Schistosomiasis: Capitalism Kills Again

Along the shores of Lake Malawi in Africa schistosomiasis — a disease that causes abdominal pain, diarrhea, malnutrition and in long-term cases liver damage, kidney failure, and even infertility — has become common over the last few decades. According to a medical researcher in the area the disease has become ubiquitous, “In some villages around Lake Malawi up to 70 percent of the people and 95 percent of schoolchildren are infected” (All Things Considered, 5/28). Lake Malawi is no small region either, it is about the size of New Jersey and borders Tanzania, Mozambique, and Malawi with over 14 million people living on its shores.
One perspective is that the outbreak is caused by parasitic worms whose life cycle takes them from snails on the lake’s shoreline to the intestinal tract of people and back again. Another view might argue that the disease is caused by overfishing in the lake that has removed the snail’s primary predator and by increased farming in the area that has raised sediment levels along the shoreline making them an even more favorable environment for the worm-carrying snails. Finally one might argue that the profit motive in agricultural production has forced millions of people to pack in around the lake’s shores so that they can overfarm the land and overfish the water, creating the perfect conditions for an outbreak of schistosomiasis.
One analysis mechanically looks at the life-cycle of the diseas; the other examines its root cause. In capitalist production the seizing of profit is the only concern while the pillaging of the environment and the damage it causes to the workers forced to live there is ignored or dishonestly rebranded an act of nature.
Today health officials seem flummoxed on how to stop the spread of schistosomiasis along Lake Malawi’s shores, but half a century ago a similar mass outbreak in China was contained and the disease eliminated within less than a decade. Thousands were organized to comb river banks finding the snails one by one and killing them until the parasite was eliminated. As English surgeon Dr. Joshua Horn noted, the mass campaign against the river snails was only made possible by a communist mass political line (Away With All Pests). In capitalist Africa today this is impossible. The profit system does not allow for thousands of people to abandon “productive” labor — labor that makes a capitalist profit — to engage in “unproductive” labor — the kind of work that would improve the living conditions of millions.
Horn stressed the Chinese Communist Party’s reliance on the peasantry and their knowledge in dealing with the fight against the snails writing, “To mobilize the masses does not mean to issue them shovels and instructions; it means to fire them with enthusiasm, to release their initiative and tap their wisdom.” Along the shores of Lake Malawi no capitalist is interested in firing up the enthusiasm of the working class. After all, once the working class killed the parasites along the lake they might turn their sights on the capitalist parasites that daily rob them of their labor and health.