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Elections 2021 and Peruvian reformist politicians – Promises, promises…

Recent Presidents of Peru were a lousy lot: Alberto Fujimori (jailed 25 years for terror); Alan García (committed suicide charged with bribery from Brazilian firm Odebrecht); Alejandro Toledo (fugitive from Obdebrecht); Pedro Pablo Kuczinski (house arrest Obdebrecht); Martin Vizcarra (impeached twice, banned from office for jumping lines for COVID vaccination). Who comes next?

After much delay, Pedro Castillo was declared to have won Presidential elections against Keiko Fujimori (Alberto’s daughter). What can workers and peasants of Peru expect of Castillo? Capitalists aim to simply gull Peruvian toilers yet again. More false promises of fighting imperialism without revolution.

Previously, this dead-end led to another – isolated ‘focos’, spontaneous guerrilla-ism unlinked to workers’ movements. Lenin said that the wages of opportunism in the labour movement is ultra-left adventurism and anarchism – of which one key component is individual terror:

“Anarchism was often a sort of punishment for the opportunist sins of the working class movement. Both monstrosities mutually supplemented each other”.[1]

Both errors (i.e. right ‘socialist’ reformist paths and ultra-left guerrilla-ism) are rooted in avoiding the difficult but necessary path of building a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary party of the workers and peasants.  We review approaches to imperialism of Mariategui and Marxist-Leninists and compare them to reformist compacts with imperialism. Under the latter are various shades of national bourgeoisie. But these have repeatedly capitulated to comprador bourgeoisie and imperialism.

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[1] V. I. Lenin: “’Left-wing Communism’, An Infantile Disorder”, in: “Selected Works”, Volume 10; London; 1946; p. 71.

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