Malaria, the Politics of Public Health and the International Crisis

Abstract

After more than a decade of increasing control, malaria has been making a dramatic resurgence in the 1970s — a resurgence which has been allowed to continue unchecked for several years. This article seeks an under standing of this de-control in the history of the class politics of public health and in an analysis of the current international capitalist crisis. These past and present experiences are analysed within a new Marxist perspective which emphasizes the autonomy of working class struggle within and against capital and the central role of the wageless in capital's division of the class. To analyse the role of un waged labor in the accumulation process and the investment or disinvestment in public health the concept of the "circuit of the reproduction of labor power" is developed. In each of the historical periods the development or underdevelop ment of public health programs are seen as the outcome of the particular charac teristics of the working class struggles and of capital's strategies of these periods. On the basis of these analyses the author suggests that the current de-control of malaria is part of that underdevelopment approach to some areas which forms part of capital's strategies of repression and global restructuring in the present crisis.