Ajiambo Ashlyn | Communist Party Marxist Kenya
Comrades, revolutionaries, and fighters for the working class and oppressed peoples of the world.
We gather at this historic International Conference of the World Anti-Imperialist Platform at a moment of profound danger and immense opportunity. Danger, because imperialism is alive. It is sharpening its knives. It is rebranding itself for a new era. Opportunity, because the masks are slipping. The people of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Global South are no longer buying the manufactured lies.
Imperialism, in its various manifestations, poses an existential threat to the sovereignty of African nations. This is the material reality of our daily existence. From the nickel mines of Burkina Faso to the oil fields of Niger, from the ports of Mombasa to the uranium pits of the Sahel, foreign capital extracts and our people bleed.
Today, imperialism is more insidious than ever. The tactics have evolved, but the goal remains the same: the exploitation of African resources and the subjugation of African peoples. They no longer arrive with slave ships and Maxim guns, though they use them if necessary. They arrive with “defence cooperation agreements,” “summits” “capacity building programs,” “technical assistance,” and “development aid.” The language is soft. The handshake is warm. But the iron fist inside the velvet glove is the same fist that once held the whip.
This is particularly evident in the neo-colonial manipulation by US and French imperialism. Under the guise of military interventions and economic aid, they continue to prop up regimes that serve their interests and destabilize those who dare to challenge their influence. In the Sahel, France claimed to fight terrorism while training and arming the very terrorist groups that kept the region in chaos, chaos that justified French bases, French uranium extraction, and French control of the CFA franc. In East Africa, the United States designates Kenya a “Major Non-NATO Ally” not as a reward for Kenyan democracy, but as a down payment on military access, intelligence cooperation, and logistical support for US regional operations. In West Africa, defence agreements with Ghana and others create the legal infrastructure for intervention without accountability, for soldiers who answer to foreign flags, for courts that cannot touch them.
The Conditions of the Working Class in Kenya
Comrades, let us speak plainly about the Kenyan working class. It is under siege. But we must understand why. The working class in Kenya remains relatively small and this is the design of imperialism. Foreign domination has deliberately stunted our industrial development, crushed our productive capacity, and locked our economy into permanent dependency. Industries that should employ millions are weak, fragmented, or simply do not exist. The result is a working class that is artificially constrained, while more than 70% of our people are pushed into the rural barbarism cornered to conditions of backwardness that the system actively maintains.
In the villages, exploitation takes multiple brutal forms. The rural worker and the poor peasant are not only exploited by the market. They suffer from pre-capitalist relations that persist under neocolonialism. Usury chains the peasant to endless cycles of debt. Rent in kind means the harvest is stripped before the family can eat. Rent in labour means unpaid toil is extracted from broken backs. Rent in money tightens the grip of landlords and local elites who serve as puppet partners to foreign capital. The peasant tills the soil but does not own it. Produces abundance but does not control it. Lives a full life but never advances from poverty.
Yet within this painful reality lies a decisive revolutionary force. The peasantry vast, enduring, and deeply angry constitutes the physical muscle of any genuine revolution in Kenya. It is the reservoir of energy, the great mass that, when organized and led by the working class, can sweep away the old order. Let us be clear: without the peasantry, there is no revolution. But with the peasantry armed with consciousness and organization there is no force on earth that can stand in our way.
Class struggle is a breathing, daily reality. It unfolds on the factory floors, on the tea plantations, in the cities streets, and in the rural villages. Workers are rising in strikes against stiffed wages, against precarious contracts, against the outright theft of their labour. From organized industrial actions to spontaneous walkouts, the working class is asserting itself even under conditions of brutal repression and deliberate fragmentation.
In the countryside, the contradictions are sharpening by the day. Peasants are resisting land grabbing. Resisting displacement from ancestral lands. Resisting the domination of landlords and agribusiness corporations that treat human beings as disposables. Localized uprisings, community resistance, and organized struggles over land and livelihood are becoming more frequent. The anger is deep. The patience, comrades, is wearing thin.
These struggles may appear scattered, a strike here, a land occupation there, a protest somewhere else. But they are connected by a common thread. They express the same fundamental contradiction: the masses versus the system that exploits them. The task before us revolutionaries is clear. Unite these struggles. Give them political direction. Transform scattered resistance into a conscious, organized force capable of advancing the National Democratic Revolution.
What are our people fighting against? Unemployment that destroys futures. The casualization of labour that turns permanent workers into disposable hands. The rising cost of living that makes survival a daily calculation. Land dispossession that severs the bond between people and earth. The erosion of social services that were won through decades of struggle. Health and education have been fully commodified if you cannot pay, you cannot live, you cannot learn. Housing is unaffordable for the majority. Hunger is no longer an exception. It is becoming the normal condition of Kenyan life.
Politically, the masses are confronting a crisis of representation. The bourgeois parties offer no solution. They recycle the same promises while deepening exploitation behind closed doors. The people are searching. They are questioning everything they were taught. And they are learning through struggle the hardest but most honest teacher, that the problem is not this politician or that politician. The problem is not only the president or the parliament. The problem is the entire system. And the system must be replaced, not reformed.
The Reality of Neocolonial Fascism
Fascism never left. In Kenya, Ruto’s regime deploys fascist violence, police murder, digital surveillance, and detention without trial against workers, students, and peasants who opposed unpopular policies like the 2024 Finance Bill. Look at the intelligence networks that track organisers while bandits armed by politicians displace entire villages across different regions. Look at the bureaucratized trade union leadership, a labour aristocracy that negotiates retreat while workers are crushed. That is fascism: the merger of comprador capital, imperialist debt, and the coercive state apparatus to wage open class war.
From Kagame’s Rwanda a surveillance paradise for neoliberal exploitation to Museveni’s Uganda, using hysteria as a smokescreen for US AFRICOM alliances, to the Janjaweed turned RSF in Sudan, we see the same phenomenon. It is the colonial continuum. Our task, therefore, is not to “resist authoritarianism.” It is to smash the neocolonial state through a National Democratic Revolution led by the working class in alliance with the peasantry.
The Pacifist Trap in the Imperialist Heartlands
But we must speak a hard truth to our comrades in the imperialist countries. We see the anti-war movements in London, New York, and Berlin. They march for peace in Ukraine. They protest the bombs on Gaza. This is good. But too often, this movement is crippled by pacifism. Pacifism, in a period of generalized imperialist war, is not a strategy. It is a life support system for capitalism. You cannot stop a bayonet with a petition. You cannot reason with a bombing campaign. The imperialist bourgeoisie does not fear your moral appeals; it fears your organized ability to disrupt its supply chains, to shut down its ports, to turn its own working class against it.
Do not ask the oppressed in Palestine, Iran, or the Sahel to be “non-violent.” We are witnessing World War Three. Not a single, declared war, but a multi-front class war waged by monopoly capital.
In Palestine, we see settler colonialism in its final, genocidal stage backed by NATO logistics. In Iran, we see a prolonged siege of strangulation and covert war, because imperialism fears any independent pole of development. In Ukraine, our analysis is clear: this is a proxy war driven by NATO expansion, where the working class of Russia and Ukraine are used as cannon fodder for competing capitalist oligarchies. And let us not forget Asia. When NATO talks about the South China Sea or the “defense” of Taiwan, they are not defending democracy. They are preparing to strangle the People’s Republic of China a target of imperialist aggression for its very success in independent development. We defend the socialist core. We oppose any imperialist encirclement of China, just as we oppose the encirclement of Russia by NATO. The Taiwan front is a single front in the same war: the war against the multipolar world order that imperialism is desperate to prevent.
The African Front: Proxy Wars and Plunder
Here in Africa, the war is hot. The crisis of the Sahel, where Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger have kicked out French imperialism, is a heroic blow. But we warn our comrades: sovereignty alone is not socialism. If the patriotic military regimes do not place power in the hands of the working class and poor peasantry, if they do not break the relations of production, they risk becoming new local bourgeois factions.
Meanwhile, imperialism is regrouping. It was humiliated in the Sahel, so it is moving to East Africa. The upcoming Africa-France summit in Nairobi is not a diplomatic engagement. It is a war council to reorganize neocolonial plunder. The new military pact between France and Kenya is not for “counterterrorism.” It is to protect French-owned tea estates, to secure uranium routes from the DRC, and to crush the revolutionary wave before it reaches the Indian Ocean.
One Enemy, Many Fronts
Our analysis is clear. The crisis of imperialism is systemic. It is not a series of isolated conflicts. They are a single, global class war. The enemy is the same: monopoly finance capital, headquartered in Washington, London, Paris, and Brussels, served locally by the comprador-bureaucratic bourgeoisie.
We see this clearly in East Africa. Kenya is a key node of this system. We host foreign military bases a direct violation of our sovereignty. Our intelligence services are integrated into imperialist networks. And right now, imperialism, having suffered humiliating defeats in the Sahel where the peoples of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger have expelled the French army is attempting to regroup in Nairobi. The upcoming Africa-France summit is not a diplomatic event. It is a war council to reorganize plunder. The new military pact between France and Kenya is not for “counter-terrorism.” It is to protect French-owned investments, secure mineral routes from the DRC, and crush the revolutionary wave before it reaches the Indian Ocean.
The Revolutionary Answer
Comrades, the liberal anti-fascist tells you to restore “democracy.” We say: you cannot restore a democracy that never existed for the worker. The anti-war pacifist tells you to lay down your arms. We say: the other side has never laid down theirs.
The only anti-fascism that works is revolutionary. To be anti-fascist is to strengthen working class organizations, which fascism wants to annihilate. The only anti-imperialism that wins is proletarian internationalism.
In Kenya, the working class is thin by design, but the peasantry is vast. The peasant is the physical force of the revolution. Chained by usury, rent in kind, and land grabbing, the peasant tills but does not own. Our task is to forge the worker-peasant alliance. To organize rank-and-file committees in the Export Processing Zones. To build red villages in the countryside.
To our comrades across Europe: Your fight against the rising far-right is our fight. Your fight against capitalist repression is our fight. But you cannot defeat your fascists without breaking from the EU’s imperialist framework. You cannot defeat your bourgeoisie while supporting the encirclement of China or the arming of Ukraine against the Russian working class.
Conclusion
Comrades, imperialism is in crisis, but it will not collapse on its own. It is becoming more aggressive, more fascist, because it is dying. The reliance on proxy wars and sanctions reveals its strategic weakness. It fears direct confrontation. It fears the united front of the world’s oppressed.
The Party is the vanguard. The working class is the leading force. The peasantry is the great peoples army. And anti-fascism is simply the name we give to the revolutionary struggle when the bourgeoisie drops its mask of democracy.
Let us stop asking when World War Three will begin. It is already here. It is being waged on the hills of Palestine, on the plains of Ukraine, in the South China Sea, in the jails of Kenya, and in the boardrooms of London and Washington.
The only answer is proletarian revolution.
