Class War 16/2024: Proletarian revolt in Kenya – Against all bourgeois falsifications!

On 18th of June 2024 the protests started in Nairobi, that included the occupation of the square in front of the National Parliament and since the beginning included confrontations with the repressive forces of the State. The original trigger for the protests was the proposal of the so-called Finance Bill 2024 by the Kenya’s president Ruto. Its adoption would mean increase of prices on wide range of basic goods from bread, eggs, vegetables and cooking oil to petrol and hygienic necessities for women and children.

Moreover, due to the nature of the Capital organization in Kenya, if you want to get a job in the “urban service sector economy” you may have no choice but to become so-called “freelancer” and you will be required to buy your own equipment, your own gas and pay the taxes to the State, even though you then proceed to work for big tech, social media company or local State agency.

This prompted the proletarians whose class belonging is being masked by the bourgeois ideology as “private entrepreneurs”, that were the most affected by the changes, to become the initiators of the protests. And just like in the case of Gilets Jaunes movement in France, corporate media and the left of Capital with workerist ideology alike jumped on the opportunity to interpret the protests as “petty bourgeois” movement “against the government corruption”, “unfair taxation”, “for more democracy”, etc. Just like in case of Gilets Jaunes, we want to stress the proletarian nature of the movement which expresses itself and confirms itself in widespread expropriation of the commodities, attacks on the infrastructure and the symbols of the State and refusal of any sort of bourgeois mediation, despite the occasional “enraged citizen” whining on TikTok that the new law “hurts his business”.

This arrangement, where the class of capitalists are able to take advantage of the local circumstances and to off-load part of the costs of means of production on the shoulders of the proletariat, is nothing new and nothing extraordinary. It does not in any way change the fact that the labor force of the proletariat is being exploited by the disembodied social relation – i.e. Capital; it does not do it any more than when the workers building the railway across the American Midwest were forced to purchase “their own” shovels and dynamite.

The social explosion appears almost one year after similar bill, having effect of drastically increasing the cost of living for the proles in Kenya, led to several days of riots damaging the highway and several railway stations in Nairobi. In the meantime, Kenya also saw protests against water and electricity cuts, occupation of Meru university by its students and recently a two months long strike of healthcare workers.

Unlike the previous protests, where billionaires Odinga, Kenyatta and some others could at least play a charade that they represent the movement and try to exploit its internal contradictions and illusions to gain some electoral support, this time, to the dismay of the media no figure that could pretend to be a “leader” can be found. Of course, while the movement shows a large degree of “spontaneity” in the sense that proletarians in struggle anywhere do understand who their class enemy is and do not need to deliberate for days to choose their targets, this does not imply the lack of organization. Methods adopted by the movement include organizing itself both online and on neighborhood level and involve both preexisting structures active in the previous struggles and the newly created ones giving the movement a direction. The “crowd sourcing” is used for collections on medical and lawyer expenses and some of the doctors joined the movement and are treating the injured.

From Nairobi protests quickly spread to include Kisumu, Eldoret, Mombasa, Lamu and other big cities as well as many smaller towns and its initial “economic” demands organically merged with the proletarian rage against the uniformed butchers, accumulated over the years of brutal repression of any protest movement and boosted by their attempts to quell this uprising. Dozens have been murdered by the cops and hundreds injured as well as hundreds arrested or made “disappear”. The mass terror tactic, deployed by the State in Kenya so many times before, however backfired this time.

For example, when the cops tried to break the blockades set up by the protesters on the highway from Nairobi to Mombasa with volleys of tear gas and rubber and life bullets – the young proles from the slums along the highway rose up and joined the riots. The scope of protests also widened to include the problems with water and electricity supply – which already triggered angry protests in the past. On 25th of June, after a battle with the cops, the protesters stormed the National Parliament of Kenya, ransacked it and partly set it ablaze. This prompted Ruto to call the army into the streets, and to curtail the internet, but without the pacifying effect he and the rest of the bourgeoisie hoped for.

The offensive tactics of the movement against the repressive forces did not stay limited to the framework of the clashes on the demonstration. The photos, ID’s, phone numbers and home addresses of the violent cops have been “doxed” – made public online – and some of them got to experience the proletarian justice first hand. As more and more carnage from the hands of the repressive forces – including the recent discovery of dozens of murdered women in a quarry on the outskirts of Nairobi, right next to the police station – the confrontational line of the movement continues. And this is happening at the same time as the Kenyan police special forces are being deployed to Haiti to crush the proletarian resistance there, under the pretext of fighting the gangs. There are some signs of cracks appearing inside the police and army corps themselves and some cops and soldiers have switched sides and joined the protests, even though it is still very rare.

Of course, the attempts to pacify, isolate and channel the movement also continue. Ruto has scratched the bill, at least temporarily, which did not have any effect. Neither did a recent sacking of the chief of police Japhet Koome. The latest attempt so far is the creation of “National Multi-Sectoral Forum for dialogue”, a desperate attempt to turn the class struggle into “civil dialogue”.

While Ruto’s traditional political competition like Odinga is silent this time, various “influencers” as well as the Stalinists from the so-called “Communist party of Kenya” are trying to step in. The criticism of Ruto’s pro-IMF and pro-NATO orientation is a major theme of the partisans of their pro-Chinese competition. The trade unions, sticking to their historical practice announced a pacifying general strike, but did not even follow-up with its actual realization.

Of course, as with any other real proletarian movement the limits are showing in its general “anti-Ruto” orientation, without much criticism towards the opposition, in its illusions of democracy and “people”, without expressed class consciousness, in its lack of perspective beyond the immediate needs and anger towards the repressive forces. We have not seen any militant materials – leaflets, posters, signs, on-line texts, etc. – that would express any criticism of capitalism beyond the anger about the poverty and police violence or complains about the capitalist management style – i.e. “corruption”. It has to be said, that we neither have any militant contact in Kenya, nor we speak any of the local languages.

This being said, nothing is over yet in Kenya despite the recent decline; and one of the expressions of the potential overcoming of these limitations, towards the internationalist proletarian solidarity, is its clear stance against sending the Kenyan cops to Haiti as well as other “peace-keeping” operations. Moreover, it seems that the proletarian revolt in Kenya is serving as the inspiration and a point of reference for the recent violent protests in Uganda and Nigeria.

As communists we see in every autonomous proletarian struggle a snippet of the social war that the proletariat wages against the bourgeoisie, an expression of the historical struggle of the proletariat as a class for revolution against the capitalism and for the global classless community!

As communists, therefore we want to stress the proletarian nature of the movement in Kenya against all bourgeois falsifiers:

* be it racists who try to stoke out the racial divisions inside our class between “Africans” and “Europeans” or “Asians”.
* be it those that try to limit the substance of the movement to its initial or superficial premise – as anti-corruption movement, as anti-tax movement, etc.
* be it partisans of “national liberation” advocating for the right of the nations to repress “their own” proletarians.
* be it so-called “communists” who divide the global capitalist society into “central” and “peripheral” countries and claim that the struggle of the proletariat in the latter matters less.

Let’s show the practical solidarity to the struggling proletariat in Kenya by adding the interests of the local capitalist faction to our list of targets – be it Kenyan State or the corporations like Safaricom, KTDA, East African Breweries!

Against capitalist war and against capitalist peace – Against global militarization efforts, of which the Kenyan expeditionary forces are part!

We were just finishing this short text on the struggles of our class in Kenya when we heard like an amplified echo the clamors of the “Days of Rage” that are setting Nigeria ablaze, fueled by the refusal of misery, slavery and dehumanization, and always following the same scenario: demonstrations, repression, riots, attacks on police stations, ransacking of government buildings, looting, etc. With always the same strengths but also the same weaknesses: determination to destroy everything that makes our lives unlivable, on the one hand, and limited criticism of “bad governance”, on the other.

Let’s also pay tribute to, and salute, the struggle that our class brothers and sisters have been waging for several weeks now, in other latitudes, in Bangladesh; struggles that are not just the umpteenth attempt by the proletariat to overthrow everything, but also, it seems, a qualitative leap in the determination of the latter, in its already very long history of confrontations with the capitalists, to “make the business unprofitable”.

And finally, let’s salute the proletarians in struggle in Pakistan, and particularly in the port city of Gwadar, a gigantic concentration of workers, so useful to the development of Chinese capitalism. For years, these proletarians have been boosting unrestrained confrontation with the exploiters, despite all the efforts of reformists of all kinds to confine them to a “national liberation struggle of the Baloch people”, which the proletariat must criticize through its determined struggle…

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