Ebola Virus: A Crisis Generated by Imperialism, Semi-Colonialism, and Semi-Feudalism

The Bundibugyo Ebola epidemic ravaging the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda is preventable, and its spread is anything but random and uncontrolled—it is a genocidal device of imperialism and a foreseeable consequence of imperialist exploitation of the Third World.

On May 16, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Bundibugyo Ebola epidemic a “public health emergency of international concern.” The WHO stated that, as of May 15, there had been 80 suspected deaths and 246 suspected cases, explaining that unlike previous strains of Ebola, the Bundibugyo strain has no specific treatments or vaccines available. As of June 10, Congolese authorities have reported 676 confirmed cases and 136 confirmed deaths. As of June 11, Uganda has reported 19 confirmed cases and 2 confirmed deaths.

The Ebola virus in particular and epidemic viruses in general over the last century are products of bureaucratic capitalism and semi-colonial and semi-feudal domination rather than just biological developments. It is a problem that is both worsened by and contributes to the persistence of large landholdings and other semi-feudal structures in Congo and beyond, serving as a factor of imperialism’s pursuit of domination and the struggle of oppressed nations for liberation.

In the 1930s, a Soviet scientist named Evgeny Pavlovsky argued that some diseases naturally exist in wildlife and certain environments. These viruses, bacteria, and parasites can circulate among animals for long periods without affecting humans. People usually become infected only when they enter these areas and encounter the disease. Mosquito-borne diseases like yellow fever in the Amazon are one example.

Ebola as a virus was at one point confined to a cycle between mammal species in humid forests, causing hemorrhagic fever in the host and then dying out. The greater exposure to people by wild animals—of which, in this case, the culprit is believed to be fruit bats—led to its spread in the human population.

Changes in the relations between man and nature (deforestation, extinction of animals and plants, and the clearance of and occupation of vast new areas for monocultural crop production) shows how this process can cause the spread of these diseases, leading to wider outbreaks and epidemics instead of just a few cases.

The example of the Ebola virus and its main means of transmission, the fruit bat, highlights the role of imperialism in the spread of the virus.

A bat infected with Ebola cannot survive, procreate, and develop as easily within the highly urban environments seen in imperialist countries. In the first recorded outbreak in Sudan, British imperialist monopolies cleared land and opened a cotton processing facility in a formerly desolate area. Bats infected with the Ebola virus roosted in the new factory, where its droppings infected the workers who were laboring under poor conditions. It was semi-colonialism and semi-feudalism that propagated the disease there and in the wider Third World. It is no surprise that Ebola, just like COVID-19, “swine flu,” Zika virus, and many others that lead to mass killings, appear first in the Third World—especially Africa and Asia—and only then reach the imperialist countries, if at all.

One reason for the high lethality is the general precariousness of life for peasants and workers on the African continent. In Congo and Uganda, the governments are ruled by the comprador bourgeoisie, who represent different power groups that serve imperialist monopolies and often fight in civil wars as a manifestation of the competition between imperialist powers for the exploitation of their raw materials and workforce. These include some of the largest deposits of cobalt, copper, coltan, gold, and diamonds in the world. As a result of imperialist domination, these countries have very insufficient and poorly-funded public health systems that are unable to meet the needs of the people.

Because it is not considered a threat to imperialist countries and it is not highly profitable given the deep poverty of those affected, vaccines and serums against Ebola have largely been ignored as an area of research and production by pharmaceutical monopolies. Monopolies in the US have developed drugs such as Zmapp, an experimental antibody treatment that was made available to two American missionaries and a select few others who contracted Ebola during a past epidemic, but this drug was not provided to the local population.

While the Center for Disease Control (CDC) has stated that the “overall risk to the American public and travelers remains low,” the Trump administration has used Ebola as a pretext to evoke Title 42 of the 1944 Public Health Service Act, which grants federal immigration authorities the right to halt the introduction of immigrants when a disease abroad is deemed a danger to public health. Trump similarly did the same in 2020 with COVID-19, which the Biden administration maintained and expanded, expelling around 2.3 million immigrants before it expired in May 2023.

As with COVID-19, imperialism uses infectious diseases to secure its domination in several ways: carrying out genocide and counterinsurgency of “excess” populations that pose a threat to its rule; offsetting economic crises through the destruction of the workforce and justification for restrictive immigration policy to control the flow of labor; and restructuring the state to further centralize power around the executive branch and restrict democratic rights, for example with bans on mass gatherings during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A clear example of reaction using disease as a weapon of counterinsurgency was in the Philippines, where the government decided to halt a disease control program in 1973 in regions affected by the People’s War led by the Communist Party of the Philippines. A military report said, “Sooner or later the rebels will become too weak to fight.” However, it was not enough to quell rebellion, as the struggle for a new democratic revolution in the Philippines teaches us; despite malaria, the People’s War continues there to this day.

Image: Healthcare workers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo prepare for entering an Ebola quarantine zone. Credit: World Bank Photo Collection.

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