The Stalinist Communist Party Marxist-Kenya (CPM-K) has issued a “Letter to the Broad Kenyan Left: The Death of Raila Odinga and the Future of the Kenyan Left”.

It took the CPM–K five days to issue anything beyond a pitiful tweet from its leader, Booker Omole, lauding Raila Odinga, the long-time opposition leader, former prime minister, and political fixer for Kenya’s ruling elite, as a champion of “Kenya’s bourgeois democratic struggle.” Now, the CPM–K is moving to politically exploit Odinga’s death seeking to launch a new pseudo-left alliance aimed at containing growing social opposition to Kenyan capitalism.

The CPM–K’s letter acknowledges the scale of the crisis engulfing the ruling class. It declares: “The death of Raila Amolo Odinga, long-time opposition figure and symbol of Kenya’s liberal-reformist politics, marks a turning point in the political history of our nation. It brings to an end a political era dominated by charismatic personalities, populist reform agendas, and cyclical pacts with the ruling bourgeoisie.” Odinga’s death, it states, has “shaken the imagination of millions who saw in him the last remaining link between popular struggle and state power.”

Indeed, since coming to power in 2022, the government of President William Ruto has faced the accelerating collapse of the entire post-independence order as he has rammed through International Monetary Fund tax hikes, privatisations and social spending cuts. These measures triggered the eruption of the Gen Z nationwide protests last year, amid soaring inequality. The government responded by deploying the army and gunning down protestors, carrying out abductions and using state-funded goons to attack demonstrators.

Facing this opposition, Ruto, in close consultation with Washington and the European Union, turned to Odinga, the leader of the bourgeois Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), to stabilise his collapsing rule. Odinga’s entry into government was the final act of a man whose political authority had already evaporated. The protests had completely bypassed him, signalling the rise of a new generation entering political life independently of Kenya’s bankrupt, tribalist parties of the ruling elite.

However, in the absence of a clear programme, perspective and political leadership, this mass movement proved inadequate to defeat a ruling elite that is determined to impose the full weight of International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity.

The anger did not subside. Protests erupted again this year, this time targeting the joint Ruto-Odinga “broad based” government, and were met with even greater state violence. On July 7, months before Odinga’s death, security forces opened fire on demonstrators, killing 57 people in one of the bloodiest massacres carried out by the Kenyan bourgeoisie since independence.

The death of Odinga is a political crisis for the Kenyan ruling class. It takes place amid a growing wave of social unrest spreading across the world. From Tanzania, Cameroon, Peru, Nepal and Bangladesh to Madagascar, Morocco, Mozambique and Angola, workers and youth are rising against soaring prices, mass unemployment, and IMF austerity programmes.

The same anger is erupting in the imperialist centres. In the US, the “No Kings” protests sparked by Trump’s efforts to install a dictatorship drew millions. Across Europe, millions have joined demonstrations opposing the Western-backed genocide in Gaza. These struggles express the reawakening of the working class under conditions of a deepening crisis of world capitalism.

Amid this intensifying global and domestic crisis, the CPM-K Letter claims, “The death of Raila Odinga opens space for the advance of revolutionary consciousness”. But their rediscovery of Odinga’s “legacy” is an act of political rehabilitation. It conceals the Odinga dynasty’s decades-long service to Kenyan capitalism, whitewashes Stalinism’s complicity in this project, and falsifies the revolutionary tasks posed before the working class. It is on these rotten foundations that the CPM-K seeks to build a “Revolutionary United Front”.

Stalinist prop for the Odinga dynasty and bourgeois nationalism

The CPM-K’s letter claims, “The Odinga family itself arose from this contradictory terrain. Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Raila’s father, represented a national-democratic tendency that challenged compradorism in the early years of independence.”

This is a falsification. From the outset, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga’s political outlook was confined to independence under capitalism in the boundaries imposed by colonialism. In the early 1960s, during the final phase of Kenya’s anti-colonial struggle, he subordinated the insurgent movement of workers and peasants to the bourgeois nationalist leadership of Jomo Kenyatta.

Kenyatta was a conservative politician who, before his detention in 1952, had sought constitutional accommodation with British imperialism. Although the colonial authorities imprisoned him on trumped-up charges of leading the anti-colonial peasant Mau Mau uprising (1952-1959), which he had publicly opposed, on his release in 1961 Kenyatta hastened to reassure the colonial administration and white settlers of his loyalty to private property and imperialist interests, declaring:

We are not going to be a gangster government. We are going to be an orderly and responsible government. We will relieve the tensions which exist today among the people who fear that an independent Kenya will jump on their property and confiscate land. Those who have been panicked about the future of their property—be it a farm, a house or some other kind—can rest assured that the future African government of Kenya will not deprive them of the right of owning that property which they own at present.

This occurred amid the most militant wave of class struggle in Kenya’s history. Between 1959 and 1965, the country was gripped by an unprecedented surge of strikes and protests that engulfed virtually every sector of the economy, from plantations, railways, docks, public services, construction, engineering, and manufacturing. At its height in May–June 1962, on the eve of independence, over 28,000 plantation labourers across Central Province struck simultaneously, losing more than 1.5 million man-hours, while railwaymen, dockers, civil servants and teachers also launched strikes.

The Kenyan working class had already emerged as a powerful, independent social force capable of playing a revolutionary role. The conditions existed to build a genuine Marxist tendency that could have unified the struggles of workers and rural masses in a fight for socialism, together with the masses across East Africa and the continent. But this perspective was fiercely opposed by Odinga.

Oginga became vice-president in the first post-independence government under Kenyatta, which quickly turned against the working class. In 1965, the KANU government enacted the Trade Disputes Act to curb labour militancy, bringing the trade-union movement under state control. All unions were compelled to join the newly created Central Confederation of Trade Unions. The Minister of Labour, then Tom Mboya, argued that this would ensure that “labour participates responsibly in nation-building” and prevent “disruptive tendencies inimical to national unity.” Strikes were severely restricted.

As vice president, Oginga became a supporter of the counterrevolutionary Stalinist Soviet bureaucracy. He invited Stalinist Eastern bloc aid, training missions, and scholarships. After his expulsion from KANU in 1966, his new party, the Kenya People’s Union (KPU), became the main channel for Soviet influence and propaganda in Kenya. Soviet bureaucracy press outlets such as Pravda and Izvestia hailed Odinga as representing the “progressive” and “national-democratic” forces of Kenya.

Moscow’s support for Odinga and similar bourgeois and petty bourgeois nationalists across Africa was aimed at containing the revolutionary movement of the working class. The Stalinist bureaucracy, defending its own privileges and fearful of independent workers’ struggles, propped up nationalist regimes and movements across Africa as bargaining chips with imperialism. The Soviet bureaucracy celebrated leaders such as Nkrumah in Ghana, Nyerere in Tanzania, Lumumba in Congo and Odinga in Kenya.

This policy was guided by the Stalinist doctrine of “socialism in one country,” which subordinated the struggles of workers in the colonial and semi-colonial world to the diplomatic needs of the Kremlin. In Africa, this meant transforming the mass anti-imperialist uprisings of the 1950s and 1960s into schemes for bourgeois state-building.

Domestically, Oginga’s KPU reflected the ambitions of disaffected sections of the petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie seeking a greater share of political and economic power within the existing capitalist state. It called for a more assertive policy of “Africanisation,” aimed at accelerating the replacement of Europeans and Asians in management, commerce, and the civil service with Africans, alongside the expropriation and redistribution of settler land without compensation.

As he would later admit in his 1967 autobiography Not Yet Uhuru [Not Yet Free], “I am not a communist, and I do not subscribe to any communist doctrine. I am a socialist who believes that socialism is the only way to remove the poverty of our people”. Odinga’s socialism, however, was one which defended private property: “Socialism, as I understand it, is not opposed to private enterprise.”

Odinga functioned as a safety valve for the post-colonial capitalist state, diverting the anger of workers and peasants into the newly created Kenyan republic. By appealing to the socialist aspirations of the masses but rejecting the independent mobilisation of the working class, the KPU helped stabilise bourgeois rule at a moment of explosive social tension. This role was later perfected by his son, Raila Odinga.

The CPM–K’s fabrication of Raila Odinga’s “reformist legacy”

After falsifying the political biography of the father, the CPM–K proceeds to embellish that of the son. Raila Odinga’s “long political life represented, in the final analysis, the limits of reformism within a neocolonial, semi-feudal order. His march through opposition politics—from the struggles against one-party dictatorship in the 1980s to the 2010 constitutional reforms—was rooted in genuine mass aspirations for democracy and justice.” Odinga ultimately “stood both as a symbol of resistance and as a pillar of the neocolonial order”.

These formulations are a political fraud. Odinga was not the embodiment of reformism’s “limits” and “resistance” to neo-colonial order. From his merger with Daniel arap Moi’s KANU in 2001 to the 2008 coalition government with Mwai Kibaki, the 2018 “Handshake” with Uhuru Kenyatta, and finally his alliance with Ruto, Odinga played the central role in suppressing mass opposition to the Kenyan ruling elite. He became the trusted political instrument through which imperialism and the Kenyan bourgeoisie suppressed every independent movement of the working class and rural masses. (See: “Former Kenyan prime minister Raila Odinga dies aged 80”).

His ability to play this role flowed directly from the betrayals of the Maoist tendencies that claimed to offer a revolutionary alternative. Today’s CPM-K presents itself as their direct inheritor. These forces rejected the struggle for socialism in favour of the “national democratic revolution,” arguing that Kenya had first to complete a bourgeois revolution in alliance with “progressive” sections of the national bourgeoisie. In practice, this meant subordinating the working class to one or another faction of the ruling elite. This perspective was advanced by Maoist organisations during the 1970s and 1980s such as the Workers’ Party of Kenya (WPK), the December Twelfth Movement (DTM), and later Mwakenya.

The WPK in its founding statement of 1974 declared that its immediate task was to “complete the national democratic revolution, which the compradors betrayed. To achieve this the WPK will mobilize and unite all anti-imperialist forces in the country and abroad. The Party’s task is to unite revolutionary and progressive elements into the movement.”

When it rebranded in 1982 as the DTM, it proclaimed its aim was to “build a united, anti-imperialist, anti-fascist front that aims at bringing together all democratic forces as a first phase of the general struggle towards socialism. In the process, the democratic forces, mainly the workers, peasantry and progressive intellectuals, are to be trained and prepared for a future communist party.”

By 1987, the movement had reconstituted itself again as Mwakenya, repeating the same formula. In its Draft Minimum Programme (1987), Mwakenya defined itself as “a democratic party of the workers, peasants, progressive intelligentsia and all the patriotic Kenyans fighting for the interests of the oppressed, exploited and humiliated majority of the people in all the nationalities of Kenya.” It insisted that “Kenya’s national capital must be involved in industrial ventures in the country,” declaring that such collaboration was essential for the success of a “national democratic revolution.”

These formulations expressed the Stalinist rejection of the independent role of the working class, and the replacement of class struggle with a programme of alliance with “patriotic” sections of the bourgeoisie. By the late 1980s, as IMF austerity and repression fuelled mass strikes and student protests, the Maoist had laid the foundations for this anger to be exploited by the bourgeois opposition, especially around Odinga. With his detentions under Moi and the residual prestige of his father, Odinga was elevated as the supposed embodiment of “national democracy.”

The Maoists had disarmed the working class, transforming what could have been a revolutionary confrontation into a controlled campaign for constitutional reform and multi-party parliamentarism, led by Odinga and representing factions of the ruling elite.

Mwakenya members rapidly made the logical step of joining Odinga’s camp and adapted to the new bourgeois order. Oduor Ong’wen, once a leading Mwakenya student radical, is today the executive director of Odinga’s ODM. Willy Mutunga rose to become Chief Justice under the 2010 constitution between 2011 and 2016, with the public support of Odinga. Wanyiri Kihoro, once a political detainee, became an MP in Odinga’s camp. Makau Mutua, a self-described “progressive” law professor, became one of Odinga’s international spokespersons. Miguna Miguna, who once claimed exile as a radical student, returned to Kenya to serve as Odinga’s senior adviser.

The CPM-K traces its lineage to the Social Democratic Party (SDP), but like Mwakenya all of its leading figures ultimately found their way into the political establishment. The SDP’s presidential candidates in the 1997 and 2002 general elections—Charity Ngilu (1997) and James Orengo (2002)—and senior party figures like Anyang’ Nyong’o, all went on to join Odinga in power. Ngilu was appointed Minister of Health (2003–2007) in Mwai Kibaki’s administration and Orengo served as Minister for Lands (2008–2013) in Kibaki’s second government, while Nyong’o became Minister for Planning and National Development (2003–2005) and later Minister for Medical Services (2008–2013).

Out of the SPD emerged Booker Omole and Mwandawiro Mghanga, who in 2019 relaunched it as the Communist Party of Kenya (CPK). Mghanga had long been integrated into the Kenyan capitalist state. Elected to parliament in 2002 under the Odinga-backed National Rainbow Coalition (NARC), he later served as Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs in Mwai Kibaki’s government. After losing his seat in 2007, he became chairperson of the SDP, continuing the party’s long record of collaboration with bourgeois governments under the banner of “progressive reform.”

The split between Mghanga and Omole came only in 2022, when Mghanga joined William Ruto’s Kenya Kwanza Alliance in the run up of the presidential elections that year. Until then, there had been no fundamental difference in orientation between them. Omole and his supporters objected to joining Ruto—a politician with a long record of violence against the working class—at a time of soaring food prices, mass youth unemployment, and worsening living conditions that threatened to erupt into social unrest. Omole judged it more effective to suppress opposition and contain social anger from the outside.

In late 2024, Omole founded the Communist Party Marxist-Kenya. The CPM-K’s Congress reaffirmed what was already clear: despite adding “Marxist” to its name, the party has no orientation to the working class. It remains a pro-capitalist organisation rooted in nationalism, representing the interests of sections of the bourgeoisie and middle class, centred on its orientation to capitalist China. It advocates for the preservation of the profit system, calling for a “mixed economic system where the state, private sector, and cooperative sector coexist”. It explains that “[u]ltimately, CPM-K aims to build an independent, nationally integrated, and self-sustaining economy by mobilising Kenya’s resources.”

Across its successive incarnations, from Mwakenya to the SDP, from the CPK to today’s CPM-K, Kenya’s Stalinist current has performed the historical function of propping up bourgeois nationalism and preventing the emergence of an independent revolutionary movement of the working class. Whether under Kenyatta, Moi, Odinga or Ruto, these organisations have urged workers to subordinate their struggles to supposedly “patriotic” and “progressive” sections of the elite. In every case, the result has been a political disaster for the working class.

The CPM-K puts itself forward to prop up Kenyan capitalism

In its “Letter to the Broad Kenyan Left”, the CPM-K identifies the vacuum left by Odinga’s death as a “moment of historical rupture” in which “the revolutionary party must intervene with ideological clarity and political firmness.” To fill this vacuum and build a new political vehicle to shore up the collapsing authority of the capitalist state, the CPM-K proposes a “Revolutionary United Front” of “workers, peasants, women, youth, [and] progressive intellectuals,” and campaigns for “unity of the exploited classes”.

Beneath this rhetoric lies a familiar Stalinist script, including the characterisation of Kenya as a “semi-feudal, neocolonial economy” and the denunciation of certain unnamed elites as a “comprador-bureaucratic bourgeoisie tied to imperialism”. This is the inherited vocabulary of Maoism, devised to rationalize alliances with so-called “patriotic” sections of the bourgeoisie under the banner of the “New Democratic Revolution.”

In 1939, Mao published The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party, where he argued that imperialism had made China a “semi-feudal, semi-colonial” country, whose “basic contradictions” lay “between imperialism and the Chinese nation” and “between feudalism and the great masses of the people.” On this basis, Mao proposed a “national revolution to overthrow foreign imperialist oppression” alongside a “democratic revolution to overthrow feudal landlord oppression.” He divided Chinese society into classes—landlords, bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, peasantry, and proletariat—insisting that the “national bourgeoisie can become a revolutionary force” distinct from the “comprador big bourgeoisie.”

The Chinese revolution, Mao wrote, had a “twofold task”: first, to complete the “bourgeois-democratic” or “new-democratic” revolution through a coalition with the national bourgeoisie; and second, to “transform it into a socialist revolution when all the necessary conditions are ripe.”

It was on this foundation that the term “bureaucrat capitalism” arose. For Maoist forces like the CPM-K, it is not a category describing the class character of the capitalist state, but a moral condemnation of its corruption. It is a deviation from what is imagined to be the “progressive” function of a capitalist government. Bureaucrat capitalists, like compradors, are portrayed as traitors to the nation and puppets of imperialism, to be replaced by “patriotic” capitalists who will supposedly defend the interests of the “people” to carry out the “national democratic revolution”. Thus, the capitalist state is not to be abolished, but reformed under new leadership.

The implication is that the CPM-K’s call for a “Revolutionary United Front” today is to replace the “bureaucrat capitalists” with more “patriotic” figures loyal to the nation. In reality, the repressive and exploitative character of the Kenyan state is not the product of individual betrayals or of a lack of patriotism, but of irreconcilable class antagonisms rooted in the global imperialist system. There is no progressive national bourgeoisie waiting to complete Kenya’s “unfinished revolution,” nor can any “patriotic” government liberate the working class from IMF austerity or imperialist domination.

As of this writing, neither the Morenoite Revolutionary Socialist League, refounded at the end of October as the Permanent Revolutionary Congress (PRC), nor the Pan-Africanist Stalinist, Kongomano la Mapinduzi (KLM), has replied to the CPM-K’s Stalinist call. Instead, these organisations are already collaborating through the National People’s Council (NPC) and have been involved in launching the Kenya Left Alliance as a new coalition.

But whatever form such regroupments take, the PRC and KLM share with the CPM-K a fundamental orientation toward the capitalist state. These projects are designed to steer the Gen Z revolt and the emerging strike movement against low wages and austerity back into safe parliamentary channels. As Odinga once served to absorb opposition into constitutional reform, the CPM-K and its allies now seek to play the same role offering pseudo-socialist rhetoric for a new generation.

The only genuine alternative lies in the theory of Permanent Revolution developed by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky warned, “The national bourgeoisie of the colonial and semi-colonial countries, being economically, politically and spiritually dependent upon the imperialist bourgeoisie, is incapable of waging a consistent struggle against imperialism.”

As he had already written in Results and Prospects (1906), “The bourgeoisie of the backward countries is not capable of conducting a revolutionary struggle against imperialism; it is linked to it by a thousand ties.” These historic tasks fall to the working class, which must seize power at the head of the rural poor, expropriate the capitalist class, and reorganize society on a socialist basis. The revolution must be international, linking struggles across Africa with those of the working class in the imperialist centers.

Raila Odinga’s death has indeed marked the end of an era. It has exposed the exhaustion of bourgeois nationalism, however radical a face it presents. This demands that workers and youth undertake a political reckoning with the Stalinist and Maoist currents that for decades upheld figures like Odinga as allies of the masses.

The way forward lies not in completing a bourgeois democratic revolution, but in overthrowing the bourgeoisie altogether. This requires building a Kenyan section of the International Committee of the Fourth International—a revolutionary leadership committed to international socialism. Only such a party can unify the most advanced layers of workers and youth, and lead the fight for the United Socialist States of Africa.