In Peru, the deepening economic crisis of capitalism and its impact on the wage-earning masses and the oppressed strata, those whose standard of living is deteriorating, fuels an ongoing clash between the various bourgeois parties in parliament that represent the interests of different sectors of employers and the economy. Whether these parties call themselves left, right or center, they are all, without exception, political tentacles of the ruling class.

But these inter-bourgeois contradictions, which are reflected in the clash between the different parties that make up the parliament, are not only an expression of the struggle for the control of business and contracts and for access to the money of corruption. It is also the struggle between parties, institutions and trade unions to find the most effective method to keep the proletariat demobilized, disorganized and divided, the class that carries on its shoulders the heavy burden of hunger, malnutrition, unemployment, low wages and lack of health care.

But the bourgeoisie will never find a party or political front capable of channeling and appeasing the discontent of the masses. Peru, in which there have been five presidents in the last five years, is an example of this. That is why it’s always ready for the alternative of coup d’état and open dictatorship.

This time the parties in parliament succeeded in bringing down President Pedro Castillo, who’s been accused of a coup and intent to dissolve parliament. Castillo was placed in preventative detention, which could be extended for 18 months, pending investigation for orchestrating rebellion and abuse of authority. Vice President Dina Boluarte was named the new president and immediately appointed her ministers.

Heated clashes within Congress forced the new president to call for new elections once more in April 2024 to make room for other political forces.

However, the streets were filled with protesters demanding Castillo’s reinstatement. In response, Boluarte immediately declared a state of emergency where the protests were loudest, denouncing them as part of Castillo’s attempted “self-coup” plan. According to the protesters, however, the coup was ostensibly carried out by Congress and parties opposed to Castillo. Clashes escalated and hundreds of protesters were injured while dozens were killed.

Prior to Castillo’s attempted “self-coup”, the Fujimori-majority Peruvian Congress had discussed the introduction of a “presidential vacancy”, but didn’t have enough votes to approve it.

The Fujimorist political gang attacked Castillo from his first day in office and tried to remove him. In a year and a half, three motions sought to affirm his “moral or physical inability” to continue in office. But all the political concessions made to opponents, both nationally and internationally, were of no help. Finally Castillo, on December 7, announced in a televised message that he would dissolve Congress and form an emergency government, impose a night curfew, and rule by decree. The Peruvian Constitution gives the president the power to dissolve Parliament. Immediately, the media loyal to the Fujimori gang announced that Castillo had implemented a “coup d’état”.

Pedro Castillo was but another administrator of the interests of the bourgeoisie, a representative of corporate economic groups, despite his previously having been a trade unionist or teacher. He was yet another of the bourgeoisie’s endless attempts to find some trickster, a “pied piper”, to delude the masses into submission to bourgeois politics.

But the various representatives of the bourgeoisie in parliament couldn’t agree on a modicum of institutional stability. Castillo posed no threat to the interests of the bourgeoisie, but he was still a casualty of inter-bourgeois contradictions.

The workers have nothing to gain by raising the banners of defending democracy or demanding Pedro Castillo’s reinstatement as president. These illusions only lead workers to defend the capitalist regime that exploits them.

The General Confederation of Workers of Peru (CGTP) proved that it works for the bosses, a mere apparatus of the bourgeois State, when it called on workers to reject the “insult to democracy” and to mobilize for “political reform”, a new constitution and early general elections. The CGTP leadership, while cynically declaring that “Congress doesn’t respond to the interests of the working class and the people” and that the current parliament is useless, nonetheless entices workers to place their hope on the election of new deputies and senators, as if that will stop the process of exploitation and impoverishment of the masses. Parliament does not and never will represent the interests of the working class. Congress, in Peru and throughout the world, is just one of the institutions of bourgeois democracy in the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat. It’s one of the institutions that must be swept away by the proletarian revolution, through class struggle, and not through the sacrosanct “constitutional path” of elections and laws as proclaimed by the traitors and politicians of the CGTP and all parties that live in Parliament or seek votes to enter it.

The Agricultural People’s Front of Peru (FARP), which groups peasant and indigenous organizations, called a national strike and declared itself in “popular insurrection”, making the same demands as the CGTP, but in addition demanded Castillo’s freedom, the closure of Congress and the establishment of a Constituent Assembly. This “popular insurrection”, raising democratic-bourgeois flags, drags the workers into an interclass, entirely bourgeois program in which the demands of the wage-earners are so watered down that they’re totally abandoned.

Meanwhile, proletarians get injured and die in the streets, in the occupation of infrastructure, manning the barricades, and in violent clashes with the military and police apparatus of the bourgeois Peruvian State.

Unsurprisingly, Peru’s “Communist” Party immediately recognized the new ruler, aligning itself with the Fujimorist gang and the governments of Spain and the United States. In contrast, the governments of Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico and Bolivia expressed support for Castillo and denounced the coup by his opponents in the government. These alignments are merely expressions of the political fronts that traditionally compete to be the stewards of the interests of the bourgeoisie in all countries. Peru is no different.

The conceivable outcomes, e.g., consolidation of the new government, reinstatement of Castillo, Constituent Assembly, early elections, etc., are all bourgeois-democratic solutions that not only do not break with the capitalist order, but continue wage exploitation and mercantile domination.

No to political reform, no to a new constitution, and no to an early general election! Yes to a general strike for higher wages and pensions, for the reduction of working hours, for the reduction of retirement age, for the payment of full wages to the unemployed, for the improvement of working conditions and environment, and against the repression of workers’ struggles!

It’s necessary for workers, in the midst of their struggles, to rebuild a true class union. The class union unites all wage-earners without distinction of industry, sex, nationality or race. The class union organizes outside the workplace to unite the class at the territorial level. The class union takes back the strike as its main form of struggle, ready to confront bourgeois parliamentary laws and government repression. It undertakes indefinite strikes, without notice, without minimum services and outside the conciliatory mechanisms imposed by all governments with the support of the bourgeois International Labor Office.

Essential for a qualitative leap in the struggles of the proletariat is the presence of the real Communist Party, the only true expression of any non-individual revolutionary will.

We communists attentively follow the evolution of the workers’ movement and readily prepare for the transformation of all united struggles for the demands of the working class into political struggle, for the seizure of power, for the destruction of bourgeois democracy and its parliamentary regime, for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the full implementation of the communist program.

- From El Partido Comunista, N. 30, January 2023