“The journey to freedom is full of sacrifices, tears, hunger, clothes full of lice, blood and death.”

― Dedan Kimathi

“You do not climb a tree from the top.”

— African Proverb

The Necessity of the Party

In the Marxist tradition, the vanguard party is an indispensable vehicle in the struggle for liberation. In a world structured by imperialism, democracy is severely constrained, especially in the global periphery. It serves, primarily, the interests of imperial powers and those national elites who work on their behalf. These social relations not only determine the daily lives of billions of people but also maintain a tight grip on the spheres of politics, culture, education, and information. For the most part, elections offer a choice between political parties that are all, in various ways, committed to the preservation of capitalism. In this context, workers, peasants and the urban poor are forced to align with political horizons established by their oppressors, which do not fundamentally challenge the social relations imposed by capitalism and imperialism. That is why the oppressed need a political vehicle that can represent them as a class. This is the role of the revolutionary party, which seeks to develop, advance and carry the aspirations of working and oppressed people on the road towards socialism.

Why is a revolutionary party needed? In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote that capitalism “creates its own gravediggers”.1 The concentration of capital in the hands of one class also creates a working class, which is the creator of all wealth in society. This class, Marx and Engels showed, can seize the means of production and redirect profit towards bettering human life. But this process does not arise spontaneously. Workers initially experience their exploitation individually rather than collectively, and ruling class ideology permeates society, making collective organisation difficult. The revolutionary party serves as the vehicle to overcome these limitations, concentrating working class experience; engaging, developing and sharing revolutionary theory; and providing strategic direction to class struggle.

The 1917 October Revolution provided a testing ground. Vladimir Lenin showed that the working class, limited to trade union activism, which tended to focus narrowly on questions of wages and working hours, did not on its own develop broader demands for political representation. It was not aware of its capacity to govern an entire state. It required a party of professional revolutionaries to introduce socialist consciousness into the labor movement, to help it organize, and to help it realize its mission of seizing state power. In this way, the revolutionary party becomes the concentrated expression of class consciousness, the institution that transforms the working class from a “class in itself” (an objective economic category) to a “class for itself” (a conscious political actor and an agent in history). This mission cannot be brought about by an NGO, a debating club, or a hollow electoral vehicle. It demands a party grounded in historical experience, rooted among the people, and reinforced by theory.

Today, in much of the global periphery, the ranks of the oppressed also include a significant rural population and — increasingly — a growing number of people who are altogether outside the workforce. Across the world, there is a historic exodus of rural workers into cities caused by factors like land grabs and climate change. These populations are forced into ballooning urban slums, where they fall into informal or vulnerable employment, or have no work prospects at all. On the African continent, roughly 40% of all people now face such conditions — populations for whom a revolutionary political change is an existential necessity.2 Here, the role of the vanguard party in uniting the oppressed and transforming their often-spontaneous resistance into conscious revolutionary action becomes critical.

The Communist Party Marxist Kenya (CPMK) is a contemporary effort to build such an organization — a vanguard party of Kenya’s working people, urban poor, and peasantry that aims at playing a leading role in the ongoing struggle against capitalism, neo-colonialism, and imperialism. Its experiences reveal not only the continued vitality of revolutionary Marxist thought, but also the ways in which Marxism is applied to the particular conditions of contemporary Kenya.

From Colony to Neo-Colony: Kenya’s Path Under Imperialism

The CPMK emerged within the context of a protracted struggle against colonial domination and imperial subversion — the overt and, later, covert undermining of national sovereignty. British colonialism, established in the late 19th century, appropriated the best land and natural resources for the benefit of white settlers and the colonial power. Through legal instruments like the 1902 Crown Lands Ordinance, the British Empire declared all “unoccupied” land to be the property of the Crown, effectively criminalizing African forms of land tenure and dispossessing millions from their ancestral territories. The most fertile lands, the infamous “White Highlands”, were reserved exclusively for European settlers, while the African majority were herded into native reserves or reduced to squatters on their own land. To compel Africans into wage labor on settler farms and in nascent industries, the colonial administration imposed hut and poll taxes, put in place curfews to control movement, and sought to crush resistance with corporal punishment and executions.

Resistance to colonial rule emerged early, with various forms of spontaneous revolts erupting alongside organised movements towards national liberation. The Kikuyu Central Association, founded in 1924, and the Kenya African Union, established in 1944, were early attempts at political organization against colonial rule. The colonial administration responded with increased repression, banning African political organizations and arresting their leaders.

The national liberation struggle reached its peak with the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s, a revolutionary peasant movement that took up arms against the British occupation. The rebellion, led by the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, organised under the slogan Gĩthaka na Wĩtĩkio! — Land and Freedom! — which reflected the realities of life for millions of Kenyan people who faced alienation from their land, economic exploitation, and political exclusion. The rebellion shook the colonial regime to its core. The British response was savage. More than 1.5 million people — primarily from the Kikuyu community — were forced into concentration camps. Thousands were tortured, executed, or subjected to hard labour and inhumane conditions. Entire communities were uprooted, and collective punishment became routine. What was framed as a counterinsurgency was a campaign of terror designed to crush resistance and reassert colonial control. Official figures acknowledge about 11,000 Mau Mau fighters killed, though the actual number of Kenyans who died as a result of British violence is significantly higher.

As the armed struggle escalated, Britain shifted its strategy from direct repression to engineering a transition of power that would, under the guise of formal liberation, preserve its economic interests. This led to the “False Independence” of 1963, a moment that did not dismantle the colonial state but transformed the mechanisms by which it exerted its rule. Through conferences at Lancaster House, from which the radical wing of the anti-colonial struggle was excluded, Britain handed the reins of power to a loyal comprador bourgeoisie — a class that, through its own enrichment, would sustain the economic logic of colonialism without its formal political trappings. This new elite accepted a neo-colonial arrangement that left British commercial interests, land ownership, and military influence intact. The result was the birth of a neo-colonial state — a black façade for ongoing white control. As the CPMK manifesto notes:

“Few and limited reforms aside, the governments that took over from colonialism have maintained the system that recycles the problems our people fought against. Those whose lands were forcibly taken away by the settlers are still landless... Slave-like labour conditions still exist in foreign and locally owned plantations that pay starvation wages to poorly organised labour.”

The post-independence era under Jomo Kenyatta consolidated the neo-colonial order in Kenya. Radicals like Pio Gama Pinto — a Marxist committed to Pan-African liberation — were assassinated, while the left-wing Kenya People's Union (KPU), which had called for more far-reaching transformation, was banned in 1969. In the years that followed, writers and intellectuals who aligned themselves with the struggles of peasants and workers were also targeted — most notably Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who was detained without trial in 1977 after staging a radical play in Gikuyu with a community theatre group.

When Daniel arap Moi assumed the presidency in 1978, Kenya descended into a one-party dictatorship characterized by severe repression, widespread torture including in the infamous Nyayo House, and the imposition of Structural Adjustment Programs by the IMF and World Bank, which privatized state assets, deepening inequality and undermining the already-weak social provisions that existed in the country.

The reintroduction of multiparty politics in the 1990s proved to be an illusion. The elites successfully reconfigured as a series of competing factions within the same comprador class. From KANU and NARC to Jubilee and Kenya Kwanza, they used newly-established political parties to compete for control of the state apparatus — often through the deliberate mobilisation of ethnic identities, which served to obscure material divisions and entrench elite power. Even the celebrated 2010 Constitution, while containing progressive reforms, remains fundamentally capitalist in its orientation. “The truth is that the national values described by the constitution,” the CPMK says, “cannot be realised under capitalism; only socialism”.

National Sovereignty and the Two-Stage Struggle

To break the cycle of neo-colonial domination, the CPMK has set out a revolutionary path grounded in the application of Marxist-Leninist theory to Kenya's specific conditions. This strategy rejects the path of reformism. The neo-colonial state, forged to sustain Kenya’s subordination to empire, cannot be mended. It must be overthrown and reconfigured to serve Kenya’s workers, peasants, and the rapidly growing mass of people living and working informally in cities. The theoretical heart of this strategy is the Two-Stage Theory of revolution, which says that in a semi-feudal, neo-colonial society like Kenya, the struggle must proceed through two distinct but dialectically-linked phases.

The first and immediate stage is the National Democratic Revolution (NDR). This is a revolutionary-democratic stage whose primary objective is the complete destruction of neo-colonialism and its domestic pillars. Its tasks include smashing the landlord class to return the “land to the tiller”; ending imperialist domination by expelling foreign military forces and breaking free from the financial control of the IMF and World Bank; and abolishing the neo-colonial state machinery to replace it with organs of people's power. The party argues that skipping this stage ignores the material realities of Kenya: the unresolved land question, the vast peasantry as a revolutionary force, and the entrenched power of a comprador class serving foreign capital.

Central to the NDR is the struggle to reclaim National Sovereignty. The CPMK defines sovereignty not as a legal phrase or a flag at the UN, but as the material capacity of a people to control their own land, labor, resources, and destiny. Kenya’s sovereignty was betrayed by the comprador class at independence and continues to be sold off through debt, unequal trade deals, and military pacts. Reclaiming sovereignty is therefore a strategic precondition for embarking on the path of socialist construction. Without control over the economy, resources, and state, any attempt to build socialism would be reined in by foreign powers.

The second phase in the revolutionary struggle is the Socialist Revolution. This phase involves the socialization of the means of production, the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat to defend the revolution from external and internal enemies, and the comprehensive transformation of society to eliminate poverty, inequality, and all forms of oppression.

This two-stage framework is reflected in the CPMK’s political program. The party’s Maximum Programme represents the ultimate goals of socialism and communism. Its Minimum Programme consists of the revolutionary-democratic tasks of the NDR — these are not reformist, social-democratic demands, but reflect clear aspirations necessary to advance through the two stages of the revolutionary process. This distinction is central to the CPMK’s theory of change and reflects its relationship with electoral power. While the party may participate tactically in elections, its strategic goal is not to win office within the neo-colonial state but to deploy the electoral process to build the organized power of the masses.

Genesis and Rectification: Forging the Vanguard

The CPMK did not emerge in a vacuum. It grew from what it terms “the long thread of Kenyan communism,” a revolutionary tradition rooted in the anti-colonial resistance and forced underground for decades. This lineage traces back to the radical, proto-revolutionary wing of the Mau Mau, which terrified both settler capital and the imperial core with its demands for land redistribution and anti-imperialism. This spark was carried forward by figures like Bildad Kaggia, the radical nationalist; Pio Gama Pinto, the Marxist martyr; and Oginga Odinga, who led the left-leaning KPU. Following the assassination of Pinto and the banning of the KPU, leftist organizing was brutally suppressed, surviving only in clandestine formations like the December Twelfth Movement and socialist study circles that defied the Moi dictatorship at great cost.

The party in its current form emerged from the Social Democratic Party of Kenya (SDP), which formed after the reintroduction of multiparty politics in the 1990s. For years, the “social democratic” label was a pragmatic concession to a political environment steeped in anti-communism. But by 2019, the party's left-wing core determined that conditions were right for a decisive rupture with reformism. At its Third National Congress, the party was formally transformed into the Communist Party of Kenya (CPK). This marked a definitive break with the constraints of social democratic politics and ideas.

The state reaction was swift. The Registrar of Political Parties refused to register the new name, claiming that Kenya “cannot allow socialist/communist parties”. The party fought back through legal action and public mobilization, winning a landmark court victory in April 2019 that affirmed its right to exist and set a precedent for ideological pluralism in Kenya. The subsequent change in its name to Communist Party Marxist – Kenya (CPMK) was a further ideological consolidation, affirming its grounding in Marxism-Leninism and its application to Kenyan conditions, and responding to a crisis within its ranks.

In 2022 elections, two senior party officials, Mwandawiro Mghanga and Benedict Wachira — referred to in internal documents as “the gang of two” — betrayed the party's official position of non-alignment and unilaterally declared support for the bourgeois Kenya Kwanza coalition. The majority of the party rejected this act of “class collaboration”, and embarked on an extensive process of self-reflection and rectification to ensure greater discipline and coherence within its ranks. The crisis reflected the CPK’s inherited organisational weaknesses, which developed a mass membership as it fought the ban on its registration, and established what it calls a “compromised foundation” with a leadership that had increasingly bourgeois elements within its ranks. The 2022 split, and the change in the party name, helped consolidate the CPMK around a disciplined vanguard bloc, whose resolve was tested in the contradictions of internal class struggle.

The Tools of Revolution: Organisation, Discipline, and the Mass Line

As a vanguard party, the CPMK has five primary tasks. It builds cadre consciousness through Marxist-Leninist education, so that every party member becomes a thinker, organiser, and agitator. It organizes, establishing cells in factories, schools, farms, universities, informal settlements, and diaspora communities. It agitates, carrying on the political line into every mass struggle — from housing and hunger, to gender oppression and landlessness. It unites, building a shared front of progressive forces, without diluting the working class leadership of the movement. And it prepares for deeper crises, for greater repression, and for future insurrection.

The strength of the vanguard party is therefore determined not only by its ideology and political line, but also by its revolutionary organization, which must be capable of institutionalising and systematising the collective power of the workers, the urban poor and the peasants — transforming theory into material force. The party’s core organizing principle is democratic centralism, a key tradition in the history of revolutionary parties. It rests on four pillars: democracy in discussion, allowing for full internal debate; centralism in action, requiring all members to uphold a decision once made; the minority obeying the majority; and lower party organs obeying higher ones. This structure is intended to enable both genuine internal democracy, which can capitalize on the collective knowledge and wisdom of the party, and unified action. The system is designed to prevent the party from being paralyzed by factionalism.

The bridge between the party and the people is known as the mass line, a method of leadership drawn from processes elaborated by Mao Zedong in the course of the Chinese Revolution. The idea and practice of the mass line reflects a continuous dialectical process of studying the diffuse and unsystematic views of the people, systematising them into a clear political line, and returning to the people with a line that can unify and lead them in organised political struggle. The process of formulating a mass line is a central feature of socialist democracy, and ensures that the party's leadership is rooted in the concrete reality of the oppressed, preventing the bureaucratisation of party cadres and ensuring that the needs of the people guide the actions and theories of the broader struggle.

To institutionalize its work, the CPMK has developed specific organizational arms. The Pio Gama Pinto Ideological School (PGPIS) serves as the “furnace of Marxist education” and the “theoretical headquarters of the revolution”. It is responsible for training cadres in Marxism-Leninism, developing bilingual educational materials in English and Kiswahili, and providing theoretical clarity to the movement. The party has also established mass organizations to lead struggles on specific fronts. These include the Revolutionary Women’s League (RWL) and the Revolutionary Youth League (RYL). These leagues function with relative autonomy under the party's political guidance, tasked with mobilizing their respective constituencies and training new generations of leaders.

The goal of this entire structure is cadre development. The party aims to forge “warrior-scholars” — committed militants who are theoretically grounded, rooted in the masses, and steeled by revolutionary discipline. This is achieved through a combination of theoretical study at the PGPIS and practical application in the heat of class struggle, a process that aims to elevate consciousness from the spontaneous to the organized. This institutionalization marks a critical evolution from an informal network of activists to a mature organization with the structures needed to sustain and develop a protracted struggle.

The Broad Front of Struggle: Uniting the Oppressed

On its own, the working class cannot advance in the struggle for the NDR. It requires a broader strategic alliance of progressive forces among all classes and social strata that can work together against the state’s primary enemies: imperialism, the comprador class, and the landlords. In the Maoist tradition, the CPMK calls this the United Front. At the heart of this coalition is the “basic alliance” between the working class, the urban poor, and the peasantry — the most exploited classes in Kenya, whose combined force forms the backbone of the revolution. The party's role is to provide ideological and political leadership to this front, ensuring it does not devolve into a populist bloc ripe for manipulation by the interests of the ruling class.

Grounded in an analysis of Kenya’s class structure, the CPMK integrates other social questions into its struggle. These, the party argues, are integral expressions of the class struggle in Kenya’s neo-colonial context. On the question of gender, for example, the party breaks with NGO driven liberal feminist frameworks and advances a position of “proletarian feminism”. Kenyan working class and peasant women face “triple oppression” — as members of an exploited class, as women under patriarchy, and as subjects of a neo-colonial nation. The RWL is tasked with leading this struggle, fighting for everything from land rights and equal wages to an end to violence against women, while linking these issues to the revolutionary struggle against imperialism and for socialism.

On LGBTQ+ rights, the CPMK struggles against the oppression faced by LGBTQ+ comrades, which it recognizes as a product of colonial-era laws, religious fundamentalism, and patriarchal traditions that continue to weigh on Kenya’s culture and society. The CPMK rejects the politics of bigotry. At the same time, it remains critical of liberal “identity politics”, which fragments class unity, and the “rainbow capitalism” promoted by imperialist NGOs, which commodifies identity while leaving systems of exploitation intact. In other words, the party seeks to integrate the fight for sexual and gender liberation into a Marxist-Leninist framework, avoiding the traps of both dogmatic dismissal and liberal co-optation.

On the ecological crisis, the CPMK sees it as an inseparable component of a broader “class war” and a direct product of imperialist accumulation. Imperialism is responsible for over 80% of historical CO2 emissions, and yet those who suffer the brunt of the impact are the African peasants, not European landlords; fisherfolk of Lamu and Lake Victoria, not Wall Street executives; and the urban poor in Mathare and Kibera, not the billionaires at Davos. The party rejects the greenwashing of capitalism and false solutions like carbon markets, which it terms “green imperialism” — a new form of colonial control. It calls instead for “People's Ecology”, a struggle rooted in the mass line that links the fight for environmental justice to the agrarian revolution, food sovereignty, and anti-imperialism, demanding ecological reparations from the imperialist powers.

Finally, the party maintains a strong commitment to internationalism and revolutionary pan-Africanism. It rejects the toothless, comprador-led pan-Africanism of institutions like the African Union, calling instead for continental unity grounded in the struggle for socialism and against imperialism. The progressive currents in the Kenyan diaspora are seen as a strategic detachment of the revolution, tasked with political education, organizing, and building solidarity. This international work is coordinated by a dedicated International Department of the Central Organising Committee (IDCOC), which forges ties with revolutionary movements worldwide, from Palestine and the Philippines to Cuba and Venezuela.

Towards Victory

The history of the African revolutionary struggle has been marked by severe betrayals and defeats. Leaders who sought to develop strategies of national sovereignty — from Pio Gama Pinto to Thomas Sankara, Patrice Lumumba to Muammar Gaddafi — were deposed and executed by Western powers working in collusion with national comprador elites. Each of their struggles was grounded in mass organizations that sought to unite the people in a common struggle for liberation and socialism. Across the continent, that struggle faced a setback as neoliberal dogmas took root and NGOs demobilized the people, transforming questions of liberation into appeals for reform.

But the struggle must continue. Africa remains the most exploited continent on the planet. Its resources are plundered. Its labor is undervalued to the point of its systematic destruction. Its lands are stolen. The debts imposed on its nations cripple their capacities to govern. Its nations are occupied by foreign militaries acting as guarantors for imperial interests. Western funded NGOs and media and academic projects exercise significant power in countries across the continent. As a consequence, the lives of the African people are cut tragically short, a crisis that climate change and environmental devastation threatens to generalize.

The CPMK therefore exists within a long historic tradition, which recognises that the revolutionary transformation of Kenya — and nations beyond it — is both a precondition for survival and a necessary outcome of the deep contradictions between the oppressed and their oppressors.The party moves with the grain of history — building on the successes and failures of the past to establish the party in every workplace, rural village and urban settlement, raising the organisation and consciousness of the masses to enable their final victory.