Contemporary
Peru is a semi-feudal and semi-colonial society in which bureaucratic
capitalism operates at the service of imperialism.
It is in
the light of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, mainly Maoism, that Chairman Gonzalo has
shown how the semi-feudal and semi-colonial character is maintained and new
modalities are developed, and particularly how bureaucratic capitalism has
developed on this basis throughout the process of contemporary society, a
problem of transcendence to understand the character of society and the
Peruvian revolution.
He argues
that in order to analyze the contemporary social process, it is necessary to
start from three closely linked questions: the moments that bureaucratic
capitalism is going through; the process of the proletariat expressed in its
highest expression: the Communist Party; and, the path that the revolution must
follow. Thus, he teaches us that in contemporary Peruvian society three
moments can be distinguished from 1895 onwards: Moment I. Development of
bureaucratic capitalism. Constitution of the PCP. Indication and outline of the
path to surround the cities from the countryside; II moment. Deepening
of bureaucratic capitalism. Reconstitution of the PCP. Establishment of the
path to surround the cities from the countryside; and III moment.
General crisis of bureaucratic capitalism. PCP leadership of the people's war.
Application and development of the path to surround the cities from the
countryside.
At the same
time, it states that contemporary Peruvian society is in a general crisis,
sick, serious, incurable and can only be transformed through armed struggle as
the Communist Party of Peru has been doing leading the people, and that there
is no other solution.
The
obsolete semi-feudal system continues to exist and marks the country from its
deepest foundations to its most elaborate ideas and, in essence, maintains the
persistent problem of land, the driving force of the class struggle of the
peasantry, especially the poor, which is the vast majority," he stresses
that the land problem continues to exist because semi-feudal relations of
exploitation are maintained, evolving into semi-feudality, the basic problem of
society that is expressed in land, servitude and gamonalism; a condition that
we must see in all aspects, economic, political and ideological, at the base
and in the superstructure.
Reaffirming
Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Chairman Gonzalo upholds the principle that agrarian
reform is the destruction of feudal landed property, individual delivery to the
peasantry under the slogan "Land for those who work it" and that is
achieved with people's war and new Power, led by the Communist Party; Likewise,
Lenin's thesis that there are two paths in agriculture: the landowner who is
reactionary, evolves feudalism and leads to the old State, and the peasant who
is advanced, destroys feudalism and leads to the new State.
The
landowner character of the agrarian laws, the results of the agrarian laws
given by the old State, proving the survival of semi-feudalism that is now
being denied.
All this
means nothing but new forms of concentration of the old latifundist property
that has not been destroyed, and it is the old landowning path followed in
contemporary Peru that was promoted in the 1920s, deepened in the 1950s and
especially in the 1960s, and continues to this day, under new conditions.
We quote an
interesting article to document what is written in the previous paragraphs:
"In
this short essay, I would like to argue that the growing inequality in the
distribution of land is, once again, a boiling problem for Peruvian
agriculture, and therefore deserves comprehensive treatment by the State and
civil society.
As a
starting point, it is necessary to recognize that the agrarian structure in
Peru is increasingly bipolar (Eguren, 2012), with two opposing trends that have
been accentuated over time. On the one hand, the emergence of large estates in
the agricultural frontier areas; and, on the other, the exacerbation of
smallholdings in peasant and indigenous territories.
For three
decades, we have experienced a new process of land concentration in Peru;
especially on the coast and in the Amazon region of the country. This process
is the product of the neoliberal turn of the State that, starting with the 1993
constitution and a series of regulations and institutions, has actively
dedicated itself to promoting:
•
Liberalization (elimination of legal barriers) to the land market,
• The
physical and/or legal development of agricultural lands in areas not
traditionally used for farming (deserts and forests), and
• The
presence of large private investment in the agricultural sector. (Remy and De
los Ríos, 2012)
This
created the conditions for the creation of new large properties and the rise of
large export agribusiness as a paradigm of agricultural development in the
country.
In
parallel, an accelerated process of fragmentation of land ownership and tenure
has been taking place at the level of family farming (ECLAC, 2020), generally
producers organized in peasant and native communities.
The result
of the differentiated intervention of the State is an agrarian structure of a
markedly unequal evolution. As an example, a button: on the Peruvian coast,
Bourlliard and Eresue (2015) show that the expansion of the agricultural
frontier in the deserts has been almost entirely exploited by corporate
agriculture. Thus, between 1994 and 2012, farms larger than 500 hectares grew
dramatically both in number (+338% more units) and in surface area (+291%[2]
more land under their control) (Bourlliard and Eresue, 2015). The same did not
happen for family farming units (5 hectares or less), which not only grew to a
lesser extent, but this increase was greater in the number of farms (+41%) than
in managed surface area (+12%). If we look at the distribution of the pie for
the year 2012, while more than 250 thousand family farming units control nearly
50% of the irrigated land on the coast, 82 large properties (from 2,500
hectares or more) own nearly 1/3 of this resource (Bourlliard and Eresue,
2015).
The central
problem is that these two models, that of the large corporate latifundia and
the tiny minifundia or “microfundio”, are unsustainable. Araujo (2022) shows that
the economic growth and apparent productive efficiency[3] of the large
agro-industries on the north coast has been sustained by a high precariousness
of employment and greater pressure on the State's public services.
Consequently, economic and human development in these territories is meager,
and their inhabitants suffer from economic vulnerability, educational
attainment and very restricted access to health, among other drawbacks of a
model sustained by the concentration of resources and limited distribution of
income (Araujo, 2022). (…).
For its
part, the progressive fragmentation of land constrains the productive
efficiency of family farming and its capacity to generate development (…). An
even more critical effect, from my perspective, is the potential regression in
the capitalization of labor relations in the field. Microfinance could
negatively affect (reduce) the demand for wage labor and harm sectors of rural
society that depend on agricultural labor.
From: The
land distribution problem: a silence that must end in agrarian policy, by Ana
Lucía Araujo R, PUCP, 2022.
The land
problem is latent and worsening. Linked to this are prices.
Peruvian
agriculture is sinking more and more every day, buying foreign food, the rest
is pure cheap demagogy. And that base is the foundation of this society and it
is there where semi-feudal relations are expressed most clearly on the Peruvian
coast as in the mountains and the jungle; the regression towards non-technical
forms; these agricultural relations colour the whole society from its deepest
roots to its most subtle forms of exposure, we must not forget that.
This
landowning path is expressed politically in the old State through gamonalism;
As Mariátegui says, gamonalismo does not designate only a social and economic
category but a whole phenomenon represented not only by the gamonales
themselves but also includes a long hierarchy of functionaries, intermediaries,
agents, parasites, etc., and that the central factor of the phenomenon is the
hegemony of the large semi-feudal property in politics and in the mechanism of
the State, which must be attacked at its root. And Chairman Gonzalo expressly
highlights the manifestation of semi-feudality in politics and in the mechanism
of the State, by conceiving that gamonalismo is the political manifestation of
semi-feudality on which this regime of servitude is sustained, in which bosses
and lackeys act, representatives of the old State in the most remote towns of
the country, although they change their clothes according to the government in
power; a factor against which the spearhead of the democratic revolution is
directed as an agrarian war.
On
gamonalismo, we quote:
“A final
issue that needs to be highlighted is related to the power and control that
these economic groups are acquiring beyond the boundaries of their lands. The
subordinate position of some of the medium and large landowners who have
associated with them has already been mentioned, not to mention the small
landowners who have rented their land or the thousands of residents who work as
laborers on their properties. By placing themselves above the traditional
actors, it is not difficult to foresee that the new companies will exert a
strong influence on local authorities. Even more so when mayors see the
possibility of carrying out infrastructure works thanks to the financing of
large economic groups that, otherwise, would be impossible to carry out; or
when companies such as Maple pay significant sums of money to regional
governments. In this way, the concentration of land on a scale such as that
seen today in Peru brings with it the concentration of power, which is not
healthy for either the rural sector or the country.”
From: The
process of land concentration in Peru, Burneo, Zulema, 2011 International
Coalition for Access to Land.
On
employment and the character of society, as we have seen in the underlines of
Araujo's article (PUCP, 2022), another study says the following:
“We must
distinguish work from employment. The latter is wage labor.
Work, which
is a broader category, includes the self-employed, the independent, and also
wage earners who specialize in employment.
This second
form of exclusion reflects the dynamics of labour insertion. In developed
countries, for example, the basic and dominant way in which a person joins the
EAP is as a salaried worker. However, in economies like ours, in the Andean
area and Central America – except Costa Rica – this modality has not been the
hegemonic one. Salaried employment has not been the dominant category of
insertion in the occupied EAP, but rather a significant percentage of
self-employment, independent work, persists.
When Weller
points out that employment is a second form of exclusion, it is because not
everyone can earn a salary. Regarding the Peruvian case, two economists
(Francisco Verdera 4 and Adolfo Figueroa 5 )
have worked
on this subject: the issue of the precariousness of the labour market not
understood as precariousness of working conditions, but rather precariousness
in the sense that it has not become a market predominantly of salaried workers,
so to speak.
In other
words, Peruvian capitalism (i.e. bureaucratic capitalism, our note) has not
managed to fully expand and, therefore, wage relations – capital and labor –
have not yet reached the point of involving the majority of the employed EAP.
Notes
4 Verdera,
Francisco. Employment in Peru: a new approach. Lima: Institute of Peruvian
Studies (IEP), 1983. See in this regard: goo.gl/cDjiVO
5 Figueroa,
Adolfo. The nature of the labor market. Lima: Pontifical Catholic University of
Peru - Department of Economics, 1983. Available at: goo.gl/i4Odsu"
From: Labor
informality: between concepts and public policies, Julio Gamero R. In Peru
Today, Underground Peru - 2013
Another
study on production relations in the countryside says:
“It is
clear that both productive and non-reproductive activities can be carried out
at the same time and that small-scale agriculture consumes and sells. Is there
any way of knowing whether small-scale agriculture, where it is expected to
find more child labour, is dedicated more to self-consumption or to sale?
According to Fernando Eguren, the country's food security depends on it,
nothing less. Indeed, the 2012 National Agricultural Census indicates that food
products are grown more in small units, more likely operated under the logic of
family production. The obvious question is: how do we get to the situation
where a country's food security is based on an essentially "informal"
activity (in the terms in which it has been defined until now)? What explains
this state disdain? The relationship of small farmers with the market is
largely haphazard, dependent on relatively precarious production conditions. In
this small-scale agriculture, we are interested in the informal nature of the
labor links that are established, where children are allowed to work in a wide
range of activities, and where perhaps the most paradigmatic and alarming thing
is that child labor is informal within the informal and underreported within
the underreported."
From: Some
notes on rural child labor Werner Jungbluth M. In the previously cited
collection.