Cancer is epidemic, rapidly gaining on cardiovascular disease as the leading cause of death in the U.S. A United Nations research agency tells us that cancer incidence worldwide is expected to rise by 70 percent over the next twenty years. The disease is growing at “an alarming pace,” according to a 2014 report by the World Health Organization.
Why is this happening? The capitalists’ mass media would have us believe that cancer — along with obesity and diabetes — is a “genetic disease,” an unstoppable killer. A mass mailing by the American Medical Association (8/22/14) bore the headline: “New research suggests cancer can’t be eradicated.” It quoted an evolutionary biologist who maintained, “[O]ur cells’ ability to develop cancer is an intrinsic property.” Meanwhile, the media does its best to ignore or minimize the role played by carcinogens in the environment. As Scientific American (5/21/10) stated: “But scientists most likely will never be able to tease out the true role of environmental contaminants because environmental exposures, genetics and lifestyle seem to all intertwine.”
This is a gross distortion of scientific reality. In fact, the rising cancer rate is directly linked to the increase of toxic chemicals and racism in our environment. This in turn reflects the bosses’ drive for short-term profit and their utter disregard for the health of the working class. To attribute cancer — and other contemporary epidemics, like diabetes — to our genes is to blame the victims for their “deficient” genetic code.
The truth is that workers are being sickened by capitalist need for profit.
On the matter of obesity, a 2008 article in Nutrition Reviews, a peer-reviewed journal of the International Life Sciences Institute, noted:
Genetic changes are unlikely to explain the rapid spread of obesity around the globe. That’s because the “gene pool”—the frequency of different genes across a population—remains fairly stable for many generations. It takes a long time for new mutations or polymorphisms to spread. So if our genes have stayed largely the same, what has changed over the past 40 years of rising obesity rates? Our environment: the physical, social, political, and economic surroundings that influence how much we eat and how active we are. Environmental changes that make it easier for people to overeat, and harder for people to get enough physical activity, have played a key role in triggering the recent surge of overweight and obesity.
No Constraint on Capitalist Poisons
The link between environmental contaminants and cancer dates back to 1775, when Percival Pott published a study of English chimney sweeps who developed cancer of the scrotum due to soot and coal tar. Since World War II, our environment has grown increasingly contaminated with carcinogens. In his 1998 book, The Politics of Cancer Revisited, Dr. Samuel S. Epstein notes that production of synthetic organic chemicals, petroleum, and natural gas all skyrocketed in the 1940s. Plasticizers and the pesticides were introduced from 1945 through 1955.
Today the globe is awash in toxic chemicals: arsenic, asbestos, benzene, formaldehyde, ionizing radiation, soot, radon, and hair dyes. Industrial and agricultural chemicals have been polluting ground water in California for at least 50 years. Millions of tons of cancer-causing pesticides have been poured onto agricultural land around the world, contaminating food supplies. In the 1960s and ‘70s, the Allied Signal Company produced the insecticide Kepone, a chemical cousin to DDT that persists for hundreds of years, and dumped it into the James River Estuary in Virginia. In 2003, the French West Indian island of Guadalupe restricted crop-growing areas due to Kepone contamination; Guadalupe has one of the highest prostate cancer rates in the world. As recently as March 2014, the Duke Energy Company was cited for dumping devastating, toxic coal ash sludge into the Cape Fear River in North Carolina, in a pattern that goes back at least four decades.
While the Centers for Disease Control currently lists 135 substances as “potential occupational carcinogens,” or cancer-causing agents, very few of the 80,000 chemicals now in use have ever been tested for safety. According to Scientific American (July 2014), “The Toxic Substances Control Act, last updated in 1976, allows industry to use new chemicals without first demonstrating that they are safe. Instead it places the burden of proof on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Yet of the more than 50,000 chemicals used commercially, the EPA has tested just 300.”
In 2010, the President’s Cancer Panel reported that “the true burden of environmentally induced cancers has been grossly underestimated.” Women who give birth with high levels of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) or DDT in their blood show an increased risk of developing breast cancer (Nature, 5/29/14). Further, environmental contaminants have been shown to permanently affect gene function. Epigenetic studies have revealed that harmful chemicals can permanently alter which genes are activated, or “turned on,” without changing the genes’ DNA coding. (The term epigenetics refers to heritable changes, influenced by the factors such as the environment, in gene expression that does not involve changes to the underlying DNA sequences). DDT can cause negative effects in animals’ offspring: “Today, no one doubts that epigenetic effects play a crucial role in development, aging and even cancer” (Scientific American, August 2014).
Business As Usual
Capitalists and their state apparatus have a long history of obscuring the cancer-environment connection, despite overwhelming scientific evidence. One glaring example: “After decades of denials, the government is conceding that since the dawn of the atomic age, workers making nuclear weapons have been exposed to radiation and chemicals that have produced cancer and early death” (New York Times, 1/29/2000).
The bosses’ indifference to our health is also exposed by the collusion between the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which promotes nuclear power worldwide. As a result, “the WHO has steadfastly resisted conducting studies on the health effects of exposure to uranium 238 following Desert Storm, Bosnia, and Kosovo” (Helen Caldicott, The New Nuclear Danger, 2002).
The capitalists’ sporadic attempts to curb pollution have little impact. The Environmental Protection Agency is chronically underfunded; the Clean Air Act is perpetually under-enforced, following the needs and urgings of industry. As stated in Occupational and Environmental Health (2011), edited by Levy and Wegman, “…the workers’ desire for comfort, income, safety, and leisure is continually counterbalanced by the employer’s need for profit.” This is an iron rule of capitalism, even more so in a period of rising inter-imperialist competition.
Lawrence Summers, chief economist of the World Bank in the early 1990s, summed up the bosses’ murderous business-as-usual in a famous memo:  “I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.”
Rx for Cancer: Communist Revolution
The medical establishment’s response to the cancer epidemic is mostly limited to encouraging screening and lifestyle changes. But while mammograms and colonoscopies may detect early cancer or precancerous changes, they do nothing to prevent the development of cancer in the population in general. And while the health system urges us to stop smoking and eat a healthy diet, it generally ignores the saturation of our food with corn syrup, the fact that fast foods are all that many can afford, and the easy access of the young to highly addictive cigarettes. In 2009, the government’s public health activities received only 3 percent of the more than $2 trillion spent by the U.S. on health care.
Because of racism, Black, Latin, and immigrant workers receive the worst medical care, and are forced to live and work in areas that are the most toxic to their health.
Children are the canaries in the coal mine (  a warning of adverse conditions and greater danger), especially vulnerable to the ravages of environment-induced cancer. By 2003, according to the New York Times, the incidence of cancer in children had increased 20 percent in the preceding 20 years. For infants under one, the increase was 36 percent!  The recent vogue of movies (like The Fault in Our Stars), TV shows, and books about children with cancer is a ruling-class tool to get us to accept this atrocity as the new normal.     
Capitalism is “a system that fouls its own nest, both the human-social conditions and the wider natural environment on which it depends” (Monthly Review, December 2011). This is the very nature of the beast.
The cancer epidemic will be defeated only when this profit-driven society is replaced by one ruled by and for workers — by communism.