From It’s Going Down (15/01/2025)
Grassroots journalist Alissa Azar reports on the unfolding ecological disaster in Los Angeles and how mutual aid groups are mobilizing in response.
On Tuesday, January 7th, people in Los Angeles County, California began receiving a high wind advisory and risk of fire notice. Come nightfall, heavy winds were underway and several fires had broken out, engulfing the city of LA in the worst disaster the city’s history. The fires became so intense that the freeways were lined up with abandoned cars stretched out for miles after people left their vehicles to flee. The city ordered mass evacuations, and thousands of Californians were displaced from their homes within hours.
Almost immediately, hundreds of individuals began to coordinate a massive city-wide mutual aid effort. People began circulating evacuation information, gathering food, water, toiletries, personal protection equipment, medications, bedding, and other essentials. The mutual aid networks stepping forward during this crisis include medics and therapists offering medical assistance and mental health care to people displaced by the fires. Individual community members have also been taking similar initiatives to support their communities. On Friday January 10th, a local man from Altadena set up an impromptu supply distribution center at a closed gas station, which he kept open despite implementation of a curfew and the deployment of the National Guard.
“We are also building free clothing stores, so those displaced can go in and choose their clothing in an environment that is more like shopping as opposed to an emergency,” someone organizing with LA Fire Mutual Aid said, adding that it also makes it easier to find people’s sizes and exact needs. Others have been making rounds to resource free community fridges in the area and ensuring people have access to evacuation and emergency supplies.
Negligent City Response and Failures of Capitalism
While individuals from the city and local counties began opening up evacuation shelters, it quickly became clear that they were woefully unprepared for a disaster of this scale. On Tuesday, Los Angeles Fire Department put all firefighters on standby as all hands were needed on deck. For the first time in two decades, a request like this was made as gusty Santa Ana winds carried the flames throughout a dry landscape. While this unfolding catastrophe was fueled directly by climate change, it was also certainly exasperated by capitalism and greed from the ruling class.
In June of 2024, LA Mayor Karen Bass signed and adopted a $12.8 billion budget that cut the fire department’s funding by more than $17.5 million, while also increasing the police budget by $126 million. On December 4th, the LAFD Fire Chief submitted a memo to the Board of Fire Commissioners stating, “Los Angeles City Fire Department (LAFD) is facing unprecedented operational challenges due to the elimination of critical civilian positions and a $7 million reduction in Overtime Variable Staffing Hours (V-Hours). […] The reduction has severely limited the Department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires, earthquakes, hazardous material incidents, and large public events.”
The LA fires are yet another example of how the disproportionate amount of funding the city uses for their nauseatingly bloated and ineffective police force, works against meeting the immediate needs of the people. Much of the police budget doesn’t even go towards services for Angelenos, but rather towards legal proceedings and millions of dollars in lawsuits, further costing the city and its residents money that would invaluably be spent on other departments people could actually benefit from. Jose Herrera with CALÓ News reported that “Los Angeles has committed more than $183 million for liability claims just four months into the 2024-25 fiscal year, with two of the biggest sources of liability settlements resulting from the LAPD and failing infrastructure, according to City Controller Kenneth Mejia.”
Faced with the erratic and negligent response of the city and county’s various institutions, the communities of LA were left to take matters into their own hands, and that is exactly what they have been doing through pop-up mutual aid networks and collaborative care. While Angelenos have responded to the current crisis with mutual aid and support, the county and state agencies have responded with violence. Since the fires broke out, there have been several reports of sweeps of houseless encampments, ongoing ICE raids, increased police surveillance and profiling, prioritization of aid for the rich, detainment of people attempting to retrieve things from their homes, and the ticketing people for distributing food and supplies.
On Tuesday, Border Patrol began unannounced raids in Bakersfield, CA, as the fires intensified and evacuations accelerated in LA. CalMatters reported that this “appears to be the first large-scale Border Patrol raid in California since the election of Donald Trump, coming just a day after Congress certified the election on January 6, in the final days of Joe Biden’s presidency. The panic and confusion, for both immigrants and local businesses that rely on their labor, foreshadow what awaits communities across California if Trump follows through on his promise to conduct mass deportations.” Kern county resident Antonio De Loera-Brust expressed that these raids are “provoking intense anxiety and a lot of fear in the community.” On social media, Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol chief in El Centro, called the sweeps “Operation Return to Sender.” He went on to say they are planning other similar operations around the state, including Fresno and Sacramento.
By Thursday, Governor Gavin Newsom deployed the California National Guard to support efforts by law enforcement to prevent “looting.” The National Guard and local police forces have been stationed in evacuated neighborhoods and at various “safety check points.” Several evacuees have been detained for attempting to return to their homes. An individual working with mutual aid groups in LA shared that when they went to check on their home, themselves and their Black neighbors were harassed by the police as affluent white people were able to pass through with no issues.
The Sidewalk Project reported that one of their team members witnessed a Santa Monica police officer arrest a queer, autistic houseless man who was trying to retrieve his personal belongings before fleeing to safety. “They told people passing by that he was being arrested for starting fires.” Despite reports that the City would be winding down deadly sweeps of houseless community members during this devastating catastrophe, there have been several reports of camps in LA continuing to be swept regardless – leaving people who already have so little with nowhere to go and their belongings taken and destroyed.
While some of the wealthy Californians who have been displaced are paying over $1,000 a night for hotel rooms, thousands of others are being displaced. Before the fires, there were over 75,000 people in LA County alone experiencing houselessness. Come Wednesday, the City said that it had offered a mere 60 hotel vouchers for unhoused folks to use for shelter in order to escape the smoke and all its hazards. In addition to the more than 75,000 houseless people in LA, over 100,000 Los Angeles County residents are currently under evacuation orders, and more than 87,000 residents under evacuation warnings.
As headlines are dominated by mansions worth tens of millions of dollars burned to the ground and a plead for sympathy toward the rich and famous, some of the oldest Black neighborhoods in the region have been reduced to nothing but ash. The Eaton Fire destroyed neighborhoods in Altadena and Pasadena, burning more than 10,600 acres. These fires are dis-proportionally impacting working class families and marginalized communities, including many Black residents who have deep roots in Altadena. Hundreds of Black families have created GoFundMes after people lost homes that have been in their families for generations. The first victim identified from the fires was Victor Shaw, a 66-year-old Black man who died with a garden hose still in his hand as he attempted to preserve his home that had been in his family for 55 years. Yesha Callahan released a report on Altadena, expressing how the area “has long served as a refuge for Black families seeking asylum from systemic racism, a sanctuary where they can thrive. The Great Migration, a movement in the early 20th century, where many African Americans moved west to escape the Jim Crow South. Altadena’s open-spaces and relative affordability compared with neighboring Pasadena, made it an attractive destination. By the 1920s and 1930s, a thriving Black community had taken root and flourished, overcoming redlining and restrictive housing covenants, to create a rich cultural and social network.”
These fires across LA could impact some of the most marginalized communities for years to come. Thousands of working class people have lost not only their homes, but their jobs as well, all in a matter of days. In the wake of the slain UnitedHealth Group CEO that has made insurance companies a non-stop topic of discussion as of late, we are shown once again the predatory nature of the insurance industry. Under capitalism, the insurance industry is an inherently predatory racket. It directly incentivizes profit over the well-being of those seeking, often, life saving coverage.
Between 2020-2022, several insurance companies have canceled 2.8 million customers insurance policies across the state of California, including 531,000 policies in LA County. People were already turning to state run insurance before the fires as they struggle to keep up with rising property tax rates. Capital B reported that “over the past four years, most major property insurance companies have stopped offering coverage in the city, and older homeowners have faced difficulties affording rising property taxes. The situation has left residents turning to California’s basic state-run insurance plan with funding challenges. The agency said last year that a major disaster like this would threaten to run the agency dry.”
Mutual Aid and Community Response
Time and time again, we see how our society is structured around and prioritizes capital. How it values conquest over conservation, and expansion over existence. The hyper-individualistic nature of our society is rooted in capitalism. Instead of seeking to mend our wounds, the ruling class exploits our pain and uses our blood to turn a profit. Take the Resnicks for example, a California family who owns almost all the water in California after they quietly seized control of the public water supply in 1994. Now, their company uses 150 billion gallons of water a year, while the working class suffers drought conditions and their company supports the territorial expansion that has turned the landscape in Palestine into an environmental catastrophe. This affluent family is just one of many contributing to the climate crisis caused by decades of unchecked corporate greed.
As Ahmad Ibsais wrote on Mondoweiss, “The fire consuming the Palisades isn’t just a California wildfire – it’s a mirror reflecting a global crisis of connected catastrophes.” Whether it be snow storms, hurricanes, wildfires, or any other large scale disaster, it’s no wonder that people turn to their neighbors for support when their government, that values money and power over human lives, inevitably fails them. Individualism conditions us to believe that we have to go through these situations all on our own. Between climate change, the pandemic, the economic crisis that is increasingly exasperated by all of these things, we see more and more people turning to mutual aid networks. Take Hurricane Helene for example, where mutual aid efforts kept thousands of people safe and alive. In a report published by It’s Going Down, Firestorm, an anarchist community center and cooperative in North Carolina assisting in mutual aid efforts during the hurricane, stated “our community is experiencing an ongoing crisis created by infrastructural collapse and the profound failure of capitalism to value and sustain life. No state or federal aid has yet reached Asheville, but all around us we’re seeing regular people acting autonomously to address immediate needs and meet one another with care.”
These crises expose systemic inequalities that are deeply rooted in our infrastructures. And while mutual aid is often an exchange of goods and/or services, it is symbiotic. In the wake of the COVID pandemic, “mutual aid” has been used more frequently by the mainstream. Co-optation was inevitable. Even law enforcement uses the term “mutual aid” to refer to police assistance and exchange of resources from neighboring counties. But mutual aid is not just another word for “charity.” In fact, these two things couldn’t be more different. Mutual aid does indeed provide to those in need, but importantly, it also seeks to tackle and destroy the structures of inequality that created these disparities in the first place. Mutual aid is the community taking care of the community. It seeks to destroy the power dynamics that exist in institutionalized aid distribution and general support. Sometimes it’s physical items, sometimes it’s emotional labor; it comes in all forms and shapes. But to put it simply, you give what you can, and you take what you need.
Many people who organize these initiatives are well versed from various efforts of disaster response, as well as violence perpetrated by the city on its own most marginalized inhabitants. The affinity groups and networks of people who have emerged consistently to advocate for various things, such as sweeps of houseless encampments, support for protestors wrongly arrested for advocating an end to the genocide in Gaza, showing up in solidarity to disrupt ICE raids along with a multitude of other causes – once again prove their mettle and commitment to community care during the worst large scale disaster in Los Angeles. And if this level of community care can be achieved during a catastrophe and fighting through the repression of grief, imagine what we can achieve in our communities on a regular day.
Similar to the pandemic initiatives that operated very much as a charity, with all the official legislation and bureaucracy that entails, such as background checks and food-hygiene certificates, we are seeing the same thing happening in LA. For example, the largest Red Cross-run shelter has been turning away all donations, and will not take food that is not food-safe verified. Food trucks in Pasadena were turned away from serving their community because they only had permits for other cities. Law enforcement has also been spotted at distribution centers harassing community members and policing how many items people could take, despite an abundance of supplies.
No One is Coming to Save Us But Ourselves
The term “mutual aid” was coined by anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin. In his writing he explains that survival and evolution of the human race depends on us working together. His writing considers the importance of mutual aid for prosperity and survival and explores its functions in the animal kingdom, Indigenous communities, the labor movement, impoverished communities, and more. As Moya K. Mason wrote, “Kropotkin’s most famous book, Mutual Aid, maintains that cooperation within a species has been an historical factor in the development of social institutions, and in fact, that the avoidance of competition greatly increases the chances of survival and raises the quality of life. He contended that mutual aid is a factor that is both biological and voluntary in nature, and is an enabler of progressive evolution. Without it, life as we know it could not exist. This can be also seen in the animal kingdom. Horses and deer unite to protect each from their foe, wolves and lions gather to hunt, while bees and ants work together in many different ways. Kropotkin said that mutual support is an established fact within the feathered world, with eagles, pelicans, vultures, sparrows, and other fowl, collectively searching for and sharing food. Some species of birds even gather together at the end of the day to sleep.”
Therefore, mutual aid is necessary for transformative change. Refusal to accept the hyper-individualistic society that our oppressors have insisted is what is natural helps us return to our roots and resist all forms of capitalist and state violence. If community and working together is what is needed for us to survive, then working together and community is inherently an act of rebellion against the ruling class. An attempt to quell the literal and metaphoric fires raging around us by means of the very institutions that wounded our planet is a fools errand. As Margaret Killjoy said, “nothing seems possible until people make it possible by means of direct action – then it seems inevitable.”
As we hit more and more record breaking temperatures across the globe and climate catastrophe becomes more common, it is imperative that we heed Mother Earth’s calls and return to our roots. To each other. It is far past time that we begin responding. As Earth bleeds, nature screams against the capitalist institutions that seek to destroy it. Against the supremely individualistic society that is the United States, holding us back from collective care and liberation. As our blood seeps through the cracks of the current system we’re forced to participate in, our exploitation is clearer than ever. The burden of truth has always been our responsibility, and as painful as it is, we have to keep going. We can’t allow ourselves to continue to be exploited as they continue to profit off the destruction of our lives, our homes, and our planet. Whether climate catastrophe or state violence and repression, it is up to us to assess how we move forward and equip ourselves to take care of each other and our communities. And that is exactly what Angelenos are doing.
Mutual Aid Resources: