The waters are finally receding in Rio Grande do Sul and the commercialisation of forms of reparation is deepening. Since the first days of the tragedy, the neoliberal governments of Rio Grande do Sul, including city halls – especially Porto Alegre – have sought to capitalise on innovative corporate solutions through city reconstruction projects. This is what researchers have called “disaster capitalism”.
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina left the city of New Orleans, in the United States, 80% submerged. The local government at the time decided to privatise the management of the tragedy by hiring Alvarez & Marsal to rebuild the city. The results were completely unsatisfactory. The communities point to a lack of dialogue with the company, no defence of housing rights, delays, overbilling and a lack of transparency, in addition to other strategies that involved mass layoffs, the privatisation of public services, and the overlapping of private and commercial interests over the public interest. Despite the fact that this information is easily found on internet searches, the mayor of Porto Alegre, Sebastião Melo, hired the same company to lead a plan to rebuild the city.
The state governor is following suit. On 10 June, Eduardo Leite announced a “New Gaucho Development Agenda”, coordinated with the support of international consultancy firm McKinsey. The company is also involved in structuring the new Development Agency that is part of the project. The consultancy has already worked in several countries, mirroring the promotion of the neoliberal ideology of economic growth permeated by corporate social responsibility.
What these consultancy firms do in practice is operate as think tanks, i.e. they are hired with public money to influence public policy-making and state planning. There has been a tendency for governments to disinvest from public universities and research institutes, which contributes to research monitoring and planning, and to outsourcing such policy-making activities to private consultancies. In this way, part of what constitutes the foundations of political projects of democratic governability, such as urban planning and the development of action plans for fair recovery with social participation and control, are completely handed over to companies and controlled by private sectors with their own interests, including in the political results of this year’s upcoming municipal elections.
Nothing new in history
These private consultancies shape public responses according to their strategies for occupying territories. Because they are mostly focused on macroeconomic responses, they propose projects that turn city halls, state governments and disaster management into real businesses, distorting the social logic of the role of the state. In other words, the crisis generated by extreme weather events, such as those experienced in Rio Grande do Sul, becomes a window of opportunity for capitalism to deepen its neoliberal logic, transforming the state’s obligation to ensure human, environmental, social and even civil and political rights, and eventually turning the state into an appendage of corporate power, no longer a regulator.
Recently, in the tragedy announced in the Rio Doce basin in Minas Gerais in 2015, the Renova Foundation, formed with the capital of the companies responsible for the destruction, Vale S.A and BHP Billiton, fulfilled the role of intermediary consultancy. In almost eight years since the Renova Foundation started operating, the homes of the affected populations have still not been satisfactorily rebuilt, and the reparations debate continues without any resolution. In addition to the Renova Foundation, many other private consultancies have been used by the Judiciary to elaborate reports and opinions that have no understanding of the social reality of the affected communities. In fact, many of the costs of these consultancies, when added together, are greater than the money actually spent by the companies on reparations for the victims.
Both in the case of Renova, in the management of the mining disaster, and Alvarez & Marsal in New Orleans, there is an abundance of literature, articles and news about the inefficiency of the approach, which leads us to ask: why do the governments of RS insist on making such a political choice? The answer is their option to deepen the neoliberal capitalist system and create profit-making mechanisms in the midst of the pain and suffering of the people. It is an innovation of capital to take advantage of the crisis generated by its own consequences, such as climate chaos and environmental destruction, and to have the capacity to build new profit-making mechanisms. In this way, what the bourgeoisie in charge of RS wants is to maintain and increase its profits, which is why it invests in itself and bails out the business community.
Popular movements build solidarity solutions
In the midst of the denialism of the problem and the lack of accountability, the social movements of the countryside and the city have once again demonstrated their unity and ability to propose effectively popular solutions to get out of the crisis with a focus on class solidarity: the working people, who are the hardest hit, are also the least responsible for the problem, but suffer even more from environmental racism in the face of the corporate and hygienist policies underway in Rio Grande do Sul. In the first half of June, the MTST (Movement of Homeless Workers) organised the occupation called Maria da Conceição Tavares (an economist, professor and intellectual with a vast critical contribution to capitalist economic development, who died recently), in an unoccupied public building in the centre of Porto Alegre. The proposal is to build a decent housing option for around 300 homeless families.
For Fernando Campos, from the MTST, the occupation of the building represents an opportunity to debate two important issues for cities: the social function of the city and recycling. According to him, “the occupation provides an immediate solution for decent housing for homeless families, and is characterised by a real and permanent transformation of a building that has been unused for years in the city centre. This is because the building will be able to serve, after undergoing the necessary adaptations, taking advantage of the physical structure that has already demanded human and natural resources (recycling dimension), giving life to the materials used, and maintaining the landscape and history of the city centre.”
While Porto Alegre city hall is proposing to build tarpaulin towns as temporary shelters for the affected families, with the support of the industrial sector, the MTST is building a counterpoint of decent housing for the families by occupying the city centre. In the same vein, the MLB (Movement for Struggle in Neighbourhoods, Slums and Favelas) occupied an old FEPAM (State Foundation for Environmental Protection) building and was violently removed by the Rio Grande do Sul military police at the request of Governor Eduardo Leite. In short, these are completely different political projects in dispute over the exercise of the right to the city in the reconstruction of Porto Alegre.
Occupying what is public in order to give dignity to the people is what the Brazilian Constitution is really all about. Looking after the well-being of its people is the main task of a ruler. Many current governments have no political project to transform the country and improve the quality of life of its people. They insist on betting on old ways in new guises to continue the domination and exploitation of the working class, but it is the unitary actions and solidarity of the organised social movements that point to paths and proposals that, in the action and struggle of every day, are building popular power to rebuild a new society.
Article originally published in Portuguese at this link: https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2024/06/24/o-capitalismo-de-desastre-e-o-caos-climatico-no-rio-grande-do-sul