[An in-depth analysis of the Peru uprising, and updates from
Europe, Myanmar and more]
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GLOBAL LEFT MIDWEEK – FEBRUARY 8, 2023  
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February 8, 2023
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_ An in-depth analysis of the Peru uprising, and updates from Europe,
Myanmar and more _

Demonstrators stand behind a sign that reads "We aren't terrorists.
Advance national elections in 2023," and calls for the writing of a
new Constitution, as they block the Pan-American highway. Credit, AP
Photo/Martin Mejia

 

* Peru: No Turning Back
* Europe’s Labor Explosion
* Leftist Party Excluded From Guatemala Election
* Myanmar People Fight for Democracy
* Electoral Reform Movements in Canada
* The West and the Uprising in Iran
* India’s CPIML (Liberation) on the International Situation
* Berlin: Social Democrats’ Dilemma
* A Look Back at the African Women’s Movement Press
* Reinvestigating Martov

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PERU: NO TURNING BACK

_Róger Rumrrill_ / OtraMirada (Lima)

[Translated from Spanish by xxxxxx. Read the original _HERE
[[link removed]ú-ha-llegado-un-punto-de-no-retorno?fbclid=IwAR2qjtHroIZZalZcNy74lqbAkIZ60zu-lsgvpDXU114oOgG-81tol3oWCic]_]

Peru has reached a point of no return from a systemic and structural
crisis that is 200 years old. Now there is only one Andean Pachakuti
and an Amazonian Ipámamu left [referring to particular cataclysmic
moments marking the advent of a new epoch, new times, the beginning of
a new history - _xxxxxx]_. “The only thing that can get us out of
this situation is utopia, or in other words — what does this mean?
That this system has come to an end, has died,​​​” says social
scientist and university professor Héctor Béjar Rivera.

Who is fighting to build utopia? And what will make possible this
Copernican turn of Peruvian history? According to analyst Alberto
Adrianzén, it’s the “democratic fury” of the people who are now
mobilizing and expressing their anger and rebellion from one end of
the country to the other. In these tumultuous, violent, dramatic and
tragic days, Peru “is living through the largest and most diverse
democratic movement in the republic’s history,” says sociologist
Sinesio López Jiménez.

Because, just as it has not been possible to return to “normality”
with the coronavirus; neither can we return to “normality” with a
Peruvian state captured by the elites and with a democracy seated and
functional to these same oligarchic groups. The sandcastle of Western
civilization was about to collapse due to the attack of an invisible
virus, and that same virus revealed the precariousness of the Peruvian
state, custom made according to the insatiable appetites of the
powerful. Now, that same state and that economic model, after 200
years, can no longer be just the bastion and celebration of a minority
hell-bent on killing any changes and transformations in society.

The underlying cause of this political and social earthquake that now
shakes Peru, with a tragic cost of more than a hundred Peruvians
killed by state repression and the destruction of public and private
goods, goes way back. It is 200 years old. Because as historians like
Jorge Basadre have pointed out, the political independence of 1821 did
not structurally change the economic, social and cultural system of
the colony. The colonial character of power, culture and subjectivity,
as the thinker Aníbal Quijano says, continued and continues to
dominate Peru.

In any case, 1821 was a trade of snot for drool. To the extent that
the colonial system of the _encomiendas_ [enslavement of indigenous]
was transformed into the great republican _haciendas_ and
_latifundia_, the basis and structure of the disgraceful feudalization
of the republic, that was only canceled in 1969 with the Agrarian
Reform of General Velasco.

The construction of the Peruvian nation is still a pending agenda.
Because the Peruvian nation is multilingual, multiethnic and
multicultural, and the Peruvian state is of colonial origin,
dysfunctional to the nation. Therefore, the construction of the
Peruvian nation, inevitably and irreversibly, passes through a
profound reform of the neocolonial state, in the economy, culture,
health, education and justice, among other reforms.

Just one example. The justice carried out by judges, prosecutors and
magistrates is the application and execution of Roman positive law.
For them, the customary law of the Andean-Ahazónic peoples—of a
third of the Peruvian population, with 55 ethnolinguistic families,
four in the Andes (Kichwa, Uru, Aymara and Jacaru) and 51 in the
Amazon—is dead letter.

This huge fracture between the multilingual, multicultural and
multiethnic nation and the monocultural state has come to the surface
these days in the behavior of the aggressive and authoritarian state
and politicians and the media in these days of citizen anger: racism,
centralism, the disintegration of the country, extreme polarization,
contempt for the poor and worse if they are Indians, among other evils
and problems of Peruvian society.

Without the structural reform of the Peruvian neocolonial state, as a
first step, and the refoundation of the Peruvian nation, as a
subsequent step, Peru could be knocked down to a failed state in the
coming decades.

The founding crisis of the Peruvian state deepened even more with the
advent of Fujimori kleptocracy. Alberto Fujimori and his alter ego
[former domestic intelligence czar] Vladimiro Montesinos increased
many times over the serpent’s egg of corruption in Peruvian society.
But not only that. Together with the violence of the Shining Path (SL)
and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) they dynamited the
country and further opened the cracks and splits of the disintegrating
country, breaking the social and institutional fabric, weakening
political parties almost to extinction and holding the State captive
and hostage to the great national and international economic power.

Fujimorismo’s and the right’s philosopher’s stone was the
political Constitution of 1993. It was the master key to lock the door
of the state and open all the doors to the market, and it turned into
the bible of economy and development. The economic and political far
right has ordered its lapdogs in Congress to defend that Constitution
as an untouchable mantra.

The immense social and political explosion of these days has exposed
one of the country’s great problems: hypercentralism, which, in the
case of Peru, is not only political, but also economic, social and
cultural. Lima's centralist vision and conception of the regions,
especially Andean-Afriendistic, is colonial. They only see the Andes
and the Amazon as territories to extract minerals, copper, zinc, gold,
oil, gas, wood.

The 18,000 laws that were passed for the Amazon between 1821 and 1960
reveal that myopia and almost blindness. That is why I hypothesize
that an Andean-Amazonian alliance that is now being woven will
transform the Amazon and the Andes into Peru’s geopolitical,
geoeconomic and hydropolitical space in the 21st century. The
protection, conservation and sustainable management of the Amazon
forest, the largest freshwater factory in the world, is one of the
axes of this strategic alliance.

The battle that is being held in the streets and cities of Peru at the
moment is a struggle for power. All the criminalizing, tricky,
conspiratorial and confrontational discourse (without denying that
there are vandals and destroyers of property that have other purposes)
of the civil-military government of Mrs. Dina Boluarte points in a
precise direction: to continue to maintain political and economic
power and therefore the permanence of that same State, Congress and
government.

As analyst Víctor Caballero Martín writes: “What is at the center
of the conflict is a matter of power, the reforms that the Peruvian
state requires, for the debate on a new consensus on the balance of
power in which the people demand to participate. He demands that they
be considered as valid political actors and interlocutors with whom to
establish the foundations of a political agenda of reforms and in
which the mobilized people, their organizations and leaders are
included as political actors with whom to dialogue.”

For this reason, President Dina Boluarte will continue to insist in
her blather that the agenda with the multitudes across the whole
country is only social and not political. Because the ideal for her
and the power that holds her as a captive and prisoner is, as Avelino
Guillén, former supreme prosecutor and former minister of the
interior, says, “to escalate the level of violence [in order] to
stay until 2026.”

The current crisis also reveals a kind of fatality in Peruvian
politics and politicians. The choice of Pedro Castillo was a kind of
symbol and emblem. The first cholo [dark-skinned] president, a rural
teacher, of popular origin, elected president precisely in the
celebration of the Bicentennial of Independence. Many of us believed
that Castillo came to the government to break the colonial atavism of
the politicians who for a bicentennial built the sandcastle of the
Peruvian state. But Pedro Castillo was really a sand castle that
collapsed.

Dina Boluarte, who succeeded Castillo, the first Peruvian woman to
arrive in the government of Peru in 200 years, should have resumed the
entire transformation agenda that Castillo had promised in his
campaign and that she later abandoned. But instead, Mrs.
Boluarte co-governs with Fujimorismo and the right, political
factions that were rejected in a titanic clean electoral
contest. “She has abandoned not only her political banners, but the
popular will,” says political scientist Ariela Ruiz Caro.

The “taking of Lima” [the mass protests since November] has to
become the taking of power. That is, elections brought forward in this
year of 2023. A large coalition of center, left and even democratic
right, added to the crowds that are now mobilizing throughout the
country, to win the elections and start the great transformations: a
new Constitution, structural reforms of the State and the refoundation
of the Peruvian Nation.

__________
EUROPE’S LABOR EXPLOSION

* PRESS REVIEW: WINTER OF DISCONTENT
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  / euro|topics (Bonn)
 
* UK LABOR DIGS IN
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  Ellen Ioanes / Vox (Washington DC)
 
* UP AGAINST MACRON
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  _Kenny Stancil_ / Common Dreams (Portland ME)

__________
LEFTIST PARTY EXCLUDED FROM GUATEMALA ELECTION
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_Thorben Austen_ / The Rio Times

The Guatemalan Electoral Tribunal TSE has informed the leftist party
_Movimiento para la Liberación de los Pueblos_ that it will not allow
its candidacy for the presidential election. The party is considered
a “political instrument” of the rural workers’ organization
_Comité de Desarrollo Campesino_ (Codeca) and has its backing
primarily among the indigenous rural population.

__________
MYANMAR PEOPLE FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY

* ETHNIC ARMED GROUPS BUTTRESS RESISTANCE
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  / Frontier Myanmar (Bangkok)
 
* THE LEFT IN MYANMAR
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  _Robert Narai_ / Red Flag (Melbourne)
 
* LABOR LEADER MA TIN TIN WAI SPEAKS
[[link removed]]   _Ma Cheria_ / Asia
Labour Review (Hong Kong)

__________
ELECTORAL REFORM MOVEMENTS IN CANADA
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_Anita Nickerson and Gisela Ruckert_ / The Tyee (Vancouver)

Far from the machinations in party backrooms, citizens in the Yukon
are stubbornly fighting for their own democratic revolution. As one
reform advocate observed, “I have come to believe that there is
something in the water that brings out people’s best selves when the
going gets hard.” That spirit has brought a scrappy team of
electoral reformers to the verge of a major leap forward.

__________
THE WEST AND IRAN
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UPRISING
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_Fereshteh Ahmadi and Sharareh Akhavan_ / Socialist Project
(Toronto)

A change in Iran cannot be implemented through interventions from the
US and the West. Change of regime, election of leaders, and a
coalition for a future free and democratic Iran must come from within
the country. Support is needed for the movement from the international
community, in the form of political pressure and sharp condemnations
against the Islamic regime.

__________
INDIA
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CPIML (LIBERATION) ON THE INTERNATIONAL SITUATION
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Liberation (New Delhi)

The global crisis of capitalism – which is also a climate crisis,
has led to deep insecurity and deprivation which has been fertile
ground for the rise of fascist and authoritarian forces all over the
world, that have blamed inequality and insecurity, not on neoliberal
policies but on minorities and immigrants. 

__________
BERLIN: SOCIAL DEMOCRATS’ DILEMMA
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_Andreas Thomsen_ / Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (Berlin)

The SPD find themselves in a paradoxical situation: their policies
have been fairly successful at the state level, but primarily due to
the social policies that have largely been shaped by Die Linke
senators. These successes would not have been possible with Mayor
Franziska Giffey’s former partner of choice, the centre-right FDP.

__________
A LOOK BACK AT THE AFRICAN WOMEN
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MOVEMENT PRESS
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_Rama Salla Dieng and Korka Sall_ / African Arguments (London)

The magazine _AWA: la revue de la femme noire_ (1964–73) was
launched by a network of women’s rights activists, in shaping the
emergence of a pan-Africanist political consciousness through
transnational organising. In addition, the magazine promoted women’s
literacy and professional training to help contribute to
nation-building efforts especially after independence. 

__________
REINVESTIGATING MARTOV [[link removed]]

_Paul Kellogg_ / Links (Sydney)

In his era, Julius Martov was without question one of the most
important intellectuals and leaders of the Russian Left, including its
principal organization, the RSDRP. For the Bolsheviks, support for
democracy and resort to terror were tactical, contingent questions.
For Martov, support for democracy and opposition to terror were
matters of principle. 

* Peru
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* Pedro Castillo
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* Dina Boluarte
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* Europe
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* Strikes
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* UK
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* France
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* Emmanuel Macron
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* Guatemala
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* Movimiento para la Liberación de los Pueblos
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* Thelma Cabrera
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* Myanmar
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* Ma Tin Tin Wai
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* Canada
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* Election reform
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* Iran
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* India
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* Communist Party of India Marxist-Leninist Liberation
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* Berlin
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* Germany
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* German Social Democratic Party
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* African women
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* AWA: la revue de la femme noire
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* Julius Martov
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* Mensheviks
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* Russia
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