Peruvian Communist Party | Ricardo López Risso
I. The strategy of imperialism’s ideological warfare in Latin America.
a. The deideologization of the popular movement and right-wing populism 1990-2021. The Peruvian experience.
The 1970s and 1980s in Peru were the period of the rise of leftist political organizations and the popular movement, especially trade unions and peasant unions, which became a decisive political force in Peruvian politics. This period was characterized by a high degree of class consciousness and politicization of the popular sectors.
The leftist organizations, although fractioned in alliance with social and popular organizations such as the General Confederation of Workers of Peru, among others, achieved the restoration of democracy after the general strikes of 1976 and 1977, which forced the dictatorship of General Francisco Morales Bermudez to call elections for the Constituent Assembly in 1978, in which the leftist organizations and the Peruvian Communist Party obtained 28% of the constituent representation.
This popular rise reached its peak with the political victory of Izquierda Unidad in the 1983 municipal elections in Lima and most of the country’s cities, consolidating its position as the second political force in Peru.
This process of accumulation of political and social forces reached its zenith in the 1985 presidential elections in which the United Left was consolidated as the second political force, but that same year was also the beginning of its decline. The popular sectors were distancing themselves from the discourse and proposals of the left, which had been plunged into division, the dispute of diligent cliques and political adventurism led by radicalized social democratic parties, which diverted attention from urgent social demands such as the solution to political violence, the terrorism of the Shining Path and the MRTA , State terrorism and the galloping economic crisis and hyperinflation of 1988-1990 aggravated by the shortage of basic foods and fuels.
Finally, this decline ended in 1990 with the extinction of Izquierda Unidad and the transfer of the popular sectors that supported it to the emerging Fujimorism.
b. The transfer.
The irruption of Fujimorism into Peruvian politics in 1990 channeled in its favor the fears of the Peruvian majorities: the generalization of terrorist violence that the Alan Garcia government had been unable to stop, the threat of a neoliberal economic “shock” announced by the candidate of the nascent ultra-right Mario Vargas Llosa and the misguided economic crisis that had plunged Peru into shortages of basic foodstuffs and hyperinflation. All this was occurring in the context of the implementation in Latin America of the so-called “Washington Consensus” or the implementation of the neoliberal model designed by U.S. imperialism for Latin America.
Alberto Fujimori won the 1990 elections, the left was reduced to an absolute minority. Once in government, Alberto Fujimori applied economic shock measures (the so-called fuji-shock) accompanied by a policy of political patronage among the most depressed social sectors.
After 21 months of government, Fujimori staged a coup d’état on April 5, 1992, closed the Congress of the Republic and abrogated the 1979 Political Constitution; in June 1992, Victor Polay Campos, leader of the MRTA, was captured and in September of the same year the leadership clique of the Shining Path terrorist organization, including its leader Abimael Guzmán Reynoso, was captured. Fujimorism had begun. Alberto Fujimori’s government had satisfied the urgent demands of the population and had warded off its deepest fear: the destruction of the country by the economic crisis and, to a lesser degree, by the terrorism of the Shining Path. Thus the transfer of the organized and unorganized social majorities linked to Fujimorism’s governmental assistance program took place in the following years.
The transfer was accompanied by a persistent policy of persecution and political repression against the remnants of the left and against union and popular leaders who opposed the economic model, with the systematic implementation of the dirty war designed by the CIA and the State Department of the U.S. government, added to the corrupt practices of Alberto Fujimori’s government, not only aimed at maintaining control of the Armed Forces, but also at financing the de-ideologization of the popular sectors from the press, the universities occupied by the Armed Forces and stimulating the creation of political parties that concealed criminal organizations linked to drug trafficking and public-private corruption, laying the foundations for politics to no longer be a question of ideologies or government programs but of “business”.
c. The triumph of ideology over political science (my suggestion).
As Karl Marx said, “ideology is a false form of knowledge” and that is what has been imposed in Latin America since the 1990s. Knowing this process is an important factor that should allow us to reflect and overcome the mistakes made.
The political struggle of the Peruvian left was always linked to the development of political platforms that analyzed reality based on science. Hence the strength of the socialist-communist proposal of the Marxist left.
In this context, there are two factors that create the conditions for the triumph of the ideology of the right over the political proposal of the left:
a. The precariousness of the economic life of the country politically destructures the most conscious sectors of the working class.
b. The precariousness of the country’s political life generates the conditions for the development of clientelism.
c. Political clientelism populism generates the conditions for the structuring of right-wing political populism, which manifests itself first with “political independence” and then with the emergence of “Fujimorism”, both of which develop pro-capitalist, non-liberal proposals. It is necessary to emphasize that this populism arises from the crisis of the largest left-wing populist movement in our country, the APRA. Both left-wing and right-wing populism have sold the idea of a capitalist revolution, in the left-wing version this aims to create a national bourgeoisie from the state – in which attempt Alan Garcia and his twelve apostles failed – while the second aims to create a capitalist revolution “liberating market forces” and, through popular capitalism, create the conditions for the development of a national bourgeoisie. As opposed to the political alternative of the “non-socialist social revolution” proposed by the APRA since its foundation, after its failure, a revolution against politics is proposed from a technocratic but implicitly pro-system perspective.
The truth is that, from both processes, which are continuous in time, the only thing that emerged was a brute and shrunken bourgeoisie and a lumpenization of politics never seen before, not only in the sphere of the state, but in all social strata, what is strengthened is the informal economy.
In the same way, this “liberation” of market forces, the only thing it produces is the strengthening of monopolies, especially financial ones, which is the space in which transnationals, monopolies, informal activities and enriched politicians, launder their ill-gotten money at the expense of poverty and precariousness of the majorities.
d. This advance of populism is also produced because the opportunist sectors of the left -in its social democratic and liberal-progressive version- abandon the political struggle in the spheres of the governments they lead, leave the defense of the principles to fall into pragmatism, do not define what kind of left they are with the intention of continuing winning elections, that is to say, they abandon the clear definition of socialism-communism that allowed the construction of the United Left, which allowed the emergence of ideological Confucianism and the citizenship to lose the ability to distinguish between the United Left and the left-wing, the clear definition of socialism-communism that allowed the construction of the United Left is abandoned, which allowed the emergence of ideological confusion and that the citizens lost the ability to distinguish between the Marxist, revolutionary and socialist left and the rest of the populist parties that labeled themselves as left every time there were electoral processes.
The crisis was such that within the opportunist left itself the idea of a popular capitalism began to be put forward, which produced the emergence of the “independence” of the “non-partisanship” within Izquierda Unida, then the struggle for the “own profile” and finally the division of the left.
It is on the basis of this decomposition in the social movement that “independentism” and Fujimorism emerge, also based on a militaristic authoritarianism that is deeply installed in the popular collective imagination and that has to do with the idea of order rather than a proposal based on solidly supported programs. It is on the basis of this defeat of Marxist doctrinaire politics, which is a crisis of praxis, that the right-wing ideology is strengthened, built not only on neo-liberal ideas, but also on a strong combination of prejudices, fears and passionate feelings that the right wing systematically and functionally instrumentalizes, without the left being able to propose a real alternative to left and right-wing populism.
Fujimorism, armed with a vast propaganda apparatus, developed a successful strategy of de-ideologization of the youth and student sectors, militarily occupying the main Peruvian universities such as San Marcos, UNI and La Cantuta. Developing a fierce campaign of anti-communism, advocating individualism against solidarity, unscrupulous competition, the exchange of humanist values for market values that fed the disenchantment of the popular sectors with the political parties that plunged the country into the crises of the 80s (Acción Popular, Partido Popular Cristiano and APRA) and the disillusionment with the parties that were incapable of becoming the government alternative to overcome the crisis and the terrorist, paramilitary and state violence, such as Izquierda Unida (United Left).
Fujimorism masterfully implemented the ideological recipe of neoliberalism: the de-ideologization of the organized and unorganized popular sectors, imposing on them the belief that their goals are at the limits of economic demands: better working conditions (decent work), worker-employer social dialogue, receiving social assistance and self-employment, thus demoralizing in the organized popular sectors the objective of fighting for power and building socialism.
In its strategy of ideological penetration of imperialism in Peru, it deployed a tenacious war with neo-liberalism as a battering ram, which showed the self-dissolution of the USSR and the fall of the Eastern European socialist bloc as the end of the socialist-communist paradigm and the “impossibility” of the struggle for socialism of the communists and left-wing socialists.
II. Popular power and the new State. Recovering the popular sectors from a perspective of building independence.
Reversing the de-ideologization of the popular sectors to transform them into agents of revolutionary change for socialism, requires the development of a tactic that has as its axis to solve, in the first place, the independence-imperialism contradiction, which facilitates the incorporation of other social sectors to the anti-imperialist struggle and in second place the development of the productive forces.
The words of Condoleezza Rice “to change the platform of Europe’s energy dependence on Russia for dependence on US energy resources” summarizes the strategy of imperialism in its essence: obtaining natural resources and monopolistic markets, where wars, diplomacy, sanctions, embargoes and other means of coercion are only mechanisms to satisfy the voracity of expanded capital.
Latin American countries are tied to a system of very deep dependencies, which affect various areas of the development of our countries, obstructing in one way or another the construction and development of the productive forces towards the goal of socialism.
In this context, in which the struggle of state monopoly capital struggles to maintain its hegemony through sanctions and war, the policy of struggle against imperialism is correct. However, it is necessary to understand that this confrontation has several levels:
a. That of the struggle at the level of regional blocs against the financial dictatorship of the dollar in the world economic system. In a way these blocs could be categorized as an anti-fascist world popular front. The BRISC, the Shanghai group, OPEC-Plus among others.
b. The anti-imperialist and anti-fascist political movements, which are not necessarily spaces of struggle for socialism.
Yes, in this context of struggle, we face the big corporate monopolies which are in a frank process of fascistization due to their loss of hegemonic power in the economic war we have gone through since the imposition of capitalist globalization in the 1990s. Dimitrov maintained that “fascism is the shameless terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist and most imperialist elements of financial capital”, however, this definition could lead us to identify “terrorist dictatorship” with a dictatorial and totalitarian regime, which is a mistake, because every state rests on mechanisms of force and this is equivalent to thinking that there is a true dichotomy “democracy vs. dictatorship” and to confusing form with essence. Today’s fascism will not be the same as that of the 30’s, it will come with another disguise, today’s fascism can perfectly articulate party pluralism with single thinking, it can be sustained not in a single state ideology, but in a massive stupidization of the population through the media, these are the forms that are already beginning to be revealed in the militarization proposed by NATO and in the war as the main way to solve economic and political problems, the cases of Ukraine and the conflict in Taiwan are manifestations of this.
These dependencies become a powerful instrument of imperialism and the neoliberal model when our nations seek a different path of development, without having broken the chains that bind them to the system of dependencies imposed by the empire.
On the other hand, the dependence of Latin American countries can become an essential political instrument for the instrumentalization of our countries by international financial capital and the military industrial complex at key moments of political confrontation.
Therefore, the struggle against the process of fascization that is being experienced on a world scale as a product of the crisis of the unipolar world and the emergence of a multipolar world, should not lead us to abandon the main struggle which is for socialism. We must transform the anti-fascist and anti-imperialist struggle into a permanent struggle against capitalism and for a socialist alternative.
In the strategy of developing a successful anti-imperialist struggle, the case of Peru lies in the communists, the leftist parties, the organized popular sectors conceiving an alternative project of nationhood, which has as its axis the solution of the independence-imperialism contradiction.
In that sense, it is necessary for communists to work in three strategic directions:
a. The construction of a politicized social movement in a socialist perspective, which means strengthening the party-civil society relationship.
b. Work to occupy spaces of power and turn them into referents of economic, social and political transformation.
c. Work to improve our ways of communicating our political perspective on the basis of popularizing socialist ideas.
In the strategy of struggle for the new society in transit to socialism, the overcoming of this dependence must ensure the leadership of the new society and the new State by the workers trained in the management of social production, which must be the essence of the anti-imperialist constitutional ideology.
