The CPK salutes you the workers and working classes of Kenya as you celebrate May Day. Workers and your class allies, who include the peasants, have always been in the forefront in the production of material wealth in Kenya as elsewhere in the World. May Day was brought about by the bloody struggle and sacrifices of the exploited and oppressed workers against the capitalists. The day therefore reminds you that all the gains that the workers and oppressed have achieved hitherto in bettering their wages and working conditions have been brought about not by the sympathies of the employers and their governments but by consistent united struggle of the forces of change and progress – the workers and their class allies. No capitalist anywhere in the world has ever bettered the condition of his or her workers without being forced to do so by the united struggle of his/her employees.
So as we celebrate May Day, we join Karl Marx, the founder of scientific communism to reiterate the message: Kenyan workers wherever you are, unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains! Refuse to be divided along ethnic, race, sex or age lines! Come together in the common struggle of demanding better living wages and better working conditions. Join trade unions and strengthen them by ensuring that they are led by true, honest and accountable leaders who do not betray workers’ interests through conspiring with employees for selfish interests! Remove traitors out of your trade unions even while you strengthen unity within them! Trade union leaders demand that no employer should violate the constitutional right of all workers of Kenya to form, join and belong to a trade union of his/her trade or choice!
Politically, you workers have always been in the frontline of the struggle for progressive change in Kenya. Workers and your allies the peasants, led the struggle for Kenya’s national liberation from British colonialism. You were also in the forefront in struggle for multiparty democracy, the Kenyan Constitution and progressive political reforms. However, your lives and living conditions have hardly changed for the better. You are still paid slave wages and work under slave like conditions. Your rights are trampled underfoot by your employers and the State with impunity. You and your families live in poor dwellings or slums in both urban and rural areas. You live a hard life of poverty, ignorance, hunger and want. When you and your families fall sick, you die of curable diseases as you cannot afford medicine or adequate health care. Your children are made to inherit the cycle of poverty, suffering and underdevelopment as you cannot afford to offer them the good education which has been made inaccessible to the children of the classes of the poor.
Yet you work hard every day. The country has also enough resources and wealth to ensure that all Kenyans realise the economic and social rights outlined in article 43 of the Constitution of Kenya. The problem is that the ruling class together with their national and county parliaments, political parties and State institutions continue to contradict, with impunity, the Constitution of Kenya, particularly article 10 by imposing the capitalist system upon the workers, the working class and the majority of Kenyans.
Capitalism is the system whose ideology and economic arrangements are based on private property and exploitation of person by person. That is why the capitalist regime is privatising everything public – water ports, airports, sugar companies and industries and other government parastatals and giving them to the rich. The best social services too, schools, universities, colleges, health and recreational facilities, etc. are private and therefore are inaccessible to most workers. The capitalist class and ideologues in power do not care that privatisation causes you workers to lose jobs, increase poverty and widen the gap between the majority poor and the few rich. Capitalism is the system that always favours the few against the majority. It is the mother of social inequality, exploitation and corruption. It breeds poverty, unemployment, greed, violence, crime, landlessness and many social evils and problems. It also creates the conditions of recolonization of our country through unfavourable and unsustainable foreign debts and investments.
It is for these reasons that in the struggle for the Kenyan Constitution, you the workers, and the majority of Kenyans wanted to remove the capitalist system and to replace it with the socialist system based on class equality and social justice and progress. In fact - read it - the spirit of the Kenyan Constitution is that of creating the socialist system that creates conditions of ensuring that all Kenyans participate in the political, economic, social and cultural life and accrue and share benefits thereof in order to nurture a just, progressive and humane society. Yes, moving towards socialism is the desire of the majority of Kenyans which they put in the Constitution but that has been betrayed by the ruling class.
In summary, CPK’s message to the Kenyan workers and working class in this May of 2019 is:
Continue strengthening your trade unions and fighting for better and better wages and working conditions for workers. But never forget that you workers are part and parcel of Kenyan society. Furthermore, you will never achieve freedom and liberation under the capitalist system but utmost only reforms that makes your suffering under the system less painful. True freedom and liberation of the workers, working class and the masses of Kenyans will follow after the removal of the capitalist system and the establishment of the socialist system. You Kenyan workers must be in the forefront of the political struggle of liberating the whole of Kenyan society from capitalism.
In this political struggle you workers must search for and find your true allies. Throughout the World the true political allies of the political struggle of workers and progressive trade unions are communist parties. In Kenya your true ally in the struggle for true freedom and liberation – socialism – is the Communist Party of Kenya (CPK). In this May Day of 2019 we urge all the Kenya workers to join and support CPK for it is the workers political party.
Long live May Day!
Long live trade unions in Kenya!
Long live Kenyan worker’s political struggles!
Long live socialism and communism!
Long live CPK!
Mwandawiro Mghanga, National Chairperson of CPK