Feudal Relics Persist in Neocolonial Kenya

 

Keynote Address to the Fourth International Theoretical Conference

 

Booker Omole, General Secretary, Communist Party Marxist Kenya (CPMK)

23rd May 2025, United Kenya Club, Nairobi

 

 

The Opening and the Class Struggle in the Realm of Theory

 

Comrades,

 

I begin by joining our National Chairperson, Comrade Mwaivu Kaluka, in extending a most heartfelt and militant welcome to all international and local delegates gathered here today. Revolutionary greetings from the entire membership of the Communist Party Marxist Kenya (CPMK) reach you in solidarity and in struggle. Welcome to Nairobi, the land of the unbowed Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi, whose blood waters the roots of our resistance.

 

Our ancestors remind us: “When the roots remain unbroken, the tree will sprout again.” And so, we gather today, deeply rooted in the revolutionary soil of Kenya and Africa, to sprout anew, stronger, bolder, and more ideologically armed than ever before.

 

This inaugural theoretical conference takes place at a moment pregnant with both danger and opportunity. Across the Global South, the working class and its vanguard parties are confronted with burning questions: What is the correct character of our national struggles? What is their dialectical connection to the global anti-imperialist front? How do we ensure that our revolutions grow organically from the specific contradictions of our own societies, rather than mechanically imitate foreign models divorced from our material realities?

 

The CPMK has taken up these questions not as a theoretical luxury, but as a matter of revolutionary necessity. For a party that does not theorise correctly cannot act correctly. And a party that does not act correctly cannot liberate its people.

 

We are honoured to co-organise this conference with the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), with the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) at its core. Your revolutionary path of protracted people’s war, class struggle, and anti-imperialist resistance offers profound lessons for us, as we seek to wage our own battles on African soil.

 

The theme of this conference, Comprador and Bureaucrat Capitalists in the Neocolonies, is not an academic exercise. It reflects the living, breathing class enemies who exploit our people daily: in the fields, in the informal settlements, in the markets, in the corridors of government, and yes, sometimes even within the Party. As our wise elders say: “When a snake enters your homestead, it matters not whether it slithers through the front door or the fence, what matters is that it bites.”

 

And the comprador–bureaucrat class has bitten the Kenyan masses for too long.

 

But to heal, we must name the disease. To strike, we must see the enemy clearly. That is why we gather, to sharpen our swords of theory, to clean our guns of ideology, and to prepare for political battle. For this Fourth Theoretical Conference is not a tea party, it is a war council. A war against opportunism, liberalism, feudal backwardness, and imperialist domination. A war to settle accounts with the past and chart the revolutionary road to socialism.

 

This conference affirms the ideological rebirth of our Party, following the first wave of rectification. This is not the Kenya of ten years ago. This is not the CPMK of ideological fog and revisionist compromise. The waters have been stirred. The lines have been drawn. The opportunists unmasked.

 

Our people teach us: “He who learns but does not correct himself is digging a grave with his own pen.”

And we, comrades, shall not dig our own graves.

 

This conference is a decisive step in the second wave of rectification, a necessary cleansing, a reaffirmation that this Party will not advance on the shaky foundations of revisionism, petty-bourgeois liberalism, or cowardly deviationism. We shall not carry forward the poisoned legacy of the “gang of two”, Mwandawiro Mghanga and Benedict Wachira, whose betrayal of democratic centralism and abandonment of class struggle inflicted grievous harm on our great party and the Kenyan revolutionary movement.

 

These sellouts, under the mask of “intellectualism,” wedded themselves to the comprador class. They distorted the Party line to please NGOs and foreign embassies and dragged our legacy and sacrifices of our martyrs in deep mud, now they are stinking with opportunisms and hated by the Kenyan masses, though defeated, we must never forget their betrayals. They championed electoral illusions while liquidating class struggle. But we say today: never again. Their deviationism shall not be repeated, and their opportunism shall not return through the backdoor in new clothes.

 

Our ideological vigilance must remain unrelenting. We must expose and defeat all forms of opportunism:

1.     The left infantilism that rejects strategy in favour of posturing;

2.     The Trotskyist idealism that scorns national liberation;

3.     The liberal economism that substitutes reform for revolution;

4.     And the bourgeois feminism that ignores class while claiming to speak for women.

5.     The imperialist NGO ideologues and the hopeless perverted champions of politics of No Polity

 

The Kenyan working class shall only march forward when its Party is guided by ideological firmness, programmatic clarity, and organisational discipline.

 

As Mao Zedong taught: “A revolution is not a dinner party. It is an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

 

And to overthrow a class, we must first see it clearly.

 

The Comprador and Bureaucrat Capitalist Class – Two Arms of the Same Beast

 

Comrades,

 

Let us now return to the very theme of this conference: Comprador and Bureaucrat Capitalism in the Neocolonies. The enemy must not be an abstract shadow. It must be identified, named, and studied with scientific clarity. In Kenya, the bourgeoisie is not national in character. It is not revolutionary. It is not productive. It is a servant class, a comprador and bureaucratic elite that survives only by licking the boots of imperialism.

 

We begin by defining our terms.

 

Comprador capitalism is the economic arm of foreign domination. Compradors are intermediaries. They are the local agents of foreign capital, tasked not with building, but with managing subsidiaries of transnational corporations. Their duty is to ensure that the pipeline of profit flows unbroken, from the sweat of Kenyan workers to the vaults of European and American capital.

 

These compradors may not always be seen in Parliament. But they rule nonetheless, from boardrooms, investment conferences, and chambers of commerce. Their task is singular: to extract surplus and channel it to their imperialist masters. They do not build factories. They build bank accounts. They do not invest in the nation. They traffic in its ruin.

 

Bureaucratic capitalism, on the other hand, is the political instrument of imperialist control. Here we find rented politicians, state technocrats, and military officers whose purpose is to protect imperialist interests through the machinery of the state. They do not govern; they administer imperialism’s affairs. They wear African faces, but they speak the language of foreign capital.

 

In Kenya, these two classes are not parallel tracks. They are one twisted rope. The comprador and bureaucrat capitalist are often the same person, owning a logistics firm on one hand, sitting on a government committee on the other; controlling real estate empires while passing land policy; brokering imperialist loans by day, imposing austerity by night.

 

From the sayings: “A man who chases two antelopes at once will lose both.”

But the comprador–bureaucrat does not chase, they are carried. They serve one master: imperialism.

 

For the revolutionary, this unity of economic and political power in the same class is not just a curiosity. It is a strategic fact. It means that Kenya is ruled by a single reactionary bloc, with no patriotic wing, no progressive wing, and no capacity for national development.

 

This class must be overthrown, not reformed. It must be disarmed, not debated. It must be exposed, isolated, and smashed through class struggle and armed revolution.

 

The Historical Birth of the Comprador–Bureaucrat Class in Kenya

Comrades, no class appears from thin air. Even traitors have a birth story. To understand the comprador–bureaucrat class in Kenya, we must return to the final decades of British colonialism.

 

As the sun set on the British Empire, the imperialists prepared a new arrangement to protect their interests. They knew that direct colonial rule was becoming untenable. The Mau Mau war had ignited a prairie fire. Across the continent, anti-colonial sentiment was swelling.

 

So British finance capital did what all imperialists do: it negotiated a false independence.

 

But to rule indirectly, they needed agents. They needed a native elite, educated enough to be respected, cowardly enough to obey, and greedy enough to sell out their people.

 

Thus, was born the Kenyan comprador class: lawyers, chiefs, businessmen, and university-trained sons of the petty bourgeoisie, plucked from the colonial civil service and military. They were given land, titles, and contracts. They were told: “Rule in our name, and we shall reward you.”

 

Alongside them rose the bureaucratic class, former colonial clerks, administrators, and army officers, now given suits and briefcases, armed with foreign degrees and foreign debts.

 

Did they oppose colonialism? No. They inherited it.

 

Did they reverse land alienation? No. They deepened it.

 

Did they industrialise Kenya? No. They made it a warehouse for imports.

 

Their accumulation was not through production, but through state contracts, foreign aid, corruption, and plunder. They sold Kenya not once, but over and over again, at donor conferences, in IMF meetings, and in backroom real estate deals.

 

They enriched themselves through the parasitic appropriation of the surplus value produced by workers and peasants.

 

They crushed every movement that dared resist them: the workers’ strikes of the 1960s, the peasant revolts in the Rift Valley, the radical university student movements of the 1980s.

 

Comrades, let us call this class by its true name: a comprador–bureaucratic dictatorship in the service of imperialism.

 

Theoretical Foundations

Comrades,

 

I now turn to a critical component of this keynote speech, and to look at some of theoretical foundations.

 

We ground our understanding in the revolutionary teachings of Lenin and Mao, who demonstrated that feudalism, and its persistence in semi-feudal forms, remains a central barrier to socialist transformation in the neocolonial world. Mao, in particular, emphasised the necessity of agrarian revolution as the precondition for people’s democracy and socialism.

 

The question of feudal remnants and their role in the revolutionary process has been dealt with extensively in the works of Lenin and Mao Zedong. Both recognised that in societies dominated by imperialism like Kenya, the path to socialism must pass through a national democratic revolution that dismantles pre-capitalist structures, particularly feudal and semi-feudal relations in the countryside.

 

Lenin: The Agrarian Question and the Bourgeois Democratic Revolution

Lenin’s writings on the agrarian question, particularly in The Development of Capitalism in Russia and Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, identified feudal relations, specifically landlordism and peasant bondage, as barriers to the development of the productive forces and the consolidation of the proletariat as a revolutionary class.

 

Lenin argued correctly that in backward and semi-feudal societies like Kenya, the democratic revolution must aim at: The elimination of feudal landholding and the redistribution of land to the peasantry; The destruction of the political power of the landlord class; The democratic reorganisation of the countryside under a new class alliance between workers and peasants.

 

Although Lenin worked within the context of Tsarist Russia, the method he developed is applicable to neocolonial societies like Kenya, where the colonial bourgeoisie replaced the aristocracy, and semi-feudal land relations were preserved or mutated under comprador capitalism.

 

Mao Zedong: Semi-Feudalism and the People’s Democratic Dictatorship

Mao’s contribution deepened Lenin’s theory by applying it to colonial and semi-colonial societies dominated by imperialism. In revolutionary China, Mao identified the countryside as the base area of the revolution and recognised the semi-feudal, semi-colonial character of Chinese society.

 

In works like Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan and On New Democracy, Mao explained that: Semi-feudalism is maintained through a fusion of landlordism, imperialism, and comprador capitalism; The peasantry, particularly the poor and landless peasants, are the main force of the revolution; The revolutionary task is to overthrow both imperialism and feudalism, as a unified process, through a people’s democratic dictatorship.

 

Mao’s method is critical for understanding Kenya’s situation. The colonial state, far from dismantling feudalism, restructured it to serve settler and imperialist interests. Post-independence, the comprador state retained these structures, allowing landlordism, patriarchal domination, and customary authority to survive under a capitalist facade.

 

Semi-Feudalism in the Neocolony

A semi-feudal system is not feudalism in its classical form, but a hybrid mode of production, where: Pre-capitalist forms of exploitation (like unpaid family labour, rent-in-kind, and patron-client ties) persist; The peasantry is not fully proletarianised or integrated into capitalist production; Land relations remain based on custom, power, and lineage rather than the market or formal legal rights.

 

This hybrid system is actively preserved by imperialism, because it ensures cheap food, docile labour reserves, and political control through traditional elites. In Kenya, this is seen in: The persistence of customary land tenure systems; Landlord–squatter relations;

Unpaid family labour and subsistence farming; Traditional authority structures embedded in the political system. These are not accidental; they are essential tools of neocolonial control, which must be overthrown as part of the NDR.

 

 

 

Learning from Revolutionary History: The Universality and Particularity of National Democratic Revolutions

 

Comrades,

 

No revolution is born in a vacuum. The flames that rise in the Kenyan countryside are fanned by winds from other struggles; from China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Russia. Yet, as Fanon warned, “each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it.”

 

We study these revolutions not to copy them, but to learn from their universality while adapting to our particularity.

 

The Chinese Revolution: Agrarian Power and Mass Line

Mao Zedong’s Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan taught us that peasants are not naturally revolutionary, they become revolutionary through organisation and ideological transformation. The Chinese Communist Party applied the mass line: “from the masses, to the masses,” building base areas, overthrowing landlords, and constructing new democratic power rooted in peasant organs.

 

Mao showed that:

1.     Armed revolution must begin in the countryside;

2.     Land reform is the axis of mass mobilisation;

3.     Patriarchy must be smashed through revolutionary women’s associations.

 

Kenya’s countryside, too, is the primary theatre of contradiction. But unlike China, we contend with settler remnants, donor-funded NGOs, and customary law manipulated by comprador chiefs. Our peasant revolution must address these specificities without abandoning the mass line and the necessity of revolutionary violence.

 

 

The Russian Revolution: Class Strategy and Alliance

Lenin’s Two Tactics of Social Democracy clarified that the bourgeoisie in colonial and semi-feudal societies cannot complete the democratic revolution. It is the proletariat, in alliance with the peasantry, that must carry the banner of bourgeois-democratic tasks; land reform, democratic rights, and national sovereignty; while preparing for socialism.

 

In Kenya, there is no patriotic bourgeoisie. No industrial capitalists. Only a comprador-bureaucrat elite clinging to imperialist life support. Therefore, the working class must lead, not tail. And the poor peasantry must be mobilised, not pacified.

 

The Vietnamese Revolution: People’s War and Dual Power

Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh built base areas in the countryside, combining armed resistance, mass education, and land redistribution under a People’s Democratic Government.

 

Their success teaches us that:

1.     Political power must be built before state power is seized;

2.     Rural administration must be revolutionised from below;

3.     Imperialism can be defeated through united front strategy, not through elite compromise.

 

In Kenya, we must also build dual power in the countryside; village committees that contest not only landlordism, but chiefs, police, religious landlords, and NGO manipulators.

 

The Philippine Revolution: Continuing the People’s War

The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), through the National Democratic Front (NDF) and New People’s Army (NPA), has waged a protracted people’s war for over 50 years. Through painstaking social investigation, political education, and mass organising, they have advanced a two-stage land reform while confronting comprador-bureaucrat violence and U.S. imperialism.

 

From the Philippines, we learn:

1.     Rectification is indispensable to correct ideological deviation;

2.     Summing-up and criticism-self-criticism are vital to political clarity;

3.     Class struggle cannot be substituted by electoral illusion or legalist compromise.

 

The Kenyan revolution must also develop its own strategy of prolonged mass resistance, rural encirclement, and ideological consolidation; guided not by imitation, but by scientific analysis.

As the proverb says: “The stream learns from the river but must cut its own course.”

 

Comrades,

 

To introduce the next part, I would like to say that without the most complete and comprehensive understanding of the Kenyan society, our revolution shall surely wane. This explains why the party takes hours to analyse the Kenyan society. 

 

Deepening the Historical-Structural Analysis of Semi-Feudalism in Kenya

To fully expose the enemy, we must grasp the historical and structural roots of Kenya’s semi-feudal formation.

 

Feudalism Before and Under Colonialism

Feudal relations in Kenya are not colonial inventions. Prior to British conquest, certain pre-capitalist relations of production existed across various ethnic formations. Some communities had established hierarchies of tribute and labour extraction, with elders or chiefs holding communal control over land and cattle. However, these relations were embedded in social reciprocity and communal obligations.

 

The feudal relations in Kenya had existed even before the period of colonialism. However, Colonialism entrenched them even further. The ownership of land continues to be used to extract surplus from the peasantry. The most common feature of feudal rent has been Rent in Kind. In areas like Taita Taveta, Peasants who had no land holding were given land by the landlord class and at the end of the harvest they would give part of their harvest to the landlord as rent in kind. This feature has continued up to date.

 

Colonialism did not eliminate these relations. It weaponised them.

 

British imperialism institutionalised feudalism through forceful land alienation. The 1915 Crown Lands Ordinance declared all “waste” or “unoccupied” land to be the property of the Crown. Over 7 million acres of the most fertile land, stretching from the White Highlands of Uasin Gishu to the lush escarpments of Kericho and Nyeri, were seized and handed to British settlers.

 

The African population was forcibly displaced into Native Reserves, overcrowded, underdeveloped, and administratively policed territories designed to contain, control, and exploit. There, a distorted version of traditional authority was imposed. Chiefs became instruments of indirect rule. Customary law was codified not to preserve culture but to enforce colonial domination.

 

Taxation, especially the hut and poll tax, was introduced not for public goods but to coerce African labour into settler farms and colonial infrastructure. With African economies destroyed, the peasantry was made to pay taxes with wages earned through exploitative labour or the forced sale of produce at artificially low prices.

 

This expropriation generated a dual agrarian economy, one capitalist and export-oriented (settler estates), the other subsistence-based, overpopulated, and underdeveloped (African reserves). This created the material base for semi-feudal relations within African areas, particularly as a response to land scarcity and proletarianisation.

 

This colonial economy fused feudal extraction with capitalist accumulation, resulting in a semi-feudal, semi-colonial mode of production.

 

With formal independence in 1963, the comprador ruling class inherited the colonial land regime through market-based land redistribution (e.g. the Million Acre Scheme), largely funded by Britain and the World Bank. Land was not redistributed to the landless peasantry, but instead purchased by African elites: civil servants, politicians, former chiefs, and businessmen; thus, forming a postcolonial African landlord class. This class mirrored settler patterns of landholding: absentee ownership, leasing to tenants, and accumulation through title deeds.

 

The government redistributed land to Africans in ways that entrenched inequalities that were created by colonialism. This comprador landlord class remains tightly linked to global finance capital, using land titles as collateral for loans and speculation, not production.

 

By 1980, 20% of large farms controlled over 80% of high-potential agricultural land, mostly in Rift Valley. In contrast, smallholders (majority) occupied less than 20% of such land, often fragmented and overused.

 

The landlord class was not born of toil. It was created through state patronage, corruption, and comprador accumulation. Its members did not till the land, they extracted rent in kind, rent in cash, labour dues, and usurious interest from the poor peasantry.

Comrades,

 

The introduction of individual land tenure through land adjudication and registration (1950s–1970s) under the Swynnerton Plan (1954) created the juridical foundation for the landlord class. Land registration was used to legitimise the power of the elites and dispossess communities

1.     Land was transformed into a commodity and a source of rent extraction, fuelling class differentiation within African communities.

2.     Former communal land became privately held, enabling:

3.     Land grabbing by elites.

4.     Emergence of petty landlords who lease land to squatters and tenants at exploitative terms.

5.     Expansion of absentee ownership.

 

Even today, Kenya’s land distribution is among the most unequal globally. According to official estimates, less than 20% of Kenyans own over 80% of arable land, with a handful of families, many tied to post-independence administrations, holding tens of thousands of acres each. In places like Taita Taveta and Laikipia, landless peasants today remain locked in sharecropping arrangements, obligated to surrender a portion of their harvest to absentee landlords.

 

This land monopoly remains the backbone of Kenya’s semi-feudal economy. It blocks productive forces, suppresses peasant initiative, and reproduces rural poverty. It is not a relic of the past, it is a present system of class rule.

 

As our people say: “The cow that feeds in your garden is not your friend.” And the landlord class, though it may wear African skin and preach Pan-Africanism, feeds off the suffering of the peasantry.

 

The Landlord Class Today: Composition and Exploitation

Who then is the landlord class in Kenya today?

 

It includes:

1.     Settler remnants, such as British and South African-owned farms and conservancies;

2.     Big landlords, Retired generals, ex-ministers, and political dynasties;

3.     Land speculators, who hoard idle land in peri-urban zones for profit;

4.     Churches and trust foundations, which own large tracts acquired during colonial patronage;

5.     Traditional chiefs and elders, who enforce patriarchal land inheritance.

 

Their modes of exploitation are varied:

1.     Rent in kind and rent in cash;

2.     Sharecropping arrangements;

3.     Debt bondage through informal moneylending;

4.     Deplorable labour conditions on flower, tea, and sugarcane estates;

5.     Tithes and church levies demanded from rural women cultivators.

 

These exploitative relations do not only oppress the peasantry, they distort the entire national economy. They prevent agricultural modernisation, deepen food insecurity, and compel rural-urban migration into slums and informal work.

 

In this context, semi-feudalism is not a cultural residue. It is a strategic barrier to socialist transformation.

 

The Role of Land Monopoly and Patriarchy in Semi-Feudal Conditions

 

Comrades,

 

If we are to uproot semi-feudalism, we must identify the dual anchors that secure its persistence: land monopoly and patriarchy. These two forces are not merely ideological vestiges, they are material systems of domination.

 

Land Monopoly: The Engine of Semi-Feudal Exploitation

Let us be clear: the monopoly of land ownership by settler remnants, comprador elites, and bureaucrat capitalists is the structural cornerstone of Kenya’s agrarian underdevelopment.

 

This monopoly is expressed through:

1.     Large idle estates owned by politicians and military elites;

2.     Foreign-owned agribusinesses in Laikipia, Naivasha, Kericho, and parts of Taita;

3.     Evictions of indigenous communities from forest lands under the pretext of conservation;

4.     Land speculation driven by capital accumulation, not food production;

5.     Land-grabbing mafias operating with the protection of state power.

 

In places like the Coast, vast swathes remain under colonial-era trust titles, controlled by absentee landlords who collect rent without labour, while the indigenous people live as tenants and squatters on ancestral land.

 

This is not a land “issue”, it is a land war. And the landlord class is not a development partner, it is a class enemy. As the African proverb warns: “A man who owns all the river forbids you from fetching water.”

 

Patriarchy: The Silent Pillar of Feudal and Capitalist Oppression

Alongside land monopoly stands patriarchy, not as cultural inertia, but as a system of gendered class rule. It manifests on three fronts:

 

Culturally:

1.     Women are denied land inheritance under customary law.

2.     Marriage systems commodify women through dowry and bride price.

3.     Single mothers and widows are dispossessed in clan-based inheritance disputes.

 

 Politically:

1.     Women are systematically excluded from decision-making in village elders’ councils, land boards, and even many cooperatives.

2.     “Women’s roles” are reduced to “development projects” rather than revolutionary mobilisation.

Economically:

1.     Women form the majority of unpaid agricultural labourers.

2.     They perform reproductive labour: cooking, fetching water, caring for children, without compensation, without rest, and without social recognition.

3.     Women are last in the queue for credit, land titles, agricultural inputs, and political representation.

 

This is not merely sexism. It is gendered exploitation rooted in feudal and capitalist relations. Let us say it plainly: the agrarian question is also a women’s question. To smash feudalism, we must smash patriarchy. To build socialism, we must emancipate women not as a special interest, but as a revolutionary class force.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Clarifying Class Relations in the Countryside

 

Comrades,

 

Clarity in class analysis is not academic, it is essential for revolutionary practice. The countryside is not homogenous. It is divided by ownership, by labour relations, and by class interests.

 

Stratification of the Peasantry:

1.     Poor Peasants: Landless or with uneconomic plots; rely on seasonal labour or petty trade; permanently in debt.

2.     Lower-Middle Peasants: Smallholders with limited surplus; depend on family labour; vulnerable to crop failure and market shocks.

3.     Middle Peasants: Own sufficient land to feed themselves; some surplus for market; may hire labour occasionally.

4.     Rich Peasants: Hire permanent labour; produce for market; accumulate through trade and informal lending.

 

Landlords and Bureaucrats:

1.     Small Landlords: Own 10–50 acres; extract rent or sharecropping tribute; often act as brokers for comprador elites.

2.     Big Landlords: Own hundreds or thousands of acres; linked to state power; extract surplus through tenancy, contract farming, and usury.

3.     Bureaucrat Capitalists: State functionaries who use office to acquire land, secure state tenders, and mediate foreign capital in agriculture.

4.     Comprador Bourgeoisie: Agents of imperialist agribusiness; operate logistics, agro-export, and finance; prioritise export crops over food sovereignty.

 

This is not a rural economy, it is a class battlefield.

 

 

Relations of Production: Who Owns, Who Works, Who Profits?

1.     Means of Production: Concentrated in the hands of landlords, comprador, and bureaucrats; land, machinery, inputs, and transport.

2.     Labour: Supplied by the poor peasantry, mainly women: manual, unpaid or underpaid, or precarious.

3.     Surplus Appropriation: Realised through rent, crop levies, interest on informal loans, and price suppression by middlemen and exporters.

 

These are not incidental contradictions. They are the material foundations of semi-feudal capitalism in the countryside.

 

The Agrarian Programme of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR)

 

Comrades,

 

If the countryside is where the contradictions are sharpest, then the countryside must also be where the revolution roots itself most firmly.

 

The agrarian programme of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) must be clearly articulated along two axes:

 

Minimum Programme (Immediate Democratic Demands):

1.     Lower Land Rent and Abolish Usury: Organise peasants to resist exploitative tenancy and interest rates.

2.     Increase Farmgate Prices and End Market Exploitation: Establish producer cooperatives to fight price suppression by brokers and cartels.

3.     Promote Collective Farming: Mobilise women’s groups and youth brigades into agricultural cooperatives.

4.     Secure Customary and Communal Land Rights: Defend communities against evictions and land grabs under the guise of “development.”

5.     Legal and Political Support for Peasant Struggles: Provide cadre-led legal education and advocacy at village level.

 

Maximum Programme (Revolutionary Transformation):

1.     Land to the Tiller: Expropriate idle and monopolised land without compensation.

2.     Abolish the Landlord Class: End rent, forced labour, and patriarchal control over land and bodies.

3.     Establish People’s Councils in the Countryside: Replace chiefs and administrators with elected revolutionary organs.

4.     Mechanise and Plan Agricultural Production: Integrate rural production into national socialist planning.

5.     Socialise Reproductive Labour: Build rural childcare centres, communal kitchens, and cooperatives to liberate women’s time and labour.

 

What’s to be done to advance the Kenyan NDR?

 

Comrades,

As a per the resolution of the Second National Congress, the party has published the following documents as a guide for action: The social class analysis of the Kenyan society, the Thesis of the United Front and the program of the United Front as an extrapolation of the Parties minimum program. We still need to deepen our understanding of the Kenyan Society in the most complete and comprehensive way.

 

Comrades,

To move forward, we must look backward, not with nostalgia, but armed with our revolutionary living science of Marxism. The Communist Party Marxist Kenya (CPMK) with the Central Organizing at its core must now undertake a comprehensive Summing-Up (SU) document, a collective analysis of the Party’s ideological, political, and organisational journey.

 

 

 

The SU must:

1.     Expose past errors and deviations, especially the liquidationist period under revisionist leadership of the gang-of-two, Benedict Wachira and Mwandawiro Mghanga;

2.     Clarify the Party’s IPO line; ideological, political, organisational; rooted in Marxism-Leninism and the specificities of Kenya’s semi-feudal, semi-colonial conditions;

3.     Analyse class forces at each stage of the Party’s history; friends, enemies, vacillators;

4.     Assess campaigns, cadre deployment, mass work, and alliances; with honesty, not defensiveness;

5.     Reaffirm democratic centralism as a bulwark against opportunism;

6.     Situate the Party’s development within the broader revolutionary legacy of Kenya; from Mau Mau to post-Moi uprisings.

 

The SU is not a report. It is a weapon. A document to consolidate the second wave of rectification and guide Party building, United Front work, and revolutionary strategy.

Let us remember: “A house built without inspecting the soil shall collapse in the rains.”

 

The SU is our inspection; our soil study; our foundation stone.

 

Strengthening Social Investigation and Class Analysis (SICA)

 

Comrades,

 

Correct strategy flows from correct analysis. And correct analysis flows from Social Investigation and Class Analysis (SICA).

 

To deepen SICA, the Party has sufficiently answered the most important questions as below:

 

What is the Mode of Production in Kenya?

1.     It is a semi-feudal, semi-colonial mode;

2.     Where capitalist relations (agribusiness, banks, finance) coexist with feudal structures (landlords, customary law, patriarchy);

3.     Where production is disarticulated from national development, serving imperialist markets, not people’s needs.

 

Who are the Class Forces?

Friends of the Revolution:

1.     Poor peasants;

2.     Landless squatters;

3.     Rural proletariat;

4.     Urban informal workers;

5.     Revolutionary youth and women;

6.     Patriotic professionals aligned with the NDR.

 

Enemies of the Revolution:

1.     Imperialist bourgeoisie

2.     Comprador capitalists;

3.     Bureaucrat Capitalists;

4.     Landlord Class

 

Middle Forces (wavering, but potentially united):

1.     Middle peasants;

2.     Radical students;

3.     Teachers and health workers under attack.

 

What are the Class Contradictions?

Principal contradiction: Between the Kenyan masses and imperialism, mediated by the comprador-bureaucrat class.

Secondary contradictions: Between landlords and tenants; between women and patriarchal institutions; between youth and unemployment; between ethnic groups manipulated by ruling elites.

 

 

SICA is not only theoretical. It must be applied:

1.     Through cadre investigations in rural zones;

2.     Through mass meetings and surveys;

3.     Through mapping of land ownership, gender roles, and production relations;

4.     Through cultural studies of ideology, language, and resistance.

 

Our great Party as the General staff of the Kenyan workers must now invest in People’s Research Brigades trained in Marxist methodology, to uncover the truth from the masses and return it to them in the form of revolution.

 

As Mao said: “No investigation, no right to speak.”

 

The United Front in the Countryside: Building Class Power Through Alliance

 

Comrades,

 

To advance the National Democratic Revolution (NDR), the United Front (UF) is an essential instrument under the absolute leadership of the Party, which serves as the general staff of the revolution. The working class, as the decisive revolutionary force, must be firmly consolidated and politically organised to lead the UF. In this alliance, the peasantry; its most reliable ally; joins the proletariat in forming the basic alliance that drives the revolutionary process forward.

 

The agrarian revolution cannot be won by isolated struggles. It requires the building of a revolutionary United Front, rooted in the worker–peasant alliance and encompassing all progressive classes, strata, and forces willing to oppose imperialism and feudalism.

 

This is not a coalition of grievances. It is an instrument of class war. Its goal is not reformist dialogue but strategic mobilisation, to isolate and destroy the comprador–bureaucrat bloc.

 

The revolutionary United Front must draw in:

1.     Peasant women’s cooperatives resisting patriarchal exclusion;

2.     Rural youth brigades confronting landlessness, drug abuse, and unemployment;

3.     Casual workers on tea and sugarcane estates, fighting for unionisation and land;

4.     Dispossessed communities from Mau Forest to Lamu, resisting eviction;

5.     Radical teachers, nurses, and extension workers, abandoned by the neoliberal state.

 

These are not “civil society” partners. They are class forces in motion.

 

Their mobilisation must be led by the Party, guided by the programme of the NDR, and elevated from defensive protests to strategic revolutionary action.

 

Let it be known: one class alone cannot make the revolution. But when the working class leads, when the poor peasantry rises, when the women rebel, when the youth agitate, and when the Party unites them all; no force on earth can stop a people determined to be free.

 

As our people remind us: “One finger cannot kill a louse. But five, clenched together, become a fist.”

 

The Bridge to Socialism: From Agrarian Revolution to People’s Democracy

 

Comrades,

 

Agrarian revolution is not the end of struggle, it is the bridge to socialism. The destruction of feudal relations clears the ground. But it is through people’s democracy that we begin to construct the new society.

 

This bridge is built on three pillars:

1.              Planned Production and Socialised Agriculture: Land is no longer a commodity. It becomes a tool of social production, embedded in a national plan.

2.              Democratic Power at the Base: People’s Councils replace appointed chiefs; revolutionary courts replace customary bias; the masses learn to govern.

3.              Cultural and Ideological Revolution: Patriarchal norms, tribal divisions, capitalist competition; all must be ideologically uprooted.

 

This is not an electoral dream. It is a revolutionary process, built on peasant mobilisation, Party leadership, and proletarian ideology.

 

As Mao said: “Without a people’s army, the people have nothing.”

 

To that, we add: Without agrarian revolution, socialism has no soil in which to grow.

 

Revolutionary Tasks for the Current Period

 

Comrades,

 

Theory must become practice. And practice must be guided by revolutionary clarity.

 

The Communist Party Marxist Kenya must carry forward five immediate and concrete revolutionary tasks:

 

1.     Deploy Cadres to the Countryside

            Identify zones of acute contradiction; landlessness, evictions, labour exploitation.

            Assign trained, disciplined cadre to organise, agitate, and educate.

            Build shamba-level cells, peasant committees, and mass study circles.

 

2.     Lead and Support Land Struggles

            Defend peasants under threat of eviction or land grabs;

            Transform land cases into political mobilisation;

            Expose landlord and comprador actors publicly;

            Use legal defence tactically, never as substitute for struggle.

 

3.     Expand Revolutionary Education in Rural Areas

            Translate the Party’s agrarian programme into Kiswahili and local languages;

            Use drama, song, and storytelling to popularise class analysis;

            Build literacy through radical pedagogy;

            Cultivate village-based schools of political education.

 

4.     Organise Revolutionary Women and Youth Structures

            Form women-led farming collectives and savings groups;

            Mobilise youth into production, defence, and education brigades;

            Challenge gendered roles and patriarchy through political campaigns;

            Make every women’s group a site of leadership development.

 

5.     Popularise the Agrarian Programme of the NDR

            Distribute leaflets, visual materials, and local broadcasts;

            Connect peasant grievances to national class struggle;

            Link Kenya’s fight to African and global revolutions;

            Show that land, dignity, and socialism are not ideals; but necessities

 

Final Declaration and Call to Action

 

Comrades,

 

This address has exposed the class nature of Kenya’s crisis: a comprador–bureaucratic dictatorship sustained by imperial finance, feudal social relations, and patriarchal oppression.

 

We have declared that Kenya is not free; it is a semi-feudal, semi-colonial neocolony.

 

We have shown that the countryside is not backward; it is betrayed.

 

We have affirmed that the agrarian question is not peripheral; it is central.

 

We have insisted that the women’s question is not secondary; it is a battlefront.

 

And we have committed ourselves to a programme of land revolution, class mobilisation, and socialist transition.

 

We say to imperialism: You shall not rule in peace.

 

We say to the comprador elite: Your time is up.

 

We say to the peasantry, the working class, and the oppressed: Organise, rise, and take what is yours.

 

As the elders say: “When the drumbeat changes, the dancers must change their steps.”

 

The drumbeat has changed. The Party has awakened. The future is ours—if we dare to fight for it.

 

Let us carry the red banner of Marxism–Leninism into every field, every village, every cooperative, every home.

 

Let us plant the seeds of socialism in the fertile soil of resistance.

 

Let us be the fire that consumes feudal relics.

 

Let us be the wind that spreads the call of liberation.

 

 

Forward ever, towards socialism, towards liberation, towards victory!

Long live the poor peasants of Kenya!

Long live proletarian internationalism!

Long live the agrarian revolution!

Long live the Communist Party Marxist Kenya!

 

 

End

 

REFERENCES

Marxist-Leninist Theory on Agrarian and National Democratic Revolution

1. Marx, K.

Capital, Vol. 1 (especially Part 3 on the production of surplus value).

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte – on the role of the peasantry and class alliances.

A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy – on modes of production and historical materialism.

 

2. Lenin, V.

The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899) – for analysis of semi-feudal capitalism and the peasantry.

Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (1905) – on the revolutionary-democratic stage, the worker–peasant alliance, and strategy.

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) – foundational for understanding Kenya’s neocolonial structure.

The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution 1905–1907 – on peasant demands and revolutionary land policy.

 

3. Mao, Z.

Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan (1927) – on peasant consciousness and leadership.

On New Democracy (1940) – foundational for NDR in semi-colonial, semi-feudal societies.

The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party (1939) – defining stages and strategy of revolution in oppressed nations.

On Contradiction and On Practice (1937) – philosophical grounding for dialectical materialism and revolutionary praxis.

Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War (1936) – on revolutionary base-building and the United Front in rural areas.

 

African and Anti-Imperialist Thought

4. Cabral, A.

Class and National Struggle in Africa – on class formation in colonial and neocolonial contexts.

The Weapon of Theory (1966) – importance of ideology, culture, and revolutionary clarity.

5. Fanon, F.

The Wretched of the Earth (1961) – on the comprador bourgeoisie and national liberation.

Toward the African Revolution – critiques of postcolonial elite and neocolonialism.

6. Nkrumah, K.

Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (1965) – foundational analysis of how imperialism survives independence.

Class Struggle in Africa – insights on social forces and the necessity of socialism.

7. Rodney, W.

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) – historical materialist critique of colonialism and postcolonial underdevelopment.

Chapter 6: “How Colonialism Distorted African Development.”

 

Kenya-Specific Political Economy and History

8. Swainson, N.

The Development of Corporate Capitalism in Kenya, 1918–1977 – on British capital, settler colonialism, and the comprador elite.

9. Leys, C.

Underdevelopment in Kenya: The Political Economy of Neo-Colonialism 1964–1971 – analysis of class formation and underdevelopment.

10. Shivji, I. G.

Class Struggles in Tanzania (1976) – applicable for comparison in East Africa; on petty-bourgeois nationalism and the peasantry.

11. Tandon, Y., & Kinyanjui, E.

Background to the Crisis in Kenya: A Comparative Study of Kenya and Tanzania (1972) – early Marxist perspectives on Kenya’s neocolonial economy.

12. Ogot, B. A.

Kenya: The Making of a Nation 1895–1995 – for historical contextualisation of land, state formation, and contradictions.

13. Ghai, Y. P., & McAuslan, J. P. W. B.

Public Law and Political Change in Kenya – on legal-political continuity of colonial structures in the postcolonial period.

 

Party and Internal Theoretical Sources

14. Communist Party Marxist Kenya (CPMK)

Programme of the United Front – foundational Party line on strategy and mass mobilisation.

Second National Congress Documents (2024) – reaffirmation of the Party’s line on semi-feudalism, NDR, and rectification.

Cadre Education Syllabus – Pio Gama Pinto Ideological School – particularly the modules on land, gender, and national oppression.

Documents of the Rectification Campaign – on revisionism, deviationism, and Party ideological consolidation.

 

V. Supplementary Sources for Gender and Peasant Struggles

15. Federici, S.

Caliban and the Witch – on the historical roots of unpaid labour and women’s exploitation.

16. Mies, M.

Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale – for grounding unpaid family labour in global capitalist and feudal systems.

17. African Women’s Studies Centre – University of Nairobi

Reports on women and land tenure, customary law, and reproductive labour.

18. Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC)

Land and Justice in Kenya – documentation of land dispossession, tenure insecurity, and rural gender oppression.