For the working class of West Africa, Ebola is a crisis. But for U.S. imperialists, the viral outbreak is an opportunity — to extend their military influence, expand their domestic war powers, and fuel the racism that exploits and divides workers throughout the world. U.S. rulers are using Ebola to accelerate their move to fascism, the stage of capitalism where the veneer of social democracy gives way to the naked reality of the bosses’ dictatorship. Only by imposing fascism on the working class can the rulers militarize the U.S. and prepare for the global war to come. Only through fascism can they hope to stave off the challenge of imperialist rivals like China and Russia.       
From cholera in Haiti to hurricanes in New Orleans or New Jersey, “natural” disasters are in fact caused by capitalism. The bosses’ drive for profits — the essence of the capitalist system — leads them to neglect infrastructure: roads, bridges, sea walls. When medical breakthroughs fail to promise a high return on investment, they get ignored. On October 23, the New York Times reported that scientists in the U.S. and Canada had discovered a vaccine that was “100 percent effective in protecting monkeys against the Ebola virus” — nearly a decade ago. With adequate funding, the life-saving product might have been licensed and in use by 2010. Instead, it sat on the shelf.
As Adrian Hill, co-director of Oxford University’s vaccine program, told the Independent (9/7/14):
Well, who makes vaccines? Today, commercial vaccine supply is monopolised by four or five mega-companies — GSK, Sanofi, Merck, Pfizer — some of the biggest companies in the world.
“The problem with that is, even if you’ve got a way of making a vaccine, unless there’s a big market, it’s not worth the while of a mega-company …. There was no business case to make an Ebola vaccine for the people who needed it most …. It’s a market failure.
Even now, as overblown panic in developed countries has triggered a push for a vaccine, U.S. bosses have no incentive or plan to relieve workers from the miseries of capitalism. To date, Ebola has afflicted about 10,000 people in West Africa. Hundreds of thousands more are fleeing the outbreak and its economic dislocation. But despite the scale of this suffering, it pales next to the malnutrition that is “directly or indirectly responsible for 3.5 million child deaths every year, in sub-Saharan Africa,” according to the United Nations. From 1992 to 2012, the World Hunger Education Service noted, “the number of hungry grew in Africa … from 175 million to 239 million.”
Africa’s deadliest scourge is starvation, essentially death by poverty and the profit system.  
Oil and M-16s
U.S. bosses and their puppet, President Barack Obama, are using Ebola to get the jump on China and Russia in exploiting oil and gas reserves in the affected region. ExxonMobil, Chevron and Anadarko Petroleum all have offshore operations in Sierra Leone and Liberia, where reserves have been estimated in excess of one billion barrels (Reuters Africa, 11/03/09). It’s likely no coincidence that Obama is sending in thousands of troops: “The U.S. military presence in West Africa [now 900] is expected … to climb to 3,900 in coming weeks” (Washington Post, 10/26/14). Meanwhile, a public relations competition is in full swing. As the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), U.S. imperialism’s top think tank, pointed out:
The United States pledged $350 million [to a UN Ebola aid fund]; the UK has committed $200 million.... Chinese and Russian donations have been notably low: China has pledged around $50 million and Russia has contributed $1 million (CFR website, 10/24/14).
Foreign aid is a basic tool of imperialism. France is contributing $88 million to the Ebola cause to re-colonize Guinea, a former possession. Britain is focused on its former colony, Sierra Leone. Liberia — founded by ex-slaves deported by U.S. racists and home to a vast Firestone rubber plantation — occupies Washington’s attention.
How the Bosses Use Ebola
Domestically, Ebola helps U.S. imperialists planning for a potential World War III by furnishing grounds for tighter, more militarized government control, especially of people’s movements. Several states have enforced quarantines of healthy medical workers returning from West Africa. In addition, Obama “has ordered the Department of Defense to form a 30-member military medical quick strike team that can deploy quickly — within 72 hours — to any new outbreaks of Ebola in the U.S.” (Global Research, 10/23/14).
By contrast, the capitalist health system has virtually no plan in place to treat Ebola in U.S. hospitals, leaving nurses and other healthcare workers either unprepared or scared away by the bosses’ media hysteria. Even so, some workers are fighting back. A protest in Dallas, in front of the hospital where a worker from Liberia died, called for justice for this victim of capitalist neglect.
Politicians from both parties have proposed a travel ban from West Africa, a move that would only discourage healthcare workers from going to treat patients there. The rulers are also stoking racist fear of African immigrant workers, who live in fear of being quarantined or deported (see page 4). Their children are bullied in school; their neighborhoods are terrorized. U.S. imperialists know Ebola is not the apocalypse. They are using the disease to gauge the limits of their ability to extend fascism.
U.S. rulers would love nothing more than a true pandemic to blame on a foreign enemy and galvanize U.S. workers toward war. The bosses had hoped to use 9/11 to that end but fell short, in part because a one-time attack failed to force workers to fall back on the state for their protection. An acute, long-term health threat could be more effective in this respect. It’s worth noting that before 9/11, U.S. ruling-class planners were preparing mainly for bioterrorism and their own fascist counter-moves (see box).
Communism: The Best Medicine
Under capitalism, the working class cannot escape the lethal deficiencies of a profit-driven health system. Communism — a system run by and for workers, without profits or bosses — would prevent many diseases by eradicating their underlying causes. It would cope with unforeseen outbreaks by using science in the service of the masses. The Chinese Revolution eliminated parasitic afflictions like schistosomiasis. It organized masses of “barefoot doctors” who, with proper training, were sent to the countryside to treat and contain curable illnesses. By organizing the masses, China ended the destructive flooding of rivers. Famine and malnutrition, facts of life for workers and peasants for centuries, became things of the past. Unfortunately, the abandonment of communist goals and the pursuit of capitalist profit in China have eroded those landmark advances.
Stamp Out the Disease of Capitalism!
Progressive Labor Party is fighting for a society run by the working class, one that will eliminate profit for all time. The reversals of the Soviet and Chinese revolutions have taught us the dangers of vestiges of capitalism, like the wage system and privileged elites. Freed from profits or bosses, a communist society will put the working class first. Food and water will be shared. And racism—a source of most of today’s threats to workers’ health—will be outlawed.
In short, communism will eliminate the most dangerous disease of all — capitalism. So join the fight to destroy the profit system and build the Progressive Labor Party!