Written in response to a diatribe by Mwaivu Kaluka, National Chairperson of the Communist Party Marxist-Kenya (CPM-K), against the International Committee of the Fourth International, this pamphlet dissects the CPM-K’s political program, “Building the Vanguard Party in Kenya,” and exposes its Stalinist-Maoist foundations. The author makes the case for the independent revolutionary mobilization of the Kenyan and international working class against all variants of Stalinist-Maoist nationalism.
1. The CPM-K’s claim that Kenya is “semi-feudal”—used to justify postponing socialist revolution—is a historical fiction, refuted by Trotsky’s law of uneven and combined development and the realities of Nairobi’s finance capital, export agriculture, and a rapidly proletarianizing informal workforce.
2. The CPM-K’s proposed “People’s Democratic State” is modeled on capitalist China, and its embrace of “multipolarity” as a road to liberation. This is a repackaged version of Kautsky’s “ultra-imperialism.” But China’s expanding role in Africa has not lessened but intensified imperialist rivalry, evidenced by French, American, and European maneuvers to obtain Kenyan resources and infrastructure.
3. The author traces Kaluka’s attacks on Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution back to Stalin’s 1924 falsifications of the October 1917 Revolution. The victory of the Bolsheviks, leading a proportionally small working class, refutes claims that Africa’s workers are too weak to lead their own revolution.
4. The defeat of the 1925–27 Chinese Revolution was a direct result of Stalin’s policy of the “bloc of four classes,” which subordinated Chinese workers to Chiang Kai-shek’s bourgeois Kuomintang and led to the 1927 Shanghai massacre. This is a historical warning against the CPM-K’s present-day class-collaborationist strategy.
5. The author surveys nationalist fronts across Africa, including Angola’s MPLA, concluding that the CPM-K’s program points toward bureaucratic repression of the working class rather than liberation.
