A new outbreak of the deadly disease Ebola broke out last month in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). As of June 17, there were 896 confirmed cases and 232 confirmed deaths, according to the DRC Ministry of Health. Neighboring Uganda, as of June 19, reported 19 cases and two deaths. The actual number of Ebola deaths is likely already significantly higher. 

This deadly disease is greatly intensified by the domination of the planet by the system of capitalism-imperialism. This system has looted and plundered the DRC for centuries. People, including children, are viciously exploited. The government is a corrupt and savagely repressive force. Reactionary armed militias are contending for power and loot, and in the province that is the center of the outbreak, an estimated 7 million people have been driven from their homes by warfare. Modern medicine barely reaches the areas where the disease is spreading, and what medical care does exist has been greatly reduced by funding cuts by the Trump regime. This is what underlies why this outbreak of Ebola is out of control.

NONE of this is necessary—it can, and must, be radically changed. One enormous step toward this would be a revolution in the U.S. which put an end to U.S. imperialism. This revolution cannot happen soon enough for the people in the DRC, and for the people of the world. At the same time, revolution in the Congo is itself urgently needed requiring a vanguard party with a scientific approach to that revolution.

What is Ebola?

Ebola is caused by a virus. It is one of the deadliest diseases known, killing about half of those infected. Those contracting Ebola get high fevers and heavy diarrhea, and then often violent bleeding, including from the eyes, ears, and nose. Because it is so deadly and so horrific there is a lot of fear associated with the virus.

It is believed that fruit bats are the breeding grounds for the virus—that the bats carry the virus without themselves becoming sick. After making a leap to humans, it is spread by contact with bodily fluids such as blood, vomit, or feces. People living with or taking care of those infected often contract the disease. It can also be spread by contact with the bodies of those who have died.

There are several different varieties of the Ebola virus. The one currently spreading in the DRC is Bundibugyo. This is different than the Zaire variant that was responsible for major outbreaks in 2014-2016 and 2018-2020. While vaccines and effective treatments now exist for the Zaire variant, no vaccine or drugs exist for the Bundibugyo variant.

Failure to Identify and Contain the Virus

Because there is no effective treatment or vaccine, containing an outbreak early is crucial to limiting its impact. This means identifying people who have the virus, tracing those that they were in contact with and preventing them from infecting others.

But in this outbreak, the virus was allowed to spread unchecked for at least seven weeks. No tests for this version of the virus were available to health workers in the area where the virus was starting to appear. A representative of the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders told the New York Times, “The private sector sees little incentive to invest in research and development for a diagnostic tool that will be used almost exclusively in the world’s poorest places.” (The "private sector” should be understood as capitalist-imperialists—who decide what is, and is not, a “good investment.”)

The virus has already traveled to major population centers and across international borders including to Goma, a major city 200 miles away from where the outbreak started, and to Kampala, the capital of Uganda. The World Health Organization has warned that as a result of the failure to identify the virus and to track those infected, this outbreak could become the largest Ebola outbreak ever and could kill more than 10,000 people.

Deadly Disease, Deadlier System

Ebola arises from nature, but it's the system of capitalism-imperialism which now dominates the planet that makes it deadly to so many.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is one of the most mineral-rich countries in Africa, but capitalism-imperialism has made life for the people who are mining and extracting this wealth a world of oppression and suffering. Despite its resources, the DRC is among the poorest countries on the planet. The average income is less than $2 per day. Only $25 is spent on health per person per year (in the United States it is $13,000). Patients treated for Ebola in Africa died at three or more times the rate of those who received care in the U.S. or Europe. Only about half of the population of the DRC had access to safe drinking water. Only 29 percent have sanitation facilities.

Two million people in the DRC make their living from “artisanal” mining. What this really means is things like workers dig dirt holes with shovels and children crawl through tunnels that can collapse any minute. Men mix mercury, which damages the nervous system, using their bare hands, into a muddy sludge hoping that it will combine with gold. All this feeds into high-tech supply chains, cobalt for jet engines and batteries, coltan used in mobile phones and laptops, gold for electronics and jewelry.

The area where the outbreak started in the DRC lacks medical supplies—including the protective gear that must be worn when treating people with Ebola, respirators, and IV fluids. Hospitals are far apart and are not easily accessible. Modern medicine has developed extraordinary tools for combating disease and sickness—yet in the countryside in the DRC, doctors don’t even have hand sanitizer (!!) They literally risk their lives to treat patients.

How this system has preyed on the DRC

Over 40 percent of the 10 million slaves brought to the Americas from the 1500s to the mid-1800s were from the Congo and Angola. The slave trade tore apart families and the societies as a whole. In 1885, King Leopold of Belgium colonized what is now the DRC, enslaving people in brutal conditions on rubber plantations. Estimates are that 10 million (!!) of a remaining population of 20 million were killed during the period 1885 to 1908.

In 1960, the anti-colonial struggle broke the formal colonial bond to Belgium. This was part of anti-colonial struggles at that time throughout the world including in Africa. But this struggle in the DRC was not able to break free of imperialism.  The first elected president of the DRC, Patrice Lumumba, was overthrown and murdered in a CIA-sponsored coup. Lumumba was an anti-colonialist fighter who was murdered, in part, because he sought independence from imperialism and wanted to use the country's vast resources to improve the lives of the Congolese people.¹

After a complex series of wars and imperialist interventions, the DRC was integrated more fully into the world imperialist system, and continued to be exploited and dominated by the U.S. especially (this further integration is addressed in depth in the article "On the ‘Driving Force of Anarchy’ and the Dynamics of Change—A Sharp Debate and Urgent Polemic: The Struggle for a Radically Different World and the Struggle for a Scientific Approach to Reality.") 

All this led to a situation of extreme lopsidedness, with one of the most resource rich regions in the world left utterly impoverished.² Again, Ebola is a deadly disease, but it is the chain of oppression from slave days to today in the Congo and Africa as a whole that has created the conditions for Ebola to spread and make it difficult to eradicate. (For more on this history, see here.)

Anti-Science Fuels Attacks on Health Care Providers

Another painful aspect of this situation is the wild spread of anti-scientific superstition among the people themselves.

Courageous doctors, nurses and health workers—from the DRC and people who have traveled there to assist—have put their lives at risk. Not only from the danger of catching the disease in unsanitary conditions with very little personal protective equipment, but also by attacks from the people themselves. Treatment tents have been burned, patients forced to flee, and health workers killed. 

While some of the attacks may be linked to the many brutal militias that operate within the DRC, some stem from a rise in conspiratorial thinking that the disease is caused by "foreign medical workers" or in conflicts over the handling of bodies of people killed by the disease. There are reports in some cases that negotiations between health workers and the community have led to agreements that satisfy the people and don’t spread the disease, but this has been highly contested.

Traditional funeral practices in the DRC involve touching and washing bodies. But the bodies are highly contagious. If people don't understand the science of the disease and how it's spread, they will not understand why what they see as their sacred burial practices are being ripped away. This is compounded by the widespread rise of conspiracy theories that Ebola is a hoax cooked up by "Western" powers to decimate the Congo. Here, people are taking the painful reality that the Congo has been decimated by imperialism, but not going beneath the surface to understand why. Instead, anti-scientific theories are spread among the people by reactionary forces to manipulate them, also making the outbreak more deadly.³

Facing grave risks to their lives, medical workers and health workers have shown great courage, and have struggled to win people to a more scientific understanding of the disease. But this situation underscores the life-and-death fight for science. 

Intolerable... and UNNECESSARY Suffering

What makes the indescribable suffering unfolding before our eyes in Africa so intolerable is that it's unnecessary. The world does NOT have to be this way. 

Capitalism-Imperialism is a system driven by the competitive accumulation of profit. This dynamic leads to and takes place through an enormous chasm between a handful of developed imperialist countries and the bulk of humanity living in countries exploited and shackled by imperialism. The enormous storehouse of medical knowledge and advances in medical technology are strangled within the confines of this imperialist world and kept from people. We see the deadly extremes of this in this Ebola outbreak.

Revolution guided by the new communism developed by the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian can change all of this. The system that now uses its military and its domination of repressive forces in oppressed nations to obtain the best conditions through brutal exploitation for the accumulation of private profit and the enrichment and preservation of its global empire could be overthrown and dismantled through revolution. And a radically different new socialist system would work to transform all the oppressive class relations and social relations that arise from and serve capitalism.

We would go to work on these oppressive conditions in the U.S., and proceed from becoming a base area of world revolution—supporting revolutionary struggles around the world. As the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America says, 

Social production and economic development are guided and evaluated according to three overarching criteria: 

The first criteria is:

 Advancing the world revolution to uproot all exploitation and oppression and to emancipate all of humanity.

This is further developed in Section 9 (p. 87), where, among other things, it says:

The structure of production and the resource base of the socialist economy cannot depend on labor and materials from other countries—much less exploitation and domination. The development of a socialist economy must not involve the export of capital—for example, building factories, or making loans, for profit. A socialist economy must not reproduce relations of domination and inequality in its international interactions. This question, too, must be put before the masses of people, as part of their coming to more deeply understand, and to act on, the basic principles on which the New Socialist Republic in North America is founded and according to which it must proceed.

Imagine this: the people of the former U.S. would no longer be known around the world for living off the wealth produced by people slaving all over the world, as if they deserved it just for being Americans, or for supporting (or passively going along with) unjust wars enforcing the global U.S. empire. 

Instead, they would be known for the opposite. For internationalist relations which supported revolution everywhere; for aiding the emergence of countries from imperialist domination; for spreading scientific understanding and advanced medical approaches all over the world. Imagine that children living in the Congo will no longer live in fear of being crushed in the mining tunnels. 

Imagine… and set out to make that world real.