NOTES AND MATERIALS ON CONTEMPORARY PERU (I)
Hereby, we publish an article found in Nuevo Perú.
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.