The latest Ebola outbreak is the result of centuries of racist neglect and imperialist plunder of Africa. The Bundibugyo strain of Ebola is spreading like wildfire in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and has made its way into neighboring Uganda. This is the 17th outbreak of Ebola over the last 50 years! With no vaccine yet available for this new strain, the crisis exposes the deadly consequences of a capitalist system that treats the lives of the working class as disposable. 

The outbreak is unfolding amid intensifying imperialist competition for the DRC's gold, cobalt, and copper—all critical for electric vehicles, AI, and military technology. Over the last two decades, a rising imperialist China has gained control over an increasing share of these minerals amid reports of child labor, horrific working conditions, and wholesale evictions of residents from mining concessions (Africa Defense Forum, 10/23/25). 

Now a declining U.S. empire is scrambling to claw its way back. None of these capitalist bosses cares one bit about our class beyond how much profit can be squeezed from our labor. 

The old colonial powers’ racist contempt for Black workers persists today. One result is a complete neglect of healthcare infrastructure that’s needed to confront crises like Ebola. Capitalism has created a world where gold and cobalt can move from mines to markets, but lifesaving healthcare cannot reach the mineworkers. 

A system that puts profits over workers’ lives does not deserve to exist. We must organize to smash capitalism and all of its racist and sexist inequities. Join Progressive Labor Party and our commitment to fight for a communist future worldwide, a future organized not around profit, but around workers’ health and well being. 

A racist disgrace

Over 1,100 suspected Ebola cases and more than 250 deaths have already been reported in northeastern Congo, but the true scale of the outbreak is much larger. Though it wasn’t officially detected until mid-May, the virus has been spreading for up to three months (The Daily, 6/3). The Bundibugyo strain has a mortality rate of up to 50 percent (New York Times, 5/18). 

The outbreak’s epicenter lies roughly 50 miles north of the provincial capital of Bunia, a region made difficult to access by seasonal rains, muddy roads, and armed militias (NY Times, 5/18). But decades of exploitation and neglect left healthcare systems fragile long before this latest strain of the virus came on the scene.

The conditions facing patients and healthcare workers are a capitalist disgrace. Patients’ families are forced to provide food and water because hospitals cannot, yet they receive no equipment to protect them from infection. Bodies in treatment wards lie covered only by sheets, with relatives and other patients nearby. Health workers are courageously showing up for their patients without the most basic resources to do their jobs or keep themselves safe (The Daily, 6/3).

Money for mines, not healthcare

The Congo’s response has been crippled by decades of global neglect. There is little testing capacity, no rapid diagnostic tests, and next to no contact tracing. The response has also been hampered by workers’ justified distrust of government authorities. For years scientists warned that better tools were urgently needed to fight new Ebola strains. But private companies have little incentive to invest in low-profit diagnostics, vaccines, or treatments in the world's poorest countries (NY Times, 6/2). Capitalism delivers what it is designed for: profits for corporations and abandonment of Black workers.

Most cases to date are linked to Mongbwalu, a gold mining hub for labor migration. Billions of dollars are extracted from the Congo's mines, yet basic healthcare infrastructure remains woefully inadequate. What little response that does exist has been weakened by recent U.S. cuts to global health programs (NY Times, 5/18). The result is a preventable catastrophe for the working class.. 

U.S. bosses have blood on their hands

The Ebola crisis exposes a capitalist contradiction. Never has the world had more scientific knowledge or technological capacity, and yet our class remains vulnerable to mass sickness, suffering, and premature death. We have the abundant capability to map viruses, develop and distribute lifesaving tests, build hospitals, and train masses of healthcare workers. But capitalist science is driven by competition and profit, not workers’ needs. 

Before Donald Trump returned to office in 2025, the U.S. funded a bare minimum of frontline workers, disease surveillance, medical supply chains, and emergency response systems in Africa (Rescue, 5/19). Don’t get it twisted—these programs were never acts of generosity. They were part of an imperialist strategy to expand influence via programs like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Health Organization, both created during the Cold War to counter the Soviet Union and the old communist movement. 

Today, without a socialist state or an international working-class movement to pressure the U.S. capitalist bosses,  they are free to cut back on aid and reserve their resources for the wider wars to come.Trump took a chainsaw to global public health by slashing tens of billions. Last year, health experts warned that these cuts would “likely result in more than 28,000 new cases of infectious diseases like Ebola…each year" (NY Times, 3/7/25) and lead to “14 million deaths” (NPR, 7/1/25). With cuts to USAID and other public health programs delaying detection and treatment of the spreading Ebola, workers in the Congo have paid with their lives  (NY Times, 5/20). At the same time, Trump has barred U.S. travelers testing positive from returning home for decent care and ordered them dumped in Kenya instead. Clearly, the health of miners in Mongbwalu, nurses in Uganda, and workers from the U.S. are all tied together. 

Communism is the cure

Profit and health are fundamentally opposed. Under communist leadership, workers have shown the power to organize health care around collective needs instead of competition. When China was led by communists in the 1960s,  mass public health campaigns trained “barefoot doctors” to serve workers in the countryside. For the first time, snail fever was eradicated in a county in Jiangxi province. That's what’s possible when millions of workers are mobilized under a communist outlook. 

That working-class potential still exists today. Capitalism digs its own grave by wrecking healthcare and creating crises it cannot solve. Diseases know no borders and neither should workers’ resistance. If capitalist-spawned Ebola is the disease, communist collectivity is the cure. Fight back!

What is Ebola?

Ebola is a viral disease spread through contaminated body fluids.  The new Bundibugyo strain is distinct from the outbreak that killed 11,000 people between 2014 and 2016. Early symptoms resemble malaria and thyroid disease, which can delay detection and treatment. What begins as fever and muscle pain can quickly escalate into uncontrolled bleeding and organ failure. Scientists are scrambling to find a vaccine,  but capitalism’s profit motive and disarray continues to hinder them.  

The month-long lockout of electric and natural gas utility workers at Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO) ended April 28th. Where before, political struggle on the job was minimal, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) leaflets, CHALLENGES, and discussions were fairly strong on the picket line. NIPSCO workers saw the Party in action. It was multiracial, men and women. Contacts were made, tamales shared. People visited. After many years on the job, more people are connecting with communist ideas and the knowledge that the working class can run society for itself!

Workers need the Party

NIPSCO, one of the largest utility companies in the U.S., provides natural gas and electricity across six states including Indiana. When they locked us out, they had scabs ready to take our jobs. Their demands included forced overtime and other attacks on our working conditions. Clerical workers at NIPSCO had already written about how their jobs were being eliminated — handed off to AI systems and call centers, their livelihoods wiped out.

NIPSCO is widely hated by the working class for its outrageously high bills. Workers in Northwest Indiana have protested staggering rate increases, much of the company’s profits flowing into the pockets of Blackstone — the notoriously racist private equity giant (Chicago Tribune, 2/28) and one of the largest in the country, largely responsible for the displacement of working-class communities nationwide. Blackstone profits from the enslavement of migrant children forced to labor in slaughterhouse plants (Time, 2/17/2023), as well as being a major investor in the genocide of mostly women and children in Gaza — owning defense technology companies Cobham and Ultra Electronics whose components are embedded in the F-35 fighter jets used by the Israeli military to bomb Gaza (Private Equity Stakeholder Project, 2/5/2024), showing that the hand that raises utility bills and attacks utility workers also displaces, bombs, and enslaves our working-class children.

The Party moved into action quickly, both inside the plant and on the outside. Young Party leadership pushed us forward — making contacts, spreading the word about the bosses’ fascist attacks.

A Party member inside was moved to take the bullhorn and speak before everyone as we filed into the union hall to vote on the contract. We had been out for two weeks, and the sellout union had brought us back with essentially the same contract we had already rejected. We were faced with a choice: vote yes, or risk sitting out for months like our fellow USW (United Steelworkers) members at BP Amoco in nearby Whiting.

A comrade speaks out

The comrade did speak to “VOTE NO” on the contract, to fight back against the company’s attacks on the working class. The comrade himself was a little surprised at the co-workers who complimented him for standing up to the sell-out contract. The vote was 708 to 486 to accept the contract, probably closer than the leaders expected.

One particular moment was especially powerful. A woman comrade from Mexico came to the picket line. After a couple of hours of carrying a sign, she wanted to speak. She spoke in Spanish (and was translated). She told of how her father, in the little town in Mexico where she grew up, was like us workers on the picket line. We were sticking up for others like her dad had done. I am sure we all felt the international solidarity circulating through our lives that night. It won’t be forgotten.

The struggle goes on. Energy has to be maintained. There is a lot to do. Do more to support the BP workers locked out. Keep plugging away to win as many workers as possible to Progressive Labor Party.

This month, workers in the U.S. will be reminded that the bosses’ racist system of chattel slavery officially ended in 1865 — but racist attacks and slavery continue today in other forms. The following is a reprint of a Challenge article originally published June 29, 2018, titled “Juneteenth Perpetuates Racist Myth” — published three years before racist crime bill architect Joe Biden signed it into law as an official federal holiday.

June 19, or “Juneteenth,” commemorates the end of chattel slavery. Juneteenth has been pushed on the working class with the sponsorship of major banks like Wells Fargo. Juneteenth perpetuates many racist myths about the U.S., including the myth that the images we’re given of Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama supposedly represent the ‘real’ U.S., and Donald Trump is something different.  

While the bosses promote their bank-sponsored Juneteenth holiday, they obscure the fact that racism and slavery never truly ended — and just as deliberately, they erase the long history of anti-racist struggle waged by Black and white workers together. These same bosses keep racism alive and entrenched in the 21st century, using it to divide Black workers from white workers, and to condition the U.S. working class to accept the bigger and deadlier wars already taking shape on the horizon.

Origins of Juneteenth

Two years before June 19, 1865 came Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which excluded slave states that were not in rebellion against the Union – Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, and Missouri – and Texas, which was not a battleground. Many planters and other slaveholders moved to Texas with over 150,000 slaves in order to escape the raging Civil War. In June, 1865, after the surrender of General Robert E. Lee and the Union victory in New Orleans, word finally came to Galveston, Texas that the slaves were free. The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, officially ending slavery throughout the country, was not passed until December, 1865.

Abraham Lincoln, the so-called “Great Emancipator” of slaves, was no believer in the equality of Black workers. His main motive for fighting the Civil War was preservation of the unity of the United States, not abolishing slavery. In 1858, Lincoln said, “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races…”

Lincoln favored setting up colonies for Black former slaves in Africa and Central America, and requested funds from Congress to deport freed slaves.

Another history we do not learn about or celebrate is that of the multitude of rebellions against slavery, many of them multiracial, from the 1600s to the 1800s.  In their book The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker document many of these. Among them are:

• The Barbados rebellions in 1649, which united Irish and African slaves;
• Bacon’s rebellion in Virginia in 1676, which united slaves and white indentured servants;
• The ‘New York City Conspiracy’ of 1741, which united African workers, white indentured servants, sailors, and Irish immigrants;
• Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831;
• John Brown’s multiracial antislavery campaign culminating at Harper’s Ferry.  
• The most successful was the Haitian rebellion, which abolished slavery and colonization on that island by 1804.

Racism never ended

At the end of the Civil War, freed slaves became wage laborers on former plantations, sharecroppers, or domestic workers. For a short time, their well-being was protected by federal troops during Reconstruction from 1865-77. Once this protection was withdrawn, white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan flourished, often made up of local law enforcement. This Jim Crow era was characterized by the open murder of thousands of Black workers, rampant imprisonment, impoverishment and indebtedness of former slaves and total segregation. 

Although many of these abuses were gradually mitigated through the Great Migration of Black workers to the North, landmark court decisions, and ultimately the Civil Rights Movement, racism has continued to flourish in all parts of the United States. Today, there are five times more workers trapped in modern slavery — through sex trafficking, forced prison labor, forced marriage, labor camps, and domestic servitude via the kafala system — than there were Black workers enslaved under chattel slavery in the 19th century (ILO, Walk Free Foundation, and the International Organization for Migration, Global Estimates of Modern Slavery, 2022). Racial wage differentials between white men and Black and Latino workers amount to nearly $800 billion a year, approaching half of total annual corporate profits. Disparities in social spending on education, health care, and housing add hundreds of billions more to that toll. The conclusion is inescapable: U.S. capitalism could not survive without racism. 

Black workers continue to be incarcerated at five times the rate of white workers and are killed by police at a sharply disproportionate rate — at roughly two to three times the frequency of white workers, despite comprising just 13 percent of the population. Officers are almost never convicted for the killing of Black workers. Schools, hospitals, and neighborhoods remain as segregated today as they were fifty years ago. And just as under Jim Crow, migrant workers are routinely rounded up, deported, or imprisoned in detention camps — where adults are compelled to perform forced labor for as little as one dollar a day, and children have been held in metal cages, separated from their parents. As of mid-2018, the federal government had separated and detained more than 2,000 children, housing many of them in chain-link enclosures in temporary border facilities; in total, more than 5,400 children were ultimately torn from their families under the zero-tolerance policy (Southern Poverty Law Center, Family Separation: A Timeline, 2019; Susan Terrio, Whose Child Am I?, UC Press, 2020). These racist attacks have flourished under both Democrats and Republicans alike.

All workers are hurt by racism

Other ideas pushed on workers today include “white privilege”, as if white workers created racism, benefitted from it, or should be paralyzed or separate themselves because of guilt. While many white workers may temporarily hold racist views, anti-Black racism was purposely and methodically created by the U.S. bosses of the 1600-1700s to justify slavery and separate white indentured servants and poor farmers from Black slaves. Before that, there had been social mixing and intermarriage between whites and non-whites.

What the ruling class fears is us recognizing that the lowered standards and super-exploitation for one sector of the working class brings down the standards for all sectors.

Racism serves capitalism well to maximize profits and minimize rebellion. Separation into different schools, neighborhoods, job titles, unions, and neighborhoods keeps us divided when only multiracial mass action would enable us to fight back effectively. U.S. rulers also rely on racism to win workers, white, Black and immigrant, to fight imperialist wars for markets and resources by painting Muslim, Arab, Asian and other workers as enemies.

It is heartening to witness the mass uprising against the separation and incarceration of immigrant children, which has actually forced a minimal change in Trump’s policies. We must use this power of the unity of millions of workers to destroy this racist system once and for all and build an egalitarian worker-run society: communism.

It’s already been three months since our historic four-day strike in February, the first since 1979! There were many political victories, but we saw some representatives who were clearly sellouts (read CHALLENGE, 3/11 issue).

Punishing us for striking, the school district extended our school calendar to “make-up” for the lost instructional days. The union leadership said they “had” to agree to the plan. Our unity between credentialed teachers, therapists, nurses, and non-credentialed instructional aides, security guards, et al got stronger as we approached the end of the school year. Soon, we will be rejuvenating ourselves and preparing for the next full year of struggles AND education.

Our strike and everything leading up to it was not revolutionary, but 100 percent reformist. However, the struggle consisted of workers acting in solidarity and without individual incentive, which is a communist concept. We have a long way to go, but being present in the struggle helps us fight towards revolution.

This is the perfect time to analyze what we learned and what our next steps should be. Our party club had a meeting to discuss some of these issues:

Lessons Learned

Clearly, rank-and-file workers are ready for escalated action. We need to maintain and build on this momentum.
It is possible to expand struggles in our contracts beyond our working conditions to include “common good” demands such as housing for our unhoused students and their families and protection from ICE.

Workers were receptive to our line that the liberals are the main danger, especially in San Francisco where illusions of being “progressive” among city leadership are used to quell dissent. Working people did not go for this and responded with anger and disgust at the powers-that-be for not prioritizing a fairer contract for educators. One chant openly criticized the superintendent’s $385,000 salary (“Listen up, Maria Siu. You need us, we don’t need you. Please tell us why—-your salary is so damn high!”)

Youth are leaders in educational struggles and often have a stronger line than adults. One student spoke at a rally directly criticizing the state. She asked why there is always money for bombing Palestine and parts of Asia, but not enough for schools and workers.

In our huge bargaining team under the guise of our size being more “democratic,” there were examples of the leadership trying to dispel critical thinking and dissent from the rank-and-file. For example, the bargaining team was told that they were “not allowed to offer objections” to the union’s counter proposals. They were also told to “temper” our expectations and to be “realistic” about the budget.

That is what we learned. Our club also came up with a few important next steps for our work.

More to do

We need to work with youth organizations and clubs. We also need to consider our role within the unions. Would it be enough to focus on teacher-student communication and base-building?

We need to consistently put out the party line and study former labor struggles and even local labor history and make connections with non-unionized sectors.

Onward, educators and students! We have a world to win!