The thousand people — and counting — killed by the latest outbreak of the Ebola virus are victims of capitalism and its racist neglect of longstanding health concerns in Africa.
Ebola has been around for nearly four decades. Past outbreaks, at the rate of more than one every two years, were concentrated in Gabon, Republic of the Congo, Zaire, Sudan, and Uganda. This time the lethal virus has struck western Africa: Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria, the continent’s most populous country. Once again, the capitalist healthcare system is unprepared to deal with it.
The virus is believed to originate in animals, from fruit bats to the wild animals butchered by impoverished Africans for “bush meat.” It spreads through the racist inequalities of capitalism, from substandard sanitary conditions to an inferior healthcare infrastructure. Despite its forty-year track record, capitalist medical science has yet to find a way to treat the disease, which kills up to 90 percent of those who are afflicted. Nor has it come up with a protective vaccine. As the New York Times noted (8/10/14), “Many drug companies have little interest in devising treatments or vaccines for Ebola because the potential for profit is small.” Instead, drug companies focus mainly on developing immensely profitable drugs, such as statins (to lower cholesterol) and anti-depressants.
Racist Neglect
According to the latest report of the Global Funding of Innovation for Neglected Disease (G-FINDER), an independent non-profit, only $3.2 billion was invested in 2012 to create new drugs for 31 neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), including Ebola. Only $527 million — or 16 percent of the total for NTD research and development — came from the pharmaceutical industry. While most Ebola funding comes from the public sector, led by the National Institutes of Health in the U.S., “some experts believe the federal government has not shown enough urgency to push these programs ahead” (NY Times).
That’s an obscene understatement. It generally takes at least $1 billion and a decade or more to get a single drug to market. By chronically underfunding the battle against diseases that afflict black people in Africa, capitalism guarantees research won’t get anywhere fast.
By contrast, consider the investment by U.S. capitalists in an area where the bosses’ oil profits are at stake. Since 2003, they have spent $1.7 trillion and killed at least half a million civilians in their invasions of Iraq (Reuters, 3/14/13) — not counting the current air assault against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
A History of Oppression
From a historical perspective, capitalism and its centuries-long imperialist devastation of Africa have created conditions that make Ebola and other epidemics severe and very difficult to contain. After the enslavement of millions of Africans for profit in the Americas, beginning in the 16th century, 93 percent of Africa was divided into colonies by the main European imperialists: Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Holland, and Portugal. In the 20th century, U.S. imperialism intensified this conquest. In addition to the destruction wrought by slavery, the imperialists have exploited labor, plundered natural resources, and propped up a long string of corrupt African rulers who have lined their own pockets while preserving the capitalist status quo (see Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa). President Barack Obama’s recent summit with 40 African leaders was just the latest example of efforts of rapacious U.S. corporations to exploit African workers by cutting deals with capitalist African leaders.
Despite the bold, socialist-inspired liberation movements of the 1950s and 1960s, political independence has done little to change the impoverishment and oppression of the African masses Those movements ultimately failed because they never made a complete break with capitalism (see “Smash Racism: A Fighter’s Manual,” p 35-40 at plp.org). Today, imperialism still holds sway. The result?  As Ibrahima Toure, a Guinean official declared, “The poor living conditions and lack of water and sanitation in most parts of Conakry [the capital of Guinea] poses a serious risk that this [Ebola] epidemic will become a crisis. People don’t think to wash their hands when they don’t have water to drink.”
Imperialist instability sparked numerous deadly civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, which ended about a decade ago after killing close to 300,000 people. After a 2008 military coup in Guinea, more than 200 protesters were killed or wounded in contested elections in 2013.
Workers Distrust Capitalist Medicine
In such a setting, it is virtually impossible to establish a public health infrastructure that might help contain the Ebola outbreak. Workers understandably do not trust the governments, and the governments put a low priority on public services. Well-intentioned efforts by groups like Doctors without Borders cannot possibly substitute for an indigenous, well-structured public health system.
There is also a shameful, racist history of pre-approval drug trials by U.S. and European pharmaceutical companies, which have used people in African and other less-developed countries as guinea pigs. Three years ago, the CIA made covert use of a vaccination campaign in Pakistan to cover the hunt for Osama bin Laden. These racist actions have rightfully made workers and farmers throughout the world deeply suspicious of any Western-related health initiatives. As a result, imperialism has made it virtually impossible to effectively contain Ebola in current conditions.
As air travel has increased, the threat of worldwide dissemination is greater than ever before. When the UN’s World Health Organization labeled the Ebola outbreak an international health emergency, it was one more reminder that the world’s working class must move swiftly to overthrow the perversity of capitalism and its profit incentive system by building revolutionary movements for communism. Communism will empower the masses, build social infrastructure to cope with any challenges, and crush the racist structures that murder and demobilize the working class. Africa has a rich anti-imperialist history. With the leadership of Progressive Labor Party, it is time to build on that history and smash capitalism once and for all!

During the PLP Summer Project, we marched to Murrieta, CA, to oppose the racist position of some of the residents in the area, particularly those who had set up an encampment across the street from Murrieta’s immigrant detention center.
Our chant was very bold and confrontational: “Death, Death, Death to the Racists! Power, Power, Power to the Workers!”
During a study session the following day, someone shared with the group that a few friends who were a part of the march found our chant too violent. “They don’t wish death on anyone!” the comrade said, expressing the sentiment of those who disagreed with the chant. This opened up a conversation on PLP’s stance on the use of violence to destroy capitalism.
So, why do we say “fight back?” Why do we wish for the death of the racist, fascist, capitalist class? Because capitalism kills! Every day, millions of workers die because of this inhumane, violent system, whether because of racist murders by the police, war, starvation, lack of health benefits, poverty-driven crimes or unsafe working conditions.
We are not in love with violence. Surely if there were a way to bring about an egalitarian society by fighting only with our words, we would pursue it. I grew up as a pacifist. A born-again Christian, I was taught to love my enemies, to do good to those that hate me and to pray for my persecutors. But, there’s no way our class will survive following such an idealist philosophy!
The ruling class will never abdicate its power. History has shown that the capitalists have no problem murdering anyone who stands in the way of what they see as “progress.” From the extermination of Native Americans, to the lynching of black slaves, to the assassination of leaders who won’t play the game, to the annihilation of thousands of members of the working class in times of war — the capitalists are unflinchingly violent in their pursuit for profit.
 The capitalists want us to admire those who promote non-violence. These so called “peacemakers” are often used by the rulers to squelch the anguish of the working class to suppress any militant responses and to coax the workers into passively accepting violence while “turning the other cheek.”  
During the meeting, one of our comrades emphasized the callousness of capitalism by sharing some of the horrors of the Salvadoran Civil War. “And when they came,” the comrade explained, “they would kill the mother, the father, the grandmother, baby…if there were a dog they’d kill the dog too… it didn’t matter!”  The Salvadoran government terrorized and targeted civilians with death squads unrelentingly trying to maintain power.
The defeat of capitalism is a matter of life and death, and the capitalists will surely kill before they relinquish their power. The working class must and will fight to defend and protect our lives, the lives of all children and our only home: planet earth. It is natural for all living beings to defend themselves in order to survive. Our resistance is our dignity. Even roses have thorns!
A Fighter

The Western imperialists have characterized China today as a police state. And it’s true. There was a large increase in the number of police following Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms of the early 1980s, and even more so after 1989, when the state capitalist government brutally crushed the mass “pro-democracy” protests in Tiananmen Square. In fact, you might say the police presence in China has grown in proportion to the country’s development as a major capitalist power.
But there was a time when the Chinese police presence was almost nonexistent, specifically during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR). Interestingly enough, with few police, there were fewer crimes. When there were no police, there were no crimes. With strong, organized communities, there is no need or place in a society for police.
During the Cultural Revolution, there were nearly a million people in my county, but only about thirty police officers. Our Chengguan Commune included fifty villages, many factories, and businesses in the biggest town of the county.  But the commune’s dispatch station had only five police officers.
At this time there were about 1,000 people in my village. In middle school, my classmates came from seven surrounding villages. In high school, all fifty villages in the commune and many state-owned enterprises were represented. During the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, I knew of no criminal activity in my village or in any neighboring villages.
Certainly, there were “crimes,” but the village government refused to deal with them as such. Village leaders never called the police for investigations; they never punished people involved as criminals. Through mediation, public criticism and economic compensation, villages dealt with these matters without sending anybody to prison. I can remember four cases that illustrate how our rural communities dealt with crime. It was superior to any other model I have experienced since.
The Community Makes Peace
One case involved my best friend and his family. His older brother played with his slingshot after school, like other boys in the village. His uncle raised pigeons as pets, and their daily flights over the village became a notable thing to see. One day, the uncle accused my friend’s brother of targeting his flock with his slingshot and slapped him. When my friend’s brother told his father about the incident, he went to challenge the uncle, and soon they were embroiled in a fistfight. My friend’s father lost the first round; he was older and the younger uncle had studied martial arts. The next morning, my friend and his brother went with their father, but they lost again. Because there were no serious injuries, the community did nothing about the incident.
The second case involved one of my classmates. His family migrated to the northeast following flood-related grain shortages during the Great Leap Forward. After life in our village stabilized, his family returned. But having sold everything, they needed furniture and household utensils, and neighbors and relatives stepped in to help. My classmate’s aunt helped the most, partly because her husband had worked for the government granary and she was relatively well-off. (In 1960, he was killed by lightning while trying to cover grain in a thunderstorm. He was recognized as a martyr of the state, which took care of his family. All of his grown children found good jobs in state-owned enterprises or joined the army.)
My classmate’s father argued with his very helpful aunt. In a spurt of anger, the aunt took back the big cooking pot she bought for the family. In our area, one never threatened to take away someone’s cooking pot, as this threatened a family’s survival. My classmate’s father lost his temper and started to push the aunt around. She went home and got her two teenage sons to try to take back all the gifts she gave to the family the year before. At that point, my classmate’s father ordered his three sons to beat their cousins with sticks. They beat them very badly, until village leaders came out and ordered them to stop.
The oldest brother of the badly beaten cousins was away serving in the army. After receiving a telegram from his mother, he came home with an officer from his unit to ensure the family was protected and treated fairly. Village leaders explained to them that the fight was a family quarrel that had gone out of control. In the end, the village leader convinced my classmate’s father to apologize to the aunt, who accepted and made peace. The dispute was settled without police involvement.
Village Mediation
The third case was between the Huang and Yuan families in the village’s first production team. The Yuan family had two daughters and the Huang family had three, all about the same age. They often worked together in the collective field. One day, Yuan Wenyin and Huang Jiashan argued and it soon became a fistfight. All the sisters from both families joined in. Yuan Wenyin hit Huang Meiyun in the head with a shovel. The fight was soon broken up by the villagers, but Huang Meiyun’s father claimed that his daughter, one of the village’s few high school graduates, suffered brain damage from the blow. The village’s revolutionary committee mediated the case and asked the Yuan family to pay the young woman’s medical expenses and compensate her for lost work points. The Yuan family accepted the mediation, another case solved without police involvement.
Redeeming an Attempted Killer
The final example was an attempted murder committed by Fu Chengzhen, the only son of a rich peasant woman in the village. When his mother died, the third production team leaders tried to help him by assigning him to an operation that required work in the early hours to get ready for the morning market. There he fell in love with his coworker, Zhou Dihua, from a poor peasant family. Her family disapproved of the relationship and insisted that she stop seeing him. Instead, Fu Chengzhen sold his house and his mother’s gold, and the couple eloped. They lived away from the village for two years, giving birth to a boy. When the baby was one year old, they decided to return, assuming that Zhou Dihua’s family would now accept them. But upon their arrival, Zhou’s father ordered her to stay at home and secretly arranged for the baby to be adopted by a family far away. Fu Chengzhen was now penniless and homeless. Village leadership assigned him to work in the forest team, where he’d have access to a house, a kitchen, plenty of grain and firewood.  
The Moon Festival is a family reunion holiday in China, with everybody celebrating with their family under the full moon. Each villager received two pounds each of meat, seafood, and a bottle of liquor from the village. But Fu Chengzhen had no family to celebrate with, and the more he thought about it, the angrier he became. He decided to kill himself and Zhou Dihua.   
He ate poison and then went to Zhou’s home, going straight to her bedroom with a knife. As the poison began to take effect, Fu’s vision was blurred and his hands were shaky. He mistook his girlfriend’s mother, sitting in the bed, for his girlfriend — and stabbed her. She screamed and her two sons rushed in and restrained him with a rope. The brothers were about to stab him with his own knife when village leaders arrived. They ordered the brothers and others to take both Fu Chengzhen and his victim to the hospital. Fortunately, doctors were able to save them both, which enabled the village leaders to deal with the matter without involving police. 
When the two were discharged from the hospital, the village leaders told a mass meeting that the villagers had not helped Fu Chengzhen sufficiently. They decided to give him a lot to build a house. A couple years later, they even helped him find a girlfriend. In 1998, I went back to my village and saw Fu at work in the village’s construction company. He told me he was very grateful to the community, and that he would have ended up in prison for a long time had he been sent to the police. He has been working very hard ever since to pay the community back.
I saw all these cases with my own eyes while growing up in my village. I am writing them down to tell the world that the Cultural Revolution empowered China’s communities to govern themselves without police involvement. They strived for positive outcomes, even in the most difficult circumstances. Many people who might have been treated as criminals were able to remain productive members of society. The community gained from their productivity while avoiding the costs of keeping someone in prison. It was a win-win situation for all.

This summer the Progressive Labor Party concentrated efforts to fight anti-immigrant racism and build communism in the cities of Los Angeles and nearby Murrieta. As we drove through LA, billboards advertising the newly released movie The Purge: Anarchy loomed overhead “United We Purge” read one billboard featuring a black youth in frightening make-up reminiscent of the anarchistic Joker in The Dark Knight.
The Purge: Anarchy is the sequel to last summer’s The Purge. Set in near future Los Angeles, the Federal government, under a group called the New Founding Fathers, has been granted unlimited power in order to bring stability to a crisis-ridden system. An epidemic of crime and unemployment has been reduced to nearly zero due to a national “purge” holiday. One night a year citizens are permitted to commit all crimes, including murder, in order to blow off pent-up violent urges and remove otherwise unemployed portions of the population. The Purge takes viewers through the streets of LA as the annual purge commences.
As the film unfolds, it becomes clear that the purge is a form of class warfare that benefits the rich. Crime and unemployment have been reduced by allowing the poor to kill the poor. The rich participate in the comfort of their mansions by buying poor people to slaughter others.
The main characters in the film form a multiracial, rag-tag army that fights its way through the murderous streets of LA, and a group of resistance fighters opposed to the purge are organized under black leadership. Despite these glimmers of multiracial unity and black leadership, the movie relies heavily on racist stereotypes to tell its story.
Early on, the film depicts a group of urban black youth preying upon an innocent, middle-class white couple. And later, an extended scene shows a drunken Latin man attempting to rape two women. These racist stereotypes deployed in the film have been and continue to be used by the bosses to justify the mass incarceration of black and Latin men and the mass deportations of Latin immigrants.
While director James DeMonaco’s intention was to “smuggle” into his horror-thriller a commentary on U.S. gun violence and class inequality, his critique is crushed by an overwhelming depiction of indiscriminate murder and revenge violence.
Despite the portrayal of a few good citizens, the foundation of the film rests on one disturbing premise — human nature is ultimately savage and animalistic. In the film, “the purge” is merely the government’s way of adapting to the fact that humans are inherently violent and evil.
This view of human nature implies that despite the vast power of the New Founding Fathers, the structural violence of the capitalist state in the form of the police, military and prison system is still necessary to keep violent workers at bay for the other 364 days a year.
With working class consciousness at low level, the implications of the film’s message in the current period are dire. This message helps the bosses further divide the working class by reinforcing an “under siege” mentality where workers, instead of uniting, live in fear of one another.
And for working-class youth, the dangers of the film’s message are more immediate. The film’s premise exploits the extreme individualism and revenge culture entrenched in capitalist youth culture. “Do what you want” no matter the consequences and “an eye for an eye” are the takeaway message for many youth.
Recent news reports of “Purge” Facebook pages and Instagram accounts popping up across social media urging users to post anything and expose anything for a 12- or 24-hour period reveal the poisonous ideology of this film. These social media accounts were soon flooded with explicit underage photos and “revenge porn.”
Revenge is an individualistic action taken to correct a real or perceived injustice. Revenge often takes the form of workers seeking retribution against other workers for something ultimately caused by capitalism. A truly revolutionary approach views injustice committed against individuals as part of a larger structure of injustice — capitalism. PLP’s view of true justice comes in the form of a communist revolution that requires the participation of masses of workers joined in multiracial unity fighting for a system without wages or borders.
Despite the real life “purging” along the border at the hands of Deporter-in-Chief Obama and the fascist thugs in Murrieta, when PLP marched through the streets of downtown LA and Murrieta, many rallied around our ideas. Challenge and our message of multiracial unity was well received by many, proving that despite the state-sanctioned racism and violence against immigrants, many workers are willing to stand up for and unite with their working class brothers and sisters for a better tomorrow.