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Coronavirus in Africa kick out imperialism

Marxist Theory · 2026-05-13

Core Argument

The article argues that the impending catastrophe of COVID-19 in Africa is not a natural disaster but the direct product of centuries of imperialist domination. The pandemic will not introduce new forms of suffering but will compound existing conditions of structural underdevelopment, mass disease, and preventable death. The central thesis is that the fight against coronavirus in Africa is inseparable from the fight against imperialism — and that the only adequate response is the socialist overthrow of capitalism, beginning with the organised working class in the continent's major industrial centres.

The article rejects the framing of the pandemic as a shared human tragedy requiring charitable intervention. Instead, it insists that the crisis exposes the normal functioning of capitalism in the periphery: a system that has deliberately stripped African states of healthcare capacity, indebted them through structural adjustment, and treated African populations as expendable or exploitable.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis draws on the Marxist theory of imperialism, particularly the Leninist tradition that understands imperialism not as a policy choice but as the highest stage of capitalism. The article deploys the concept of structural underdevelopment as the outcome of colonial plunder and neocolonial economic domination, mediated through institutions like the IMF and World Bank. This places the argument within the Marxist tradition of dependency theory and the critique of "aid" as a mechanism of continued subordination.

The article also draws on the Marxist theory of the state in the periphery. The African bourgeoisie is characterised as "weak and degenerate," tied to foreign capital and landed property, and incapable of leading a project of national development. This is a classical Trotskyist position: the bourgeois-democratic tasks of the revolution — national independence, land reform, universal healthcare — can only be carried out by the working class, which must immediately transition to socialist tasks.

The argument about the working class's "special role" in production as the basis for socialist consciousness is a direct reference to the Marxist theory of class consciousness, distinguishing the proletariat from the peasantry or the urban poor. The article does not engage with the tendency of the rate of profit to fall or overaccumulation, focusing instead on the political economy of imperialist extraction and the concrete mechanisms of dependency.

Conjunctural Relevance

The article was published in April 2020, at the onset of the global pandemic. It makes specific, empirically grounded claims about the material conditions that would determine the pandemic's trajectory in Africa:

  • Testing capacity: South Africa had conducted 87,000 tests; Nigeria and Kenya fewer than 5,000; Zimbabwe and Namibia around 300. These figures illustrate the absence of the basic epidemiological infrastructure required to track the virus.
  • ICU capacity: Kenya had 130 intensive care beds for 50 million people; Mali had 37; Somalia had 15. Seventeen governments told the WHO they had no ICU capacity at all. Sierra Leone had 13 ventilators; the Central African Republic and Liberia had three each.
  • Pre-existing disease burden: Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 62% of global deaths from communicable diseases and nutritional problems, compared to a global average of 23%. Malaria alone kills 429,000 people annually, 92% of them in Africa.
  • The debt regime: The article cites David Malpass of the World Bank proposing debt suspension conditional on further free-market reforms — at the precise moment Western states were turning to state intervention.

The article also records a specific political event: the comments by French scientists Jean-Paul Mira and Camille Locht suggesting Africa as a site for coronavirus vaccine trials, and the subsequent backlash. This is presented not as an aberration but as continuous with a history of medical experimentation, including Pfizer's Trovan trial in Kano (1990s), the US CDC's AZT trials in Zimbabwe (1994), and the sterilisation experiments of Eugen Fischer in Namibia.

The conjunctural argument is that the pandemic arrived in a continent already devastated by the IMF's structural adjustment programmes, which had systematically dismantled public healthcare, water, and sanitation infrastructure over four decades. The 2008 cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe is presented as a precedent: 98,000 infections and thousands of deaths from a disease that is entirely preventable with oral rehydration therapy, caused by the collapse of water and health systems under IMF-imposed austerity.

Where the Argument Continues

The article is relatively self-contained as a conjunctural intervention, but it opens several lines of argument that are developed elsewhere in the IDOM corpus:

  • The strategy of permanent revolution in Africa: The article asserts that the working class can begin with bourgeois-democratic tasks and immediately transition to socialist ones. This is a compressed statement of the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution, which is elaborated at length in other IDOM articles on Africa, particularly those dealing with South Africa, Nigeria, and Egypt.
  • The role of the African bourgeoisie: The characterisation of the bourgeoisie as "weak and degenerate" and "tied head and foot" to foreign capital is a recurring theme in IDOM's analysis of post-colonial states. Articles on the ANC in South Africa, the MPLA in Angola, and the ruling parties in Nigeria develop this argument in greater detail.
  • The critique of "aid" and NGOs: The article's dismissal of Western NGOs as part of the "cycle of dependency" is a position that IDOM has developed in articles on humanitarian intervention, the politics of charitable foundations, and the role of organisations like the Gates Foundation in shaping global health policy.
  • The pandemic as a crisis of capitalism: The broader argument that COVID-19 exposes the contradictions of capitalism is developed in IDOM's pandemic-era output, including articles on the economic crash, the failure of healthcare systems in the imperialist heartlands, and the political response of ruling classes worldwide.

Connections

The article should be read alongside:

  • Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism — the theoretical foundation for the article's understanding of imperialism as a system of extraction and domination.
  • Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution — the strategic framework for the claim that the working class must take up bourgeois-democratic tasks and transcend them.
  • Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa — the historical analysis of colonial plunder and structural underdevelopment that the article assumes as background.
  • IDOM articles on South Africa — particularly those analysing the ANC's role in managing capitalism and the prospects for working-class leadership in the continent's most industrialised economy.
  • IDOM articles on the IMF and World Bank — developing the critique of structural adjustment and the debt regime that the article introduces through the example of Zimbabwe's cholera epidemic.
  • Against the Stream episodes on global health and imperialism — the podcast has covered the politics of pharmaceutical monopolies, vaccine apartheid, and the role of institutions like the WHO in managing crises for capital.

Key Quotes

  1. "The coronavirus pandemic will not introduce anything new to the African continent. Before coronavirus, some of the world's highest rates of infectious diseases resulting in death were found in Africa."

  2. "The deaths and infections were entirely preventable. With effective replacement of fluids and electrolytes, through simple oral rehydration therapy, mortality can be reduced to less than one percent. But the privatisation and deregulation of the water and sanitation facilities caused unaffordable fees for water access, leading the poor to rely on degraded water sources."

  3. "The IMF and World Bank programmes often imposed conditions that specify ceilings on the public sector wages, which forced government cuts to wages and workers in the healthcare sector. But the reduced wages and lack of job security often drove health workers to move elsewhere, producing a 'brain drain'."

  4. "The fight against the coronavirus in Africa is a fight against imperialism. The ravages of centuries of imperialist domination has left the entire African continent vulnerable to even more suffering."

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

  6. "It is entirely possible for the proletariat to be victorious in an African country and, by starting with the bourgeois-democratic tasks of the revolution, immediately go over to the socialist tasks. But, in the end, the necessary condition for holding onto power is to extend the revolution to the advanced capitalist countries."