempting to build a paradise out of hell
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compels a grotesque search for profit wherever it is to be made—even
in desperate times, the system knows no morality. As capital and
empire turn Maui and the planet into a burning nightmare, power could
consolidate in increasingly violent and extractive ways. The people
that are and will be hit the hardest
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those who have already been most brutalized by the past centuries of
imperialism-capitalism-racism-patriarchy that delivered us to this
apex.

But even at this apex, the future is not a foregone conclusion. The
social relations that have existed since time immemorial
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Indigenous Hawai‘i remind all of us that a world beyond the prisons
of capital and empire are possible. The ways people are mobilizing
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care for one another in the wake of Maui’s disaster illuminate our
deepest human selves—generosity, compassion, cooperation,
interdependence. Both show us the alternative to systems premised on
hierarchy, exploitation, and greed. They show us that humans are
absolutely capable
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constructing far more utopic futures that are structured to
incentivize, inspire, and cultivate the best of our human capacities
rather than the worst.

Our different potential future trajectories couldn’t be more stark.
Maui is a powerful reminder that we all need to fight like hell to get
out of hell.

_Support mutual aid efforts on Maui
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_Andrea Brower is an activist and scholar from Kaua‘i. She is an
assistant professor in the Solidarity & Social Justice Program with
Gonzaga University's Department of Sociology. Her research, writing,
and teaching on capitalism, colonialism, the environment, food, and
agriculture is embedded in social movements for justice, equality,
liberation, and ecological regeneration._

* Maui
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* wildfire
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* disaster capitalism
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* Climate Change
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