In 2017 and in the first few months of 2018, corruption scandals have been heavily affecting Peruâs political elite. These scandals are not only reduced to the political Right, but even include individuals with a social-democratic political orientation. The corruption scandals provoked by one of Brazilâs major companies, Odebrecht, has resulted in a political crisis as it apparently also involved the then President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski . As a consequence, in March 2018, Kuczynski presented his renouncement before being impeached in an imminent session of Congress.
The current political crisis dates from the start of the Kuczynski government in July 2016. In May of the same year, Kuczynski had won the Presidential elections after beating Keiko Fujimori , the leader of Fuerza Popular and daughter of former President Alberto Fujimori. However, as the absolute majority corresponded to the popular Right of Fuerza Popular , since the installation of the new Congress, Kuczynskiâs cabinets have been heavily under attack, resulting in the fall of one cabinet and three ministers (Education, Economics and Finance, and Transport and Communication).
The Left , and more in particular the socialist Left , has not been benefitting from the crisis in the âupper classesâ, one of Leninâs three conditions that characterize a revolutionary situation. Why not? The socialist Left is also discredited? The massive means of communication have initiated a campaign against the socialist Left with the objective to avoid its possible resurgence? Or is it because the population has a general aversion to politics?
In this book, it will be argued that currently, the socialist Left is not able to use political crises within the bourgeoisie for the benefit of projects that point to end exploitation and oppression. This is not because a major part considers revolution and revolutionary struggle something of the past or has projected it for a very distant and vague future, but because the socialist Leftâs political and social bases have reduced considerably, making it incapable of organizing massive protests against the State and Capital.
The weakness of the socialist Left has nothing to do with the strength of the Right, but everything with its own lack of power. It is not because the Right is strong and therefore the Left is weak, it is because the Left is weak that the Right is strong. It is up to the socialist Left to change the correlation of class forces in its favor. This weakness might also explain why Peru has been âexcludedâ from what has been called the pink tide or the ascendency to state power of left-wing-oriented currents and even socialist organizations in Latin America.
The particularity of capitalist development in Peru and the evolution of its class structures provide the objective conditions (and limitations) for the political practice of socialist organizations. In Peru, these conditions form the basis of what might be called the hegemony of neoliberalism in society and help to understand the structural character of the political weakness of the socialist Left . However, and that is what we would like to underline, it depends on the political practice of the revolutionary forces if these conditions are maintained, deepened, changed, or destroyed. As Petras and Veltmeyer (2010, 58) argue, âit is not enough to establish the workings of capitalism and imperialism in terms of their objectively given conditions that affect people and countries according to their class location in this system. We need to establish the political dynamics of popular and working-class responses to these conditionsâto neoliberal policies of structural adjustment to the purported requirements of the new world orderâ. As a matter of fact, the struggle for a revolutionary change of the neoliberal development model starts with a fight over the consciousness of the population. Having the correct consciousness regarding the existing relations is an indispensable condition for revolutionary practice.
Notwithstanding the weakness of the socialist Left or the fact that the neoliberal ideology has taken roots in all layers of society, we believe that the necessity for revolutionary change in Peru can easily be defended on the grounds of general accepted development goals. If it means the steady and structural improvement of the social conditions of a continuously growing part of the country, it should imply a break with the commoditization of the basic social needs of the population, such as water, health care, and education. If it also points to a qualitative increase of the participation of the population in political and economic decision-making, it should mean giving the exploited and oppressed masses the ownership, the control, and the management over the means of social production. This radical change of the course of development is within capitalism, and especially today given the global correlation of class forces, impossible. It would mean a break with the political and economic power base of the dominant classes , i.e., the private property over the means of production. This brings us to the objective of this book.
1.1 Objective of the Book
In this book, we study the development of capitalism, class, and revolution in Peru in the period 1980â2016. It intends to shed light on the fact why the socialist Left has not been able to gain state power in the last thirty-six years. 1
Although a lot has been written on the Peruvian socialist Left and its errors but, as will be pointed out in Chapter 2, these works do no help us to explain why the socialist Left is still in an agonizing state. As we conclude in Chapter 8, since the 1990s, the socialist Left has been thrown back to the stage of primitive political, ideological, and organizational accumulation .
This book explains that the reasons why the socialist Left has not attained state power are principally related to the objective and subjective conditions of capitalist development. We argue that the erosion of the political and social bases of the Peruvian socialist Left, the product of the dynamics of capitalist development in the 1980s and 1990s and the implementation of a radical form of neoliberalism in 1990s, has not been understood by the socialist Left . 2 This lack of understanding has disabled it to politically and organizationally address the processes that eroded its political and social bases. The political practice of the socialist Left did not change as a consequence of the changes in the class structure and in the distribution of employment by enterprise size groups that were going on in the 1980s and 1990s. This is one of the main reasons for the loss of political and social power of the socialist Left in the 1990s. The fact that the Peruvian socialist Left has still not embarked on an analysis of the evolution of the Peruvian class structure might explain not only the continuation of the political and organizational agony of the socialist Left, but also the hegemony of neoliberalism in Peruvian society. 3
We believe that our explanation of why the socialist Left has not gained state power in the last thirty-six years is an important contribution to the known factors such as political and military errors of the socialist Left in the 1980s and 1990s, the economic and social disaster of state-led development between 1985 and 1990, and the neoliberal attack on the proletariat and the peasantry , as it combines elements of the objective and subjective conditions of capitalist development in Peru. Although it is not possible to determine if the factors mentioned in this book really have been decisive, we think they have been and still are crucial. We are convinced that not only without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement as Lenin argued in What is to be done?, but also without knowledge about the underlying trends of social reality it is not possible to successfully intervene in social reality with the objective to change it.
It can be supposed that an understanding of the workings of capitalism in Peru as it relates to the dynamics of social change (class formation and struggle) might help strengthen the theoretical and political weaponry of the forces that struggle for a revolutionary social transformation of the system. Hence, we hope that this book is not only seen as another social-scientific interpretation of Peruvian political, economic, and social reality but also as a contribution to change, i.e., to help bring about a process of revolutionary social transformation of capitalism in Peru, 4 which, following Carchedi (1987, 95), can be defined as a path that irreversibly changes the prevailing system of capitalist production relations .
1.2 Filling the Gap
This book has been guided by a range of questions on Peruvian capitalist development in general and on the countryâs socialist Left in particular. One of these questions had to do with the class structure and the political and social bases of the socialist Left . We asked ourself how the particularities of capitalist development in Peru and the evolving class structure were related to the structural weakness of the socialist Left .
This work hopes to fill an important gap in academic research as in Peru and abroad, in scholarly literature and other, no work exists that has analyzed the evolution of the countryâs class structure of the last thirty-six years in relation to the itâs particular capitalistâs development process. However, we need to mention the efforts of Orlando Plaza (2007, 2009) to have placed the problem of class renewed on the academic agenda.
Although the study on Peruvian class and the Peruvian class structure has started to reemerge, see, for instance, also the work of Huber and Lamas (2017) on the new middle class in Peru, unfortunately these studies are not based on a critical political economy perspective but rather on a Weberian concept of class and a structural-functionalist theory of social stratification. Future studies on the Peruvian class structure at the level of a concrete society and research on the social and economic conditions of the proletariat and the proletari...