COVID19 in Africa To fight the virus fight imperialism

Marxist Theory · 2026-05-13

Core Argument

The article argues that the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa cannot be understood or combated without confronting the structural violence of imperialism. The central thesis is that the catastrophic failure to vaccinate the African continent is not a matter of logistical misfortune or temporary supply disruption, but a direct expression of capitalist logic: the pursuit of profit by pharmaceutical monopolies, the subordination of public health to intellectual property regimes, and the deliberate prioritisation of wealthy nations' populations through bilateral deals that hoard surplus doses. The disruption of vaccine supplies from India's Serum Institute is presented not as an accident but as the logical consequence of a system in which production capacity is concentrated, patents are enforced, and the market allocates life-saving technology to the highest bidder. The article insists that the fight against the virus in Africa is inseparable from the fight against imperialism, and that only a socialist revolution can break the structural underdevelopment that leaves the continent vulnerable.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis draws on the Marxist theory of imperialism as developed by Lenin and Luxemburg, particularly the understanding that the underdevelopment of the Global South is not a natural condition but the product of centuries of colonial plunder and the continued extraction of surplus value through mechanisms of debt, unequal exchange, and monopoly capital. The article applies this framework concretely: the debt crisis that predates the pandemic, the concentration of vaccine production in a handful of corporations, and the role of intellectual property (TRIPS) as a legal weapon to maintain monopoly profits are all analysed as contemporary forms of imperialist domination.

The argument also implicitly draws on Marx's analysis of the contradiction between the social character of production and the private appropriation of profit. The vaccines were developed with massive public funding — German taxpayers subsidised BioNTech, American public money backed Moderna — yet the resulting technology is privately owned and rationed by the market. This is a textbook case of the socialisation of costs and the privatisation of benefits, a dynamic Marx identified in Capital as inherent to capitalism's mode of production.

The article sits within the Trotskyist tradition's emphasis on permanent revolution and the impossibility of genuine national development under imperialism. The characterisation of the African bourgeoisie as "weak and degenerate," tied to foreign capital and landowners, and incapable of leading a progressive project, is a direct application of Trotsky's analysis of the comprador bourgeoisie in the colonial and semi-colonial world.

Conjunctural Relevance

The article was published in May 2021, at a moment when the global vaccination campaign was starkly revealing the inequalities of the capitalist world order. The data it cites remains damning: rich countries had secured 87 percent of vaccine doses; high-income countries had vaccinated one in four people while low-income countries had vaccinated one in 500. The US had secured over a billion doses — enough to cover its population several times over — while most African countries had not received a single dose.

The specific conjuncture is defined by the catastrophic wave of COVID-19 in India, which led to an export ban on vaccines from the Serum Institute — the primary supplier of AstraZeneca doses to Africa via the COVAX mechanism. This exposed the fragility of a global health architecture built on charity and market mechanisms rather than planned, public production. The article notes that the Africa CDC had ordered 220 million Johnson & Johnson doses, but this was far short of the 750 million needed to vaccinate 60 percent of the continent's population by the end of 2022.

The article also captures the moment when the Biden administration — under pressure from the scale of the crisis and the geopolitical challenge of Chinese and Russian "vaccine diplomacy" — shifted position to support a temporary waiver of intellectual property protections at the WTO. The article correctly identifies this as a move to defend the general interests of American capitalism, not a concession to humanitarianism, and notes that the pharmaceutical industry's opposition and the complexity of WTO negotiations meant little would change in the short term.

The debt crisis is another key conjunctural factor: the article reports that 16 of the poorest sub-Saharan African governments were spending more on debt servicing than on social sectors before the pandemic, and that the G20's Debt Service Suspension Initiative was insufficient to stop $2.5 billion flowing to creditors outside Africa each month.

Where the Argument Continues

The article's analysis of vaccine inequality and intellectual property is developed further in several In Defence of Marxism pieces. The broader question of how the pandemic exposes the crisis of capitalism is explored in articles on the economic fallout, the role of the state, and the failures of reformist responses. The characterisation of the African bourgeoisie and the strategy for socialist revolution in the ex-colonial world connects to the Marxist tradition's ongoing debates about the nature of the post-colonial state and the possibilities for independent development.

The argument about the relationship between public health and imperialism is not fully developed here in terms of a positive programme for how a socialist health system would be organised — that is a question taken up in other IDOM articles on socialist planning and the transition to a planned economy. The article also leaves open the question of how the working class in Africa can be organised to lead the struggle against imperialism, which is addressed in the broader strategic writings of the Revolutionary Communist International.

Connections

This article should be read alongside Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism for the theoretical framework, and alongside contemporary Marxist analyses of the pandemic such as those published in Against the Stream and other IDOM articles on the political economy of COVID-19. The analysis of intellectual property and the TRIPS agreement connects to the broader Marxist critique of the knowledge economy and the enclosure of the commons. The discussion of debt and underdevelopment echoes the work of Samir Amin and other dependency theorists, though the article's political conclusions are more explicitly revolutionary than the reformist currents in that tradition.

For readers interested in the specific question of vaccine production and monopoly capital, the article's data on Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson dividends and buybacks provides a starting point for further investigation into the political economy of the pharmaceutical industry.

Key Quotes

1. "There is no solution to the pandemic within national boundaries. The problem is that we live under capitalism which means that what determines the policy of the ruling classes are profits and narrow self–interest."

2. "On average in high-income countries, almost one in four people has received a vaccine. In low-income countries, it's one in more than 500."

3. "Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and AstraZeneca — three of the world's top coronavirus vaccine manufacturers — have paid out a combined $26 billion in dividends and stock buybacks to their shareholders over the past year. According to the People's Vaccine Alliance... this sum could fully fund the cost of inoculating Africa's entire 1.3 billion population."

4. "The fact is that these vaccines were funded by public money but now a small group of corporations are allowed to keep the vaccine technology and knowhow under lock and key while selling their limited doses to the highest bidder and leaving poor countries in the cold."

5. "The weak and degenerate bourgeoisie in Africa is too dependent on foreign capital and imperialism to carry society forward. It is tied, hand–and–foot, not only to foreign capital, but to the class of landowners, with which it forms a reactionary bloc, representing a bulwark against progress."

6. "The only way out of this barbaric nightmare for the 1.3 billion people in Africa is to struggle against imperialism. But the struggle against imperialism is the same as the struggle against capitalism as a whole."