2023-11-17 15:26:14
By Victor Montes
Failed, without pain or glory, the motion for vacancy due to permanent moral incapacity presented against Dina Boluarte by the groups that call themselves left in Congress (Together for Peru-Democratic Change and even Peru Libre), the absolute impotence of these parliamentary groups in the fight against the government.
Furthermore, their actions show the most absolute disconnection with the workers’ and popular organizations, which they impose their strategy and try to permanently subordinate.
That is why it is worth asking again: What role do these political groups, which claim to represent the people in Congress, play in the fight against Boluarte’s murderous government? What should be the role of a true parliamentary representation of the workers and the people?
Again about parliament
The Congress of the Republic, the parliament, is one of the institutions that make up the Peruvian State. A state that since its origin, represents and defends the interests of the dominant, racist and discriminatory classes, absolutely subject to the power of the imperialist powers (first England and then the United States), from which they receive the crumbs of the feast that means plunder. of our riches. And with those crumbs, they have made their fortune.
This characteristic is not exclusive to the Peruvian State. Throughout the world, states represent the interests and power of the class that lives off the exploitation of other people’s labor: the class of capitalists, the bourgeoisie, owners of the banks, mines, factories, oil wells and all the large companies that They exist in the world. And that State is designed to protect that power by force of its laws and bullets.
In this framework, Congress is the scene where the saddest of pantomimes takes place: while the bourgeoisie and imperialism have guaranteed the votes to approve all the norms they want, they make the people believe that they are also part of the decision-making process. decisions. For this, it needs the existence of some “popular” parliamentary representation, which by some mysterious power, will be able to ‘convince’ the other parties to approve measures ‘favorable’ to the working class and the poor people.
However, history has shown more than once that this is not possible. We had the most recent example in the brother country of Chile, where the powerful outbreak that began in October 2019, a powerful revolution against 30 years of neoliberalism, looting and growing inequality, imposed through mobilization the call for a Constitutional Convention (constituent Assembly).
The election to said body, a fair demand of the Chilean working people who expressed their desire to overthrow the economic and social order left by the Pinochet dictatorship, gave a clear majority to the ‘left’ parties and independent groups born from the popular outbreak. .
However, the bourgeoisie knew how to maintain control of the situation through the agreement adopted by those parties of Chilean ‘democracy’, from the right-wing National Renovation and the UDI, to the ‘leftist’ Communist Party and the Frente Amplio, by only approving those articles that obtained 2/3 of the vote of the Convention. Thus they ensured that the independent majority had no option to change anything on its own.
This is because in so-called ‘democracy’ (actually bourgeois democracy, of the rich) the true power comes from those who have the money. They, the bourgeoisie, have enshrined in the Constitution their right to exploit and enrich themselves with our natural resources with our work. And from their point of view, no institution can even try to take that right away from them. Not even those of ‘democracy’ itself.
Congress before the southern uprising
The other clear example, and even closer, that shows the inability of the ‘left’ representations in Congress, is their performance in the face of the uprising of the people of the south, during the first months of 2023.
Then, the heroic and revolutionary struggle of the South put on the table the possible fall of Boluarte and the entire Congress, and the immediate call for general elections.
In this framework, while the people of the south and the other sectors that came out to fight against the government (artisanal miners in Arequipa, agroindustry workers in Ica and La Libertad, for example) demanded his immediate fall along with that of Congress, the parties of the regime, including those who call themselves ‘left’, played to negotiate the votes for the “advance of elections.” As if it were possible to forget the massacres of Ayacucho (December 14 and 15, 2022) and Juliaca (January 9, 2023), defended and applauded by the majority of Congress. The result: Boluarte, with 70 dead, 49 of them from extrajudicial executions, weathered the wave of fighting and remained in power.
Immediately afterwards, that ‘left’ surrendered to coexistence with Boluarte and his allies in Congress. Finally, this policy has translated into a set of electoral calculations that lead these parliamentarians to vote in various blocs according to their group interests, always placing the direct action of the working class and the people in the background. The most palpable – and lowly – example of this coexistence is the agreement between Perú Libre and Fujimori and Avanza País, to form the board of directors of Congress.
These parliamentary groups are addicted to the electoral game that they identify with democracy. And in fact they have completely abandoned the need to promote and strengthen the unitary and national mobilization against the government, resuming the methods of the South that had an insurrectional and revolutionary character. And more fundamentally, they long ago discarded the classist (Marxist) conception of the State, which precisely maintains that it is an instrument that uses violence to guarantee the domination of the bourgeoisie over the working class and the people. And therefore its institutions, be it the parliament, the presidency or the judiciary, are always at the service of safeguarding that order.
Is it possible for the working class and the people to use parliament?
By abandoning the Marxist conception of the State, these parties and groups have renounced any possibility of being a useful instrument for the workers’ and popular struggle, not only against the murderous government of Dina Bolurate, but in general.
This, beyond the good intentions that any individual person may have. Maximum proof of this is the sad end of Isabel Cortés, former leader of Sitobur, loved and supported by the union vanguard, who today has revealed herself as a supporter of the logic of political ‘anything goes’, without principles, even accepting a smile in the face the recognition of the murderer Boluarte, in order, says “Chabelita”, to ‘carry the voice of the workers’.
What attitude should we workers and the people, their conscious vanguard, assume before parliament? Is there no way to enter the electoral field from a classist and revolutionary position?
Unlike everything that the current ‘leftists’, ‘progressives’ and supposed democrats who call themselves ‘left’ in Congress (actually a bamba left) say, a genuine working-class and popular parliamentary representation must at least permanently use the speaker provided by Congress for two purposes:
The first, unmask the falsehood of bourgeois democracy, doing everything possible so that the working people see that there is nothing good to get from Congress or from any election.
The second, subordinate all parliamentary action to the promotion and strengthening of the direct action of workers’ and popular organizations. To its growing and increasingly organized and conscious mobilization.
This is what our colleague María Rivera, from the International Workers’ Movement (MIT) in Chile, did recently during the operation of the Constituent Assembly, calling on the poor people of Chile not to abandon the mobilization, demanding that the pact be broken. of the ⅔, or proposing the nationalization of all Chilean mining and the expropriation of the wealth of the 7 richest families in Chile. Also, at the end of the 70’s, Hugo Blanco, Magda Benavides and Ricardo Napurí did it, in the 1978 Constituent Assembly.
But to achieve this, precisely, it is central that any ‘left’ representation, that claims to be revolutionary, in parliament, acts as an arm of a workers’, Marxist party, that integrates individual wills into conscious and organized action, to counteract the corrosive action of bourgeois democracy, full of lobbies and offers that tend to corrupt those who reach those levels of power.
Only in this way will any parliamentary representation that genuinely expresses the interests of the working people be able to unmask the rotten democracy of the rich and promote and strengthen the direct struggle of workers’ and popular organizations.
The current ‘left’ in Congress does none of this. Therefore, their sad role is summarized in coexistence with a murderous government, which they call a dictatorship, but with which commissions, boards of directors and votes are distributed. They negotiate and “attack” only when the situation suits them. This so-called ‘left’, this bamba left, only deserves the repudiation of the organizations of the working people, whose vanguard must advance to the construction of its own class party: a revolutionary party that takes up the bases of Marxism to guide its actions, inside and outside parliament, always linked to and promoting the direct struggle of the people with a revolutionary strategy.
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