By Booker Omole

General Secretary, Communist Party Marxist Kenya (CPMK)

October 17^th, 2025

Caracas, Venezuela

 

Comuna o Nada: The Question of Power in the Age of Imperialist War

Comrades, the slogan “Comuna o Nada” — the commune or nothing — is not merely a Venezuelan proclamation; it is a universal cry of the proletariat in our epoch of crisis. It affirms that without transforming the relations of production, without uprooting imperialist domination, and without transferring power from the exploiting classes to the working people, there can be no socialism.

 

Today, humanity lives under the thunder of a new imperialist world war — a war not yet declared in name, but already raging in form. From Palestine to Donbass, from the Sahel to the Caribbean, from the Congo Basin to the South China Sea, imperialism seeks to preserve a dying order through violence, blockades, and fascism. The United States, NATO, and their comprador allies have turned entire continents into battlefields to maintain the profits of monopoly capital.

 

Yet amidst this storm, a new world is being born. The Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, standing firm against imperialist aggression, continues to illuminate the path of people’s power. When President Hugo Chávez, in his historic Golpe de Timón on 20 October 2012, declared “Comuna o nada!”, he was not making a rhetorical appeal — he was defining the strategic question of the revolution: how to build socialism not from above, but from below; not through decrees, but through the organised power of the masses.

 

The commune, in its Venezuelan expression, carries forward the spirit of the Paris Commune, the Soviets of 1917, the Chinese people’s communes, and the African traditions of collective production and community solidarity that imperialism sought to destroy. It is the embryo of the new state, the form of proletarian power that fuses political authority with social production, administration, and defence.

 

For the Communist Party Marxist Kenya (CPMK), Comuna o Nada is not a Venezuelan slogan alone — it is a historical necessity for all neocolonial societies trapped in the vicious cycle of dependency, underdevelopment, and comprador betrayal. In Kenya, as in much of Africa, the political independence of the 1960s masked a deeper economic and structural subjugation. The comprador and bureaucrat capitalist classes replaced the colonial settlers as the local agents of imperialist capital. Thus, the question of power remains unresolved.

 

Our revolution, therefore, must answer the same question that Chávez posed and that Marx resolved in the fires of the Paris Commune: Who rules? In whose hands lies power? The commune, in our conditions, becomes the revolutionary organ through which workers, peasants, and the poor exercise collective authority — politically, economically, and ideologically.

 

In participating in this conference, the CPMK affirms its unwavering solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution, with the Venezuelan working class, and with all anti-imperialist forces resisting the new fascist order of capital. Our paper seeks to contribute to the collective theoretical advance of the world movement by grounding the principles of Comuna o Nada and Anti-Imperialism and Anti-Fascism in the material conditions of semi-feudal, neocolonial Africa.

 

It proclaims that the African revolution will triumph only when the working people seize power through their own organs — the communes, the people’s assemblies, and the revolutionary committees.

 

 

 

 

The Historical Roots of Neocolonial Domination in Kenya

 

“Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically remove from our soil if our independence is to be real.”

— Amílcar Cabral

 

Every revolution must first confront its own history. For Kenya, the present crisis of dependency, poverty, and comprador rule cannot be understood outside the long arc of colonial and neocolonial domination. The chain that binds the Kenyan working people today was forged in the furnaces of British settler colonialism and later refashioned by imperialism through local agents—the comprador and bureaucrat capitalist classes.

 

From Colonial Conquest to Settler Capitalism

British imperialism seized Kenya not for civilisation, but for land, labour, and profit. By the dawn of the twentieth century, vast tracts of fertile soil in the White Highlands were expropriated by a handful of settlers. The colonial state became the armed gendarme of this expropriation—built upon forced labour, hut and poll taxes, and the bayonets of the King’s African Rifles. The peasantry was uprooted and proletarianised, compelled to serve as cheap labour on settler plantations, in railways, and in the emerging colonial towns.

 

The colonial economy was never designed for the development of Kenya but for the enrichment of British finance capital. Every railway line led to the port; every plantation produced for London’s markets; every administrative decree ensured the supremacy of imperial profits over native welfare. It was in this furnace of oppression that the first embers of resistance were kindled—from the squatter uprisings of the 1920s to the revolutionary Mau Mau war for land and freedom in the 1950s.

 

The Betrayal of Independence

The 1963 flag-raising ceremony did not end colonial rule—it merely changed its colour. The settler flag was lowered, but imperialist domination persisted through economic, military, and political control. Kenya’s comprador and bureaucrat elites inherited the colonial state intact and became its new administrators. The so-called independence constitution safeguarded private property and foreign capital, ensuring that imperialism retained command over the country’s economy through banks, agribusiness, and multinational corporations.

 

This betrayal was not accidental—it was structural. Imperialism restructured its domination through neo-colonialism, as Lenin foresaw in his analysis of finance capital. British and later US imperialism shifted from direct rule to indirect control through loans, trade agreements, and “development aid.” The old colonial governors were replaced by presidents trained in the ideology of bourgeois nationalism—men who wore African skins but carried foreign minds.

 

The comprador class arose from this betrayal. It is the class that lives by mediating between imperialism and the national economy, enriching itself through commissions, tenders, and contracts, while strangling the productive forces of the nation. Alongside it stands the bureaucrat capitalist class—those who use the machinery of the state for private accumulation, looting public resources and repressing the masses. Together they form the twin pillars of neocolonial rule.

 

The Structure of Neocolonial Dependency

In the decades that followed, imperialism perfected its grip on Kenya through the mechanisms of debt, trade, and militarisation.

• Debt: The IMF and World Bank imposed structural adjustment programmes that dismantled public services, de-industrialised the economy, and opened national markets to imperialist monopolies.
• Trade: Kenya’s export economy was tied to the production of primary commodities—tea, coffee, flowers—whose prices are dictated by foreign markets, while the country imports manufactured goods at inflated rates.
• Militarisation: Through AFRICOM, NATO partnerships, and intelligence pacts, imperialism has turned Kenya into a forward base for US military operations in the Horn of Africa. This militarisation is the armed wing of economic dependency.

 

The result is a distorted, hybrid economy—half-feudal, half-capitalist—where landlords dominate the countryside and foreign capital dominates the cities. It is a system of dependent capitalism, unable to develop the forces of production without deepening the exploitation of workers and peasants.

 

The Class Character of the Kenyan State

The Kenyan state, inherited from colonialism, remains an instrument of class rule. It is not a neutral arbiter but a weapon in the hands of the exploiting classes. Every government since independence—whether cloaked in liberal democracy or “developmental” rhetoric—has preserved the same economic base: private ownership of the means of production, subservience to foreign capital, and repression of the working class.

 

The façade of parliamentary democracy masks the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Beneath the electoral circus, the comprador elite govern on behalf of imperialism, using the police, military, and judiciary to protect their interests. The state’s violence against striking workers, landless peasants, and protesting youth exposes its true nature as a bourgeois dictatorship of the comprador class.

 

The Persistence of Semi-Feudal Relations

In the countryside, colonial land relations persist. Millions of peasants remain landless or confined to small plots under the domination of landlords and agribusiness corporations. The so-called land reforms of independence merely redistributed titles among the elite, not the soil among the tillers. This semi-feudal structure binds the peasantry in debt and dependency, perpetuating hunger amidst abundance.

 

As Marx wrote, “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” In Kenya, that nightmare is the persistence of colonial property relations under neocolonial flags.

 

 

 

The Revolutionary Lesson

The lesson is clear: there can be no national liberation without the destruction of the comprador-bureaucrat order. The Kenyan working class cannot free itself without overthrowing the local agents of imperialism. True independence demands the creation of a new state—rooted in the alliance of workers and peasants, expressed through their own organs of power: the communes.

 

This is why the question of Comuna o Nada is not foreign to Kenya. It is the very question our revolution must answer. The old state cannot be reformed—it must be smashed and replaced by the democratic dictatorship of the people. Only through this process can we realise what Dedan Kimathi proclaimed from the gallows: “We are fighting for self-rule, for land, and for the rights of the people to govern themselves.”

 

Class Structure and the Question of Power

“Without a correct understanding of classes and class struggle, there can be no talk of revolution.”

— Mao Zedong

 

Revolution is not born of slogans, nor sustained by sentiment. It is born from the contradictions that tear a society apart, and it advances only when the revolutionary class consciously grasps these contradictions. The central task of Marxism-Leninism in Kenya today is therefore to identify the class structure of neocolonial society, define the principal enemy, and unite the motive forces of the revolution around the struggle for power.

 

The Principal Classes of Neocolonial Kenya

The material reality of Kenya reveals the coexistence of capitalist and semi-feudal relations. The dominant mode of production remains dependent capitalism — tethered to imperialist finance, agribusiness, and comprador accumulation. Beneath this, feudal remnants persist in land tenure, labour relations, and patriarchal domination. Within this social formation, we distinguish the following classes:

 

 

a) The Working Class (Proletariat)

Born in the colonial era and expanded under neocolonial capitalism, the Kenyan proletariat constitutes the most advanced and revolutionary class. It includes:

• Industrial workers in manufacturing, transport, and construction;
• Public-sector workers in education, health, and administration;
• Informal and casual labourers in urban centres, who represent the semi-proletariat, oscillating between wage labour and petty production.

 

Despite its militancy — from the 1960s strikes of the East African Railways workers to the contemporary teachers’, doctors’, and factory workers’ struggles — the working class remains politically unorganised on a national revolutionary scale. Yet, its objective position makes it the leading force capable of providing ideological and political direction to all other oppressed classes.

 

b) The Peasantry

The peasantry forms the majority of Kenya’s population. It is differentiated into:

• Rich peasants, who own sufficient land and employ others’ labour;
• Middle peasants, who produce mainly for subsistence but sell small surpluses;
• Poor peasants and landless peasants, who own little or no land, depend on seasonal wage labour, and bear the heaviest burden of exploitation.

 

The poor and landless peasants are the most revolutionary section, for they suffer doubly — from landlords who extort rent and from imperialist agribusiness that robs their produce. Their liberation is inseparable from land redistribution and the destruction of feudal property.

 

c) The Petty Bourgeoisie

This class includes small traders, artisans, teachers, low-ranking civil servants, and sections of the intelligentsia. It is a vacillating class — revolutionary in times of crisis, reactionary when fearful of losing its privileges. Within its ranks arise both progressive intellectuals who side with the people, and opportunists who seek assimilation into the bourgeois order. The revolutionary party must win the left wing of this class through ideological education and mass work.

 

d) The National Bourgeoisie

A small stratum of Kenyan capitalists engaged in production, transport, and small-scale industry, whose interests occasionally conflict with foreign monopolies. Under certain conditions, sections of the national bourgeoisie can participate in the National Democratic Revolution (NDR). However, history shows that this class tends to compromise with imperialism rather than confront it. As Lenin warned, it “vacillates between revolution and reaction.”

 

e) The Comprador and Bureaucrat Bourgeoisie

This is the principal enemy of the Kenyan revolution. The comprador bourgeoisie accumulates wealth through its subservient relationship with imperialist capital—through import–export monopolies, foreign franchises, and financial speculation. It controls the banks, parastatals, and political parties.

 

The bureaucrat bourgeoisie, rooted in the state apparatus, uses political power for personal accumulation—through contracts, tenders, and corruption. Together they constitute the ruling class of neocolonial Kenya, guardians of imperialist interests and the domestic face of global capital.

 

As Mao described the Chinese bourgeoisie of his time, they are “dependent on imperialism, allied with feudalism, and opposed to the people.”

 

The Nature of the Kenyan State

The Kenyan state is the dictatorship of the comprador-bureaucrat bourgeoisie, supported by landlords and imperialism. It pretends to be democratic, but its democracy is limited to the bourgeoisie. Elections serve only to legitimise the same ruling bloc under different names. The police, army, and judiciary exist to defend private property and suppress class struggle.

 

This state, built upon colonial foundations, cannot be captured through elections or reformed through constitutional amendments. It must be overthrown and replaced by a new state of the working people — a People’s Democratic State — led by the proletariat and based on the alliance of workers and peasants.

 

The Alliance of Workers and Peasants

The revolution in Kenya cannot succeed without the unity of workers and peasants. The working class brings ideology, organisation, and consciousness; the peasantry brings numbers, resilience, and the demand for land. This alliance forms the core of the National Democratic Revolution.

 

As Lenin taught, “The alliance of the workers and the peasants is the cornerstone of the socialist revolution.” In our conditions, this alliance must take practical form in communes, people’s assemblies, and cooperative production units where both classes exercise power collectively.

 

These organs of people’s power will constitute the embryo of the new state — the Kenyan commune — linking the Comuna o Nada spirit of Venezuela to the historical struggles of our own people.

 

The Revolutionary Party and the Question of Leadership

Every revolution demands a vanguard. Without a party grounded in Marxism-Leninism, the working class cannot fulfil its historic mission. The Communist Party Marxist Kenya (CPMK) stands as the conscious detachment of the proletariat, armed with theory, rooted in the masses, and disciplined in practice.

 

Our task is not merely to interpret class relations but to transform them — to unite the advanced elements of the working class, organise the revolutionary peasantry, and forge alliances with all progressive strata against imperialism and its local agents.

 

The Party’s ideological weapon is Marxism-Leninism, its political form is democratic centralism, and its strategic goal is socialism. The Party educates, organises, and mobilises — applying the mass line: from the masses, to the masses. In doing so, it prepares the working people to replace the old state with a new one built from below.

 

The Revolutionary Essence of the Commune

The commune is not a utopian dream — it is the concrete expression of class power. In the words of Marx, it is “the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour.”

 

In the Kenyan context, the commune represents the organised unity of workers, peasants, and the oppressed — controlling production, distribution, education, and self-defence. It is the nucleus of people’s power, the anti-thesis of the bourgeois state, and the embryo of socialism. The struggle to build such organs of power, even in embryonic form, is the task of every revolutionary in our time.

 

The Question of Power

Ultimately, the revolution is a question of power — who holds it, in whose interests, and through what institutions. As long as the state remains in the hands of the comprador-bureaucrat class, imperialism will continue to suck the blood of the Kenyan people. The liberation of Kenya requires nothing less than the destruction of the bourgeois state and the establishment of the people’s power.

 

It is through this seizure of power that Comuna o Nada becomes not just a slogan, but a living reality — the point where national liberation and socialism converge.

 

The Commune and People’s Power under Neocolonial Conditions

The question of the commune is, in essence, the question of people’s power — who governs, how they govern, and in whose interest. Under neo-colonialism, the bourgeoisie seeks to mask its dictatorship behind parliamentary facades, constitutional reforms, and decentralisation schemes. Yet beneath this surface lies the same colonial state, armed and intact, serving imperialist and comprador interests.

 

In this context, the commune arises not as an administrative experiment, but as an act of rebellion. It is the political, economic, and ideological weapon through which the working people begin to wrest power from the bourgeois state and exercise self-rule.

 

The Commune as a Revolutionary Form of Power

When Chávez declared “Comuna o nada”, he was not inventing a new doctrine but reviving the historical essence of the proletarian revolution. The commune expresses what Marx discovered in 1871: that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes — it must smash it and replace it with new organs of power rooted in the masses.

 

In Venezuela, the commune has emerged as the living cell of the Bolivarian Revolution — uniting production, governance, and social welfare under collective ownership and control. It demonstrates, in practice, that socialism is not decreed from above but constructed from below through conscious participation.

 

For the Communist Party Marxist Kenya (CPMK), this lesson is central. The commune is not foreign to our soil; it resonates with the historical memory of African communalism — the precolonial forms of collective labour and shared production that imperialism sought to destroy. But unlike the precolonial commune, which was based on natural economy and limited consciousness, the socialist commune is built upon modern production and proletarian leadership. It represents the revolutionary restoration and transformation of communal relations on the basis of class struggle.

 

Embryonic Forms of People’s Power in Kenya

The Kenyan working people, even without naming it, are already advancing along the path of the commune. Across the country, under the pressure of oppression and neglect, the masses have begun to create self-organised structures that perform the tasks the bourgeois state refuses to undertake. These include:

• The People’s Assemblies in the urban slums, where the people investigate police killings, organise community defence, and document state violence.
• Food Sovereignty Committees and peasant cooperatives, which reclaim land for collective farming, seed exchange, and agroecological production.
• Self-help groups and harambee initiatives that mobilise labour and resources for education, health, and water — though often depoliticised, they show the latent potential for socialist organisation.
• Youth collectives and revolutionary student organisations that challenge state repression, unemployment, and imperialist ideology.

 

Each of these formations represents a germinal commune — a form of dual power emerging under neocolonial conditions. Their evolution depends on political direction, ideological education, and the leadership of the working class organised in its vanguard party. The task of the CPMK is to guide these spontaneous efforts toward conscious political power — transforming self-help into self-rule, protest into people’s governance, and cooperation into class organisation.

 

The Dialectic of Mass Line and Commune Building

Mao Zedong taught that “to lead correctly, one must go to the masses, learn from them, and return to them their own ideas concentrated.” This is the method of the mass line, which must guide the building of communes in Kenya.

 

Communes cannot be proclaimed; they must be built through social investigation, class analysis, and participation. Each people’s committee, cooperative, and youth organisation must become a school of socialism — linking theory with practice and uniting the people around their most immediate needs: land, food, housing, and justice.

 

Thus, the commune grows organically from the contradictions of everyday life. It is born in struggle, nurtured in solidarity, and defended through collective consciousness. As the people organise to solve their problems independently of the bourgeois state, they begin to realise their capacity to govern — and with that realisation, the old order trembles.

 

 

 

 

The Commune as the Embryo of the People’s Democratic State

In Marxist terms, every revolutionary process must resolve the question of the state. The bourgeois state, built on coercion and private property, serves the exploiting classes. The commune, by contrast, is the political form of proletarian democracy — a state of a new type.

 

It fuses legislative and executive functions in the hands of the people. Delegates are elected, accountable, and recallable. Production, defence, and welfare are organised collectively. Education and culture become instruments of socialist consciousness rather than bourgeois indoctrination.

 

In the Kenyan context, such a people’s democratic state will not arise from the parliamentary chambers of Nairobi but from the communal assemblies of workers, peasants, and youth — from the self-organised organs of struggle in factories, farms, schools, and neighbourhoods. The commune, therefore, is not a reform but a revolutionary rupture — the destruction of the comprador-bureaucrat state and the creation of a new power from below.

 

Obstacles and Revolutionary Tasks

Imperialism and its Kenyan agents will not surrender power willingly. The ruling class understands that the growth of people’s power is the death sentence of the old order. Thus, they will seek to co-opt, repress, or discredit every attempt at autonomous organisation.

 

The revolutionary movement must therefore:

• Unite all democratic and anti-imperialist forces under the leadership of the working class.
• Build clandestine and open structures that link community struggles to the Party’s political line.
• Develop armed and ideological self-defence against state repression, in line with the principles of people’s war under neocolonial conditions.
• Integrate production and political education within the commune, ensuring that economic self-reliance strengthens class consciousness.
• Forge proletarian internationalism, learning from the experiences of the Venezuelan communes, Cuban popular councils, and the revolutionary people’s governments of the Philippines and Palestine.

 

Only through such organised, conscious struggle will the Kenyan commune mature from embryo to embryo of state power.

 

The Revolutionary Culture of the Commune

A revolution that does not transform the culture will perish. The commune must nurture a new culture of collective production, equality, and service. It must bury tribalism, patriarchy, and individualism — the ideological weapons of imperialism.

 

The revolutionary commune is both a political and cultural project. It educates by example: through cooperative work, democratic decision-making, and social solidarity. It restores the dignity of labour, revives the communal spirit of ujamaa without its bureaucratic distortions, and arms the masses with the consciousness that freedom is not granted — it is built. In the words of Cabral, “Culture is simultaneously the fruit of a people’s history and the seed of their liberation.” The commune is that seed.

 

The Commune as the Bridge to Socialism

The commune is not the end but the beginning of socialism. It is the transitional structure through which the people learn to govern themselves, reorganise production, and transform social relations. From the commune will arise the People’s Democratic Republic of Kenya — a state grounded in the alliance of workers and peasants, guided by Marxism-Leninism, and linked in solidarity with the anti-imperialist nations of the world.

 

It is through the commune that the NDR finds its socialist content; it is through the commune that the slogan Comuna o Nada becomes flesh in Africa. The path to socialism passes through the commune. The path to people’s power passes through organisation. And the path to victory passes through unity.

 

Anti-Imperialism and Anti-Fascism: The Global Struggle

 

“Imperialism is a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the world’s population by a handful of ‘advanced’ countries.”

— V. I. Lenin

 

“The struggle against imperialism is the struggle for life itself.”

— Fidel Castro

 

The age in which we live is the age of imperialism — the highest and final stage of capitalism — and of the world proletarian revolution that will bury it.  The battle lines are drawn: on one side stand the imperialist powers led by the United States, NATO, and their comprador allies; on the other stand the oppressed nations, working peoples, and socialist forces struggling for liberation.  The crisis of capitalism has entered a stage of generalised war, fascisation, and environmental collapse.  Yet, precisely in this chaos, the forces of revolution are again ascending.

 

The Crisis of Imperialism and the Drive Toward War

The contradictions of monopoly capitalism — between labour and capital, between imperialist powers, and between imperialism and the oppressed nations — have reached explosive levels.  The world economy is paralysed by over-production and under-consumption; the financial oligarchs export capital not for development but for speculation.  To escape their own crisis, the imperialists resort to war, sanctions, and militarisation.

 

The United States, facing economic decline, seeks to re-divide the world through military aggression.  NATO’s wars in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and now its proxy war in Ukraine, expose the naked violence of imperialist “democracy.”  Its strategy extends to Africa through AFRICOM, to Asia through AUKUS, and to Latin America through endless coups and sanctions.

 

Imperialism today wages a hybrid world war: by bombs and drones, by debt and sanctions, by propaganda and digital surveillance.  Its essence remains unchanged — the plunder of resources and the suppression of peoples’ sovereignty.

 

The Rise of Fascism as the Political Face of Decay

Fascism is not an accident; it is the political expression of monopoly capital in crisis.  As capitalism’s contradictions sharpen, the bourgeoisie abandons its liberal mask and resorts to open dictatorship.  The growth of right-wing populism, religious extremism, and chauvinistic nationalism across continents marks the fascist turn of the bourgeoisie.

 

In Africa, imperialism nurtures fascism through militarised regimes, mercenary companies, and religious militias.  In Europe and North America, fascism manifests as racist xenophobia and the criminalisation of dissent.  Everywhere it serves the same purpose — to divide the working class, crush revolutionary organisation, and defend imperialist profit. Lenin’s warning echoes true: “Imperialism is the epoch of wars and revolutions.”  Fascism is the desperate war policy of a dying order; anti-fascism is the banner of the new world being born.

 

 Africa: The New Frontier of Imperialist Re-colonisation

Africa stands once again at the crossroads of history.  The imperialists seek to recolonise the continent through economic dependency, debt traps, and military bases.  The Sahel burns under the boots of NATO and its proxies; the Congo bleeds for coltan; Sudan starves under sanctions; and Kenya, under AFRICOM partnership, has become a forward operating base for US militarism in the Horn of Africa.

 

Every military base is a chain around Africa’s neck; every foreign loan is a noose around its sovereignty.  The struggle against imperialism in Africa is therefore inseparable from the struggle against the comprador regimes that serve it.

 

But resistance is rising.  In Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, the people demand liberation from French domination.  In the Congo and Sudan, popular movements challenge neocolonial plunder.  Across the continent, a new Pan-African consciousness is awakening — one that rejects bourgeois nationalism and asserts proletarian internationalism.

 

The task of revolutionaries is to transform this awakening into organised anti-imperialist struggle, under the leadership of the working class.

 

The Global Anti-Imperialist Front

In every corner of the world, the oppressed are uniting against the common enemy.  The heroic resistance of Palestine, confronting Zionism and US imperialism, stands as a beacon to all.  The Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and the Cuban Revolution remain strongholds of socialism in the Americas.  The people’s wars in the Philippines and India, the armed struggles in Palestine and Congo, and the mass movements across Asia and Africa demonstrate that the spirit of October 1917 still lives.

 

This is not a collection of isolated uprisings but the material basis of a new international alignment — the world anti-imperialist front.  Its unity must be ideological, political, and organisational:

• Ideological, through the reaffirmation of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism;
• Political, through coordinated struggle against imperialist war, sanctions, and plunder;
• Organisational, through solidarity networks, joint campaigns, and conferences such as this one.

 

The World Anti-Imperialist Platform (WAP), in convening this conference, provides a vital arena for forging this unity.  It is the embryonic centre of a new International of resistance — a comintern of the oppressed, where revolutionary parties and movements share strategy, theory, and solidarity.

 

 

 

Kenya in the International Division of Imperialist Labour

Kenya’s ruling class, in alliance with imperialism, has positioned the country as a regional outpost for US, British, and EU interests.  Its army fights imperialist wars under the banner of “peacekeeping”; its ports, skies, and intelligence serve foreign masters.  Its economy is a workshop of foreign capital — flower farms for Europe, coffee for America, and cheap labour for the Gulf.

 

This subservience is not diplomacy; it is class collaboration at a global level.  The Kenyan comprador bourgeoisie sells national sovereignty in exchange for aid, loans, and military training.  It turns the blood of our people into the oil that greases imperialist machinery.

 

Therefore, the anti-imperialist struggle in Kenya must be waged simultaneously at two levels:

• Against the external enemy — imperialism itself;
• Against the internal enemy — the comprador and bureaucrat classes who serve imperialism

This dual struggle defines the National Democratic Revolution and binds Kenya’s destiny to that of the world proletariat.

 

The Dialectical Unity of Anti-Imperialism and Anti-Fascism

Imperialism breeds fascism; fascism defends imperialism.  To fight one is to fight the other.  The anti-imperialist movement must therefore be consciously anti-fascist, mobilising the masses not only against foreign domination but also against domestic reaction.

 

In the Kenyan context, anti-fascism means resisting state repression, police killings, and ethnic chauvinism — all tools used by the bourgeoisie to maintain its rule.  Every People Assembly that documents police violence, every workers’ strike crushed by armed force, every peasant who defends land from eviction — these are acts of anti-fascist resistance.

 

The Party must weld these struggles into a single political current, guided by revolutionary theory and united under proletarian leadership.  Only a socialist programme can extinguish both imperialism and fascism at their root.

 

Revolutionary Internationalism: The Only Road to Victory

Proletarian internationalism is not charity — it is strategy.  The working class of Kenya cannot liberate itself in isolation; its victory is bound to the triumph of all oppressed peoples.  The same enemy that blockades Venezuela, bombs Palestine, and militarises Africa exploits the Kenyan worker and peasant.  Therefore, our solidarity is not sentimental but practical — expressed through coordination, exchange, and common struggle.

 

As Marx proclaimed, “Workers of all countries, unite!” — and today we must add, “Oppressed nations and workers of all continents, unite!” The new world is already gestating in the womb of the old.  The Bolivarian communes, the Cuban people’s councils, the Philippine people’s governments, and the rising African revolutionary movements are the embryos of the future socialist world.  Our task is to nurture, defend, and link them into one unbreakable chain.

 

The Anti-Imperialist Duty of the CPMK

The Communist Party Marxist Kenya, as a detachment of the international proletariat, recognises its duty to the world revolution.  It commits to:

• Exposing imperialism in all its forms — economic, political, cultural, and military;
• Building solidarity with anti-imperialist movements in Africa, Latin America, and Asia;
• Educating the masses on the nature of imperialism and the necessity of socialism;
• Developing organs of people’s power that link local struggles to global strategy;
• Defending socialist nations such as Cuba, Venezuela, DPRK, and China from imperialist aggression.

In this unity of thought and action, we declare that the liberation of Kenya is a front in the liberation of humanity. Comrades, we are neither East nor West — we are the struggling South, the rising Red South, whose destiny is to bury imperialism beneath the weight of its own crimes.

 

 

Towards the Commune Constitution: Lessons for Africa

In every genuine revolution there arrives a moment when the people must give political and constitutional form to the power they have seized.  Such a moment has now come for Venezuela — and through it, for the world’s revolutionary movement.  The proposal for a “Commune Constitution” represents not merely a reform of bourgeois legality but the birth of a new kind of state: one that expresses, institutionalises, and defends the power of the working people.  It marks a decisive step from the struggle to seize power to the struggle to consolidate and reproduce power in socialist form.

 

 The Historical Meaning of the Commune Constitution

The Venezuelan Revolution, born in the flames of anti-imperialist struggle, has traversed a profound dialectic: from the Bolivarian Republic to the Bolivarian Commune, from state reforms to people’s power.  When Chávez declared “Comuna o nada!” in 2012, he was summing up decades of experience — the truth that socialism can only endure when power belongs to the organised masses.

 

Now, under the leadership of President Nicolás Maduro and the revolutionary institutions of the Bolivarian Republic, Venezuela advances towards a Commune Constitution — a new social contract that elevates the communes from local initiatives to the foundational units of the state.  It seeks to legally enshrine what history has already created in practice: the dual power of the people.  This constitutional process has world-historic significance.  It challenges the liberal conception of sovereignty based on individual property, and replaces it with collective sovereignty based on social property.  It transforms the commune from a “participatory” body into the primary cell of socialist governance.

 

The Commune Constitution as the Vanguard of Socialist Democracy

Bourgeois constitutions codify the power of the exploiters; the Commune Constitution codifies the power of the exploited.  It embodies three revolutionary principles:

• Economic sovereignty — the socialisation of production and distribution under communal control.
• Political sovereignty — the fusion of legislative and executive power in people’s assemblies, elected and recallable.
• Cultural sovereignty — the elevation of socialist values, human solidarity, and collective ethics as the moral basis of society.

 

Where the bourgeois constitution proclaims “rights” without material means to realise them, the Commune Constitution seeks to guarantee those rights through the direct control of the people over the material base of society.  It transforms democracy from a ritual of voting into a system of direct participation and collective administration.

 

This is the highest form of people’s democracy — not parliamentary but popular, not representative but participatory, not individualistic but social.  It brings to completion the vision of Marx in the Paris Commune and Lenin in State and Revolution: the withering away of the old bureaucratic state and its replacement by a state of the working people.

 

 Lessons for Africa: From Sham Independence to People’s Power

Africa, six decades after the flag of colonialism was lowered, still lives under the chains of neocolonial domination.  The constitutions imposed by imperialism have preserved the colonial state — its armed forces, bureaucracy, and courts — while wrapping it in nationalist colours.  These constitutions protect private property, foreign investment, and comprador privilege, not the liberation of the masses.

 

To advance the African revolution, the working people must draft their own constitutional order — one rooted in the realities of class struggle and in the traditions of communal democracy that pre-dated colonial conquest.  The Commune Constitution of Venezuela offers invaluable lessons for this task.

 

From it we learn that a genuine people’s constitution must:

• Emerge from the masses, not from legal experts or elite assemblies;
• Be tested in practice before codification — as the Venezuelan communes have already demonstrated their viability;
• Subordinate private property to social need, replacing bourgeois law with socialist justice;
• Institutionalise the alliance of workers and peasants, ensuring that production and governance serve collective interests;
• Recognise international solidarity as a constitutional principle, linking national liberation to world revolution.

 

These lessons must guide the struggle in Africa from sham independence to real sovereignty, from bourgeois constitutions to people’s constitutions, from neo-colonial parliaments to revolutionary communes.

 

The Commune Constitution and the National Democratic Revolution (NDR)

For the CPMK, the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) is the necessary bridge between the anti-imperialist struggle and socialist transformation.  It is not the end of revolution but its beginning.  The NDR aims to destroy the power of the comprador-bureaucrat bourgeoisie, liquidate semi-feudalism, and establish people’s democratic power under proletarian leadership.

 

In this framework, the Commune Constitution corresponds to the political form of the NDR.  It provides the mechanism through which the alliance of workers and peasants governs society and directs production.  It gives the revolution a stable base of legality while preparing the conditions for the socialist transition.

 

Thus, the Bolivarian experience does not contradict the African path — it illuminates it.  The Venezuelan commune, the Cuban people’s councils, the Mozambican and Angolan people’s committees of the liberation war — all reveal the same universal truth: the revolution must organise the people’s power, or it will perish.

 

The Tasks of Revolutionaries in Africa

The road from the old constitution to the Commune Constitution will not be peaceful.  Imperialism and its African agents will resist with every means — from coups and blockades to ideological warfare.  Therefore, African revolutionaries must prepare on all fronts:

• Ideologically, by exposing the falseness of bourgeois democracy and affirming the proletarian conception of power.
• Politically, by building organs of people’s power at local level — people’s assemblies, cooperatives, and community defence.
• Economically, by developing self-reliant production and socialist planning to break dependence on imperialist markets.
• Culturally, by decolonising education and media, restoring revolutionary consciousness rooted in African reality.
• Organisationally, by strengthening the vanguard party as the nucleus of the new state.

 

The transformation of society must be mirrored in the transformation of the individual.  The commune educates new men and women who labour not for profit but for the collective good; who think not as tribes, sects, or consumers but as builders of a new civilisation.

 

From Bolivarian Venezuela to Revolutionary Africa

The Bolivarian Revolution demonstrates that socialism is possible even under siege, when guided by the people’s power and proletarian internationalism.  Its constitutional advance is therefore not only a Venezuelan victory but a universal blow against imperialism.

 

Africa must take up this banner.  The road to continental liberation lies not in new trade blocs or neoliberal pacts, but in a federation of communes — a revolutionary Pan-Africanism grounded in socialism, not bourgeois diplomacy.

 

The Commune Constitution of Venezuela is thus both a model and a mirror — a model of socialist construction, and a mirror reflecting what Africa must still accomplish.  Its essence can be captured in a single truth: revolutionary power belongs to the people, or it ceases to be revolutionary.

 

The Revolutionary Synthesis

In Kenya, the commune will rise from the factories, the plantations, the informal settlements, and the rural villages.  Each will be a school of socialist governance and collective production.  As these communes unite into a national network of people’s power, the basis of a Kenyan Commune Constitution will emerge — expressing, in law and in practice, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the democratic rule of the people.

 

Thus, the Venezuelan experience and the Kenyan revolution converge on one truth: the path to socialism passes through the commune; the path to people’s power passes through the constitution of the communes. 

 

The Commune or Nothing – The Future Belongs to the Proletariat

History is once again at a turning point.  The old-world trembles beneath the weight of its own contradictions; imperialism, rotting yet rabid, clings to life through war, lies, and fascism.  But wherever there is oppression, resistance is born — and wherever resistance is organised, revolution becomes inevitable.

 

Today, that resistance bears many faces: the communes of Venezuela, the armed struggle of Palestine, the people’s wars of Asia, the youth uprisings of Africa.  Beneath their diversity lies a single historical current — the march of the proletariat and the oppressed towards the mastery of their own destiny.

 

The Commune as the Form of the New World

The commune is not a dream but a necessity.  It is the answer to the question that has haunted every exploited class: how shall we govern ourselves after the destruction of the old order?

 

In the commune, production serves use, not profit.  Power serves the people, not the few.  The division between ruler and ruled begins to disappear; labour regains its dignity; solidarity replaces competition.  The commune is at once a weapon of war and a seed of peace — war against exploitation, peace among the producers.

 

For the Kenyan working people, the commune is the bridge between the struggle for national liberation and the construction of socialism.  It fuses the revolutionary wisdom of Marx and Lenin with the lived traditions of African communalism and self-organisation.  It transforms uhuru from a flag into a material reality.

 

The Crisis of Neocolonialism and the Inevitability of Revolution

Neocolonial Kenya stands as a microcosm of the world imperialist order — dependent, unequal, and violent.  A handful enrich themselves by serving foreign masters, while millions toil in hunger.  The peasant still ploughs another man’s field; the worker still sweats for another man’s profit; the youth still wander without future.

 

But as Lenin reminded us, “There are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen.”  The contradictions of Kenyan society are ripening towards such a moment.  When the masses realise that their suffering is not fate but policy, not misfortune but class design, the earth will tremble again as it did in the forests of Dedan Kimathi. The task of the Communist Party Marxist Kenya is to turn that spontaneous anger into organised power — to transform the cry of protest into the discipline of revolution.

 

The National Democratic Revolution as the African Road to Socialism

Our revolution is not an imitation of any foreign path; it is the concrete application of Marxism-Leninism to the conditions of semi-feudal, neocolonial Africa.  The National Democratic Revolution (NDR) remains our strategic stage — the overthrow of imperialist domination and the destruction of the comprador-bureaucrat order, leading inexorably to socialism.

 

The NDR’s political form is the People’s Democratic State; its economic form is collective ownership and planning; its ideological form is socialist consciousness grounded in African reality.  And its living institution — its beating heart — is the commune. Thus, to advance the NDR is to build the commune; to defend the commune is to defend the revolution; to link all communes is to create the socialist state of the future.

 

Proletarian Internationalism: From Kenya to the World

No revolution stands alone.  The victory of one front strengthens all others.  The Communist Party Marxist Kenya salutes the Venezuelan people for carrying forward the banner of Comuna o Nada under siege; the Cuban comrades for their unbroken defiance; the Palestinian people for their heroic resistance; and the struggling peoples of Congo, Sudan, and Haiti for their courage in the face of imperialist aggression.

 

We declare that the liberation of Africa is inseparable from the liberation of humanity.  The same bullets that kill our peasants in Laikipia are forged from the same steel that bombs Gaza and sanctions Caracas.  Therefore, our answer must also be one — international solidarity grounded in class struggle. Let the revolutionary movements of the South form an anti-imperialist continental and global alliance — a red front of the oppressed — linking the communes, people’s armies, and vanguard parties in one chain of resistance.

 

The Ideological Vanguard: The Party as the Mind of the Revolution

Without a revolutionary party, the people’s energy disperses; with a revolutionary party, it becomes a torrent that no dam can hold.  The Communist Party Marxist Kenya stands as the organised will of the proletariat — disciplined, united, and rooted in the masses.  It must study the laws of class struggle, guide the building of communes, and forge cadres who live for the people and die for the revolution.

 

Our theory is Marxism-Leninism, our practice is the mass line, our faith is the creative power of the working people.  The Party is the red thread that connects every commune, every strike, every land occupation into one historic mission: the seizure of power and the construction of socialism.

 

 

The Future Belongs to the Proletariat

The bourgeoisie boasts of its civilisation, yet that civilisation rests upon exploitation, hunger, and war.  It destroys the earth and calls it development; it enslaves nations and calls it order.  Its time is over.

 

The future belongs to those who build, not to those who plunder — to those who produce, not to those who speculate — to those who unite, not to those who divide.  The future belongs to the working class, to the peasantry, to the revolutionary youth and women, to the international front of the oppressed.

 

It belongs to the communes that will rise from the ruins of imperialism, to the red banners that will flutter again over liberated Africa, and to the solidarity of peoples who know that socialism is not a dream but a necessity for survival.

 

Final Call

Comrades, the choice before humanity is stark and simple:

Comuna o nada.  Socialism or barbarism.  Life or extinction.

 

Let us therefore stand shoulder to shoulder with the Venezuelan people and with all oppressed nations of the earth.  Let us carry the spirit of the Commune Constitution into our own revolutions.  Let us turn every factory into a school of socialism, every farm into a fortress of resistance, every village into a commune of the people.

 

When the people govern themselves, no empire can enslave them.  When the proletariat holds power, no force can turn back history.

 

Long live the Bolivarian Revolution!

Long live proletarian internationalism!

Long live the alliance of workers and peasants!

The Commune or Nothing — Genuine Freedom or Death!