It is important for many who were recently radicalized by the #RejectFinanceBill protests to understand that we are not the first to take on the powers that have shaped Kenya into a country subservient to foreign interests. Under Moi, neoliberalism and authoritarianism stripped Kenyans of self-determination, but many movements—including the December Twelfth Movement/Mwakenya and the Release Political Prisoners Movement—fought back. In this teach-in, we are joined by organizers of these movements, plus Women Solidarity Network, to discuss movement-building, linking past and present st ..read more

We need to think beyond just graft and theft. For all of the wastage and graft of MPs, for example, Parliament still only makes up less than 1% of Kenya's national budget. We need to think beyond individual vice—concepts like greed and corruption and dishonesty—and think towards larger structures, particularly production. Agricultural production, industrial production, infrastructure... We were lucky to have Gussai Hamror Sheikheldin join us for the last teach-in. Towards the end of that discussion, Gussai looked at what's happening now in Kenya from a pan-African lens and helped us see w ..read more

Staggering visions of unity from Kenya’s historic #RejectFinanceBill protests demonstrated a solidarity that many thought was impossible. However, now that the clear threat of a single bill has diffused, many feel we are in unprecedented, uncharted waters. Nothing could be further from the truth. In 2012-13, our Sudanese comrades realised that street demonstrations were the manifestation of people power, but only through mass organising could that power actually be wielded. From neighborhood resistance committees to informal unions, Sudanese have drawn upon African revolutionary traditions of ..read more

Unmaking as Emancipation Who really is a Luddite? Contrary to popular usage of the term, Luddites are not anti-technology; they are anti-exploitation. In E4, we discussed the constant tug-of-war between labor and capital that pushes history forward. Capital, on its side, innovates to strive for more accumulation and profits, primarily by developing new technology to reduce labor costs. This is the situation skilled artisans in 18th century Europe found themselves in; after being forced into the wage economy by capitalism, the system continued reducing its use for them as it innovated technolog ..read more

What is imperialism, and how is the Kenyan state complicit in enabling it? Why, since Independence, has the Kenyan state been a willing imperialist stooge — in terms of military action, global finance, economic partners, trade deals, and more? Why do our rulers value the acceptance of the West more than that of their own people? What lessons can we learn from Palestinians, Sudanese, and others who have resisted imperialism at home? On 11 July, our team and Qwani/Bunge la Mayut hosted a teach-in on Imperialism. It was called Beyond the Bill: Imperialism, Globalism, and the People's Resistance ..read more

Having established what happened to unions in Kenya and the role of capitalism in their weakening and eventual co-optation, we move on to imagining what unions can look like in today's conditions. To begin, we highlight a concept rooted in historical recurrence, initially highlighted by Marx and Engels: dialectical materialism. At its core, dialectical materialism is about the constant tug-of-war between labor and capital. We situate the history of labor union activism in Kenya within this tug; careful not to regurgitate the oft-repeated myth that history simply repeats itself. It is indeed tr ..read more

In this episode, we discuss capitalism as a monster—specifically a vampire—that feeds off the surplus value of the working class’s labour. This is not a particularly new idea; Karl Marx, who remains to be one of the most influential thinkers of capitalism wrote in Capital Volume 1 that “Capital is dead labour, which vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Just as the vampire’s thirst for blood is insatiable, so is capital’s craving for more unpaid work. We explore the ways this unfolds in Kenya, a country with a deep-seated capitalist e ..read more

Learning about the ways of the Aztec today, we all pretty much agree that their ideas around human sacrifices are barbaric. That they have no place in our “modern” civilizations today. But is this really the case? In this episode, we explore the ways in which capitalism’s ways of knowing and doing (its epistemologies) perpetuate the same ideas of human sacrifice today. We start with the more direct examples of workers literally dying for profit—the construction workers who die building homes they cannot afford to live, and the many factory workers who die manufacturing products we can use (dea ..read more

We begin in Mombasa where, in 1947, workers staged a general strike. Over 10,000 people gathered in a field they called Kiwanja cha Maskini and demanded dignified living and working conditions from the colonial administration. Today, the Mombasa port is being contested for privatisation. Dockworkers seem to have no power over their fate, no voice or choice beyond entreating politicians to act on their behalf. What happened? What happened to the militant, powerful unions of the pre-independence era? How did we get to today, where the image of "workers unions" in Kenya conjures images like that ..read more

The wait is over! Season 2 is just around the corner. Our first episode drops this Friday. Subscribe on YouTube or find us anywhere you get podcasts ..read more