Another look at Protracted Peoples’ War - the nuts and bolts strategy of the Peruvian Revolution—part 3

By SJ Otto

Recently I re-read the article “On Infantile Internet Disorders and Real Questions of Revolutionary Strategy: A Response to the “Debate” over the Universality of Protracted People’s War,” by Kenny Lake. The article was in Kites Journal. While the article is basically an attack on the Gonzaloistas on the internet, it has a lot of examples of tactics the pro-Gonzalo people used that worked well.

When I read this article a second time, I realized he has taken a hard look at the people’s war that the Communist Party of Peru (often referred to as Shining Path or Sendero Luminoso in Spanish) carried out and he actually found a lot of things that the group did right. The tone of the article seems as if he is against the Gonzalo movement. At one point he wrote:

“The greatest weakness of Sendero Luminoso and Chairman Gonzalo is that many of

its/his written statements are dogmatic as fuck. There, I said it. There is a strong religiosity emanating from many of these statements that projects a grand and godly faith in the impending victory of the revolution, even suggesting the strategic offensive of the world revolution (in the 1980s?!?), rather than a compelling, nuanced analysis of the state of the world and the prospects for and difficulties of revolution.”

But there were other points he made in the groups favor. For example he noticed that the Senderos made use of their positions at the university where they worked. They used this as a tactic to recruit and to develop and spread their ideas:

Using Bourgeois Institutions to Accumulate Revolutionary Forces

Sendero Luminoso did not just come out of nowhere, guns blazing, and launch people’s war in 1980. They spent over a decade building up support and organization, principally among the rural population in the Ayacucho region, but also among other strata of society and in other areas. And the way they did so was an ingenious use of bourgeois institutions for the purpose of accumulating revolutionary forces. In 1962, a young Abimael Guzmán (AKA Chairman Gonzalo) was appointed professor of philosophy at the National University of San Cristóbal de Huamanga in the capital of the Ayacucho region. There, in rousing lectures that earned him the nickname “Champú,” Professor Guzmán and his comrades used their faculty positions to present students with a historical materialist understanding of society and the need for revolution. By the late 1960s, Sendero Luminoso had virtual control over the university, including administrative functions, and had a particularly strong position within the teacher’s college. They used these positions to recruit the cadre who would go on to form the backbone of the people’s war. Moreover, from the teacher’s college, they dispatched newly-minted university graduates to the surrounding peasant communities in the Ayacucho region as school teachers, where they in turn conducted social investigation and organized those peasant communities in preparation for launching the people’s war.

This strategic use of the University of Huamanga to recruit communist cadre was made possible by the fact that the nationalist Peruvian governments of the 1960s and ’70s put considerable government resources into eduction, resulting in extremely high rates of secondary school and college education, including among the proletariat and peasantry. This was done in part to bring the periphery—largely Indian and peasant—under the ideological hegemony of the Peruvian bourgeoisie, which was largely white and mestizo and centered in the cities. Students at the University of Huamanga were mostly from Quechua Indian peasant backgrounds and the first in their family to receive higher education. But since the Peruvian economy had no future for all these educated basic masses, especially as it went into foreign debt crisis in the 1980s and was subjected to IMF-mandated SAPs (structural adjustment programs), the dashed expectations among young, educated proletarians and peasants created fertile ground for communist recruitment.

Gonzalo’s strategic genius was in taking advantage of the bourgeoisie’s rapid expansion of education to gain temporary footholds within the bourgeois ideological state apparatuses and use these positions to accumulate forces for revolution—in other words, in his correct reading of the conjuncture, not prophetic divination. These positions were always temporary, and Sendero lost its control over the University of Huamanga by the mid 1970s. But the damage was done, and Sendero cadre trained at the university were already organizing peasants all over Ayacucho—the region that would become the first stronghold of the people’s war in the early 1980s. Professor Guzmán took a position at La Cantuta teacher’s college on the outskirts of Lima in the mid-to-late 1970s, recruiting more teachers into Sendero’s ranks. Sendero would continue to employ this strategy in other places throughout the people’s war. For example, it deployed 100 teachers in schools in the slums of the Central Highway region east of Lima, helping the people’s war to advance towards the center of bourgeois power. Here there is a broader lesson: the bourgeoisie’s ideological hegemony over the masses is something that has to be forged and continually reforged, and at moments when the nature of this hegemony is in transition, as it was when the Peruvian bourgeoisie massively expanded education in part to bring more peripheral populations under its ideological hegemony, communists can seize opportunities. For more detail on Sendero’s use of bourgeois educational institutions, see my article “Gramsci and Gonzalo: Considerations on Conquering Combat Positions within the Inner Wall of Hegemony.”

This is a tactic that has been used extensively in the US for many years. No where has the US left been more successful than taking up positions at universities. There was a time in the 1970s when followers of Herbert Marcuse relied heavily on universities to promote what many people were calling the “new left.”

Conservatives have not ignored the leftist presence on Campuses. There have been attempts to build up campaigns against so called “political correctness.”

For example, Zack Beauchamp, writing for Vox, raised the issue:

Does “political correctness” really crush conservative speech on campus? The data suggests no.

Also SHIKHA DALMIA wrote for Reason:

When it comes to free speech on American campuses, there seems to be a law of conservation at work: Just when the internal threat of censorship from left-wing campus activists is abating, the external threat from right-wing lawmakers starts rising. Given that the new threat relies not on the decibel level of immature 18-year-olds but the state power of motivated adults, it may be much harder to fight.

Concerns about political correctness on campus date back at least 25 years before Philip Roth wrote The Human Stain, his brilliant novel depicting the travails of a half-black classics professor pretending to be Jewish who gets summarily fired after black students take offense over his use of the word "spooks."

There have also been attempts to eliminate tenure for public college and university professors. There is little doubt that getting rid of leftist teachers is a major motivation for these efforts.

Another important factor Lake presents us with is that the Senderos learned Quechua, the language of the Indian peasants and they focused on organizing an actual peasant base. Organizing the actual people who need revolution the most is hard work. Much of the established political parties in Peru do what Marxist parties do every where—the hang out with intellectuals and avoid the real shitty work that is necessary for building a revolutionary movement:

When it came to the organized Left, Sendero largely stayed out of the debates and turf wars among it in the 1960s and ’70s, instead focusing its efforts on building a mass base and training communist cadre among the Quechua-speaking Indian peasants of Ayacucho. The organized Left, by contrast, was centered in Lima and had little interest in devoting attention and organization to peripheral Ayacucho, where they would have had to learn Quechua (which Sendero cadre did) and integrate with a culture and a way of life that was foreign to them. The new generation of “Maoists” in the US could take a hint from this example, turn off their computers, stop spending so much time among the same circles of Leftists, and instead go to the housing projects, get jobs alongside immigrants in the fields and meatpacking plants, or find whatever other appropriate ways to integrate with the masses.

In this country a leftist group would need to focus on the actual working class—the people who work in factories. The other places to organize would include the slums. This would require getting to know minorities, such as Afro-Americans. A few years ago, the Socialist Workers Party came to Wichita and tried to give their news paper to factory workers and they made and honest effort to organize among the workers. They weren’t successful, but they do deserve some praise for going to the places that leftists need to go in order to build a revolutionary movement.

One charge against the Senderos was that they attacked established leftist parties. That sounds pretty bad, but Lake actually defended some of their actions, using hard evidence that some of this was justified:

While this alliance of classes under Sendero’s leadership was possible and necessary, the people’s war also confronted a political situation quite different from China in the 1930s and ’40s. Peru had a highly developed organized Left that in many cases occupied government positions and a network of internationally-funded NGOs providing social services, especially in the slums. On the latter, it’s no coincidence that bourgeois economist Hernando de Soto, advocate of land-titling and micro-entrepreneurship as the “solution” to poverty in the slums, hailed from Peru. NGO-sponsored projects among the slum masses of Lima were being praised internationally in the 1980s by neoliberal ideologues bent on preventing revolution through petty-bourgeoisifying slum residents. As Lenin constantly reminded us about small-scale production, these projects promoting entrepreneurship only resulted in class differentiation, with a few successful and the majority slipping into deeper poverty. As a consequence, class conflict within the slums of Lima could be considerable and the NGOs responsible for this were by and large acting as defenders of the 1980s neoliberal reordering of capitalism-imperialism. So Sendero’s targeting of NGOs and the petty-bourgeois elite within the slums as it advanced the people’s war in Lima needs to be evaluated in this context—which doesn’t mean Sendero was always correct in how it handled this antagonism, but it does mean the antagonism was real.

United Left and the Sendero attacks

When Sendero did start making strategic moves into Lima, it confronted an organized Left that acted as an impediment to the advance of the people’s war. Union leaders sought to prevent strikes from turning into class struggle. The Izquierda Unida (IU, United Left) held considerable government positions, with its candidate Alfonso Barrantes elected mayor of Lima in 1984 and promising a glass of milk a day for every child. The IU also had considerable authority in some shantytowns established prior to the 1980s. A salient example is Villa El Salvador, a slum governed by the IU in the 1980s and celebrated as a model where slum residents were lifting themselves up through entrepreneurship. The IU program in Villa El Salvador resulted in some slum micro-entrepreneurs getting ahead while many others fell behind, with 46% underemployment by the mid-1980s. Many of the new migrants arriving after 1980 were left to fend for themselves without the benefits of IU clientelism. Consequently, Sendero’s popularity in the face of the failure of Leftist reforms grew, as did its organized strength in the neighborhood. The IU responded to Sendero’s advance and the justified complaints of the masses against IU failures by increasingly standing in the way of the revolution and even siding with the Peruvian military. IU district vice mayor María Elena Moyano openly called for the formation of rondas (anti-Sendero “neighborhood defense organizations” aligned with the Peruvian government) and led a fifty-person “peace” march in Villa El Salvador during Sendero’s February 1992 Lima armed stike. Moyano was subsequently assassinated by Sendero guerrillas. By March 1992, Sendero had the upper hand in CUAVES, the neighborhood-based governing body of Villa El Salvador, and was leading residents in protests demanding the IU municipal government step down, as it had failed to meet the needs of the people and had even allowed the recent establishment of a military base in the district.

I have found that Troskyists have really been hard on the Senderos, condemning them as if they were the terrorist group that bourgeois politicians and pundits claim they are. I rarely read anyone, besides the actual Gonzaloistas, who actually defend the Peruvian Maoists. Even some Maoists have condemned the actions of these Senderos. So to sum up Lake’s comments:

Summing Up Sendero Luminoso and the People’s War in Peru

One of the grand failures of the international communist movement (ICM) in recent decades has been its inability to or lack of interest in summing up recent waves of revolutionary struggle. As a consequence, there is no comprehensive history of the people’s war in Peru. This is despite Sendero Luminoso’s accomplishments organizing a mass base for revolutionary struggle first in the highland regions of Peru, expanding across the periphery and into the slums of Lima, and advancing people’s war to become a serious contender for power in the early 1990s. There was debate in the pages of A World To Win against the right-opportunist line within the Communist Party of Peru that argued for peace negotiations after the 1992 capture of Chairman Gonzalo. As important as that debate was in the mid-1990s, it mainly addressed the “line” questions as statements of principles rather than concrete analysis of the history of the people’s war and its current state that could have helped chart a path forward. At the same time and especially in recent years, there has been a lot of recycling of old statements by Sendero Luminoso and Chairman Gonzalo by the church of PPW universalism.

While Lake does not appear to be a hard core Gonzaloista supporter, this is probably the most positive article on the Peruvian Revolution I have ever read, outside of actual Gonzaloistas. This is similar to the approach we have taken here at this blog site. We criticize them for the things we don’t think work well, but we study those things that worked well for them. All together the Peruvian Revolution went very well until the capture of Chairman Gonzalo. The Communist Party of Peru was too top heavy. They did not seem to have a back up plan in case Gonzalo was captured. That flaw brought the military wing down. But the Gonzaloistas have continued to build a revolutionary movement. That movement has gone world-wide. They may have lost the military campaign, but they have continued as a revolutionary movement. I appreciate the enthusiasm of the Gonzaloistas. They obviously have some ideas we can use. So we will continue to give them space here at this blog. I’m not sure why they seem to come off as dogmatic. They do seem that way at times. Maybe that arose from the Peruvian culture? Maybe there are other reasons for that attitude? Over time this is something we can study, along with Gonzaloista tactics.