The following message was delivered by our party’s vice-chair Joti Brar to the second congress of the Communist Party of Kenya in Nairobi on 16 November 2024, where it was warmly received by a young and militant membership.
The congress was the culmination of a two-year rectification process which followed betrayals by former leaders and a split in the party. The delegates agreed to rename the party Communist Party Marxist – Kenya (CPMK), adopted a new Kiswahili translation of The Internationale as their anthem, and reaffirmed their commitment to Marxism-Leninism.
The slogan adopted by the congress was ‘Advancing the national-democratic revolution for a truly independent, socialist Kenya’. Besides a large number of international delegates from fraternal parties and organisations, it was also addressed by leaders of progressive broad front organisations in Kenya, representing workers, women, students, young people, cultural fighters and intellectuals.
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I bring greetings and a red salute to this second congress of the Communist Party of Kenya from the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) and from the progressive workers of Britain. It is a great joy and an honour to be with you on such an important occasion in our shared struggle and at such a vital moment in history.
Although we live far away, we have followed your recent struggles with great attention, knowing well how the crisis in Kenya is a reflection not only of the global overproduction crisis, but also of the unfinished liberation struggle, which left your country with what we today refer to as ‘flag and anthem’ independence. That is, with the outward semblance of independence but without any real sovereignty, caught in a debt trap through which the wealth produced by Kenyan workers is unable to benefit them or the country, and is instead hoovered up and sent abroad to line the pockets of financiers in London and New York.
While the Kenyan people achieved a great victory in the national-liberation struggle of the 1950s, ejecting the British overlords and their settler-colonial regime at the point of a gun, the intervention of US imperialism kept Kenya in financial subjection as a ‘sphere of influence’ for the colonial looters. White faces in the government offices were replaced with black ones, British exploiters took second place to American ones, but the essential colonial relationship was reinforced rather than being dismantled and the fruits of their liberation struggle were denied to the Kenyan masses.
We see on our social media feeds the sacrifices that Kenya’s people are now making in their efforts to bring down the comprador regime of William Ruto, and the leading role that the Communist Party of Kenya is playing in trying to bring discipline and direction to that movement. And we take this opportunity to ask ourselves: what is it that makes the communists the best friends of the people?
In essence, it is that as well as standing beside the people through all their troubles, we communists do not allow ourselves to be swept away by the details of any particular struggle; we do not sell to the masses the illusion that victory in one battle is the same thing as victory in the war as a whole. While fighting for victory in each battle, we work to raise the consciousness of the masses so they can understand the role that this particular confrontation plays in the advancement of their cause as a whole, and to prepare them to raise their demands from ‘Down with the preset regime!’ to ‘Down with the imperialist system!’
The war we are engaged in is a class war; a war for socialism; a war for the future of humanity. We may engage in that war on different fronts; the path to victory may vary depending on where we are starting from and the conditions in which we are working. But as communists, we understand that our problems will only find a permanent solution with the complete abolition of capitalist relations, which rest on the system of capitalist production for profit.
This is the root from which the entire imperialist outgrowth began to sprout more than a century ago, and which has grown to such monstrous proportions today. This is the essence of the system which threatens to drown the world in blood in its desperate quest to save itself from inevitable doom.
The communists, by studying the liberating science of Marxism, by internalising the Marxist-Leninist method and applying it everywhere, are able to do more than sympathise with and support the struggling masses; they are able to empower them with knowledge.
Marxist science gives us the ability to explain why the world is divided into exploiters and exploited; what exactly capitalist and imperialist exploitation consist of, and how the present exploitative society has created within itself the very forces that will explode and supersede it. These are, on the one hand, the modern means of mass production, which have the capability of supplying all of humanity with a decent and constantly rising standard of living, and on the other, the modern proletariat, the class which lives by selling its labour-power to create wealth for the capitalists, but which has no property and no stake whatsoever in the current system.
The combination of these two great forces under the leadership of a communist party, guided by socialist science and setting up a new planned economy in place of the old exploitative one, will finally allow humanity to resolve all the obscene and inescapable social contradictions that capitalism itself has created, and which have grown to such immense proportions with the extension of capitalism to every corner of the globe – that is, with the development of capitalism into imperialism
Marx and Engels were a thousand times right when they wrote in the Communist Manifesto in 1848 that what this system produces above all are its own gravediggers.
But while the death of the imperialist system and its replacement by socialism are historical inevitabilities, they will not occur without mass action. Marxist science gives us the tools we need to play the role that history has set before us. But while our enemy is in many ways weaker than it has ever been, we should not underestimate either its strength or its cunning.
The ruling elites may be a tiny minority, but they have huge means at their disposal. Besides machineries of mass suppression, besides using science, academia, bribery and all kinds of divide-and-rule tactics to confuse and set workers against one another, the imperialists have also put huge funding into creating a fake ‘Marxism’ with which to misdirect the energies of revolutionary-minded workers and to cause chaos and dissent within our movement.
It is only by working hard to grasp the fundamentals of scientific socialism as encapsulated in the works of the great founders of our movement – Marx, Engels and Lenin – that we can equip ourselves to recognise and root out all the wrong ideas that constantly infiltrate our minds, our parties and our movement.
It is a great privilege for my party, trying to build such an organisation in the heartland of the world’s oldest imperial power, to stand in solidarity and to join in common work with a party such as the Communist Party of Kenya, which is working to the same end in what was once one of the British empire’s colonial territories.
We know that the greatest act of solidarity British workers could offer to their struggling compatriots in Kenya would be to make the situation in Britain so difficult that our ruling class was unable to continue giving attention to its colonial operations abroad.
From the other direction, the loss of its wealth-extraction rights in Kenya would deal a severe blow to the British financier elite in its ability to rule at home, at a time when their rule and their system is already deeply mired in crisis – a crisis that drives austerity and repression at home and is creating a deep wellspring of anger amongst the impoverished mass of British workers.
Truly, our struggle is one, and our desire for mutual cooperation in this struggle is no mere verbal flourish. We take to heart the profound words of Comrade Lenin, who taught us that the revolutionary movement in the imperialist countries is a sham and a fraud if it is not closely connected to the movement for liberation in the colonial countries.
We in the CPGB-ML will continue to do everything in our power to inject class-consciousness into the working class in Britain so that it can become a real force in the world and add its weight to the great global struggle against imperialism that is now entering a new phase.
While many look at the deepening of a third world war that is evident all around us and tremble at the prospect, our party recognises that this war drive is born of crisis and desperation, and that the balance of class forces in the world has dramatically shifted since the US imperialists gloated about the “end of history” in 1991.
We are sure that, if we all continue to do our work well, the opportunities presented by the present situation of crisis, austerity, repression and war can be turned to the advantage of our common struggle. The chance for us to strike decisive blows against our common imperialist enemy must not be missed, as it teeters on the edge of the precipice of its worst ever economic crisis.
We must do everything in our power to make sure that knock-out blows are delivered from all directions so that the peoples of all countries can finally take their destiny into their own hands, delivering on the bright promise offered by a prosperous and peaceful socialist future.
Long live international solidarity!
Long live the Communist Party of Kenya!
Victory to the forces of anti-imperialist resistance!
